Month: January 2020

17 deaths, 444 cases of new viral pneumonia reported in Hubei

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

A total of 444 cases of new coronavirus-related pneumonia and 17 deaths had been reported in central China’s Hubei Province as of 8 p.m. Wednesday, according to local authorities.
Among the confirmed cases, 399 patients are receiving treatment in hospitals, with 71 in severe condition and 24 in critical condition, said Yang Yunyan, deputy governor of the province, at a press conference.
— Read on en.people.cn/n3/2020/0123/c90000-9651273.html

How The Military-Industrial Complex Gets Away With Murder in Contract After Contract

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

Increasingly, this means contractors are able to hold the Pentagon hostage over a weapon’s lifetime, which means overcharges of just about every imaginable sort, including for labor. The Project On Government Oversight (where I work) has, for instance, been uncovering overcharges in spare parts since our founding, including an infamous $435 hammer back in 1983. I’m sad to report that what, in the 1980s, was a seemingly outrageous $640 plastic toilet-seat cover for military airplanes now costs an eye-popping $10,000. A number of factors help explain such otherwise unimaginable prices, including the way contractors often retain intellectual property rights to many of the systems taxpayers funded to develop, legal loopholes that make it difficult for the government to challenge wild charges, and a system largely beholden to the interests of defense companies.

— Read on www.commondreams.org/views/2020/01/21/how-military-industrial-complex-gets-away-murder-contract-after-contract

Holy crap!

[1998] Foreign Affairs – Now a Word From X

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

”What bothers me is how superficial and ill informed the whole Senate debate was,” added Mr. Kennan, who was present at the creation of NATO and whose anonymous 1947 article in the journal Foreign Affairs, signed ”X,” defined America’s cold-war containment policy for 40 years. ”I was particularly bothered by the references to Russia as a country dying to attack Western Europe. Don’t people understand? Our differences in the cold war were with the Soviet Communist regime. And now we are turning our backs on the very people who mounted the greatest bloodless revolution in history to remove that Soviet regime.
”And Russia’s democracy is as far advanced, if not farther, as any of these countries we’ve just signed up to defend from Russia,” said Mr. Kennan, who joined the State Department in 1926 and was U.S. Ambassador to Moscow in 1952. ”It shows so little understanding of Russian history and Soviet history. Of course there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia, and then [the NATO expanders] will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are — but this is just wrong.”
— Read on archive.is/Wg8nf