It’s funny to read mainstream reviews of Official Secrets now—they seem to still not fully grasp the importance of what they just saw. The AV Club review (8/27/19) leads: “Virtually everyone now agrees that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was a colossal mistake based on faulty (at best) or fabricated (at worst) intelligence.” Well, “mistake” is a serious understatement, even with “colossal” attached to it, for something so fervently pursued, and you just saw a movie about the diabolical, illegal lengths to which the US and British governments went to get everyone in line for it. So, no, “fabricated” is not the “worst” it is.Yet more tales from the Iraq War Crypt
Trump’s ultimate objective, as China clearly knows, is to whip up a world crisis over trade, then dramatically end it – of course, before next year’s elections. Trump has become a master dictator of US financial markets, rising or lowering them by surprise tweets. No president should ever have such power, but Trump has seized it.
There is no telling how much money his minions have made in short or long selling on the stock market thanks to insider information. America’s trillion dollar markets have come to depend on how Trump feels when he wakes up in the morning and watches Fox news, the Mother of Misinformation.
psychiatric diagnoses are scientifically worthless as tools to identify discrete mental health disordersGreat for scamming insurance carriers though. They love their categorizations. As always, "The myth of mental illness" is the book to read here.
The resulting balance of strong property protections and weak regulatory and taxing power may or may not have been conducive to economic growth (that’s for economic historians to figure out).That case is already laid out abundantly clearly. Everywhere that is applied, it results in strong economic growth; when property is not protected and taxes and regulations are maximized the people are immiserated.
When I look past the ideas to the ideologues, all I see are representatives of old institutions trying to prevent powerless people from testing their worth in a new space. I only hear a command to kneel and continue to accept their rule and the disagreeable status quo. If you want my advice, whether you lean left or right, ignore the ideological hair splitting, the calls to action, and keep doing what you’ve been doing – keep exposing inconsistencies and hypocrisies in traditional institutions of power – keep doing what drives these ideologues to dedicate massive tomes to their experiences of being challenged online.
