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Western journalists did not understand the real situation in Russia, naively believing that there would be a real coup d’état in Moscow.

Israel has “a blatant disregard for moral boundaries,” charge Ukrainian diplomats.

By Lauren Marcus, World Israel News

Israel’s Foreign Ministry summoned the Ukrainian Ambassador to Israel, Yevgen Korniychuk, for a dressing-down after Kyiv accused Jerusalem of harboring a “pro-Russia” stance and charging that by remaining neutral in the conflict, Israel is acting “immorally.”

Since the onset of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Jerusalem has maintained a neutral stance on the war, and Israel has remained one of the few Western countries to maintain warm relations with both Moscow and Kyiv.

Despite Israel spending millions of dollars constructing and staffing a field hospital in Ukraine, supplying millions of dollars in aid and sending extensive humanitarian aid to the embattled country, as well as treating wounded Ukrainian soldiers in Israel free of charge, Kyiv has ramped up its demands that Israel clearly take its side in the conflict.

But on Sunday, the Ukrainian Embassy in Israel finally triggered a formal reprimand from Jerusalem after posting a screed on Facebook slamming the Jewish state for failing to impose Western-style sanctions on Russia and not providing the country with military equipment.

“The so-called ‘neutrality’ of Israel’s government is considered as a clear pro-Russian position,” the Ukrainian Embassy posted on its page. The post specifically referenced recent comments from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who said that one reason why Israel will not provide weapons to Ukraine is the fear that those assets could fall into Iranian hands.

The embassy slammed Netanyahu’s comments as “entirely fictional and speculative assumptions” and Foreign Minister Eli Cohen’s recent visit to Kyiv as “fruitless,” despite the fact he pledged some $200 million in foreign aid to the country.

Ukrainian diplomats also accused Israel of having “a blatant disregard for moral boundaries” because Israeli officials attended a recent event in Jerusalem that was organized by the Russian Embassy.

In 2022, Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky equated the war with the Holocaust in a speech to the Knesset, which angered Israeli lawmakers across the political spectrum.

The post Jerusalem summons Ukrainian ambassador after ‘pro-Russia’ accusations appeared first on World Israel News.

Syrians in Sudan fear returning home, but their only other option is a dangerous smuggling route

From at least the mid-twentieth century, all the way to the early 2000s, popular visions of technology’s role in the future were marked by sunny optimism. Technology, it was said, would raise the standard of living, topple once and for all the old information-hoarding hierarchies and monopolies, and unite people around the world in one harmonious democratic celebration. Today, no one even pretends to believe such a future is imminent. What happened?  

Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson suggest an answer in Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity. Acemoglu and Johnson, both professors at MIT, argue that the “secret sauce of shared prosperity in the decades following World War II” was “a direction of technology that created new tasks and jobs for workers of all skill levels and an institutional framework enabling workers to share productivity increases with employers and managers”—in other words, a set of policies promoting the development and growth of technologies that supported and enriched, rather than displaced, workers. But in recent decades, we’ve followed a different recipe, so to speak, one that has empowered employers, managers, and other elites while condemning everyone else to stagnating wages, precarious employment, and a Panopticon-like corporate invasion of our privacy. 

As far as sauces go, Acemoglu and Johnson’s is rather bland, but it comes with an intriguing garnish: an emphasis on the sheer contingency of our technologies’ trajectory, and its broader political and social impact. “Technology’s bias against working people,” they argue, “is always a choice, not an inevitable side effect of ‘progress.’” For Acemoglu and Johnson, deterministic thinking about technology has crippled our ability to address today’s problems, and blinded us to how our history could have been different.  

