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Miguel Antonio Bernal and some fellow independents at the Electoral Tribunal, with more than 15,000 more signatures to submit. Photo from Bernal’s Twitter feed.
Bernal’s move in the race for a ballot spot
by Eric Jackson
The basic rules are that come January 5, the top three independent candidates for president with the most signatures accepted as valid by the Electoral Tribunal get on the ballot, provided that they have at least 18,500 signatures. The limit is three, arbitrarily set at the behest of the political parties that notwithstanding all denials the electoral magistrates and prosecutor represent. In effect it’s less because they allow for and encourage ringers to bump real candidates off the ballot.
On June 7 law professor, activist and radio show host Miguel Antonio Bernal showed up with more than 15,000 signatures to present, adding to more than 3,000 he had previously submitted. The tribunal, offering no particular explanations, struck about one-third of the signatures he had submitted, leaving him in fourth place at the end of May. Bernal is prepared to challenge the disqualifications one by one, and has had vague assurances that his complaint will be reviewed.
As it now stands an unknown, who makes references to public offices he has never held — nor even sought — has never been know to engage in any sort of public advocacy and who says that he is a law student with sufficient time and funding from an unidentified business he says he has leads the pack. That’s Dimitri Flores, this election cycle’s ringer — more could come forward — whom the magistrates say has submitted more than 50,000 signatures so far. Campaign finance secrecy laws not only encourage bribery but also deny the public any financial information about who Flores’s backers actually might be.
Independent legislator, former attorney general and one of Bernal’s students way back when, Ana Matilde Gómez, registered second at the end of may with 27,418 signatures accepted by election authorities. Journalist and attorney Ricardo Lombana had been in third place with 12,726 signatures, with Bernal in fourth. Now, perhaps Bernal has vaulted into third place. Given the going rate of rejected signatures, and that the others are certainly not standing still, perhaps he’s still running fourth.
Gómez is accepted by some of the power brokers here, like the Motta family for one of whose businesses she once worked, as a reliable establishment candidate. She was appointed as attorney general during the Martín Torrijos administration and took care not to move against a number of corruption cases — in particular the political ties of Colombian racketeer David Murcia Guzmánwith the government and political parties in that time — but did go after several key people in the Ministry of Education who were caught stealing in rather flagrant fashion. She was removed by the Martinelli administration on a corruption complaint — one of the prosecutors under her was shaking down the family of a woman accused of a crime by threatening to imprison her under harsh conditions unless they paid him, and that family asked her to tap their own phone to prove it. She acceded to that request, caught the prosecutor in the flagrant act of extortion, fired him and charged him with a crime. But she was charged with illegal wiretapping and convicted while the extortionist went free. As a legislator she has fit in, but without putting her family on the payroll or engaging in other such abuses common among her colleagues. She has by and large opposed impeachment charges against high court magistrates, with the noteworthy exception of Alejandro Moncada Luna, who was jailed for amassing millions of dollars while on the bench and being unable to explain a legal source for this income. Moncada Luna is now out of prison and practicing law again.
Lombana is an advocate of ethics in journalism, who tends to accept the model that a journalist should not express his or her opinion on the substance of a controversial issue. Thus, while his name and face are known from newspaper columns and cable television shows, he has not been known as a leader of any movement for anything in particular.
Bernal was known as an opponent of the dictatorship — twice exiled and once beaten nearly to death — and these days is perhaps best known as the leading advocate of a constitutional convention to replace our current document, which is a 1972 relic of the military regime of that time.
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El día 9 de junio se conmemora un aniversario más de la desaparición del sacerdote Héctor Gallego, en Santa Fe de Veraguas. Pese a ser el caso de desaparición forzosa más conocido de la historia panameña, pese a haber sido condenados por el hecho cuatro agentes de la fuerza pública panameña, que cumplieron sus condenas, sigue manteniéndose la inoperancia del Ministerio Público y del Instituto de Medicina Legal en dar correcta identificación a los restos encontrados en el cuartel de Tocumen, en los que se ha denunciado que, a propósito, se confundieron los de Gallego y Heliodoro Portugal.
El encuentro de Héctor Gallego y el movimiento campesino veragüense no fue casualidad. Su llegada a Santa Fe constituyó la confluencia de una creciente lucha de campesinos pobres por la tierra, frente a la voracidad de los terratenientes, situación que se repetía en todo el continente latinoamericano, y que produjo un vuelco en la Iglesia católica de los años 60, con el Concilio Vaticano II, y la “opción preferencial por los pobres” de la Conferencia General del Episcopado Latinoamericano en Medellín del año 1968.
Por supuesto, hay dos lecturas de este proceso, una como compromiso real de la Iglesia; otra, como una política inteligente de contrainsurgencia, cuando el continente ardía en conflictos por todos lados. De Antioquia, Colombia, cuya capital es Medellín, procedía Gallego.
Llega a una provincia atravesada por conflictos agrarios, donde el obispo Vásquez Pinto había trazado una estrategia denominada “Plan Veraguas”, que consistía en la creación de un sistema de cooperativas con asistencia social, CEPAS y la Juan XXIII, que mitigaran ese conflicto. En la comunidad de La Mula, en Santa Fe, donde se instaló Héctor, se había producido una ocupación de tierras por parte de campesinos pobres, la cual era confrontada por los terratenientes de la zona, encabezados por la familia Vernaza.
La Iglesia competía con el Partido del Pueblo por la dirección del creciente movimiento campesino, que se había empezado a organizar en Soná a mediados de los años 50, enfrentando a los Martinelli, donde se distinguió Carlos Francisco Changmarín. Este movimiento y los de otros municipios confluyeron en la llamada Federación de Ligas Campesinas, que llegaron a realizar varios congresos nacionales a lo largo de la década.
El resto de la historia es bastante conocida, pero para quienes desean una amena y minuciosa descripción de los sucesos que precedieron y prosiguieron a la desaparición de este sacerdote comprometido con los campesinos pobres, recomiendo la novela El calvario del padre Héctor Gallego, del sociólogo Pablo Asís Navarro Icaza.
La novela contiene todo. Desde los sentimientos de los campesinos sobre el conflicto agrario, hasta el proceso judicial, incluyendo el señalamiento de uno de los condenados, Melbourne Walker, contra Edilberto Del Cid y un equipo de los Macho de Monte, como los reales autores del secuestro. Pablo Navarro ha hecho una exhaustiva labor investigativa que convierte a esta novela en documento valioso a atesorar como parte de la historia nacional.
El libro culmina con una denuncia que ya ha hecho también Alexis Sánchez (La Estrella, 1/3/18): los restos de Gallego y Portugal fueron cambiados a propósito para confundir las investigaciones; que los restos de ambos ya fueron identificados en laboratorios extranjeros con las muestras de ADN extraídas de los huesos encontrados en el cuartel de Tocumen de las antiguas Fuerzas de Defensa. La desidia y complicidad de la Procuraduría y del Instituto de Medicina Legal han impedido hasta ahora cumplir con la exhumación de los restos de Portugal y poner orden en la investigación final. Increíble.
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The gauntlet thrown down: the legislature moves to stop an audit of its payroll. The comptroller then cut off all payments to all National Assembly deputies’ staff members.
After nine more deputies get their payrolls suspended by the
Comptroller General, the National Assembly boots his auditors
by Eric Jackson
The legislature is a bunch of thugs? Doesn’t almost every Panamanian more or less perceive this to be the case, with the real division in society between those who are on or hope to be on the gravy train and those who would derail it?
On May 28 Comptroller General Federico Humbert ordered the suspension of payments to those on the legislative payrolls of 11 deputies: José Luis Varela, Elías Castillo, Jorge Alberto Rosas, Carlos Motta, Melitón Arrocha, Athenas Athanasiadis, Fernando Carrillo, Jaime Pedrol, Aris De Icaza, Juan Serrano and Salvador Real. On June 5 he ordered payments suspended to the legislative staff of nine more deputies, Adolfo “Baby” Valderrama, Dana Castañeda, Ausencio Palacio, Crescencia Prado, José Castillo, José Domínguez, Iván Picota, Néstor Guardia and Felipe Vargas.
Humbert cited things from irregular paperwork to one deputy who has nine family members on the payroll to the standard “botellas” (no-show theoretical employees whose salaries the legislator typically pockets). In some cases, in a direct slap at long-established political patronage traditions, Humbert suggested and questioned campaign crews and mistresses appearing on payrolls. The 20 deputies whose payrolls were blocked represent more than one-third of the legislature and all party caucuses, and the audits were not yet over. Humbert had already reached a final conclusion about the control methods for the legislature managing its payroll, but the particulars of each payroll were still under investigation.
So National Assembly president Yanibel Ábrego, in the name of the legislature rather than in her own right, issued an order that Humbert’s work was over and his auditors were expelled from the legislature. Humbert responded by cutting off all payments for all legislative payrolls. Legislator and PRD leader Pedro Miguel González responded that this action gave the legislature cause to impeach Humbert.
How to put it in partisan terms? It’s the political parties against everybody else, with a caste accustomed to doing things in a certain way opposing labor, business and civic groups.
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Utilizando un colorido busito, el Instituto Smithsonian de Investigaciones Tropicales se toma las calles para trasladarse a escuelas públicas, organizaciones comunitarias y ferias en las provincias de Panamá, Panamá Oeste y Colón por medio del programa Q?Bus, llevando las ciencias del Smithsonian a la calle. Este programa tiene como objetivo principal proporcionar educación informal a niños y jóvenes que no han tenido la oportunidad de visitar las instalaciones de programas públicos del Instituto y encender su curiosidad e interés por las ciencias.
El Q?Bus proviene del programa Q?rius que maneja el Museo Nacional de Historia Natural de la Institución Smithsonian en Washington, DC. Q?rius se implementará en Panamá en un futuro bajo el nombre de Q?rioso Panamá como un espacio de descubrimiento dentro del Centro Natural Punta Culebra en la Calzada de Amador.
El Q?Bus transporta equipo tecnológico, colecciones y todos los implementos necesarios para llevar a cabo actividades interactivas y divertidas a través del aprendizaje por indagación. Todas las actividades están relacionadas a alguna disciplina que estudia el Smithsonian en Panamá, como la entomología, la hidrología, la arqueología, la ecología microbiana, la biodiversidad y el monitoreo físico. Las actividades fueron desarrolladas para estudiantes de 1º a 9º grado y las mismas están alineadas a los estándares nacionales del Ministerio de Educación (MEDUCA).
El programa correrá de mayo a noviembre del presente año, gracias a una subvención otorgada por el Youth Access Implementation Grant (YAG), la Fundación Smithsonian y la oficina del Director del Smithsonian en Panamá. Para este año escolar (duración de la subvención), el programa Q?Bus tiene como meta brindar educación científica informal de alta calidad a 6,250 estudiantes de áreas socioeconómicamente desfavorecidas. El programa ya ha tenido una amplia acogida y confiamos que será exitoso en despertar el interés científico en los futuros ciudadanos del país.
Para mayor información sobre el programa Q?Bus, comunicarse al correo: hassellk@si.edu
Karina Hassell, Coordinadora del programa Q?Bus durante las actividades interactivas a través del aprendizaje por indagación. Foto por Jorge Alemán — Smithsonian
El Instituto Smithsonian de Investigaciones Tropicales, en ciudad de Panamá, Panamá, es una unidad de la Institución Smithsonian. El Instituto promueve la comprensión de la naturaleza tropical y su importancia para el bienestar de la humanidad, capacita estudiantes para llevar a cabo investigaciones en los trópicos, y fomenta la conservación mediante la concienciación pública sobre la belleza e importancia de los ecosistemas tropicales. Sitio web:www.stri.si.edu. Video Promocional:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9JDSIwBegk
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Coral reef conservation efforts will soon get a major boost with a global monitoring system that will detect physical changes in coral cover at high resolution on a daily basis.
The satellite-based system will enable researchers, policy makers, and environmentalists to track severe bleaching events, reef dynamiting, and coastal development in near-real time.
The system will leverage Planet’s daily high resolution satellite imagery, running the data through cloud computing-based algorithms to map reefs and chart changes over time.
Coral reef conservation efforts will soon get a major boost with a global monitoring system that will detect physical changes in coral cover at high resolution on a daily basis, enabling researchers, policy makers, and environmentalists to track severe bleaching events, reef dynamiting, and coastal development in near-real time. The satellite-based system — which is the product of a partnership between Paul G. Allen Philanthropies, Planet, Carnegie Institution of Science, University of Queensland, and the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology — will launch at five pilot sites this fall, before rolling out globally in 2020.
“This system could be a game-changer for coral reef conservation,” Carnegie scientist Greg Asner, told Mongabay. “It will be the first large-scale monitoring system that can detect where reefs are changing thereby enabling direct action to mitigate losses.”
Planet satellite image of reef off Moorea Island in Tahiti.
The world’s coral reefs have been hard hit by a combination of rising sea temperatures, which trigger bleaching; coastal development that damages reefs directly and indirectly; unsustainable fishing practices, including overexploitation of key species and fish bombing; and run-off and sedimentation from agriculture, aquaculture, deforestation, and other forms of land use. Ocean acidification is another looming danger, threatening to undermine the very structural basis of reefs.
Given the importance of coral reef ecosystems in supporting local livelihoods through fishing and tourism, mitigating coastal erosion, and housing up to a quarter of ocean biodiversity, there are deep concerns about these trends. But current systems for monitoring coral health are spotty, usually based on scuba or aircraft surveys — which are limited in extent — or blunt proxy data like sea surface temperatures, which don’t account for differences in resilience among coral communities.
The new system will change that by combining technology with field survey data. The system will leverage Planet’s daily high resolution satellite imagery, running the data through cloud computing-based artificial intelligence (AI) that corrects for “distortions from the atmosphere, sun glint, materials in the water column and surface waves” and then applies algorithms from ocean researchers at the University of Queensland’s Remote Sensing Research Center to classify the reefs. Carnegie will then apply a change detection algorithm to the data, giving the system its the monitoring capability. Asner said the system will retain pixel history, eventually enabling researchers to potentially monitor changes over time, including coral recovery after bleaching events.
Four representations of Heron Island on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. The upper left shows the 2010 dataset from the United Nations Environment Program’s World Conservation Monitoring Center (UNEP-WCMC). The upper right shows the partnership’s benthic data overlaid on UNEP-WCMC’s map. The lower left shows shows the partnership’s benthic data overlaid on a satellite image from Planet. The lower right shows the Planet satellite image.
In the first year, the project will produce an initial mosaic of coral reef sites globally and do validation at five sites: Heron Island on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, Moorea in French Polynesia, Belize’s Lighthouse Reef, Hawaii’s Kaneohe Bay, and Karimunjawa, off the Indonesian island of Java. The initiative chose these sites because they “represent a variety of reef types and status from across the globe and where field verification data are readily available,” according to a statement from Paul Allen Philanthropies. The project will also develop a community engagement plan to work with researchers, conservationists, policymakers, and others to implement and share findings from the initiative.
After that first phase, the initiative will scale the mapping from specific sites to entire regions and deploy the AI-based alert system. By the end of 2020, the project aims to scale the mapping from regions to the entire world, potentially enabling the first high resolution global reef monitoring system, rivaling what Global Forest Watch is doing for the planet’s forests and Global Fishing Watch endeavors to do for fishing on the high seas.
Planet satellite image of Heron Island. “We need to know what is occurring in this hidden world of shallow coral reefs if we have any hope to save them,” said Art Min, vice president of impact for Paul Allen Philanthropies, in a statement. “Coral reefs cover less than one percent of the ocean surface and yet nearly 1 billion people and 25 percent of all marine life depend on them.”Planet satellite image of coral off Belize’s Lighthouse Reef. Taken March 28, 2018.
Andrew Zolli, vice president for global impact initiatives at Planet, said the initiative could usher in a new era for coral reef managers and conservationists.
“Seeing change is the first step in taking responsibility for it,” Zolli stated in a press release. “By putting the most complete, up-to-date picture of the world’s corals in the hands of scientists, conservationists, and communities, we hope to accelerate action on the coral crisis before it’s too late.”
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2. Google News hardly covers Panama, and so much of their “coverage” is actually sales hype. And the advertising that Google will sponsor? Fraudulent stuff there, especially when it comes to political libel coming from one country to affect another country’s elections, is an ongoing scandal and not just in the United States.
3. What is the point of this press release out of Montreal? Go down toward the bottom:
“Legal Disclaimer
Certain statements in this document, including those which express management’s expectations or estimations with regard to the Company’s future performance, constitute “forward-looking statements” as understood by applicable securities laws.
…
This news release does not constitute a solicitation to buy or sell any securities in the United States.”
Safe to say that this is an offer that would likely be considered illegal under US securities laws. But isn’t Canada more calm and civilized than the USA? Actually, Canadian securities markets are notoriously fraud-friendly, much more so than those of the United States.
4. This company claims a history back to 2005 (which is not to say that the same people have been running it all along). You would think that such a firm would have someone with at least an inkling of a journalistic background to write its press releases. The standard, often violated by folks writing longer, in-depth stuff that’s nevertheless valid, is an inverted pyramid style lead, answering the questions “Who? What? When? Where?”
Forget, for a moment, the “Who?” about the company. Who is the bank in Panama? They don’t say.
A proposal to invest money on the basis of a connection with an unidentified entity, person or family is one of the hallmarks of fraud in or connected to Panama.
5. So, since this offer is likely illegal in the United States and you are thus unlikely to find a US broker willing to touch this with a 10-foot pole, do you run right out to a Panamanian brokerage firm to make your stock purchase? In an infamous ruling to protect his patron at the time, the criminal who just got out of prison and is now working at a law firm again, then Supreme Court presiding magistrate Alejandro Moncada Luna, infamously ruled in 2012 that stock swindles are in effect legal in Panama if they do not involve shares traded on this country’s small Bolsa de Valores stock and bond exchange. Neither the courts nor the politicians have ever seen fit to disavow this. So you just might be able to find a Panamanian broker who can get you some of these shares. That doesn’t make it a wise move.
7. Remember all the buzz words and phrases of the Dot-Com Bubble? Perhaps, way back when, you listened to the gurus and to noted economic theorist Willow Bay, believed devoutly in “the new economy,” so put all of your life’s savings into Fog Dog. (The ephemeral online sporting goods company, not the unrelated brewery of a later time and similar name, nor the lewd dancing.) One of today’s overused buzz phrases is “big data.” Never mind that the European Union has moved to restrict some of the practices that go under that heading, and that it’s one of the nexes of controversy in the United States with respect to Russian propaganda campaigns in the 2016 US election season.
“Big data” is a bipartisan malady, which made huge money for a few Democratic consultants for one of the worst political campaigns ever, and which brought the alt-right into the mainstream of Republican politics at least until their star started to fade with the Roy Moore campaign in Alabama. It is a controversial private espionage / micro-targeted advertising technique, pioneered by secretive government agencies and some of their contractors, one of which is Google.
And there you have it in this company’s self-description: “The company captures value from big data to deliver seamless and personalized user experiences for the benefits of all parties in the ecosystem.” Whatever THAT means.
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Bottom line? Google should be ashamed for presenting this as news about Panama.
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My alarm clock, the Yellow Crowned Amazon (often called a parrot rather than an amazon), wakes me up at dawn outside my bedroom window. It’s about 12 inches or 30 centimeters tall.
Mi despertador, la Amazona Coroniamarillo, me despierta al amanecer fuera de la ventana de mi habitación. Tiene alrededor de 12 pulgadas o 30 centímetros de alto.
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People do fear and despise cell phone robbers. But when you look at the Attorney General’s website, the most wanted are all alleged drug dealers or rapists, the noteworthy crimes are things like robberies and homicides by obnoxious driving, the communiques tend to be about things within the bureaucracy — but former public officials who stole millions don’t get much mention, and Ricardo Martinelli’s fugitive family members don’t get on the most wanted list. The emphasis appears to be intentional, a message to ordinary people that the law can get them and not to be concerned with those who stole millions from us. From the Ministerio Publico website.
21-fold increase in corrruption cases, but…
by Eric Jackson
At the end of May, after weeks of stories about high-profile public corruption suspects getting out on bail mostly on condition of not leaving Panama, the Public Ministry let the press and public know of a spectacular increase in the number of criminal cases about embezzlement, graft and other such raids on the public treasury. There were 35 open cases at the beginning of the year, and the between then and the end of April 734 new ones were added.
So is Panama getting tough on crime in high places? Not really. A few high-profile private sector defendants who were involved in government contracting made plea bargains that not only keep them out of prison but preserve their ability to bid on government contracts. Part of their deals is usually to tell all, which means that secretaries and bag men and women are named along with an ultimate beneficiary or two. The people who actually got the big kickbacks for overpriced contracts of course say it’s all a pack of lies, except for a very few who make their own plea bargains, in the course of which they tend to name mostly underlings. The huge increase coincides with the Blue Apple scandal, which involves most of the larger construction companies doing business in Panama, some financial institutions and a relatively few former public officials. The people at the top appear to have made out like bandits. (This genre of banditry is not much for the firearms displays, but do not be fooled.) The new cases are generally not people at the top.
Meanwhile, the Comptroller General has suspended payments to those on 11 legislators’ payrolls, claiming various irregularities. There may be some botellas there — phantom employees who may not even know they were such, whose alleged salaries go into the pocket of their claimed employer legislators. However, it seems that in at least some of the cases there may have been sloppy records but there was no dishonesty. Reports and records have been forwarded to prosecutors. And indeed, criminal complaints have been filed — against the comptroller for having the audacity to audit the legislature’s expenditures. Those have been quickly dismissed, but it seems that more are coming.
