The Urge to Splurge Why Is It So Hard to Reduce the Pentagon Budget?
By William D. Hartung
Through good times and bad, regardless of what’s actually happening in the world, one thing is certain: in the long run, the Pentagon budget won’t go down.
“It is likely [that] the brain's blunted response to repeated acts of dishonesty reflects a reduced emotional response to these acts,” Garrett said.
Phi Beta Iota: The public has been dumbed down deliberately, with a mix of deliberate rote learning, poisoned air, food, and water, and a complicit media that entertains rather than informs. Government has chosen to focus on spending money for special interests rather than making decisions in the public interest. Lying is endemic within US culture.
While this new Cold War is certainly different from the first Cold war that ended in 1989, we are not in doubt that there is a new such tragic war and that the risk of military confrontation between Russia and NATO countries in Europe has increased. We also happen to think it could have been avoided. This Cold War has to do with, among many other things, NATO’s counterproductive expansion since 1994, the way Yugoslavia broke down and was broken up, with Ukraine and now Syria as well as – perhaps surprisingly to some – the rapidly diminishing political power and legitimacy of the West in the emerging world order.
The American Centers for Disease Control are pushing vaccines with all their might. Yet they are also the institution that is supposed to be responsible for vaccine safety. Something definitely is not working properly here…
If you wanted to buy a product, and the main source of research on the product was the company selling it, would you automatically assume the product was safe and effective? But you see, that’s the just the beginning of the problem. Suppose the company’s research was cited thousands of times in the press, as the authoritative standard of proof—and anyone who disputed that research was labeled a conspiracy theorist and a quack and a danger to the community and an anti-science lunatic. Would you begin to suspect the company had some awesome media connections? Would you suspect some very powerful people were backing the company? This is exactly the situation with the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC)…
The experience of voters in Texas and other states may be bearing out Trump’s warning as multiple reports are surfacing of electronic voting machines changing virtual ballots from Republican to Democratic presidential candidates.