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This evening's music features James Brown's guitarist Jimmy Nolen. These recordings feature Nolen as a solo artist prior to joining Brown. Enjoy!

“The darkest secret of this country, I am afraid, is that too many of its citizens imagine that they belong to a much higher civilization somewhere else. That higher civilization doesn’t have to be another country. It can be the past instead—the United States as it was before it was spoiled by immigrants and the enfranchisement of the blacks.

This state of mind allows too many of us to lie and cheat and steal from the rest of us, to sell us junk and addictive poisons and corrupting entertainments. What are the rest of us, after all, but sub-human aborigines?”

-- Kurt Vonnegut

News and Opinion

This is an interesting interview with John Pilger, who hopefully needs no introduction here. Here are some excerpts from the interview:

Mainstream Media and Imperial Power

Dennis Bernstein: I would like to read now a little of the statement that you sent to the World’s Socialist Conference where they were discussing the deep nature of censorship. You wrote, “Something has changed. Although the media was always a loose extension of capital power, it is now almost fully integrated. Dissent, once tolerated in the mainstream, has now regressed to a metaphoric underground as liberal capitalism moves toward a form of corporate dictatorship.” And it is getting worse at an exponential rate, wouldn’t you say?

John Pilger: Yes. Chris Hedges is an example of that. He was right in the mainstream at The New York Times and now finds himself outside it. Another example is America’s most celebrated investigative journalist, Seymour Hersh, who it appears now can only get published in Germany. Hersh has effectively been ejected from the mainstream in the United States.

In my own case, I navigated my way through the mainstream. My films are still shown on commercial TV in Britain. My written journalism, however, is no longer welcome. Its last home was The Guardian, which three years ago got rid of people like me and others in a kind of purge of those who were saying what The Guardian no longer says anymore.

That has happened right across the liberal media. The Washington Post–which is at the moment going through a period of self-aggrandizement with the release of the film The Post–is also the notorious source of a site which listed some of the most distinguished dissenting sites in the United States, including Consortiumnews, Black Agenda Report, Counterpunch and others, as sources of Russian propaganda. It is forcing all of us into this margin, when really the mainstream is in the margin and the margin is in the mainstream.

Dennis Bernstein: Could you talk about the work of Julian Assange in the context of this corporate censorship machine?

John Pilger: Julian Assange has personally borne the brunt of much of this historic shift. He and Wikileaks have exposed so much, and that is unforgivable. There is no doubt that what Wikileaks has done is the most important disclosure journalism of my lifetime. Around the world, politicians who have been deceiving the public have been caught out by the revelations of Wikileaks. It is quite an epic achievement.

Anger has been directed at Julian by people in the media who have been shamed by Wikileaks. Because Wikileaks did the job that journalists ought to have been doing for many years. Wikileaks has done it across such a spectrum and put to shame those who are paid to keep the record straight. That has been Assange’s crime.

Syria: Turkish offensive on Afrin forces US to perform diplomatic balancing act between allies

Turkey disputes US version of Trump-Erdogan phone call

The US and Turkey have released opposing accounts of a phone call between Donald Trump and Recep Tayyip Erdogan, highlighting deepening tensions between the two countries amid a Turkish military campaign inside Syria last weekend.

According to the White House readout of a call between the two leaders, Trump relayed “concerns” over the escalating violence in the Kurdish enclave in Afrin and urged Turkey to “de-escalate, limit its military actions and avoid civilian casualties”. Trump also called on Ankara to avoid actions that risked conflict with US forces, which have provided arms and air cover for the Kurdish militias Turkey is now battling in Syria, the White House said.

However, a Turkish official said the White House readout did not accurately reflect the content of the call. Trump did not raise concerns about escalating violence in Afrin, the official said, and the two presidents had simply exchanged views on the operation.

The official also denied that Trump had “expressed concern about destructive and false rhetoric coming from Turkey”, as mentioned in the White House readout, saying Trump had instead stressed that open criticism of the US in Ankara was raising concerns in Washington. The official said Erdogan replied that US policies – such as support for the People’s Protection Units (YPG) and the “harbouring” of Fethullah Gulen, an exiled cleric accused of masterminding the 2016 attempted coup – had “caused outrage among the Turkish people”.

The differing accounts offer a glimpse into how deep the mistrust has become between the two largest military powers in Nato, over the issue of American support for the Syrian Kurdish fighters.

South Korea 'has very strong concerns' the US might strike North Korea, ex-CIA Korea expert says

A former chief of the CIA's Korea division who recently returned
from South Korea
says he found widespread worry that the US is gearing up for
a military strike against North Korea.

