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This evening's music features early blues and vaudeville singer Ida Cox. Enjoy!

“They want to be the agents, not the victims, of history. They identify with God's power and believe they are godlike. That is their basic madness. They are overcome by some archtype; their egos have expanded psychotically so that they cannot tell where they begin and the godhead leaves off. It is not hubris, not pride; it is inflation of the ego to its ultimate — confusion between him who worships and that which is worshipped. Man has not eaten God; God has eaten man.”

-- Philip K. Dick

News and Opinion

The Only ‘Agency’ Ukraine Has Is The Central Intelligence Kind

“You’re denying the agency of Ukrainians!”

This is a line you’ve probably had bleated at you by propagandized empire livestock if you’ve engaged in online debate about the role western powers have played in paving the way to this war.

One of the many, many tricks that imperial spinmeisters have pulled out of their hats in their shockingly frenetic campaign to manage the narrative about what’s happening in Ukraine is to insist that it’s outrageous and disgusting to suggest that Ukraine is being used as a sacrificial pawn in the grand chessboard maneuverings of the US-centralized empire, because it is denying the “agency” of that nation. The argument is that Ukraine freely chose to enter into the situation in which it now finds itself, with no outside pressure or influence of any kind whatsoever.

Seemingly overnight it became not just wrong to say that the US hegemon has played a role in giving rise to this war, but actually monstrous and evil. My online notifications are currently flooded with furious empire apologists screaming at me for assigning any degree of responsibility in this conflict to western power structures with the kind of vitriol people normally reserve for Holocaust deniers or pedophelia advocates.

Imperial narrative managers have even been working overtime to make the word “westsplaining” happen, which is their progressive-sounding term for when one makes the self-evident observation that western powers influence world events. Mainstream westerners are actively trained to regurgitate lines like “Stop westsplaining to Ukrainians about coups and proxy conflicts! You’re denying their agency!”

Calling this a “proxy war” between Russia and the United States or calling Kyiv a “puppet regime” of Washington is strictly taboo now. That Ukraine has lacked independent agency in this war and the events leading up to it is something you are simply not allowed to say.

Well, I’m saying it. This is a proxy war. Kyiv is a puppet regime. Ukraine does not have independent agency in any meaningful way. This is not the fault of the Ukrainian people, who are obviously far and away the greatest victims of the Russian invasion, but of the giant western power structure which deliberately worked to take away the nation’s agency many years before the invasion took place.

I mean, my god. The US and its allies are pouring billions of dollars worth of weapons into Ukraine from around the world, the CIA has been training Ukrainians to kill Russians, the US intelligence cartel is directly sharing military intelligence with Kyiv as we speak, and this follows US-backed coups in Ukraine in 2014 and in 2004 before that.

This is a proxy war. This is exactly the thing that a proxy war is. The only “agency” Ukraine has is the Central Intelligence kind.

In this article, a leftist Ukrainian activist explains how the US government created the crisis, backing two coups in one decade, fueling a devastating civil war that killed 14,000 people, and exploiting his nation as "cannon fodder" against Russiahttps://t.co/4G5FjLC48S

— Benjamin Norton (@BenjaminNorton) March 15, 2022

In an excellent article for Multipolarista titled “Ukrainian leftist criticizes Western war drive with Russia: US is using Ukraine as ‘cannon fodder’“, Ukrainian-American Yuliy Dubovyk writes the following:

Like any other US puppet regime, Ukraine doesn’t have any real independence. Kiev has been actively pushed to confront Russia by every US administration, against the will of the majority of Ukrainian people.
…
The support for Ukraine that fills the Western media now is not out of real solidarity with the people of Ukraine. If that were the case, the US wouldn’t have overthrown our government twice in a decade; it wouldn’t have supported the policies that made us the poorest country in Europe; it wouldn’t have fueled a brutal civil war for the past eight years.

The reason US media outlets and politicians are all backing Ukraine now is because they want to use the Ukrainian military and civilian population as cannon fodder in a proxy war with a political adversary.

