orangkampung

Wit is the highest form of sarcasm

[orangkampung @orangkampung]

1) It is America 🇺🇸 that needs a regime change
2) No, the answer is not the Democrats

[depths of wikipedia! @depthsofwiki]

length of the table of contents in "united states involvement in regime change"

[orangkampung @orangkampung]

‘What we allow is what will continue’

[Renzo™ @fwrenzo1]

A rich kid can fail upward through connections and nepotism. A poor kid can do everything right and still end up working retail with a master's degree. Meritocracy is the story we tell. Inherited advantage is the system we have.

[Thierry from arvy 🇨🇭 @ThierryBorgeat]

Nothing - and I mean nothing - beats Zurich.

[orangkampung @orangkampung]

1st choice: ‘Israel’ because everything is free courtesy of the US 🇺🇸 empire.

2nd (and real) choice: Nowhere. The grass is greener where you water it.

[World of Statistics @stats_feed]

If you could move to any country right now for free and get instant citizenship, where would you move to and why?

[orangkampung @orangkampung]

@stats_feed 1st choice: ‘Israel’ because everything is free courtesy of the US 🇺🇸 empire

2nd (and real) choice: Nowhere. The grass is greener where you water it.

[Chris Hedges @ChrisLynnHedges]

Power does not rest in the Congress. It does not rest in the courts. It does not even rest in the imperial presidency. It rests in the hands of Wall Street financiers, Silicon Valley, private equity firms, the fossil fuel industry, the predatory health care and pharmaceutical giants, agribusinesses and, most of all, the war industry.

No mainstream politician, including Bernie Sanders, dares utter a word against our entrenched militarism. If you do, you end up like Ralph Nader, who was turned into a pariah by a compliant media and our corporate-indentured political parties. Nader spoke the truth. He paid for his honesty.

We are about to witness the largest increase in war spending in American history with a proposed $1.5 trillion budget. The average taxpayer already shells out over $4,000 a year to the war industry as consumer and environmental agencies are dismantled, health care and education are defunded and programs such as Medicaid and food stamps (the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) are slashed.

The new Pentagon budget will hand $58.5 billion to artificial intelligence and military command-and-control centers and see the effective merging of the United States and Israeli military industrial complexes. Seventy-four percent of the increase in the proposed $1.5 trillion budget will go to private contractors, including those who are building massive data centers on military bases.

None of this is good for us or good for the planet. The Pentagon, powered by the fossil fuel industry, is the world’s largest institutional polluter, emitting an estimated 66 million metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2024.

Americans, meanwhile, struggle with rising prices — nearly 30 percent of people go into debt to buy groceries. An estimated 114,174. Americans die each year due to lack of health insurance or inadequate health care while a single-payer universal health care system could cover every American, save more than 100,000 lives a year, and reduce annual health expenditures by $1.04 trillion, or nearly 20 percent. Twenty-five percent of Americans are functionally unemployed. The minimum wage remains frozen, despite Democratic Party promises to raise it, at $ 7.25 an hour.

The elites use war not only for personal enrichment, but to stifle class conflict.

War, as W.E.B. Du Bois said, diverts the poor from their real interests. It funnels national frustrations into the “heroic” battle against a common enemy. The nationalist cant, with its endemic racism, seduces those who are alienated or on the margins of society into feeling they suddenly belong. It entices them to sacrifice themselves for a “noble” cause. They become the architects of their own enslavement. They march like sheep into war’s purgatory.

By the time they wake up, it is too late. They are cast aside, as so many of our veterans have painfully discovered, like human refuse.

But as a tactic to consolidate power and enrich the billionaire class, it is unbeatable.

Wars will only be curtailed, if not halted, when we nationalize the weapons industry and dramatically reduce the military budget. Until then, nothing, absolutely nothing, will change.

Indeed, things will only get worse.

No one in Congress — or any other branch of government — will do this for us.

The masters of war sitting in the boardrooms of Boeing, General Dynamics or Northrop Grumman are not praying for peace in the Middle East or coexistence with China and Russia. The generals — who build their careers by orchestrating wars and post military careers enriching themselves working for defense contractors — are not seeking a cessation of global conflicts. They are seeking hundreds of billions in taxpayer dollars and government debt to fuel the self-defeating cycle of endless war.

The corporate vultures — especially the war makers — are, as I write, descending on Congress. They are meeting with Democratic Party leaders and holding out promises of millions in cash. They will corrupt, neutralize and compromise most. They will destroy the careers of the very few who refuse to do their bidding.

They hold the real power. They have no intention of surrendering it.

