[yor_on]

Then we have India-China and of course we then will need to add India-Pakistan

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/07/07/indi-j07.html

[yor_on]

And Israel-USA- Saudi Arabia- Iran and Irak. And we're building up to it.

[yor_on]

Come on. Global warming? Forget about it. It will be a wonder if we go out of this decade without a major war.


syntax

[yor_on]

You don't act anywhere near the way you talk. Letting you lose on the universe would be worse than any pandemic ever existing.

[yor_on]

And you still don't want my type of democracy, am I correct?

Business as usual, all the way to your extinction.

[yor_on]

Your smartphone

" I found the child, a girl caked in dirt with an ailing newborn strapped to her back, hacking at the ground for cobalt at Lake Malo, not far from Kolwezi. Her limbs were like sticks, her face was crusted with mucus and she had a rib-cracking cough. The horror of her wretched existence could never be remedied by an academic report, I decided. An attempt had to be made to hold someone accountable.

I returned home and tracked down Terrence Collingsworth, a human rights lawyer and expert in strategic litigation. Together with my Congolese colleague, Roger-Claude Liwanga, a professor at Emory University, we coordinated with partners in DRC to approach families deep in the cobalt territory. We finally found 14 families who wanted to tell their stories. By September 2019, Terrence, Roger, and I were sitting down in DRC to meet Bisette.

On Monday, Bisette and 13 other families have launched a landmark legal case in DC Federal Court in the United States against Apple, Microsoft, Dell, Google and Tesla for what they consider to be the companies’ complicity in the injuries and deaths of their children. In documents filed with the court, the plaintiffs claim that the defendants are liable for forced labour under US federal law, which they allege took place at some of the biggest industrial cobalt sites in the Congo – Mashamba East, Lake Malo B-5, Commus and Tilwizembe. I am acting as an expert witness in the case. "

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/commentisfree/2019/dec/16/i-saw-the-unbearable-grief-inflicted-on-families-by-cobalt-mining-i-pray-for-change

And those supporting it, amongst them the EU and the UK

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/commentisfree/2021/jul/21/the-uk-has-been-linked-to-congos-conflict-minerals-where-are-the-criminal-charges

[yor_on]

And this search for minerals, rare earths, will get even more extensive and ruthless with the amount of batteries needed..

And this is so correct so I have to cite it.

" “When I started work, I didn’t think about climate change. It was far enough back that people were still kind of wondering, is it really happening? Then pretty early in my career as a professor, I realized I had to incorporate climate change into most of what I was doing. These tree-killing bark beetles I study have always had outbreaks. It’s not anything new. But when mountain pine beetle developed this most recent outbreak, it was so far out of the norm in size and severity, we couldn’t ignore that.

“I would walk through these forests and almost everything was dead. When you see a beetle kill 70 acres of trees across North America, you just have to change your research questions. My focus had to shift from the beetles to how we can help our forests survive this. You have to come at these systems from a completely different direction now.

“We’re coming at things all wrong, trying to save a species by putting it in a zoo or replanting trees. But if you aren’t going to the root cause of the problem it’s still going to happen. That’s not to say that if we didn’t just get our act together and make some major changes, we couldn’t save some of this. We just can’t do it one species at a time.” "

She's incredibly on the spot there.

Ban

[yor_on]

So what did we 'export' to those countries?
Civilization?

Well, if that is what you think I can do without it.

"  The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) alone produces more than 50 per cent of the world’s cobalt and around 20 per cent of it is extracted by hand through a process known as artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM), according to a recent report available on ResearchGate. The remainder is produced in large industrial mines typically owned by foreign firms, many of which are Chinese.

The lawsuit’s text states that giant tech companies are “knowingly benefiting from and providing substantial support to this ‘artisanal’ mining system in the DRC. Defendants know and have known for a significant period of time the reality that DRC’s cobalt mining sector is dependent upon children, with males performing the most hazardous work in the primitive cobalt mines, including tunnel digging”. "

2020  https://www.lifegate.com/cobalt-mining-congo-tech-lawsuit

[yor_on]

What we did export was the game. Not that it didn't already exist, but ours was a lot more elaborate, refined and brutal.

[yor_on]

It's not about morals. It's about rights.

[yor_on]

" A Congolese human rights activist said he was forced to flee the country with his family after being involved in a lawsuit accusing the world’s largest technology companies of killing children in cobalt mines in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DR Congo)....   All the companies named in the lawsuit have said that they are committed to the responsible sourcing of minerals, which includes upholding the human rights of workers at any tier of global supply chains. "

https://copperbeltkatangamining.com/human-rights-activist-forced-to-flee-drc-over-child-cobalt-mining-lawsuit/

And finally 2021

 "  We just filed our briefs in opposition to the five companies’ motion to dismiss the case: They argued that they cannot be liable because they merely purchase cobalt. However, we demonstrate that they know the cobalt is mined by children who are frequently killed or maimed, they claim to have policies that require them to monitor to prevent any form of child labor, and they have direct contracts with mining companies that they know are using child labor. "

http://iradvocates.org/press-release/cobalt-mining-case-nestle/human-rights-day

So it doesn't matter where it comes from or under what circumstances, as long as you can behave as if you didn't know.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plausible_deniability


Missing link.