Though Acemoglu and Johnson never quite put it this way, their arguments reveal a surprising feature of technological determinism: its appearance in both an optimistic and a pessimistic flavor. The former insists that “[n]ew technologies … expand human capabilities and, when applied throughout the economy, greatly increase efficiency and productivity” and promises that “[s]ociety will sooner or later find a way of sharing these gains.” Besides the obvious rejoinder that technology has victims today, regardless of its eventual benefits, this view obscures the possibility that technologies will be directed even in the future to benefit only the elites in tech and business, who can absolve themselves of responsibility with the assurance that down the road, the out-of-work proles will find something to do. The pessimistic strain of technological determinism, meanwhile, sees modern technology’s use for “automation, surveillance, data collection, and advertising” as unavoidable. Technology’s trajectory cannot be altered, the argument goes, and so there’s no point in wishing that it could have instead promoted individual agency and widespread affluence—or in agitating for political reform. 

As the subtitle suggests, Power and Progress only makes this argument with great circumlocution. The book’s ultimate topics of interest are the rise and fall of postwar abundance in addition to assessments of automation, AI, social media, and other timely topics. But, before these are discussed, the reader faces a full millennium, and hundreds of pages, on not just the Industrial Revolution, but also its agricultural predecessor, the construction of the Suez Canal, American Reconstruction, and many other largely irrelevant matters. For Acemoglu, this method continues the style of his previous books, such as Why Nations Fail, which similarly hid a compelling thesis about state development behind mountains of cocktail-party-ready historical trivia. But it marks a break from the concision of Johnson’s previous books, such as Jump-Starting America, on the importance of breakthrough science to economic growth, and 13 Bankers, a history of the 2008 financial crisis. Vague musings on the nature of power and ideological influence are similarly tiresome. 

Though Acemoglu and Johnson give much attention to particular technological trends, economic puzzles, and policy challenges, two broader points in their emphasis on choice and contingency in the history of technology deserve particular attention. First, they make the important point that we didn’t have to squander so much talent and money in recent decades on industries and products that devalue humans, violate our privacy, and fuel an advertising arms-race for our attention. With the right incentives, policies, and investments, perhaps we could have instead gotten clean energy, better transportation, and other substantive innovations, along with well-paying jobs across social classes. Acemoglu and Johnson’s rejection of inevitability is a useful reminder that discrete poor choices got us into this mess, and that a new approach to political economy could get us out.  

The emphasis on choice and agency seriously errs, however, when Acemoglu and Johnson use it to justify a stance of principled agnosticism about technology’s value: “Technology does not have a preordained direction, and nothing about it is inevitable.” “Digital technology,” for example, “is not pro-democratic or antidemocratic”; social media can topple dictators and promote democracy, as in the Facebook- and Twitter-facilitated Arab Spring, but it can also promote misinformation, extremism, and hate speech. Similarly, they note, the early radio gave a greater platform to not just President Roosevelt, but also the demagogic Father Charles Coughlin and the Nazis. The sensible conclusion, surely, is that technology is good when used well and bad when used poorly, and so we should give using it well a try. What could be more obvious? 

If only it were so. Tempting as this way of thinking is, it obscures technology’s inherent transformative power, which is never just a matter of how it is used. Technology is more than just tools we apply to our environment at will; it determines what our very environment is, shaping the content of our thoughts and actions, our ways of thinking, our modes of interacting with everything beyond ourselves, and even the boundary between what is properly “ourselves” and what is “beyond.” What common laments about misinformation and the rejection of “trusted media sources” miss is that liberal democracy plus the Internet is not the same system, just with faster communication and a larger menu of beliefs to select from; it is a new system in which the older modes of authority, legitimacy, and consensus risk becoming incomprehensible. Against the authors’ overriding insistence on our own agency, and our freedom to use technology for good or ill, Marshall McCluhan’s warning remains apposite: “Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot. For the ‘content’ of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.” The world with the atom bomb is a different world from that without, regardless of whether the white hats drop it on the black hats or vice versa. 

A clearer understanding of technology would recognize, to modify Churchill’s quip about architecture, that we shape our technology, and thereafter our technology shapes us. In their meandering way, Acemoglu and Johnson are right to reject the myth of unstoppable “progress” peddled by its beneficiaries. But to do so, only to exaggerate our control over technology once we have unleashed it, is simply to replace one myth with another, perhaps even more dangerous, one. 

