𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗜’𝗺 𝗥𝗲𝗮𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴: "𝗛𝗮𝗿𝗱𝗹𝘆 𝗪𝗮𝗿" 𝗯𝘆 𝗗𝗼𝗻 𝗠𝗲𝗲 𝗖𝗵𝗼𝗶-
Choi's poetry reveals the dizzying uncertainties of war, militarism, despotism, especially around our historic conflicts in southeast Asia. Not sure what to expect, but bracing myself . . .
#books #bookreviews #bookworm #readreadread #tbr #tbrpile #tbrlist #quotes #reading #donmeechoi #hardlywar #poetry #war #militarism #korea #vietnam
Student journalists going hard
CW for medical experimentation
"All nations that depend on energy from the Gulf will have to work out their own arrangements with Iran. What choice will they have? If the United States with its mighty Navy can’t or won’t open the strait, no coalition of forces with just a fraction of the Americans’ capability will be able to, either. The Anglo-French initiative to police the strait after a cease-fire is a bit of a joke. French President Emmanuel Macron has made it clear that this “coalition” will operate only under peaceful conditions in the strait: It will escort ships, but only if they don’t need an escort. Yet with Iran in control, the strait is not going to be safe again for a long time. China presumably has some influence over Tehran, but even China cannot force open the strait by itself.
One effect of this transformation may be an expanding great-power naval race. In the past, most of the world’s nations, including China, counted on the United States to both prevent and address such emergencies. Now the nations in Europe and Asia that depend on access to the Persian Gulf’s resources are helpless against the loss of energy supplies that are vital to their economic and political stability. How long can they tolerate this before they start building their own fleets, as a means of wielding influence in an every-nation-for-itself world where order and predictability have broken down?
The American defeat in the Gulf will have broader global ramifications as well. The whole world can see that just a few weeks of war with a second-rank power have reduced American weapons stocks to perilously low levels (...) The questions this raises about America’s readiness for another major conflict may or may not prompt Xi Jinping to launch an attack on Taiwan, or Vladimir Putin to step up his aggression against Europe. But at the very least America’s allies (...) must wonder about American staying power..."
#Iran #USA #Trump #Israel #StraitOfHormus #MiddleEast #Militarism #War
A voice that cares in a time of unhinged militarism und the irrational belief that only war will secure the future of nations, even though it gets more and more evident, that winning a war and profiting from it is not the likely outcome of an aggression quite the contrary.
"The White House originally signaled that it would need an extra $200 billion to prosecute the Iran war. More recently, the administration made a defense budget request of $1.5 trillion for fiscal 2027, a roughly 40 percent boost over this year. That’s a massive $600 billion increase, or roughly $4,000 per household.
That’s just additional spending for 2027. Defense budgets rarely go down, especially today, with a lobbying army fighting to keep spigots open and Mr. Hegseth more than willing to listen. Put these numbers together, and the bill is staggering but not surprising.
Economists have long known that only a small fraction of the costs of war show up immediately in government spending accounts. What the Pentagon is doing is cash flow accounting — keeping track of the dollars flowing out of the Treasury. The economists Linda Bilmes and Joseph Stiglitz argue that we get very different — and much more realistic — estimates with accrual accounting, when you add the cost of each future obligation as you create it.
They estimated that the Iraq war cost the U.S. around $3 trillion. A huge share of those expenses came after the conflict, including the expense of lifetime medical care and disability benefits for veterans, and the higher recruitment and retention costs that follow a bloody war — all compounded by a rising interest bill.
The Pentagon’s lowball $25 billion estimate gets a lot of attention, but it’s more of a headline than a real number. The best any economist can do right now is get the order of magnitude right, and my math suggests the Iran war will cost hundreds of billions of dollars, and very possibly trillions.
War is hell. And hell comes with a hefty price tag."
“We Are Being Driven To Our Doom By Mindless Machines Of Our Own Making”
by Caitlin Johnstone in Caitlin’s Newsletter on Substack
“#War. #Militarism. #Ecocide. #Exploitation. #Imperialist extraction. These things happen because they are profitable, and we are led by systems and institutions which consistently cause the most profitable thing to happen. They continually slant all movement toward the most profitable outcome, regardless of the negative impact it can have on human beings and the other organisms with whom we share this planet”
https://open.substack.com/pub/caitlinjohnstone/p/we-are-being-driven-to-our-doom-by
#Press #SocialMedia #Capitalism #Propaganda #Disinformation #DismantleCapitalism
"Two years ago, Trump was campaigning on lowering prices at home and ending foreign wars; now his coalition is doing contortions to explain to its base why oil prices are up, more troops are overseas with hundreds killed or wounded, and billions of taxpayer dollars are being incinerated in a war of choice.
Speculation abounds. Did the shockingly smooth decapitation of Venezuela’s government convince Trump that the United States could do the same to Iran? Maybe it was Israel that conned, cajoled, or coerced the Trump administration into turning Israel’s strongest foe into a failed state. Perhaps the Saudis were in Trump’s other ear for the same reason. It could have been Trump’s hawkish advisors who, whether for power, machismo, or religious fanaticism, pushed the United States to war by filtering selective information to a mentally fading president.
Even to otherwise sober foreign policy experts, the Iran war seems irrational to the point of unexplainable madness, imposed on the world through some combination of American belligerence, hubris, and a “special relationship” with Israel. However, as tempting as it might be to ridicule the Trump regime’s stupidity — and there is no shortage of material for that — it is worth stepping back and asking: Who benefits from the madness?"
Good for the youth of #Germany to be agitating now in opposition to #Militarism and a return to military #conscription (aka a #Draft)
More than 50,000 pupils expected to strike over German rearmament policy | Germany | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/may/07/germany-pupils-strike-rearmament-policy-protest-boycott
What belongs together finally comes together ...
Israel's weapons manufacturer
Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, looking back onto the proud tradition of keeping Palestinians down since 1948, and Germany's number one car company Volkswagen, founded in the Third Reich allegedly for giving cheap cars to the Volk but actually ending up in motorizing Wehrmacht and SS
might join up to transform a car plant in Osnabrück into a producer of missile defense systems. So German workers would play a direct role in Israel's wars as defense and offense of course are two sides of the same medal.
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