"Seoul has very strong concerns about the potential for a US 'preventive attack' on North Korea," the former chief, Bruce Klingner, said. Klingner's comments follow recent reports suggesting the US is considering a "bloody nose" strike — highly visible but materially limited — on North Korea to make a statement, and that President Donald Trump's secretaries of state and defense are the key figures holding him back.

Klingner seemed to pick up on a fear in Seoul of a larger attack. "Some are suggesting that the US is thinking of hitting two or three targets and that North Korea would likely respond proportionately," Klingner said. "Not the all-out artillery barrage on Seoul."

To attack North Korea in such a way that it would notice but
result in a response short of all-out war would require meticulous planning, flawless
execution, and a healthy dose of luck, as no
one can say with certainty how the country's leader, Kim Jong Un,
would react.

Experts have panned the idea of a strike on North Korea with near unanimity, but the Trump administration has consistently touted the use of force as a potential tool.

North Korea now wants more “cooperation between North and South Korea”

North Korea is famous for its sudden displays of military might, but on Wednesday, it dropped a bomb of a different sort: The Hermit Kingdom announced that it hopes to unify “all Koreans at home and abroad,” Reuters reported.

The surprise message, sent out over state media, urged all Koreans to “promote contact, travel, cooperation between North and South Korea,” and was apparently sent after a meeting between government and political parties. It also called for a de-escalation of military tensions within the Korean peninsula, and claimed that military drills with “outside forces” are not helpful, according to Reuters.

Two Months After U.S. Invaded Afghanistan, Donald Rumsfeld Asked What Languages Are Spoken There

Roughyly two months after the start of U.S. combat operations in Afghanistan, then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was still unsure about which languages were spoken in the country and asked aides to provide him a report on the subject. That and other revelations come from a collection of hundreds of Rumsfeld’s communications released Wednesday by the National Security Archive, a research center based at George Washington University. ...

The “Languages” memo is part of a roughly 900-page tranche of Rumsfeld’s memos released after a five-year Freedom of Information Act fight by the National Security Archive. Following a FOIA lawsuit filed by the archive, the government agreed to release a total of roughly 59,000 pages of memos in monthly tranches. The first group of memos contains many of Rumsfeld’s notorious short internal memoranda, known colloquially as “snowflakes,” which were written in the months before and after the September 11 attacks. ...

While the correspondence released Wednesday represents a snapshot of Rumsfeld’s thinking at various points, the documents strongly suggest that the defense secretary was not envisioning an open-ended era of U.S. military operations after the 9/11 attacks. A number of memos written in December 2001 refer to the need to plan for “when the war on terrorism is over” and for a U.S. strategy in the region “after things settle down.”

Almost 17 years later, the region is more violent and unstable than ever, something that, at least from the documents released so far, Rumsfeld seems not to have anticipated.

Trump threatens to cut aid to Palestinians for 'disrespecting' Pence

Donald Trump threatened to cut aid to the Palestinian Authority on Thursday, saying that Palestinians had “disrespected” Vice-President Mike Pence on his visit to the region.

Speaking at the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland, Trump told reporters, “respect has to be shown to the US or we’re just not going any further”.

After Trump recognised Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, close allies in Europe and the Middle East denounced the decision as a provocation to unrest and a major setback to peace talks.

Not long afterward, the president of the Palestinian authority, Mahmoud Abbas, declined to meet with Pence on a recent visit to Israel.

Earlier this month, Abbas called recognition of Jerusalem “the slap of the century”, and said that Palestinians could no longer trust the US as an honest broker in the talks.

Senior Israeli Official Mocked for Bizarre Claim That Detained Palestinian Teen Is a Paid Actor

Michael Oren, Israel's enior official in charge of diplomacy, was roundly mocked on Thursday for admitting that he had opened a formal investigation of a family of Palestinian activists based on an internet conspiracy theory, which claims that they are not a real family but a troupe of actors paid to pretend that the occupation of their land in the West Bank upsets them.

Oren’s strange admission to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz came in response to a wave of negative publicity for the Jewish state following the arrest last month of a 16-year-old Palestinian girl, Ahed Tamimi, who was filmed by her mother slapping an Israeli soldier outside their home in the village of Nabi Saleh. ...