[yor_on]

Painfully transparent isn't it? But it is the game, it builds on it.

[yor_on]

I want to change the roots of that game, and that's one part of it, global warming is another. It's the same game and the same consequences.

[yor_on]

that democracy I think of would be a tool for changing it, if you want it to be changed?

I still don't know if you want. But if you don't I think two words are sufficient.

Good riddance

[yor_on]

" WASHINGTON, DC ─ JUNE 1, 2021 ─ A landmark court decision could be handed down by the end of this month when arguably the most conservative court in the last century deliberates on whether corporations are immune from the universal prohibition of slavery and held liable under international law for human rights crimes which includes aiding and abetting.

This month - which also marks the World Day against Child Labor, Juneteenth, and 16 years since the case filing - the U.S. Supreme court will decide when or how multinational companies like Nestlé and Cargill could be sued for aiding and abetting human rights abuses under the Alien Tort Statute (ATS), passed by Congress in 1789. "

and how USA, and its supreme court,. looked at slavery, and human rights.

" WASHINGTON, DC ─ JUNE 17, 2021 ─ In 2005, International Rights Advocates sued Nestlé and Cargill on behalf of six children trafficked from Mali to Cote D’Ivoire to forcibly harvest cocoa under dangerous conditions. Today, 16 years after the case was filed, the Supreme Court issued a heavily divided opinion with an unclear result in our child slavery case against Nestlé and Cargill under the Alien Tort Statute (ATS). The one certainty is that eight Justices agreed that the operative complaint did not satisfy the Supreme Court’s standard set in the Kiobel case for extraterritorial application of the ATS. Kiobel requires that the allegations “touch and concern” the territory of the United States. Justice Alito dissented saying the Court should not have even reached the Kiobel question and instead should have remanded the case. Justice Thomas’s majority opinion found that the current complaint alleging Nestlé and Cargill made major operational decisions from the United States that supported the system of child slavey harvesting cocoa in Cote D’Ivoire were not sufficient.

The case was remanded to the trial court "

yep, Answering that question would have been scary, wouldn't it? Why make a decision when one can bump it around in USA:s legal system, hoping it to go away.

http://iradvocates.org/press-release/nestle/us-supreme-court-dismisses-claims-against-nestl%C3%A9-and-cargill-and-remands-trial

[Eternal Student]

Hi Yor_on.  I hope you are well.
   This post caught my attention.  I'm glad to say that I don't have a mobile phone (but probably do have several other devices with batteries).   The article is well written and since most people have phones it is hard-hitting and easy to identify with. 

Your smartphone

" I found the child, a girl caked in dirt with an ailing newborn strapped to her back, hacking at the ground for cobalt at Lake Malo, not far from Kolwezi. Her limbs were like sticks, her face was crusted with mucus and she had a rib-cracking cough. The horror of her wretched existence could never be remedied by an academic report, I decided. An attempt had to be made to hold someone accountable.

I returned home and tracked down Terrence Collingsworth, a human rights lawyer and expert in strategic litigation. Together with my Congolese colleague, Roger-Claude Liwanga, a professor at Emory University, we coordinated with partners in DRC to approach families deep in the cobalt territory. We finally found 14 families who wanted to tell their stories. By September 2019, Terrence, Roger, and I were sitting down in DRC to meet Bisette.

On Monday, Bisette and 13 other families have launched a landmark legal case in DC Federal Court in the United States against Apple, Microsoft, Dell, Google and Tesla for what they consider to be the companies’ complicity in the injuries and deaths of their children. In documents filed with the court, the plaintiffs claim that the defendants are liable for forced labour under US federal law, which they allege took place at some of the biggest industrial cobalt sites in the Congo – Mashamba East, Lake Malo B-5, Commus and Tilwizembe. I am acting as an expert witness in the case. "

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/commentisfree/2019/dec/16/i-saw-the-unbearable-grief-inflicted-on-families-by-cobalt-mining-i-pray-for-change

And those supporting it, amongst them the EU and the UK

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/commentisfree/2021/jul/21/the-uk-has-been-linked-to-congos-conflict-minerals-where-are-the-criminal-charges

[yor_on]

The only thing missing today is Japan, deciding to go nuclear and weaponize themselves, 'protecting themselves' against a Chinese takeover of Taiwan.

[yor_on]

Yeah, I agree ES, I had to follow it up once I read it.

[yor_on]

But it doesn't seem to have a outcome yet. If we look at the supreme courts handling of the other case I would say that USA still is for slavery, as long as it is done outside its domain, and doesn't really like human rights.

[yor_on]

And in the end it comes down to the game, profits and assets. And that's the main problem with batteries, the assets. The rest is just a extension of how people, businesses, courts and governments behave when they get their profits questioned, one way or another.