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity, by Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson (PublicAffairs, 560 pp., $32)  

The post Beware the Technological Idiot appeared first on Providence.

The Biden administration is “discriminating against and banning cooperation with Jews based on where they live,” says Senator Ted Cruz.

By Lauren Marcus, World Israel News

The Biden administration announced on Sunday that it is halting all scientific and technological cooperative projects with Israeli institutions in Judea and Samaria, following the denial of a grant to a university located over the Green Line.

Former president Donald Trump reversed a U.S. policy barring funding and collaboration with Judea and Samaria-based educational and research institutions, signing agreements with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that removed any geographical restrictions to U.S.-Israel cooperation.

According to KAN News, Biden administration officials informed their Israeli counterparts of a decision to revert back to the previous U.S. policy of refusing to fund or collaborate with institutions located over the 1967 Green Line, shortly after Ariel University was turned down research funding.

“I object to the decision and think it is wrong. In similar cases in the past, the Israeli Government fully reimbursed parties damaged by such decisions,” Foreign Minister Eli Cohen said during a press briefing following news of the decision.

A Biden administration official downplayed the significance of the move when speaking to KAN, claiming that the decision “simply reflects the position of the United States over the years.”

They added that “we are working toward negotiations for a two-state solution, where Israel lives in peace and security alongside a viable Palestinian state.”

Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) released a blistering statement saying that the decision was a victory for the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) movement and slammed the government for what said is tantamount to antisemitic discrimination against Jews.

“Joe Biden and Biden administration officials are pathologically obsessed with undermining Israel. Since day one of their administration, they have launched campaigns against our Israeli allies that are granular, whole of government, and done in secret,” Cruz said.

“This new boycott of Israeli Jews is yet another example. The State Department is telling the entire U.S. government not to cooperate with Jews in Judea and Samaria. And, of course, it was sent to Congress in secret and only revealed because reporters found out,” he continued.

Cruz noted that “the Biden administration defends funding scientific research in Wuhan with the Chinese Communist Party, but they’re discriminating against and banning cooperation with Jews based on where they live.”

The post ‘Obsessed with undermining Israel’ – US halts Judea and Samaria collaboration appeared first on World Israel News.

On Wednesday evening, police in Cranston, Rhode Island responded to a call from a woman who reported that a drone was hovering outside of her bathroom window.

As she had just arrived home from work and was preparing to take a shower, the woman heard a buzzing noise and went outside into the backyard, upon investigating, noticed the drone. She managed to grab the drone before it could take off and disabled it by submerging it in her pool, before calling the police.

Through their investigation, the police were able to trace the drone to Christopher Jones, a convicted sex offender whose requirement to register as such had ended in 2015.

When officers arrived at Jones’ Midland Drive home, they spoke to a woman who identified herself as his mother. She stated that she was unaware of her son having a drone and expressed that the alleged victim was likely upset, but was unwilling to speak further about the case. Jones admitted to operating the drone when questioned.

First published by Global Research on January 23, 2020

BlackRock is a global financial giant with customers in 100 countries and its tentacles in major asset classes all over the world; and it now manages the spigots to trillions …

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The post Where Did this “New World Order” Coup Come From? The Rockefeller’s “Social Engineering Project” appeared first on Global Research.

Millionaire fashion designer and social media influencer Rima Zahran, co-owner (together with her sister) of Dubai-based Dinz, is promoting a boycott of Israeli products in the UAE while repeating the antisemitic trope about Jews’ desire for money above all else.

The famous (millionaire and refugee) Palestinian fashion designer who lives in the #UAE is calling to boycott Israeli products in the UAE and repeats old antisemitic tropes about a Jewish desire for money.#ترحيل_الفلسطينيين pic.twitter.com/ePoLvhwcBB

— GND (@GND_arabic) June 24, 2023

The post WATCH: Israelis’ [Jews] ‘biggest weakness is money, we all know that,’ says millionaire BDS activist appeared first on World Israel News.