Yes indeedy. Amid all the phony profile pic activism and concern trolling about denial of Ukraine’s “agency”, no concern whatsoever has been shown for actual, known assaults on Ukrainian independence by the US-centralized empire.

Where was all this reverence for Ukraine’s “agency” in 2004, when The Guardian was reporting that “while the gains of the orange-bedecked ‘chestnut revolution’ are Ukraine’s, the campaign is an American creation, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in western branding and mass marketing that, in four countries in four years, has been used to try to salvage rigged elections and topple unsavoury regimes”?

Where was the respect for Ukraine’s “agency” in 2014, when a leaked phone call between Victoria Nuland (now working on Ukraine under the Biden administration) and US Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt showed US officials casually discussing who they were going to select as Ukraine’s next Prime Minister following a US-backed coup in Kyiv?

Where was all this respect for Ukraine’s “agency” in 2018, when Joe Biden openly boasted before the Council on Foreign Relations that he had used his power as Obama’s Vice President to brazenly interfere in Ukraine’s judicial system?

Obama VP Joseph Biden brags about how he rigged the judicial system of another country. pic.twitter.com/BC4u7AUPHB

— Defend Assange Campaign (@DefendAssange) January 27, 2018

The US power alliance does not care about Ukraine’s sovereignty beyond what measures need to be taken to actively subvert it. When people object to criticisms of the way the empire has actively robbed Ukrainians of any real agency, what they are actually doing is defending the most powerful empire that has ever existed from attempts to highlight its malfeasance.

I’m not just spouting off about a far away nation from my safe home here in Australia, for the record. This is a dynamic which affects my country directly, and is very likely to affect it a lot more as the empire’s “great power competition” with China heats up.

It is very likely that in the not-too-distant future, Australia will end up playing a crucial role in the empire’s grand chessboard maneuverings to stop the rise of China. When that occurs, I will most certainly be saying that we are being used as pawns in a proxy conflict, and I will most certainly be saying that our agency in this matter has been stolen from us.

As in Ukraine, there have been US-backed coups in Australia not once but twice. This nation is now functionally little more than a US military and intelligence base with a smattering of suburbs and kangaroos, which is why the puppet regime in our capital Canberra has done nothing whatsoever to end Washington’s brutal persecution of Australian journalist Julian Assange. John Mearsheimer, now the subject of great controversy for his completely accurate predictions years ago that US and NATO actions would lead to this exact war in Ukraine, told an Australian think tank in 2019 that the US will destroy Australia if Canberra doesn’t align with imperial agendas against Beijing. And he was right.

And yes, just as there are Ukrainians supporting the imperial line against Moscow, when the time comes for Australia to make great sacrifices for US unipolarist agendas against the Chinese government there will absolutely be Australians supporting it. Because of a massive propaganda campaign in this nation facilitated by our Murdoch-dominated press and imperial narrative management operations like the empire-funded Australian Strategic Policy Institute, there are many Australians who intensely despise China right now. I know. I’ve met them.

But that won’t mean our sovereignty wasn’t robbed from us, by mass-scale oligarchic psyops, by CIA coups, by secret deals, by the threat of knowing we’d be immediately attacked by a murderous empire if we tried to pivot to Beijing or even to simply espouse a neutral posture. What’s true of Ukraine is also true of Australia: we have no meaningful agency in the most important decisions made by this nation.

Denying the western role in subverting Ukrainian sovereignty doesn’t benefit ordinary Ukrainians, it hurts them. You can’t fix a problem you don’t understand, and until there’s widespread understanding of the way the US empire uses proxies to advance its agendas of global domination, nothing can be done to stop these ugly proxy wars from happening.

Media FALSELY Says Russian Offensive Stalled

Obama defense secretary Leon Panetta says NATO is in a “proxy war” with Russia

Leon Panetta, the former US secretary of defense and CIA director under Barack Obama and White House chief of staff under Bill Clinton, said Thursday that the United States is involved in a proxy war with Russia in Ukraine.

