View from inside the gut of the empire

 

• I'm reading a fascinating book about two Americans who moved to China during Mao's rise to power following WW II.  A woman named Joan Hinton (who was a nuclear physicist and worked on the Manhattan Project) and her dairy farming husband Sid Engst.  She was offered a teaching job in China but turned it down and worked on a dairy farm with her husband near the Mongolian border. While pregnant Joan was attending Lamaze classes in Beijing. (Lamaze was created by the former Soviet Union.) Fascinating read. The book is called 'Silage Choppers & Snake Spirits: The Lives & Struggles of Two Americans in Modern China'.  They stayed in China their entire adult life.

In 1952, while in Beijing to deliver her baby Joan was invited to attend the Asian and Pacific Peace Conference. Once it became known that she had worked on the Manhattan Project (that developed the atomic bomb) she was asked to speak to the assembled. Here are some of her words (that became quite controversial when reported back in the US):

...as one who touched with my own hands the very bomb which was dropped on Nagasaki, I feel a deep sense of guilt and shame at the part I played in this crime against humanity as a whole, and this crime against the Japanese people in particular....And I am ashamed to admit it took the horror of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to shock me out of this ivory tower of complacency, to shock me into the fundamental realization that there is no such thing as "pure" science; that science has a meaning only in relation to its service to mankind; only in so far as it helps to create a rich and beautiful new world. 

Joan Hinton, Former Fellow in Physics, Institute of Nuclear Studies, University of Chicago

• I am scheduled to speak about space issues in a couple up-coming webinars.  Some are now listed (and others will soon be added) on the new Global Network website Events page which can be found here.

• Reading an article about the new Space Force really summed up my disgust with the entire project.  SpaceWar.com posted this: "Because of its small size and high dependency on advanced technology, the US Space Force is perhaps better positioned than any branch of the US military to become a cash-cow for private industry".  Look out fellow citizens they are going to fleece us....

• There is some good organizing going on in big cities across the US opposing the massive Pentagon budget.  In November in New Haven, Connecticut peaceniks organized a referendum asking the voters if they wanted to seriously cut the military budget.  People resounding voted YES.  In Brooklyn, New York similar work is also underway. Local and state governments are strapped for cash and most of the nation's social needs have been dumped by the feds onto the laps of local authorities.  So it is a good strategy to bring these issues of endless war spending to the public by tying it to unmet social and infrastructure needs. Especially now with all the economic dislocation going on.
  

• In recent days we are again seeing more US-NATO supported shelling by the puppet Ukrainian regime of its own Russian speaking citizens who live near the Russian border in the Donbass region. Why? What was the crime of the civilians in the Donbass? A couple things quickly come to mind.  First, the US-NATO want to draw Russia into a shooting match which would then 'justify further encirclement' of Russia along their borders. Secondly, they want to force Russia to spend more on the military which will impact its already heavily sanctioned economy.  US-NATO don't give a damn about the lives destroyed by this ugly, illegal, and immoral strategy.
  

Bruce