"US-trained officers" does not mean "a growing US military presence in Africa". Presumably they are ex-US military who have taken the lucrative mercenary route...
The US is known for contracting its more questionable military activities out to mercenaries. Remember Blackwater? One of the first contracts, worth $488 million, was helping the US forces out in Afghanistan, mainly doing jobs the official army could not afford to be seen doing.
The Blackwater thing (egregious as it was) was within countries that the US military was also engaged. Without ruling it out, I have not read of any suggestion of US government policy in Africa being assisted by mercenaries...
US government policy has been implemented via freelancers and mercenaries and without direct involvement of official US armed forces before.
Bay of Pigs, 1961
Chile, 1973
It is of course possible that the recent spate of changes of governments in Africa via mercenaries was accomplished without financial and other US government assistance. Any number of major corporations might be responsible for them, but the US government has always been the handmaid of big business, so I don't know if one or more of its arms (no pun intended) helped facilitate at least some of the changes.
It usually takes a few months, or even years, for such links to surface.
I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops. - Stephen J. Gould
"US-trained officers" does not mean "a growing US military presence in Africa". Presumably they are ex-US military who have taken the lucrative mercenary route...
Nope, mercs would never have the army behind them. These are local officers who benefited from training by US observers.
Governments, all cut from the same, hypocritical cloth.
That is a given, but there are differences between governments. In the past 80 years Australian governments were formed by either the conservative coalition (the misnamed Liberal Party and the National Party, previously known as the Country (meaning rural) Party) or the mildly socialist democratic Labor Party. We basically have a two-party system*. The difference in policies between the two is not massive, but it is large enough that nobody with a bit of empathy and humanity should take more than a picosecond to decide to give their preference towards Labor when they vote.
*Our preferential voting system occasionally enables a minor party to gain the balance of power, but that complication can be ignored in this post.
I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops. - Stephen J. Gould
I was in a prosthetics and orthotics clinic the other day and I noticed they only had one magazine in the waiting room, three copies of the same thing, this one:
It's a "luxury magazine", Rolex ads, plastic surgeon showcases, luxury shopping development opportunities, --these sorts of everyday things. Fairly interesting I guess, but still strange for a clinic waiting room. I'm sure there's money around, but odds are the majority of patients are using some kind of assistance or on payment plans.
"With less regulation on the margins we expect the financial sector to do well under the incoming administration” —money manager
UK govt scraps regs that oblige house builders to be 'neutrient neutral', including preventing them from connecting sewage outflows directly to local watercourses. We are literally a country full of shit.
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"It isn't necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice.
There are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia."
Frank Zappa
"This is how humanity ends; bickering over the irrelevant."
Clinton Huxley » 21 Jun 2012 » 14:10:36 GMT
They should make a new rule that sewage should be piped into the homes of those who voted for Brexit.
100% verifiable facts or your money back. Anti-fascist. Enemy of woo - theistic or otherwise. Cloth is not an antiviral. Imagination and fantasy is no substitute for tangible reality. Wishing doesn't make it real.
"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear" - George Orwell
"I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!" - Barry Goldwater