The manufacturing of weapons systems and the waging of war are the chief activities of the U.S. government. It is no longer one among other means of advancing the national interest. War and violence are how we speak to the rest of the world.

The “shadow world,” — as the author Andrew Feinstein calls it in his book on the global arms trade — is defined by staggering levels of corruption, deception and senseless death. It is lawless and unregulated. Its criminal activities, cannibalization of national budgets and secrecy are sanctified in the name of “national security.”

Lockheed Martin, RTX (formerly Raytheon Technologies), Boeing, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, BAE Systems, Leonardo, Airbus, Rheinmetall and ThyssenKrupp, along with Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Palantir, Goldman Sachs, Citibank and Exxon, are the state.

We, including our political class, are the vassals.

Read my my full column, 'The Enemy at Home' on Substack at the link below:

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

You are not wrong to be angry about what is happening to your living standards.

The housing is genuinely unaffordable.

The healthcare is genuinely inaccessible.

The wages have genuinely failed to keep pace with productivity for decades.

The anger is correct. The diagnosis is worth the work.

The question is whether the diagnosis leads you toward the people making those decisions:

The asset managers, the hospital chains, the private equity firms, the political donors, the regulatory revolving door. All of them domestic, all of them accessible, all of them with addresses in American cities and names on American ballots.

Or whether it leads you toward people who look different, speak different languages, and live in countries that are, conveniently, too far away to vote out of office.

The anger is yours.

Where it goes is a choice.

And someone has been working very hard, for a very long time, to make sure it goes in a particular direction.

[orangkampung @orangkampung]

Scroll past, BLOCK.

Arguing with idiots increases their visibility. That’s how social media algorithm works, no?

Engaging also means that you respect - nay, validate - their point of view.

[orangkampung @orangkampung]

@azrulrhm

[orangkampung @orangkampung]

@1MarcHarder1 @ATLCWorker In Malay we have a saying, ‘Siapa yang makan cili, dialah merasa pedasnya’.

If the shoe fits…

[orangkampung @orangkampung]

7️⃣ “If Allah willed harm for me, could they remove the harm He willed? Or if He willed mercy for me, could they withhold His mercy?’ Say: ‘Allah is sufficient for me. Let those who put their trust put their trust in Him alone.’” (Az-Zumar, 38)

[orangkampung @orangkampung]

6️⃣ “How many living creatures do not carry their own provisions! Allah provides for them and for you. He is the All-Hearing, the All-Knowing.” (Al-Ankabut, 60)

[orangkampung @orangkampung]

5️⃣ “Whatever mercy Allah opens to people, none can withhold it. And whatever He withholds, none can send it after Him. He is the Almighty, the All-Wise.” (Fatir, 2)

[orangkampung @orangkampung]

4️⃣ “I have put my trust in Allah, my Lord and your Lord. There is no living creature on earth whose forelock Allah does not hold. Indeed, my Lord is on a straight path.” (Hud, 56)

[orangkampung @orangkampung]

3️⃣ “There is no living creature on earth whose sustenance is not Allah’s responsibility. He knows its dwelling place and its resting place. All of this is recorded in a clear Book.” (Hud, 6)

[orangkampung @orangkampung]

2️⃣ If Allah touches you with harm, none can undo it except Him. And if He intends good for you, none can withhold His bounty. He grants it to whoever He wills of His servants. And He is the All-Forgiving, Most Merciful.

(Yunus, 107)

[orangkampung @orangkampung]

1️⃣ Say, “Nothing will ever befall us except what Allah has destined for us. He is our Protector.” So in Allah let the believers put their trust.

(At-Tawbah, 51)

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

The poverty of Africa is one of the most successful lies ever told.

Not because Africa has no poverty. It does. The poverty is real and it kills real people every day.

But the story of why, that is the lie.

The story says: underdevelopment. Corruption. Tribalism. Poor institutions. A continent that simply never found its footing.

The story does not say: 400 years of slave trade that forcibly removed somewhere between 12 and 20 million people, the young, the strong, the able, from the continent’s productive capacity.

The story does not say: colonialism that reorganized entire economies to produce raw materials for European industry and banned the development of local manufacturing.

The story does not say: the debt architecture of the post-independence era, which ensured that countries that escaped political colonialism immediately entered financial colonialism, with IMF conditions attached that dismantled the public institutions the colonizers had refused to build in the first place.

Africa is not underdeveloped.

Africa is precisely as developed as centuries of deliberate extraction were designed to leave it.

That is not misfortune.

That is a policy outcome.