If I miss something, I have to wonder do I highlight it now or just move on? The article I'm highlighting went up in December. I missed it. In part because WSWS did a poor web redesign. In the past, at the top of the home page, I could select "science" across the top and go to the science section. In the redesign, that option was removed. And I thought the science section was removed as well. It's still there. If you do page down and page down and page down and page down and . . .
So this went up in December and it's by Don Barrett:
The destruction of the Arecibo radio telescope, a scientific crime, is a direct consequence of years of neglect and underfunding. Far from being an unforeseeable disaster, it directly flows from decades of impoverishment of all activities, scientific, cultural, artistic, that do not most directly channel the riches of labor into the overflowing coffers of the ruling class.
The telescope, 305 meters in diameter and commissioned in 1963, was the world’s largest single-dish instrument until the completion of a 500-meter dish in China in 2016, sharing its similar unusual design.
Instead of a large and massive movable structure consisting of a radio-reflecting dish and receiver at the dish’s focus, Arecibo was built in a natural area of Puerto Rico in which the underlying limestone geology creates bowl-shaped depressions rather than valleys. The water outflow is through underlying river caves in the limestone. The bottom of one of these depressions was outfitted with panels comprising a spherical radio-reflecting dish, and an array of receivers and a powerful radar were suspended at a movable focus high above on a network of cables from masts atop the bowl’s encircling ridges.
On August 10 of this year, after 15 years of increasingly tenuous funding, two changes in management and an ongoing transition to “pay-to-play” private partnership support, one of those cables snapped. Before the bureaucracy could even decide to approve, much less implement, temporary or permanent repairs, a main supporting cable from the same support mast snapped on November 7. At this point, without redundant support, the fate of the telescope was sealed: no safe access could be obtained to shore up the 900-ton suspended platform, and additional strand breaks began in an unstoppable cascade.
On December 1, the single remaining cable on the damaged side completely failed, dropping the platform 137 meters onto the dish and snapping numerous cables and support points throughout the mast system. Only ruins remain.
Arecibo has a distinguished scientific career behind it. Within months of commissioning on November 1, 1963, it managed the unprecedented act of bouncing radar off the innermost planet in the solar system, Mercury, and in so doing correctly measuring its rotation period of 59 days.
"Iraq snapshot" (THE COMMON ILLS):
Monday, January 25, 2021. With or without attention from the US press, the Iraq War drags on still.
The disappointment that is Joe Biden, get used to it. SOVEREIGN WEALTH FUND INSTITUTE reports of the new president:
Big pharma is smiling big right now. The big three insulin producers are Eli Lilly and Company, Novo Nordisk A/S, and Sanofi S.A., in which they dominate more than 90% of the world insulin market by value. After swearing-in, U.S. President Joe Biden’s HHS froze the Trump administration’s December 2020 drug policy that mandates community health centers to pass on all their insulin and epinephrine discount savings to patients.
The rule was finalized in late December 2020. The drug rule was put in place to benefit patients who have a hard time paying for expensive insulin and allergy medication. Former President Trump campaigned on lowering the price of important pharmaceutical drugs like insulin, which is used to treat diabetes, and epinephrine. Diabetes afflicts over a quarter of Medicare beneficiaries and drives billions in Medicare spending every year. More than 20 million Americans have diabetes, in which the body fails to properly use sugar from food due to insufficient insulin, a hormone produced in the pancreas.
Jackson Hinkle covers it in the video below.
And it is price gouging. Big Pharma is profiting and Joe Biden's going to help him steal from people even more. Steal?
It is theft. They're not paying off some big investment (subsidized by the government) into coming up with insulin. As Senator Bernie Sanders noted in July of 2019:
The patent was sold for one dollar. Years ago. And yet Big Pharma wants to rip you off and risk your health and Joe Biden's on board with them. How very pathetic and telling about how the next four years will go.
When we covered this topic at THIRD, we ran the following photo.
Walmart knew what it was doing and so did the customers who saw the sign in the drug store window -- Walmart was saying to those who can't afford insulin (a huge number of people), 'We'll sell you pet insulin.'
Joe Biden's addiction to for-profit will be the death of many Americans.
And outside of the US? Over at THE NATION, they pretend to car about Iraq for a few seconds while pointing fingers. Please note, they do this by publishing an article already published elsewhere. They have how many writers on the payroll and not one can write about Iraq. Telling, isn't it? Danny SJursen's long article (already published elsewhere) includes this:
It’s increasingly clear that Washington’s legacy wars in the Greater Middle East—Iraq and Afghanistan, in particular—are generally no longer on the public’s radar. Enter an elected old man who’s charged with handling old business that, at least to most civilians, is old news. Odds are that Biden’s ancient tricks will amount to safe bets in a region that past US policies essentially destroyed. Joe is likely to take a middle path in the region between large-scale military intervention of the Bush or Obama kind and more prudent full-scale withdrawal.
As a result, such wars will probably drag on just below the threshold of American public awareness, while avoiding Pentagon or partisan charges that his version of cutting-and-running endangered US security. The prospect of “victory” won’t even factor into the equation (after all, Biden’s squad members aren’t stupid), but political survival certainly will. Here’s what such a Biden-era future might then look like in a few such sub-theaters.