“We are engaged in a conflict here, it’s a proxy war with Russia, whether we say so or not,” Panetta said.

He concluded, “I think the only way basically to deal with [Russian President Vladimir] Putin right now is to double down on ourselves, which means to provide as much military aid as necessary.”

He added, “The way you get leverage is by, frankly, going in and killing Russians.”

Panetta’s comments came one day after US President Joe Biden announced the deployment of an additional $1 billion in weapons to Ukraine, adding to the $2.5 billion in weapons given to the country since 2014.

“Russia & China, Together at Last”: Historian Al McCoy Predicts Ukraine War to Birth New World Order

Corporate Media Accused of 'Cheerleading' for US Escalation in Ukraine

In the run-up to and during the Bush administration's catastrophic invasion of Iraq, corporate media outlets were accused of acting as stenographers for the White House, amplifying official justifications for the attack—which were lies—while stifling dissenting voices.

Today, having apparently learned no lessons—or the wrong ones—from Iraq, reporters for corporate newspapers and cable TV programs are yet again facing criticism for their coverage of a war, this time one in which the White House has vowed not to involve U.S. troops.

During briefings held at the White House over the past week as Russia ramped up its assault on Ukraine, correspondents have incessantly pushed Press Secretary Jen Psaki on President Joe Biden's refusal to escalate U.S. involvement in the war even further, questioning the administration's refusal to impose a no-fly zone and send MiG-29 fighter jets to Ukraine.

By contrast, very few questions have centered on the diplomatic talks between Russia and Ukraine and what the U.S. is doing to facilitate the ongoing negotiations.

"Even with this additional aid that you're providing today, it seems there are still other options on the table," ABC News correspondent Mary Bruce said during a press briefing Wednesday after President Joe Biden authorized another $800 million worth of weaponry for Ukraine, including drones and anti-aircraft systems.

"So why hold back?" Bruce asked. "Why not use every tool at your disposal now to spare additional lives?"

When Psaki outlined the slew of measures the U.S. has taken in concert with Western allies to cripple Russia's economy and bolster Ukraine's defenses—and noted there are additional steps the administration could take in the future—Bruce was not assuaged.

"But what are you waiting for?" she asked.

That line of questioning—highlighted by The Intercept in one of two video compilations of recent press briefings—encapsulated the approach much of the White House press corps has taken during the first three weeks of Russia's deadly assault on Ukraine.

In one exchange on Monday, a reporter suggested to Psaki that by refusing to send American troops into Ukraine and impose a no-fly zone—which experts agree would likely spark a full-blown war between the U.S. and Russia—the Biden administration is effectively "pushing these guys [Ukrainian soldiers] to commit suicide."

"Can you imagine if the press covered climate change like this?" The Intercept's Ryan Grim asked during a HillTV segment on Thursday. "Or the expiration of the child tax credit? Or the Saudi and UAE war on Yemen that has led to hundreds of thousands of deaths? Or the seizure of Afghanistan's central bank reserves?"

In his HillTV segment, Grim pointed to a striking back-and-forth in which Gray Television's White House correspondent Jon Decker pressed Psaki on why the Biden administration is not providing "more offensive weapons" to the Ukrainian military.

"If a Ukrainian military officer or someone who is enlisted has one of these weapons," said Decker, "they can take out a Russian military official of some sort with these weapons."

The White House press corps is hardly alone in its hawkish coverage of Russia's assault, which has killed at least 816 civilians and sparked a massive humanitarian crisis.

As Gideon Taaffe and Chloe Simon of Media Matters noted last week, "Both right-wing and mainstream cable news have featured commentary from hosts and guests pushing the idea of a NATO-imposed 'no-fly zone' over Ukraine, sometimes without providing important context about the possibility of escalation into a hot war with Russia."

"On March 4, Fox News contributor and retired Gen. Keith Kellogg pushed for a no-fly zone during an appearance on Fox News' America Reports, claiming that 'no plans are perfect, but there is a way to do and we should at least explore it,'" Taaffe and Simon observed. "On the March 6 edition of Meet the Press, NBC anchor Chuck Todd pressed Secretary of State Anthony Blinken on his hesitancy to execute a no-fly zone, saying, 'Why rule out the no-fly zone? Why not make Putin think it's possible?'"

"This eagerness to get into a war with Russia," the pair wrote, "seems to ignore the potentially devastating consequences of the U.S. initiating that escalation, which could include nuclear fallout." ...

In a symposium ahead of the 19th anniversary of the Bush administration's initial bombing of Baghdad, progressive foreign policy analyst Kate Kizer warned that in its coverage of Russia's war in Ukraine, "the mainstream media is repeating the same mistakes it made 20 years ago in the lead-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq."

"When 'serious' policy publications invite the likes of uber war hawks like John Bolton into their pages and tankie conspiracy theorists and those complicit in selling the invasion of Iraq onto our screens as legitimate, unbiased commentators, they actively warp the information that gets through to the average viewer," Kizer wrote. "As usual when there's the opportunity to inflate ratings, the media jumps on, quickly creating a narrative that war is inevitable, diplomacy is exhausted (before it even gets started), and being against militaristic U.S. or NATO solutions to the crisis is unpatriotic at best."

"The lesson that national American media outlets have failed to learn is that their critical role in our democracy is more than just questioning 'official' narratives," she added. "It is also remaining critical, or even just acknowledging the confirmation bias produced by the corporate war racketeering in Washington that drives policymakers and the American public to think that our only choices in the face of insecurity and conflict are more war or doing nothing."

Kremlin SHUTS DOWN Potential Ukraine Peace Deal

The latest fresh off of The Guardian's propaganda catapult:

Kyiv says ‘no question’ of surrender in Mariupol after Russia sets 5am deadline

Russia has given Ukrainian forces a deadline of 5am Moscow time (2am GMT) on Monday to lay down their arms in the eastern port city of Mariupol, where it said a “terrible humanitarian catastrophe” was unfolding. “Lay down your arms,” Colonel-General Mikhail Mizintsev, the director of the Russian National Defence Management Center, said on Sunday in a briefing. “A terrible humanitarian catastrophe has developed,” he said. “All who lay down their arms are guaranteed safe passage out of Mariupol.”

The deadline was quickly rejected by Ukraine’s deputy prime minister Iryna Vereshchuk saying that there can be “no question” of surrender. “There can be no talk of any surrenders, laying down of arms. We have already informed the Russian side about this,” she said, according to online news site Ukrainska Pravda. “Instead of wasting time on 8 pages of letters, just open a [humanitarian] corridor.”

Mariupol has suffered some of the heaviest bombardment since Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February. Many of its 400,000 residents remain trapped in the city with little, if any, food, water or power. Mizintsev said humanitarian corridors for civilians would be opened eastwards and westwards out of Mariupol at 10am Moscow time (7am GMT) on Monday.

Russia and Ukraine have traded blame for the failure to open such corridors in recent weeks. Mizintsev, without providing evidence, said that Ukrainian “bandits”, “neo-Nazis” and nationalists had engaged in “mass terror” and gone on a killing spree in the city.

Zelensky BANS Opposition Parties, Nationalizes Media

Looks like demockery to me:

Zelensky nationalizes TV news and restricts opposition parties

On Saturday and Sunday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky invoked his emergency powers under martial law to suppress several opposition political parties and implement a "unified information policy."

In an address to the nation delivered Sunday, he announced a temporary ban on "any activity" by 11 political parties. The ban includes the Opposition Platform – For Life party, which holds 43 seats in Ukraine's national parliament and is the largest opposition party. ...

Zelensky's information policy involves "combining all national TV channels, the program content of which consists mainly of information and/or information-analytical programs, [into] a single information platform of strategic communication" to be called "United News."

U.S.'s Bloody Fingerprints Are All Over Ukraine

Iraq War lesson: ‘preventative wars’ are illegal wars, period.

