Global

Vast quantities of lies from top U.S. government officials led up to the Iraq invasion. Now, marking its 20th anniversary, the same media outlets that eagerly boosted those lies are offering retrospectives. Don’t expect them to shed light on the most difficult truths, including their own complicity in pushing for war.

 What propelled the United States to start the war on Iraq in March 2003 were dynamics of media and politics that are still very much with us today.

It appears that the military-industrial complex has complete control of the government of the United States, which recently voted to give the Pentagon roughly a trillion dollars of the tax-payers money. This was done

by cutting back on social programs which would have helped poor working families.

Recently Joan Roelofs published a book entitled “The Trillion Dollar Silencer: Why There Is So Little Anti-War Protest in the United States” (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2022). In this book, she points out that the U.S. military-industrial complex has located military bases in regions where the local economy is entirely dependent on them. The vast river of money flowing into the pockets of the military-industrial complex implies that very many people earn their living, directly, or indirectly, from the manufacture or use of weapons.

The high-profile and sudden failure of Silicon Valley Bank, which hid huge losses from its depositors, investors, and regulators, highlights the dangers of corporate fraud for our financial system. It confirms the kind of problems highlighted by a recent study published in the Journal of Financial Economics estimating that only one-third of corporate frauds are detected, with an average of 10% of large publicly traded firms committing securities fraud every year. This means that the true extent of corporate fraud is much larger than what is currently being reported. The study also estimates that corporate fraud destroys 1.6% of equity value each year, which equals to $830 billion in 2021.

 Strong commitment to freedom?

I had second thoughts as I braved an atmospheric river of rain, using my periscope to drive on the freeway to Downtown L.A.’s Music Center to hear George Frideric Handel’s Solomon. But the rapturous atmospheric river of sound that awaited me made me glad that I had made the effort to hear the three-and-a-half-hour cascade of baroque instrumental music with choir and soloists regaling this heathen and a near capacity crowd with three vignettes from the Old Testament about Judea’s King Solomon set to Handel’s indelible strains.

The future tapped me quietly on the shoulder the other day and suggested that I take a moment to learn about the writing bots.

They’re coming!

Excuse me, they’re here. And they struck me as alien invaders, this recent manifestation of artificial intelligence on the Internet, which college students, high school students — anybody — can download, feed a topic and get it to write an essay for them. Is this technology’s next step, after Roomba the robot vacuum cleaner? Humanity is relieved of one more odious task — writing stuff.

 That was the summary of a news report published on the homepage of the pro-Israel group, UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI).