World News

>> Be 22, shirtless and unarmed
>> Sitting on a parkbench with a buddy of mine around 9PM on a Saturday in his neighborhood
>> Cops roll up and draw guns on us
>> Say lOL what are you gonna do shoot us
>> not so funny now

>>Executing an unarmed crying teenager on his knees trying to pull his pants up and crawl

>Last I checked it was mainland china trying to erode rule of law and the citizens fighting back against it.

>I can't experience peace until this is resolved. There won't be any peace for me. Night, afternoon, any time of day. Peaceful mornings are not a thing for me. Certainly a piece of me goes with this forest. Save the forest within us all and fix this fire.

>neolib

>CIA buzzword

>The Sunday military coup in Bolivia has put in place a government which appears likely to reverse a decision by just-resigned President Evo Morales to cancel an agreement with a German company for developing lithium deposits in the Latin American country for batteries like those in electric cars.

>"Bolivia's lithium belongs to the Bolivian people," tweeted Washington Monthly contributor David Atkins. "Not to multinational corporate cabals."

>The Morales move on Nov. 4 to cancel the December 2018 agreement with Germany's ACI Systems Alemania (ACISA) came after weeks of protests from residents of the Potosí area. The region has 50% to 70% of the world's lithium reserves in the Salar de Uyuni salt flats.

>Among other clients, ACISA provides batteries to Tesla; Tesla's stock rose Monday after the weekend.

>Morales' cancellation of the ACISA deal opened the door to either a renegotiation of the agreement with terms delivering more of the profits to the area's population or the outright nationalization of the Bolivian lithium extraction industry.

>The Jeffrey Epstein story is a case study of the abuses and pathologies inherent to extreme wealth. The only way to stop them is to create a world without billionaires.

>In other words, the monstrous, sprawling crimes Epstein is accused of couldn’t have been possible without the extreme wealth inequality that prevails in our current world. And while this fact won’t blow anybody’s mind, it gains extra urgency when you consider some of the other stuff Epstein was planning to do.

>We now know that Epstein wanted to be a twenty-first-century Genghis Khan and flood the human gene pool with his DNA by artificially impregnating scores of women at his New Mexico ranch. He also wanted his head and penis frozen for some as-yet-undisclosed purpose. This is all horrifying enough. But consider also a more mundane but equally horrifying detail about Epstein’s beliefs that has gotten less attention: that Epstein opposed efforts to provide the poor with health care and relief from starvation, because he believed doing so would lead to overpopulation.

>Compound that with the corrosive effects of extreme wealth on the human brain. Both anecdotal evidence and many, many studies show that having wealth and power increases a person’s sense of entitlement — their feeling that they’re not bound by the rules of wider society — while reducing their ability to empathize, exercise moral judgment, and be generous. As one wealth manager told sociologist Brooke Harrington, author of Capital Without Borders: Wealth Managers and the One Percent, “National borders are nothing to them. They might as well not exist. The laws are nothing to them. They might as well not exist. It’s potentially very, very dangerous.”

>This isn’t just something intrinsic to wealth. It’s the natural outcome of concentrated, unaccountable power wielded by a small collection of people largely removed from the lived experience of the vast majority of people on Earth, just as feudalist monarchies and totalitarian dictatorships produced their own classes of people who engaged in extreme cruelty and selfishness, and wielded power simply to perpetuate it. We know where the concentration of wealth and power ultimately leads; the question is whether we’re willing to do something about it.