This week marks the 19th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and in the last two decades there has been no serious American reckoning with the magnitude of the crime that our government and its allies committed.

The invasion was an unprovoked war of aggression in flagrant violation of the U.N. Charter, and it led to decades of violence and instability whose effects continue to plague the region until today. The war was also one of the biggest strategic errors of modern U.S. history, but it is insufficient to acknowledge the war as a “mistake” and leave it at that. The U.S. still presents itself as a defender of international order, but in 2003 it broke the most important rule that prohibits the use of force except for self-defense.

For the last 20 years, the U.S. has treated the sovereignty of many states as conditional, reserving the right to attack others when it so chooses. If we should learn anything from U.S. wars in this century, it is that aggression against other states is always wrong and it erodes the protections under international law that help to maintain peace and security. No matter the pretext or rationalization, no state has the right to attack another. Supposedly good intentions are no justification.

The lesson of the Iraq war is not only that the U.S. should stay out of the regime change business, but also that the U.S. should renounce preventive warfare once and for all. ...

If the use of force is restricted only to self-defense, that implies that the U.S. should also renounce waging wars for ostensibly humanitarian reasons. This is not only because humanitarian interventions often fail to meet the criteria for just war, but also because the U.S. does not have the authority on its own or as part of a group of states to decide that the prohibition on the use of force can be disregarded whenever it sees fit.

It was fashionable after the 1999 U.S./NATO intervention in Kosovo to describe that war as “illegal but legitimate,” but if the prohibition means anything it can’t be violated like that. If NATO is to be a truly defensive alliance, it shouldn’t be used as a platform for wars that have nothing to do with the defense of its members.

Inflation Caused By Corporate Greed – Not Russia!

Pakistani PM steps up criticism of west as confidence vote looms

Addressing the crowds at a public rally in Punjab last week, Pakistan’s prime minister was on the attack. Western leaders, Imran Khan said, treated Pakistan as their “slave” and presumed that “whatever you say, we will do”.Days before, it had been announced that Khan would be facing a vote of no confidence in parliament at the end of March, after more than 100 members of Pakistan’s united opposition successfully tabled a motion to oust him. The vote will take place on Friday 25 March.

The prime minister’s opponents, who have put aside their own differences to unite in an anti-Khan coalition, have accused him of bad governance and economic incompetence as inflation has soared and Khan has appeared to lose the backing of the military establishment credited with bringing him to power in the first place.

As he fights for his political life, however, Khan has turned to a strategy he hopes will win him support, even as his government’s popularity is nosediving: brazen bashing of the west. He was particularly scathing of a recent request by diplomats of 22 countries, including EU member states, who jointly called on Pakistan to support a resolution in the United Nations general assembly condemning Russia’s aggression against Ukraine.

Khan, who has been trying to cultivate a closer relationship with Russia in defiance of the west and was in Moscow on the day of the invasion – saying it was an “exciting time” to be there – point-blank refused, expressing only “concern” at the situation. According to a narrative being pushed by Khan and ministers close to him, the vote of no confidence is part of a conspiracy by foreign powers in the west, and even the CIA, to topple his government, which is no longer willing to support the actions of the west and Nato as they did during the “war on terror”.

Kenosha off-duty police officer shown putting knee on 12-year-old girl’s neck

School officials in Kenosha, Wisconsin, released surveillance footage that showed an off-duty police officer putting his knee on a 12-year-old girl’s neck to restrain her amid a lunchtime fight.

The Kenosha Unified School District released redacted footage of the 4 March fight on Friday. It showed the officer, Shawn Guetschow, intervening in the fight and scuffling with the girl, before falling to the ground and hitting his head on a table.

Guetschow, working as a security guard at the school, then pushed the girl’s head into the ground and used his knee on her neck for about half a minute before handcuffing her and walking her out of the cafeteria.

Jerrel Perez, the girl’s father, has called for criminal charges against Guetschow for using a type of restraint that was banned for Wisconsin law enforcement officers last year. He said his daughter was in therapy and seeing a neurologist for her injuries.

