American aggression

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish%E2%80%93American_War

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican%E2%80%93American_War

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overthrow_of_the_Hawaiian_Kingdom

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bay_of_Pigs_Invasion

Martin's Beach

https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/martins-beach-access-road-private-property-14863810.php

The Friends of Martin's Beach sought to prove the public has a right to use the road because of "public dedication." In property law, this dedication can either be explicit (a land grant by the owner, for example) or implied. The Martins Beach case was one of implied public dedication; the Friends argued because previous owners allowed beach-goers to use the single road down to Martins Beach, that constituted public dedication of the road.

The court ruled this was not the case, as the owners were charging a parking fee.

“Payment of a fee to access or use property implies that such use is not a matter of right but instead is a permitted use,” the appeals court wrote in their ruling. “A party who pays for a privilege and is granted the privilege in exchange for the payment is not acting as though he or she had an unfettered right to exercise the privilege.”

"Because the public’s use of the road and beach was thus permissive, it did not ripen into a public dedication that would give the public a permanent right to use the property," the ruling continued.

https://www.courts.ca.gov/opinions/nonpub/A154022.PDF

https://www.sfgate.com/opinion/openforum/article/Public-agency-overreached-on-Martins-Beach-5668020.php

https://www.hmbreview.com/news/judge-rules-against-public-access-for-martins-beach/article_ffdc327e-3d05-11e3-9292-001a4bcf887a.html

https://www.eastbaytimes.com/2013/10/01/setback-for-martins-beach-access-movement/

https://medium.com/@vkhosla/martins-beach-a-matter-of-principle-property-rights-b32f4de1c97

http://titleinsurancecenter.com/Title%20Insurance%20Pages/Cases/Opinions/FriendsOfMartinsBeach_v_MartinsBeach1.pdf

astronomical levels of raptor mortality

They killed (and continue to kill) astronomical levels of rare and endangered species protected by both Federal and state law but they get a pass.

Truly, some animals are more equal than others.

https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/campaigns/protecting_birds_of_prey_at_altamont_pass/pdfs/factsheet.pdf

These astronomical levels of raptor mortality continue unabated, due in part to the failure of federal and state wildlife protection agencies to take any regulatory action. Bird kills at Altamont Pass occur in violation of federal and state wildlife protection laws, including the Bald Eagle and Golden Eagle Protection Act, Migratory Bird Treaty Act, and numerous California Fish and Game Codes. 

The wind power industry has been aware of the magnitude of the impacts to birds of prey at Altamont Pass since at least 1988, when the first of numerous studies of raptor mortality was published. To date, the industry has not implemented a single meaningful mitigation measure to reduce raptor kills or to compensate for removing significant numbers of birds from populations of imperiled species. 

In fact some efforts, such as the rodent control program at Altamont, have actually increased the risk to raptors while threatening endangered species such as the San Joaquin kit fox, California red-legged frog and California tiger salamander. 

Recent research by the California Energy Commission has shown the mortality risk to raptors at Altamont Pass has significantly increased over the past 15 years. 

Trump is a symbol

 https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1747416041670549727.html

1.  People in normal political circles fail to grasp Trump repeatedly. They see his lack of discipline and how ineffective he was or his moral failings and assume it must be because Trump is a charismatic figure and people vote for him are in a cult of personality. This is wrong.

2.  Far more important is the FACT of Trump and his relationship to his voters. The people who vote for him see him as a symbol. Your hatred of Trump is seen as your hatred of the American people who vote for Trump. If the system thwarts Trump it is a rejection of them.

3.  You reject their will when you reject Trump. When you prevent Trump from building the wall, you are saying to the people, “we love immigrants more than you.” When you prosecute Trump, you are prosecuting them.

4.  When you “fortify” the elections you are telling these people that their vote, their will does not matter. Every rejection of Trump, every time you fight against him, you are heightening the tensions and contradictions within the system, pushing it to a breaking point.

5.  I get that you hate Trump.
You find him gauche, immoral and see him as a buffoon. But every time you oppose him you are expressing your opposition to the participation of those who vote for him in the system.

6.  What has become abundantly clear is you want their vote, their donations, but then they are supposed to shut up and go home and let their “betters” run the show. On issue after issue you have ignored them and looked out for yourselves.

7.  They are fed up. They want their factory jobs back. They want to know that if their sons do well in school they can get into Harvard. They want the border closed and probably 5 million migrants deported.