That's it. One mention of Iraq in a sentence. A shared sentence with Afghanistan. "Generally no longer on the public's radar"? Well, golly, Danny, doesn't really appear that they're on your radar either.
The article's disgraceful. It has nothing about what's going on in Iraq currently. It has no new information. It does offer Danny's 'hot take' on Iraq that he could have written last year . . . or the year before . . . or the year before.
Thinks for keeping us uninformed, Danny, and thank you also to THE NATION for proving yet again to be a garbage dump of time and money.
While Danny's so 'circumspect,' Dirk Adriaensens can and does cover Iraq (GLOBAL RESEARCH via COUNTERINFORMATION):
Is it the oil-resource curse that has brought the Iraqi people to this deplorable condition? Or, have the US-installed political system and after them the Iranian influence over Iraqi politics, been the main reasons behind mischiefs such as the case of “an estimated $239.7 billion has left the country illegally since 2003”, currently being inquired by the Iraqi parliament. Most of this money was indeed oil money, meaning that both oil and revenue have been conveniently syphoned away from Iraq, leaving its people in harrowing dearth.” [1]
A Transparency International report, published March 16, 2005, states that: “The reconstruction of post-war Iraq is in danger of becoming ‘the biggest corruption scandal in history.”[2]
The analysis underneath tries to give an overview – although incomplete – of the rampant corruption imported by the US invaders and optimized by its installed Quisling government. It is only one aspect of the total destruction of the Iraqi state. This is the story of a country that was targeted to become a failed state, by design of the imperialist and neoliberal US/UK elites, or should we call them “the organized-crime world syndicate”. The sectarian political and neoliberal economic system they installed is totally broken, beyond repair. The Iraqis call the period after the withdrawal of US combat troops “the second face of the occupation”, leaving in place all the neoliberal sectarian laws the occupiers enacted.
The criminal activities of the occupiers are well documented, many times reported and analysed, but the US still refuses to accept responsibility and accountability for its gross violations of International Humanitarian Law. It’s very important that the true story of Iraq is repeatedly told, until it becomes part of humanity’s collective memory, because Iraq serves as a template for the nefarious consequences of what “humanitarian” imperial interventions really mean, as is the case for other “humanitarian” war zones, from Afghanistan to Libya. “Bringing democracy” is always the official narrative, the harsh reality however is destruction, plunder, submission, exploitation and oppression. The truths about corruption have to be documented, explained and repeated over and over again. Hence this article.
This is well formulated in the message that novelist, painter and poet John Berger (+ 02.01.2017) wrote on 18 June 2003 in support of the World Tribunal on Iraq initiative, the greatest achievement of the global peace movement ever:
“The records have to be kept and, by definition, the perpetrators, far from keeping records, try to destroy them. They are killers of the innocent and of memory. The records are required to inspire still further the mounting opposition to the new global tyranny. The new tyrants, incomparably over-armed, can win every war – both military and economic. Yet they are losing the war (this is how they call it) of communication. They are not winning the support of world public opinion. More and more people are saying NO. Finally this will be the tyranny’s undoing. But after how many more tragedies, invasions and collateral disasters? After how much more of the new poverty the tyranny engenders? Hence the urgency of keeping records, of remembering, of assembling the evidence, so that the accusations become unforgettable, and proverbial on every continent. More and more people are going to say NO, for this is the precondition today for saying YES to all we are determined to save and everything we love.”[3]
[. . .]
From the first days after the invasion, the US and its coalition partners created a wasteful, opaque and corrupt system in Iraq. Massive theft, fraud, bribery and crimes of all kinds have failed reconstruction, infecting the government and wider society. There are hundreds of fraudulent, incomplete, failed or useless projects that have cost Iraq tens of billions of dollars. Judging from the final results, the projects have delivered surprisingly little lasting benefit to the Iraqis. These corrupt acts are a clear violation of the occupier’s responsibilities under the Geneva Conventions, the UN Convention against Corruption (2003) and Security Council resolutions.
On corruption, Joel Wing Tweets:
The vast corruption is one of the things that has fueled the 15-month and counting protests in Iraq. THE NEW ARAB Tweets:
The protesters are also forming political alliances. IRAQ SOLIDARITY NEWS notes:
Kaamil Ahmed (MIDDLE EAST EYE) covers the same story. They're alsod emanding the release of those who are missing.
MEHR NEWS reports this morning, "The Saberin news channel reported in a breaking news item that a logistics convoy of the American occupiers had been targeted on the Basra-Nasiriyah highway on Monday." They note there were six strikes on US military convoys on Friday.
In other news of Joe Biden and Iraq, Yasmine Mosimann (RUDAW) reports:
The United States on Friday suspended a program that granted Iraqis
refuge in the US in exchange for aiding American troops in Iraq,
according to a statement from the state department.
“Effective January 22, 2021, the United States is suspending the Direct
Access Program for the U.S.-Affiliated Iraqis for 90 days,” reads the statement from Daniel B. Smith, the acting secretary of state.
He justified the temporary halt to the program, which incentivized
Iraqis to work with the US military, by saying they have identified
individuals stealing documents from the state department’s Worldwide
Refugee Admissions Processing System “to take advantage” of the
program.
A new day dawning? Feels a great deal like past horrible days.
