I also had it in hiking Peru. I found it to be a mild stimulant, similar to caffeine but wihlthout any jitters. Didn't notice any euphoria at all, TBH.
My wife and I drank coca tea during the whole stay in Peru, and the altitude didn't bother us at all, which I presume was because of the coca.
The article doesn't even say how long the protection lasts for, or mention a single one of the ingredients by name. Doesn't really give the reader much to go on :-/
Has Israel tried removing themselves from lands they are illegally occupying?
Has Israel tried not constantly lobbing missiles and rockets at Lebanon? (yes, I know Hezbollah had launched many rockets at territories Israel are illegally occupying, something like 1/4 of the number Israel has launched).
Has Israel tried not dropping leaflets on Lebanese civilians, demanding they leave so Israel can steal their homes and land?
Has Israel even tried stopping harassing the Lebanese population with sonic booms and armed drones?
AFAICT the only thing Israel actually has tried, is more of the above.
As much as Israel likes to spread that narrative, religious fundamentalism had nothing to do with October 7th. And the number of innocents murdered, the amount of destruction wrought, the land stolen by Israel in Gaza since then has completely eclipsed the relative few killed by Hamas. Or are Israeli lives worth more?
Israel left Gaza before, I don't think it will happen again soon. Palestinians will also not work in Israel anymore in the foreseeable future at least.
It is not a question about which lives are worth more. There are a lot of indications that Palestinian lives are worth more in Israel than in Gaza for that matter.
To blame this attack on Israel is quite callous and I don't believe you that you care about any lives in that region. It just doesn't add up, but that is just my opinion.
If it wasn't fundamentalism, what do you think motivated the attacks?
> If it wasn't fundamentalism, what do you think motivated the attacks?
I don't mean to be snarky, but I'm finding it very difficult to take you seriously when you make preposterous comments like "Palestinian lives are worth more in Israel than in Gaza" and "Israel left Gaza before".
Hamas is not a fundamentalist group, and indeed they have frequently called out Islamic extremist groups, such as ISIS, for their murderous behaviour. Probably best we don't discuss ISIS further in the context of Israel though...
I also suspect you know very well the reasons for the October 7th attack, which Hamas have been open about[0]: in essence, it's a battle against:
- Israel's blockade and control of the Gaza strip
- Israel's occupation and colonialism of Palestinian lands
- Israel's continued violence, murder and dehumanisation of Palestinian civilians
- Continued Israeli aggression and land theft
- Israel's apartheid regime
- Israel's complete disregard for human rights, international law and the UN
- Israel's inhumane treatment of thousands of Palestinian hostages, including institutionalised violence, torture, starvation, amputation, sexual assault and rape[1]
You are making excuses, Hamas is a fundamentalist group.
We can go back into history on who started the conflict, but even then I come back to the persecutions of Jews that fought for their independence and won. The result of that is the state of Israel. A democracy. Flawed, but in another league than comparable nations in that region.
A victory some are not ready to accept but they ultimately have to. Perhaps after they manage this first step there will be hope for a Palestinian state.
And yes, Israel did leave Gaza in 2005. That there were blockades was due to security concerns, which proved to be justified not only after the October attacks.
> Israel is a sick, apartheid regime that must be stopped.
This is a quote by you in another comment. Together with your excused for Hamas your arguments seem obsessive and misdirected.
You've offered no evidence to support this repeated claim, and haven't refuted the evidence to the contrary.
> your arguments seem obsessive and misdirected
Not obsessive, just consistent; I could just as well call you obsessive for your repeated excuses of Israel's destruction of Gaza and their murder, starvation, torture and rape of Palestinians.
You have a very Israeli view on history, and it's obvious neither of us are going to change our standpoint, so I bid you adieu.
How much their charta still is relevant today is in question, but they have direct calls to kill Jews in there. They adapted that from al-Husseini, which stated it exactly like that. That was before the founding of Israel btw.
I don't think I want to indulge in proving Hamas to be an extremist organization any further.
More lies, and straight out of the Hasbara playbook at that! From the Hamas charter:
"Hamas affirms that its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion. Hamas does not wage a struggle against the Jews because they are Jewish but wages a struggle against the Zionists who occupy Palestine. Yet, it is the Zionists who constantly identify Judaism and the Jews with their own colonial project and illegal entity."[0]
How much their charta still is relevant today is in question, but they have direct calls to kill Jews in there.
Not the 2008 charter. The most anyone can point to is the passage that supposedly calls for the "annihilation" of Israel, but that's very clearly a mistranslation. (The actual phrasing predicts Israel will be "invalidated" by Islam, a lot more like Khrushchev's "We will leave you in the dust").