8.  They want an end to abortion. If not an outright ban, a willingness to restrict it to only incest, rape and an actual life threat to the mother. That’s it. No elective abortions. They don’t want their kids trans in the schools.

9.  They don’t want their kids to die in stupid wars. They don’t want 40+ billion of borrowed/printed money to go to protect the Ukraine. Etc, etc, etc, etc…

But again and again they have been told they can’t have any of this because it threatens tax cuts. What a joke.

10.  You go ahead and try to convince yourself that it’s a cult of personality.

What the people want is for you to work with Trump to get him elected and make the people’s agenda a success. They want you to go to bat for Trump, for them.

11.  You have to see Trump as a distilled symbol of the people’s discontent with your position of privilege and influence. Every time you oppose Trump, you justly their attachment to him as a symbol. You must embrace the people’s opposition to the regime. All of it.

USS McCain incident

 https://features.propublica.org/navy-uss-mccain-crash/navy-installed-touch-screen-steering-ten-sailors-paid-with-their-lives/

To guide the McCain, Bordeaux relied upon a navigation system the Navy considered a triumph of technology and thrift. It featured slick black touch screens to operate the ship’s wheel and propellers. It knit together information from radars and digital maps. It would save money by requiring fewer sailors to safely steer the ship.

Bordeaux felt confident using the system to control the speed and heading of the ship. But there were many things he did not understand about the array of dials, arrows and data that filled the touch screen.

“There was actually a lot of functions on there that I had no clue what on earth they did,” Bordeaux said of the system.

Bordeaux, one of the newest sailors on the ship, was joined in uncertainty by one of the most seasoned, Cmdr. Alfredo Sanchez, captain of the McCain.

A 19-year Navy veteran, Sanchez had watched as technicians replaced the ship’s traditional steering controls a year earlier with the new navigation system. Almost from the start, it caused him headaches. The system constantly indicated problems with steering. They were mostly false alarms, quickly fixed, but by March 2017, Sanchez’s engineers were calling the system “unstable,” with “multiple and cascading failures regularly.”

Sanchez grew to distrust the navigation system, especially for use in delicate operations. He often ordered it to run in backup manual mode, which eliminated some of the automated functions but also created new risks.

...

In the end, though, the Navy punished its own sailors for failing to master a flawed system that they had been inadequately trained on and that the Navy itself came to admit it did not fully understand.

...

In 2014, Navy officials discovered a flaw in the IBNS. One component could not keep track of more than 150 ships at a time without malfunctioning, according to Navy investigators. The Navy’s solution? Sailors were told to delete tracked ships before the total hit the magic number.

The navigation system could also become overloaded if too much information streamed in from a ship tracking database used worldwide to prevent maritime collisions. The Navy’s second solution was similar to the first: Drop the feed when it became too much.

They were patches on top of patches that left the Navy’s destroyers without a full picture of the seas around them. But none of the problems was serious enough to attract high-level attention. A Navy system designed to track problems in major ship systems did not contain any reports that mentioned the IBNS until last year, according to a Navy official.

Surprising viewpoint on Putin

https://therevealer.org/putins-christian-russia-as-a-model-for-america/

Only ten miles separate the parish and the monastery, but in terms of support for Vladimir Putin, their reasons were often light years apart. While inhabitants of the monastery by and large seemed reticent, apart from Fr. Tryphon, to express political fealty to Putin, they often portrayed his role as almost apocalyptic in the future of global Christianity. Many monks drew upon the language of the Third Rome and the figure of Tsar-Martyr Nicholas II to portend what could happen in the face of growing secularism, and how Putin’s push for Christianity in the public sphere might be the only thing that saves the world. 

In contrast, to some extent, members of St. John’s parish viewed the president of the Russian Federation ideologically as a good candidate to promote Christian values globally. They tended to focus on current events that they heard about through various Russian government–sponsored media outlets or via word of mouth from Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia (ROCOR) clergy who frequently visited Russia. 

On the whole, both sets of converts supported Putin, but for different ideological reasons. Beyond the Orthodox convert community, most of the Woodford residents I spoke with were in no way aligned with Vladimir Putin or Russian political ideologies, yet they often spoke of him with fondness or, at the very least, admiration.

Deaths caused by America

 

Wars the US waged in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan following September 11, 2001 caused at least 4.5 million deaths and displaced 38 to 60 million people, with 7.6 million children starving today, according to studies by Brown University.

https://t.co/92t1OxyHtp