Asked to explain what led him to open a classified investigation of the conspiracy theory that the Tamimi family is “not genuine, and was specially put together for propaganda” purposes, Oren told Haaretz that he suspected that “members of the family were chosen for their appearance,” an apparent reference to the fact that Ahed and her younger brother Mohammed are blond and fair-skinned. He also found their clothing suspicious, calling their jeans and T-shirts “a real costume. American dress in every respect, not Palestinian, with backward baseball caps. Even Europeans don’t wear backward baseball caps.”

“It was all prepared. It’s what’s known as Pallywood,” he added, referring to an American blogger’s conspiracy theory that all video documenting incidents in which Israeli soldiers are caught on video abusing Palestinians is staged fiction.

China 'holding at least 120,000 Uighurs in re-education camps'

At least 120,000 members of China’s Muslim Uighur minority have been confined to political “re-education camps” redolent of the Mao era that are springing up across the country’s western borderlands, a report has claimed.

Radio Free Asia (RFA), a US-backed news group whose journalists have produced some of the most detailed reporting on the heavily securitised region of Xinjiang, said it obtained the figure from a security official in Kashgar, a city in China’s far west that has been the focus of a major crackdown. ...

Maya Wang, a Human Rights Watch campaigner who wrote a recent report on the camps, said the figures cited by RFA were credible although growing levels of repression in Xinjiang meant reliable numbers were impossible to ascertain. Estimates of the total number of people who have spent time in such centres in Xinjiang, which has a population of about 22 million, ran as high as 800,000, Wang added. “It’s just like a black hole which people are added to and don’t get out of.”

Spain will block Catalonia’s fugitive leader from becoming president again

The Spanish government moved Thursday to legally block former Catalan leader Carles Puigdemont from resuming his role as president of the regional government.

Puigdemont’s party, Together for Catalonia, took the most seats in December’s snap election, a vote Madrid mistakenly hoped would stem the long-building secessionist tide of Catalonians wanting to break away from Spain’s economic woes. ...

Referring to the arrest warrant, Spain’s Deputy Prime Minister Soraya Saenz de Santamaria said Thursday “current circumstances do not permit his [Puigdemont] investiture,” Reuters reported. She added that officials in Madrid are investigating whether a legal challenge could be presented to the Constitutional Court against the speaker’s nomination, which if successful would stop the vote to confirm Puigdemont.

MLK’s Radical Final Years: Civil Rights Leader Was Isolated After Taking On Capitalism & Vietnam War

Democrats are probably going to give Trump his border wall

Democrats in Congress are quietly preparing to give President Trump something they never thought they would: a vote to fund a wall on the border with Mexico, with the U.S. taxpayers paying for it.

That’s the inevitable conclusion many Democrats (and gleeful Republicans) are privately resigned to this week as two weeks of talks begin in an attempt to reach a deal on protections for undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children as part of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (DACA), established under Obama. ...

Cryin’ Chuck Schumer fully understands, especially after his humiliating defeat, that if there is no Wall, there is no DACA. We must have safety and security, together with a strong Military, for our great people!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 24, 2018

And even though Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said the wall is “off the table,” earlier this week, Democrats described that as more of a negotiation posture than an absolutist position. Schumer clarified that he didn’t mean the wall was off the table forever. In a statement to VICE News, he said “the wall offer was part of a broader deal. The president rejected that broader deal, so the offer is off the table.”

And many Democrats argue that funding the wall is the least-bad of a bunch of compromises they’ll have to make to get a deal done with immigration hard-liners in Congress and the White House. As a result, many Democrats are now more open to the wall after steadfastly blocking it for Trump’s first year in office.

Puerto Rico's New Power Struggle: Privatization

Harvard’s Endowment Is Profiting From Puerto Rico’s Debt as the Island’s Schools Face Crippling Cuts

Members of the Puerto Rican diaspora have joined student activists and financial reform groups in a weeklong campaign to target university endowments profiting from Puerto Rican debt. At Harvard University on Wednesday, the coalition called on the institution’s $37 billion endowment, the world’s largest, to divest from its $2 billion commitment with the Baupost Group. In October, The Intercept identified Baupost, a Boston-based hedge fund managed by billionaire Seth Klarman, as a large holder of one type of Puerto Rican debt. The fund had been hiding $911 million in COFINA bonds, a debt instrument backed by sales tax receipts, through a shell corporation named Decagon Holdings.

A disclosure last week from the COFINA bondholders said that Baupost’s investment had increased to $931 million. Klarman has consistently dismissed cries for debt cancellation for Puerto Rico, saying the island would be better off in the long run repaying its debts. Baupost bought the bonds on the cheap and would reap a huge payday if paid back at face value. ...