You are making excuses, Israel is a Jewish supremacist state practicing apartheid and ethnic cleansing. Your arguments seem obsessive and misdirected, and whether intentionally or inadvertently acting as if the situation began on October 7th 2023 which it did not.
Thanks. And on top of all that the fact that Israel clearly considered this situation manageable and sustainable. Netanyahu's plan was "managing the conflict", with periodic "mowing of the grass". He didn't see any need to "resolve" the "conflict", and neither did most Israeli citizens, whose lives were not effected by it at all (to the extent they would plan a music festival a mile from Gaza without a second thought).
While Palestinians in both Gaza and West Bank live intolerably. And surrounding countries that promissed not to regularize relations with Israel until the situation were resolved were abandoning Palestinians and regularizing relations anyway (for, among other things, access to Israeli weapons and technology they could use to repress their own and other populations).
This is what motivated the attack, an attempt to find _some_ way to do what other things had not, get Israel to see this as a situation that was not in fact sustainable, that they coudln't just go on like this forever no problem.
I think it is a violation of international law and a war crime to intentionally target or kidnap civilians, which I think happened that day. But it was not "unprovoked", and it does not require resorting to the explanation of "they just like violence" to explain motivation.
Certainly I don't do that and don't approve of it. I didn't say I was planning on doing it, or approved of it.
In fact, I specifically said I thought it was a violation of international law and a war crime to intentionally attack or kidnap civilians. So I'm not sure what you are saying "no" to in response to me?
Talking about motivation is different than talking about if we approve of the choices.
Bad immoral choices that are war crimes and violations of international law do not somehow prove that the motivation is "fundamentalism", right? If the question is what was the motivation for the attack, saying the motivation is something other than "fundamentalism" is not to say attacking or kidnapping civilians is ok. You asked, if not fundamentalism, what is the motivation? We told you. Bad immoral choices that are war crimes on Oct 7th also don't erase the prior decades of history, involving many many violations of international law and war crimes. Which are as we described above.
The CIA is a symptom rather than the problem. The CIA simply reflects US foreign policy. This isn't a political issue either because you'd be hard-pressed to find a difference between Democratic and Republican administrations when it comes to foreign policy.
The so-called War on Terror and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq persisted through 4 presidents, 2 from each party. Both parties are neoliberals.
Abrahm Lincoln [1]:
> Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed.
sounds an awful lot like Karl Marx and the Labor Theory of Value [2]. So what happened? The two world wars massively increased US wealth, power and influence [3] and there was also the Red Scare, particularly after WW2 (although there were concerns about communists prior to that). The Red Scare (and Reagan in particular) destroyed the labor movement in the US. Now we people who champion tax cuts for Jeff Bezos. That's how successful the propaganda has been.
What's clear is the capitalists will side with fascists to destroy socialists and communists. Every time. Fascism is capitalism in crisis.
Why do I bring all this up? Because when you make a materialist analysis of historical events, you see the US acting in the interests of capital owners every time. So after WW2, with the red Scare, who was good at fighting communists? Nazis obviously. So is it any surprise that Nazis ended up in the command structure of NATO? Not in the slightest.
So there's no reforming the CIA in the current system. The entire system is corrupt. And the only antidote is class consciousness and class solidarity. Any polarization you see in modern politics is merely a tool to prevent class solidarity by workers. Racism was fanned in Reconstruction to avoid unity between freed slaves and poor white people. Race, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, the middle class (as distinct from the "lower class"), whatever it is. There's always some manufactured culture war nonsense to keep people divided.
Until people realize they have more in common with their fellow worker than they do the guy who owns the warehouse they work in, nothing will change.
I think this is a sound analysis, if rather depressing!
I really just can't see how this ever changes. You are right that the Dems and Republicans are two cheeks of the same arse - but worse, they don't even play fair within their own rules; just look at the shenanigans they've been undertaking to keep Jill Stein's Green party underfunded and off the ballot!
What makes you think Trump will do anything RFK wants after RFK endorsement of Trump led to a majority Harris polling bump? Did you know Trump hasn’t invested in any down ballot races and is on track to lose the House as a result, meanwhile Harris is investing tens of millions into down ballot races for a chance at securing a congressional majority? Dysfunctional governance is all we can hope for under Trump’s administration.
Ahh yes a shill… great arguments. If it was just an executive order, why didn’t Trump already do it? He already promised in 2016 to do it. RFK was pressing Trump to keep the promise he already broke.
> Further, we want to spare the dev-experience of using WHERE clauses
A laudable goal, but one which is easily solved at library level, or at the "infrastructure code" level. I've been doing this across a range of databases for several years.
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