Comprehensive49

Russia has fined Google 2 undecillion (20 decillion) USD for banning Russian TV channels from YouTube. Russia fined Google starting at 100,000 every day since the ban in 2020, with the fine doubling for every week of noncompliance.

Good to see a government sticking to their exponential fines against corporations in at least this instance. Russia has no need for Google anyway, since Yandex and co can fill the gap. This should also ensure Russia's national sovereignty.

Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheDeprogram/comments/1gfplpe/couldnt_pass_on_the_opportunity_to_make_this/

Ben Norton makes a great overview of the comprehensive new financial architecture that Russia is proposing at the BRICS summit to dedollarize and decentralize the global financial system.

These plans are incredible. The US-dominated financial system has lasted over 80 years. If carried through, BRICS will reshape global finance and equity for the next century.

Scientists extracted fat cells from the patient, turned them into stem cells (induced pluripotent stem cells), then back into pancreatic islet cells now able to produce insulin. These functioning islet cells were then simply injected into the patient's abdominal muscles. Injection into the abdominal wall minimized invasiveness and avoided inflammation compared to previous practices of injection into the liver. The entire injection procedure took less than half an hour.

Because the cells are from the patient's own body, they don't need a compatible donor and experience no immune rejection to the transplant.

Afterwards, the patient's blood sugar levels became normal and they no longer needed external insulin.

Here's the research paper link: https://www.cell.com/cell/abstract/S0092-8674(24)01022-5

This documentary provides an incredible in-depth view of learning at ELAM. ELAM (the Latin American School of Medicine) is an international medical school run by the Cuban government to train physicians from around the world on free scholarships.

ELAM is the largest medical school in the world by enrollment, 19,550 students as of 2012. For comparison, Harvard Medical School only teaches 712 medical students today. ELAM is incredibly diverse, with students from all across the world. For example, over 500 Palestinian students attend ELAM.

USians can apply to ELAM via the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization. For those of you in other countries, you can apply to ELAM through Cuban diplomatic missions in the your home country. Here's ELAM's website (in Spanish) if y'all find it helpful.

Israel's pager terrorist attacks underscore the importance of securing tech supply chains. To protect national sovereignty, nations that aren't yet US vassals must protect their information space and use only home-built or ally-built electronics.

How does capitalism and for-profit medicine infect the intentions of doctors and physicians? How is this related to things like capitalist alienation? I'd love to read y'all's thoughts about this. I'll go first 😅:

Especially in the USA, due to their much higher wages and command over nurses, doctors are practically petty bourgeois, not regular workers. As such, American doctors are quite disconnected from the hardships of regular workers, usually own sizable portfolios of rental properties and other rentier enterprises, and have political views more similar to a Wall-Street trust-fund baby.

Just so you know I'm not bullshitting, several people in my family are medical doctors (MDs). I'm intimately familiar with the goings-on's in the US medical industry, and the general views of those in medicine. While they do care about their patients, they don't really seem to care about whether their wages and moneymaking enterprises indirectly harm patients, nor do they seem to have much control over the consequences either.

This rot even extends to MD associations. If you didn't know, the American Medical Association, which lobbies for physicians and doctors, deliberately lobbied from 1980-2000s to reduce the number of physicians trained in order to "prevent a physician surplus" and increase physician wages (possibly to stop doctors from suffering the same wage decreases other US workers faced under neoliberalism). They were a bit overzealous and singlehandedly caused the physician shortage in the USA today.^[https://www.niskanencenter.org/the-planning-of-u-s-physician-shortages/]

Purdue Pharma didn't sell opioids directly to people, it paid doctors to sell it to patients. Some doctors even went along with it despite seeing the consequences their patients suffered. The kickbacks were just too good to pass up.^[https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/05/02/magazine/money-issue-insys-opioids-kickbacks.html] One of the MDs I know personally is a pain management physician and works with pain medicine daily. They know other doctors who have gotten fired for their Purdue kickbacks, and even one that got themselves addicted to Purdue opioids (IDK what that idiot was thinking).

The doctors I know do find health insurance to be super annoying, though their large wages make them OK with the situation (Doctors in the USA are paid much more than doctors in single-payer systems, like a bribe to accept the shittiness of the system. For example, many Canadian doctors move to the USA to increase their wages by 2X). They have to employ a dedicated nurse for insurance paperwork just to wrangle money out of insurance companies.

All in all, I can't say that US doctors are shitty humans, especially since I know them. They mostly seem to have resigned themselves to accept the capitalist system for what it is, and to just try to maximize personal benefits from it. If their patients feel better along the way, that's nice too.

Scott Ritter discusses the history of false pretenses the US government has used to repeatedly search him, and the events around the most recent raid.

TLDW Summary of Discussed Points:

FBI's Raid of Ritter's House

When Scott Ritter went on his book tour in Russia, he talked with the Russian embassy about what he was doing so they wouldn't suspect him of anything malicious. Since Ritter was a former intelligence officer, this was important to clear up misconceptions. The Russians talked with him and showed him an essay about peace written by Anatoly Antonov (the Russian ambassador to the USA). Later, Ritter used this as a source in an article he wrote as a journalist, in which he lays out how he obtained the essay.

The FBI used this to accuse him of "working for the Russian government" and raid his house. They're using the Foreign Agents Registration Act act (FARA), which lets the US gov act against any citizen who writes non-State Department approved stuff on the basis that they are "working for a foreign government".

The FBI raid carted away his massive archive of already-declassified evidence of the Iraq War sham on false pretenses of "keeping classified documents", which Ritter has used over the years to write articles, books, and documentaries on the Iraq War lie.