As reported by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Perez “and activists from Kenosha, Milwaukee and Chicago stood outside the school district on Wednesday, where they likened the incident to Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin and his use of knee chokehold restraint when he murdered George Floyd”.

Critics Blast Murphy for Helping Drive Dems 'Into a Ditch' and Then Blaming Progressives

Progressive political observers on Friday scoffed at comments from corporate Democratic Rep. Stephanie Murphy of Florida, who tried to blame progressives in the party for her retirement from Congress, despite the fact that right-leaning members have gotten much of what they wanted—including blockage of President Joe Biden's agenda—over the past year.

The congresswoman, who has represented Florida's 7th Congressional District since 2017 and announced her plan to retire in December, told Politico that the Democratic Party does not give conservative members of the party "leeway" to cast right-leaning votes—despite the fact that many lawmakers have spent their careers doing just that and have successfully damaged Biden's chances of passing his domestic agenda.

Murphy was one of several Democrats who in early November delayed a vote on the Build Back Better Act—Biden's 10-year spending plan to invest in climate action and anti-poverty programs which is now stalled in the Senate due to conservative Democrats' objections—claiming they wanted to wait for a cost estimate from the Congressional Budget Office.

The congresswoman objected to tying the passage of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act to the Build Back Better Act, a strategy pushed by progressives including Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), who reasoned that passing the infrastructure bill by itself would put at risk the president's broader plan to provide paid family leave, free community college, and climate action—a prediction that has proven true four months later.

Murphy complained that the labor movement backed progressives' strategy.

"The infrastructure bill was one of the most historic job-creating bills for labor. And instead of [being] focused on the bill that would create jobs today for their members, they were focused on carrying out the Democratic leadership's approach to the two bills," she said of labor groups.

As Mike Casca, communications director for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt), noted, progressives' efforts to ensure Biden's full domestic agenda was passed have not been successful so far, allowing Murphy to get "everything she wanted"—likely to the detriment of Democrats' chances of maintaining power in November. ...

In addition to helping to kill the Build Back Better Act, journalist David Sirota noted, the Big Pharma-backed congresswoman helped to weaken a proposal to allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices—a longtime Democratic priority—by voting against it in the House Ways and Means Committee in September. A narrower version of the proposal was later included in the Build Back Better Act.

Despite successfully obstructing her own party's agenda, Murphy claimed in the interview that Democratic leaders have "beat moderates into submission" in recent years, dismissing the president's proposals as "rainbows and unicorns."

Climate Groups Blast Biden Energy Dept for Approving LNG Export Increase

Climate action advocates this week sharply criticized the Biden administration for signing off on increasing gas exports from the United States as Europe faces supply problems exacerbated by Russia's war on Ukraine.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) on Wednesday issued two long-term orders giving a pair of Cheniere Energy projects in Louisiana and Texas "additional flexibility to export the equivalent of 0.72 billion cubic feet per day" of liquefied natural gas (LNG) "to any country with which the U.S. does not have a free trade agreement, including all of Europe."

As Cheniere welcomed the move, saying in a statement that "we appreciate the DOE granting this authorization for export to non-FTA countries," Greenpeace USA senior climate campaigner Ashley Thomson slammed the authorizations as a betrayal of President Joe Biden's climate pledges.

"Peace will only come through accelerating the transition to renewable energy, not by trading Russian oligarchs for American oil and gas barons," Thomson said. "The Biden administration's decision to increase gas exports empowers the same Big Oil companies that are fueling conflicts around the world and are responsible for skyrocketing gas prices."

"President Biden has an opportunity to make good on his climate promises while delivering a healthier, just, and peaceful future," she added. "This starts by declaring a climate emergency and using the Defense Production Act to ramp up the delivery of renewable and energy-efficient equipment to Europe."

Recycled plastic bottles leach more chemicals into drinks, review finds

A widely used kind of recycled plastic bottle passes more potentially harmful chemicals into their contents than newly manufactured bottles, researchers have warned. Researchers from Brunel University London found 150 chemicals that leached into drinks from plastic bottles, with 18 of those chemicals found in levels exceeding regulations.