A report issued by Hedge Clippers this week detailed how Harvard’s investment with Baupost was harming Puerto Rico. “Along with other vulture funds, [Baupost] is waging an aggressive campaign to force Puerto Rico to pay creditors — rather than pay for basic services or vital infrastructure,” the report states. “In other words, Baupost, on behalf of Harvard and other clients, is trying to get its hands on money that should be going toward a just recovery in Puerto Rico.”

Senate committee to release transcripts of Donald Trump Jr interview

The Senate judiciary committee plans to release transcripts from closed-door interviews with Donald Trump Jr and others, as it wraps up its investigation into the meeting between Russians and senior campaign figures, including the president’s son, at Trump Tower in New York during the 2016 election.

Republican Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa said on Thursday that he wants to work out a bipartisan agreement with the ranking Democratic on the committee, Dianne Feinstein of California, to release transcripts from interviews conducted last September.

Grassley said he had hoped to interview Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law who also attended the meeting. But he says the chances of that were “shot” and Kushner was now “spooked” after Feinstein unilaterally released a transcript from a different interview conducted as part of the congressional Russia investigation.

The Military Wants to Dictate Private Land Use -- and Washington State Might Let It

If a new bill in the Washington State legislature is passed, commanders of military bases could have the power to impact land use planning anywhere in the state.

Critics of the bill fear it would be a slide down the slippery slope of allowing the military free reign to do what it wants -- wherever it wants to do it -- within the state, with little or no recourse by the citizens it could impact. For example, the Navy, which has already expressed a desire to control marine traffic along Puget Sound's Hood Canal region, could decide to close the waterway to all civilian traffic. Another Navy wish has been to end civilian drone traffic over civilian land near its bases -- and it could decide to end it over the entire state. (While many might celebrate the end of drones, it would still be an instance of the military impeding civilian liberties.) ...

"The alarming piece is the assumption inherent in the bill that the military base commanders can dictate or require [that] the planning for zoning and land use must accommodate their mission, whatever their mission is," Larry Morrell, a military veteran and founder of the Sustainable Economy Collaborative, said. "So, their mission is assumed to be suitable for our state no matter what it is." This could mean an expansion of military training exercises into private lands, forcing people to move. It could also result in the military flying increasing numbers of warplanes over state and national parks, which is already a major problem across much of Washington State.

The bill was drafted by The Spectrum Group, which has been the go-to beltway consulting group hired by Washington State's Department of Commerce (via the Washington Military Alliance, or WMA) to assist in making all of Washington State "more compatible" with military activities, according to the WMA website.
It is worth noting that the WMA was convened and supported by Washington's so-called "green governor" Jay Inslee. It uses taxpayer money to fund studies supportive of bringing more military jobs to the state.

Climate Bellwether? With Cape Town Almost Out of Water, "Day Zero" Looms

For residents of Cape Town, "Day Zero" is getting closer.

That's the day when taps in the drought-stricken coastal South African city are projected run dry, and its residents would be forced to head to police-guarded distribution sites to obtain their daily ration of water.

The city warned last week that the day was "now likely to happen." And on Monday, the city, citing a drop in dam levels, moved the projected day up from April 22 to April 12. 

"We have reached a point of no return," Cape Town Mayor Patricia de Lille said last week announcing tightened water restrictions for the city's 4 million residents. Starting Feb. 1, residents face a 50 liter per day limit (13.2 gallons). [For comparison, Americans' daily home use is 88 gallons of water, the EPA says.]

When Day Zero hits, the limit will be 25 liters per day, to be collected at one of 200 water collection points. Agence France-Presse reports: "With about 5,000 families for each water collection point, the police and army are ready to be deployed to prevent unrest in the lines." ...

Cape Town is being described as the first major city in the developed world that would run out of water.

Also of Interest

Here are some articles of interest, some which defied fair-use abstraction.

Migration Reform from a Native American Perspective

Manbij becomes key as US looks to rein in Turkey's Syrian offensive

Why beetles are the most important organisms on the planet

A Little Night Music

Jimmy Nolen - The Way You Do

Jimmy Nolen - It Hurts Me Too

Jimmy Nolen - Jimmy's Jive

Jimmy Nolen - How Fine Can You Be

Jimmy Nolen - Wipe Your Tears

Jimmy Nolen - Swingin' Peter Gunn

Jimmy Nolen - Movin' On Down The Line

Jimmy Nolen - You've Been Goofing

Jimmy Nolen - I Can't Stand You No More

Jimmy Nolen & his Band - Slow Freight Back Home