Listening to Soldiers Of Reason: The RAND Corporation and the Rise of the American Empire

Opening quote.

Soldiers Of Reason: The RAND Corporation and the Rise of the American Empire

Related:

The Rand Corporation: The Think Tank That Controls America (archived)

By the 1960s, America’s rivals were paying attention. The Soviet newspaper Pravda nicknamed RAND “the academy of science and death and destruction.” American outfits preferred to call them the “wizards of Armageddon.”

The Militia and the Mole

This whole story seems suspicious to me. The overemphasis that the mole was a loner, that he was a criminal, and legally changed his name, etc.

The Militia and the Mole

John Williams kept a backpack filled with everything he’d need to go on the run: three pairs of socks; a few hundred dollars cash; makeshift disguises and lock-picking gear; medical supplies, vitamins and high-calorie energy gels; and thumb drives that each held more than 100 gigabytes of encrypted documents, which he would quickly distribute if he were about to be arrested or killed.

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PH: The BongBong Rocket 🤭

Source: President Marcos hails AFP as a force for peace

The Mystery of Marcos’ Rocket Program

’A Failed Project?’
The only VALID reason I could think of for all these “secrecy” or lack of transparency is that the program itself was NOT successful, and there are a number of ways that it could have failed. For one, the FAILURE or SUCCESS RATE of the launches were never published, and it’s possible that there were just too many launch failures, like the rockets exploding or veering off course at their launch pad or after launch, or even rockets not taking off at all. And even if the launches were successful, there is the issue of how accurate the rocket was in terms of hitting its target. If it ends up several hundreds or thousands of meters from its intended target, then it’s not very useful. And just like the Launch Rate, the Accuracy of the rockets were also never published.

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Syria’s Rojava [Where They Run Torture Camps] Is in Grave Danger +

Federalization of Syria a.k.a. Balkanization

Syria’s Rojava Revolution Is in Grave Danger (Reason magazine)

If the Kurdish-Arab alliance unravels, the U.S. military may decide to directly back Arab tribes as a bulwark against Iran and the Islamic State, according to Nicholas Heras, who has advised the U.S.-led military coalition in Syria and is now senior director for strategy at the nonprofit New Lines Institute for Strategy and Policy in Washington. In 2019, when former President Donald Trump wanted to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria, the Trump administration considered a strategy of letting the Kurdish forces fall to Turkey and buying off Arab tribes.

The United States has, directly and indirectly, backed all sides of the fight. Turkey is a NATO ally. Some of the SNA [Syrian National Army] units now attacking Kobane had received weapons and training from the CIA and the U.S. military. (After the Trump administration cut off support, a U.S. official condemned these same factions as “thugs, bandits, and pirates that should be wiped off the face of the earth,” and the Biden administration imposed human rights sanctions.) Meanwhile, several hundred U.S. troops are embedded with the SDF.

In his Sunday victory speech about the fall of the Assad government, President Joe Biden said that he wanted to support an “independent, sovereign—an independent—independent—I want to say it again—sovereign Syria.” But U.S. policy at the moment seems to be creating the opposite: a Syria chopped up [Balkanization] by foreign powers.

Rojava is also known as the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria.

Related:

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(Primer) A Decade of EDCA: US military bases and its expanding war games in the Philippines

The outright re-establishment of US military bases in the country and its relentless and escalating war games on land, sea, and air are flagrant manifestations of US imperialist domination of the Philippines. This further tightens the grip of US imperialism on the Philippine neocolonial state, especially on the puppet Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP).

(Primer) A Decade of EDCA: US military bases and its expanding war games in the Philippines