The FBI took away all his family's electronics and bugged his TV, so he had to replace those.

Kursk Offensive Aftermath

Ritter has previously met and talked with Apti Alaudinov, one of the Russian commanders now assigned to clean up after the Kursk Offensive. Apti has said that the Kursk Offensive was the result of the Russian Ministry of Defense leaving parts of the border poorly guarded against NATO-armed units. Apti and co. have already knocked out the Kursk invasion’s logistics, is capturing their equipment, and now just has to kill and capture the leftover Ukrainian stragglers. Ritter is waiting to interview him in a bit.

On a related note, Ritter says the US government regularly releases known fake declassified evidence to produce false inflammatory headlines in the media about Russia, China, Iran, etc. and lie to the US people. Any stuff in the US media about this invasion is guaranteed bullshit.

The invasion force was equipped with the nicest NATO gear (Starlink, latest training, live US intelligence) and speak English/French/Polish, indicating this incursion was planned and executed by NATO, not Ukraine alone. Do not believe the shit in the media about Zelensky ordering this alone. NATO ordered this, its failure is just a nice excuse to get rid of Zelensky for someone more malleable.

We will see severe Russian retaliation for this, possibly even attacking F16 bases in Poland and Romania in return.

Overall Russia-Ukraine Situation

The Russians have exhausted Ukrainian reserves and are advancing continuously, forcing the Ukrainians into unreinforced positions. The Kursk invasion has used up all of Ukraine's new equipment without distracting any significant amount of the Russian army, as the Russians merely deployed troops from reserve to clean up and did not shift any off of the frontline.

In response to the invasion, Russia is changing their peace deal to unconditional surrender for Ukraine and incorporate all Russian-speaking areas of Ukraine into Russia. Russia has no choice but to do so to halt further NATO assaults on their borders.

Israel and the Axis of Resistance

Israel is fatally losing from the Palestinian genocide. The Houthis have completely shut down Israel's southern port, Hezbollah has depopulated Northern Israel via their rockets and settlers' fears. Most of the world is committed to a two-state solution, which will require Israel to remove its settlements and make it collapse.

Israel cannot take on the Axis of Resistance. It is running out of tanks, spare parts, and ammunition. Its army is exhausted. To stay in power, Netanyahu wants to keep the conflict just below all-out war so he can stay in power.

Hezbollah and Iran are looking for a balance between an effective response to stop Israel from attacking again without provoking all-out war, for example by bypassing the Iron Dome to take out airfields and F35s, to show even more clearly that they can destroy Israel's military if needed. Russia and China are also working to help this along.

America is an empire in decline, and this crumbling empire seeks to take everything down with it. I don't want that solution, and that's why I and [alternative media] struggle to correct this slide by empowering the American people with knowledge and information about the reality of what's going on so they can better hold their government officials accountable for what's done in their name. … The US, in my case, is seeking to interfere in my ability to carry out advocacy journalism by manufacturing .. a case of violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

— Scott Ritter

Regardless of the possibly legitimate origins of Bangladeshi protests, we must keep a close eye on their possible co-opting by the USA and the resulting new administration.

Bangladesh is in a great location for the USA to use it to fuck with India and China.

Belly of the Beast is a Cuba-based journalism collective trying to provide a counterweight to anti-Cuba propaganda.

TLDR: Israel deliberately attacked the USS Liberty spy ship in 1967 during the Six-Day War, with the intention of sinking it, for 3 reasons:

1. To stop the ship's crew from informing the USA that Israel had started the Six-Day War via their surprise attack on Egypt
2. To stop the ship from overhearing their plans to invade the Golan Heights, which might prompt the USA to stop them and slow their acquisition of more Lebensraum
3. As a Gulf of Tonkin style false-flag operation, with the goal of pinning blame on the Egyptians for sinking the ship in order to get the US to help them invade Egypt for even more Lebensraum.

After failing to sink the ship, which would have killed all crew and witnesses, Israel used AIPAC and associated organizations to lobby for the view of the attack as an "Israeli mistake".

The Israel-USA relationship seems mutually parasitic. The USA uses Israel as a military base, but gets to use Israeli settlers surrounding it as human shields. In return, Israel can kill Americans for their own goals.

Acquiring nukes seems like the best way for any country to protect themselves against outside interference.

We know that as soon as Gaddafi decommissioned his nukes, Libya was targeted and invaded. If Iraq actually did have nukes, the USA wouldn't have been so brazen to invade.

China, Russia, and North Korea's acquisitions of nukes are also some of the main reasons why they are not easy targets for direct US invasion.

If Iran had nukes, it would drastically limit Israel's ability to indiscriminately attack Iranian assets.

Western policies against nuclear proliferation always seem to target the countries that need them the most to ensure national sovereignty, and never refer to their own nukes.

For example, they always fearmonger about "rogue states" like North Korea getting nukes, while being perfectly okay with Israel's own nukes. It might be best if these policies are ignored entirely.

TLDR: China is the only significant force in renewables adoption in the world, because the country uses central planning to advance its environmental objectives. The West's reliance on the profit motive to drive green energy is not working and will not work because renewables are not profitable enough.

This article is the most positive I have ever seen any mainstream news be towards China and central planning. I don't think there is a single "but at what cost" statement in the entire article. Frankly, I'm impressed this managed to get past the TIME editors.

The author, Brett Christophers, wrote The Price is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won't Save the Planet and Our Lives in Their Portfolios: Why Asset Managers Own the World, and Rentier Capitalism: Who Owns the Economy, and Who Pays for It?, among others, published via Verso Books.