Meanwhile, hundreds of residency visas and work permits have been revoked for fraud. But no immigration official, nor any attorney, is facing prosecution for being a party to any of these frauds.
Meanwhile, prosecutors say that at least $1.9 million was laundered through the Financial Pacific brokerage firm and ended up in the “New Business” account linked to Ricardo Martinelli’s purchase of newspapers and broadcast stations with funds siphoned out of the public treasury. There is no move yet to strip the former president of his media empire.
Meanwhile, the cases of hundreds of millions of dollars of national government funds laundered through juntas comunales — community councils — for vote buying purposes in the 2014 Ricardo Martinelli proxy re-election campaign is stalled. Whether Martinelli himself ever faces justice over this remains to be seen — the Supreme Court rather than the ordinary prosecutors have jurisdiction — but this stall is in the cases of Martinelli’s men and women.
So there is little public appreciation of or enthusiasm for this year’s numerical crackdown on public corruption that Attorney General Kenia Porcell claims.
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The cepo — here, the Embera version of the stocks — an indigenous form of justice that was in place long before the current elites and their recent ancestors invented impunity for themselves. Photo by Eric Jackson.
A slow smash and grab season?
In April, the Varela administration and legislature jammed through a law loosening the telecommunications concessions contracts to allow wireless telephone and Internet companies to buy one another. We were told that our neighbors have fewer companies, so we should join the trend. Thus, following the lead of Honduras to have less competition and more monopolistic practices sailed right through.
In May, we were told that a new electric rate structure would go into effect, so as to essentially ban home and business solar electric generation. Just because. However, there was a brief outcry and the president and his utilities authority backed down.
About the same time, construction starts for the fourth bridge over the canal and other big projects were postponed. Could it be that between the Odebrecht and Blue Apple scandals, all the would-be bidders are skittish about getting caught again playing the same old games at the same time that they are negotiating their plea bargains?
Normally the last year of a presidency is peak corruption season, as people at all levels of the government grab what they can before losing their public jobs. But maybe this time it’s different.
Is the public corruption sector of our economy slowing down along with construction and a sluggishly recovering import/export sector? Time will tell.
China’s claim, which overlaps several countries’ exclusive economic zones as codified in the UN Law of the Sea Convention.
Chinese take out?
China’s assertion of maritime territorial claims in the South China Sea is problematic because it is a vague assertion of the way things supposedly were back in the days of ancient dynasties. China claimed Vietnam and the Straits of Malacca at various points, too. But subsequent dynasties turned inward, going so far as to order the destruction of all documents about the world outside of a lesser China. Then foreign powers carved concessions out of that China, which occupations lasted until the middle of the 20th century.
So should Italy get to claim the old Roman Empire, too, notwithstanding the existence of later legitimate states? Mussolini was into that sort of thinking but even his fellow fascists never bought it.
The construction and militarization of artificial islands is also a problem, but this is of far more recent vintage and a more complicated set of questions. With climate change and rising sea levels the construction or enhancement of islands in the sea may be the only hope for survival of some small Pacific states. It’s an area of international law that cries out for the negotiation and adoption of an amendment to the Law of the Sea Convention.
Panama is a maritime nation and should also look askance at China’s actions in the South China Sea, even if we are now economically dependent on Beijing.
But neither Panama, the American people nor anybody else should accept the Trump administration’s rhetoric about China’s fortified islands in the South China Sea. From the Pentagon’s Joint Staff director Lieutenant General Kenneth McKenzie we hear that the United States can “take down” China’s fortified islands.
Well, yes. And China can take out Washington, and the United States can take out Beijing, and at least seven or eight countries could take out the Panama Canal. But the threat of radioactive death is unacceptable in the world.
Bear in mind…
Refusal to believe until proof is given is a rational position; denial of all outside of our own limited experience is absurd.
Annie Besant
A state too expensive in itself, or by virtue of its dependencies, ultimately falls into decay; its free government is transformed into a tyranny; it disregards the principles which it should preserve, and finally degenerates into despotism.
Simón Bolívar
All judgment is relative. It may be right today and wrong tomorrow. The only thing that makes it truly right is the desire to have it constantly moving in the right direction.
Frances Perkins
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