And they found that drinks bottled using recycled Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET) can contained higher concentrations of chemicals than those bottled using new PET, which suggests that problems with the recycling process may be causing contamination.

They are calling for more careful recycling methods to remove the potentially harmful chemicals.

The thermoplastic PET is the third most widely used type of plastic in food packaging, with one of its most popular end uses in single-use drinks bottles. Such bottles are also one of the most commonly found forms of plastic litter, leading to a number of initiatives to increase levels of PET recycling. A recent EU directive called for PET bottles to contain at least 30% recycled content by 2030.

But PET is also known for being the source of a number of potential chemical contaminants, including endocrine disruptors such as Bisphenol A, which can cause reproductive disorders, cardiovascular problems and cancer, among other ill effects.

Heatwaves at both of Earth’s poles alarm climate scientists

Startling heatwaves at both of Earth’s poles are causing alarm among climate scientists, who have warned the “unprecedented” events could signal faster and abrupt climate breakdown. Temperatures in Antarctica reached record levels at the weekend, an astonishing 40C above normal in places. At the same time, weather stations near the north pole also showed signs of melting, with some temperatures 30C above normal, hitting levels normally attained far later in the year.

At this time of year, the Antarctic should be rapidly cooling after its summer, and the Arctic only slowly emerging from its winter, as days lengthen. For both poles to show such heating at once is unprecedented.

The rapid rise in temperatures at the poles is a warning of disruption in Earth’s climate systems. Last year, in the first chapter of a comprehensive review of climate science, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned of unprecedented warming signals already occurring, resulting in some changes – such as polar melt – that could rapidly become irreversible.

The danger is twofold: heatwaves at the poles are a strong signal of the damage humanity is wreaking on the climate; and the melting could also trigger further cascading changes that will accelerate climate breakdown. As polar sea ice melts, particularly in the Arctic, it reveals dark sea that absorbs more heat than reflective ice, warming the planet further. Much of the Antarctic ice covers land, and its melting raises sea levels.

Also of Interest

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

Iraq War Lesson: the seduction may be sweet but the hangover is hell

US and NATO allies arm neo-Nazi units in Ukraine as foreign policy elites yearn for Afghan-style insurgency

People Overestimate The US War Machine And Underestimate The US Propaganda Machine

Erasing History To Own Putin: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Was bombing of Mariupol theater staged by Ukrainian Azov extremists to trigger NATO intervention?

What Will Be The Geographic End State Of The War In Ukraine

The NYT Now Admits the Biden Laptop -- Falsely Called "Russian Disinformation" -- is Authentic

CIA Ghouls DOUBLE DOWN On Hunter Biden Laptop COVERUP

High energy costs trigger unrest in parts of Europe

Extend life of key climate sensor that maps world’s forests, Nasa told

“U.S. Hypocrisy on Ukraine”: Biden Admin Remains Silent on Morocco’s Occupation of Western Sahara

Putin Fires HYPERSONIC MISSILE In SCREW YOU To NATO

China BLAMES NATO For Ukraine Crisis, Increases Russia Ties

Krystal Ball: US ADMITS It May Block Ukraine Peace Deal

Murtaza Hussain: How Saudi Is MANIPULATING US Elections

$15 Billion For Ukraine – NOTHING For U.S. COVID Relief

Dr. Diana Johnstone: Washington’s Endless War

A Little Night Music

Ida Cox - Lawdy, Lawdy Blues

Ida Cox - Wild Women Don't Have The Blues

Papa Charlie Jackson & Ida Cox - How Long Daddy, How Long?

Ida Cox - One Hour Mama

Ida Cox - Chicago Monkey Man Blues

Ida Cox - Last Mile Blues

Ida Cox - I Can't Quit That Man

Ida Cox - Cherry Pickin' Blues

Ida Cox - Hard Time Blues

Ida Cox - Take Him Off My Mind