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This evening's music features Memphis blues piano player Rosco Gordon. Enjoy!

"The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress."

-- Frederick Douglass

News and Opinion

Worth a click and a full read:

Protesting for Jayland Walker

Jayland Walker was killed by police in Akron, Ohio when he was shot more than 60 times. The nature of his death, and the brutality of his killing, made headlines. But lest anyone forget, the police kill an average of three people every day in this country and one of those victims will be Black. ...

Police killings do not occur in a vacuum. They are a key part of the state’s plan to keep Black people under physical control. Of course there should be community control of the police, but that can’t happen unless there is a truly democratic state, one that gives the people control over every aspect of their lives. Obviously police should be prosecuted when they kill, but those instances will always be few and far between. The system can be counted on to act as it was intended. ...

It is time to look at our own past in this country and to other countries in order to determine strategies of action. While the era of the civil rights movement, the liberation movement, is fetishized, its lessons are rarely heeded. A mass movement did bring about change. The people who struggled had no political friends, which was actually a good thing. They were under no illusions that politicians would advocate on their behalf. Yet they made demands anyway, knowing that people in power did not want to hear from them. Now we have “activism” that involves bad actors from the Black political class, which was created in response to the liberation movement, and which does the job that a buffer class always does.

Lawyers can sue and get monetary settlements, mothers of dead children are dragged out for show, while the state apparatus churns on. The mass movement which could put a stop to this and other human rights abuses is rarely mentioned as a response. Political treachery and allegiance to the Democratic Party lead to a repetition of outrage followed by bitter disappointment when justice does not come. There will always be a Jayland Walker, one every day to be exact. They may be hit by one bullet or by many. The sad revolving door of marches, outrage, and opportunism will continue absent a determination to change course.

Perhaps we should look not just to our past but to the rest of the world for guidance. While Black people here wring their hands due to misleadership, inertia and political impotence, the masses in Ecuador recently brought their country to a standstill with a general strike. Thousands of people took to the streets against neo-liberal policies and environmental destruction and their demands were met. ... Unlike indigenous Ecuadoreans, Black people in this country are under the misapprehension that they have the rights that the law claims they have. The recently celebrated Declaration of Independence said all men were created equal while simultaneously permitting chattel slavery in the new nation. It isn’t surprising that a Black family mourns a police homicide every day.

Russian Official Makes Nuclear Threat Over US Support for Ukraine War Crimes Probe

A top Kremlin official responded Wednesday to the U.S.-backed effort to investigate war crimes perpetrated by Russian forces invading Ukraine by warning that Americans could face retribution for their hypocrisy in the form of thermonuclear annihilation.

Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, who currently serves as President Vladimir Putin's deputy of national security, wrote on his Telegram channel that "the United States and their useless mongrels should remember the words of scripture: 'Judge not, lest you be judged; So that one day the great day of God's wrath will not come to their house.'"

He ominously added that "the idea to punish a country with the largest nuclear potential is absurd and potentially creates the threat to mankind's existence."

Medvedev sardonically accused the United States of sowing "chaos and destruction across the world for the sake of 'true democracy.'"

"All American history, from the time of the conquest of the Indians, is a bloody war of annihilation. And we are talking about the most brutal extermination of the civilian population," he said. "It has become a signature style of American politics, whoever is in power there. During World War II, the United States destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in this way."

"Vietnam and Korea, Yugoslavia and Iraq, Cuba, Afghanistan, and Syria are well aware of how disastrous the consequences of such invasions are—the list is long, and constantly updated," he continued. "The number of victims of the criminal policy of the United States today is comparable to the victims of the Nazi regime."

Referring to the U.S. government's complicated support for investigating alleged and documented Russian war crimes in Ukraine, Medvedev asked: "So who's going to give us a show trial? Those who kill people and commit war crimes with impunity, but do not meet real condemnation in the international structures financed by them? Those who so firmly believed in their exclusivity and impunity? Those who believe they have the right to judge others, but be beyond the jurisdiction of any court?"

"With Russia, this will not work," Medvedev insisted. "They understand this very well. Therefore, the filthy dogs of war stop by with their disgusting bark."

Meanwhile, the Associated Press reports longtime Putin aide and State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin on Wednesday took a swipe at Western sanctions and seizures targeting his country by suggesting it could reclaim Alaska, which the U.S. puchased from czarist Russia for $7.2 million in 1867.

"When they attempt to appropriate our assets abroad," Volodin said in a meeting with lawmakers, "they should be aware that we also have something to claim back."

[Hmmm, well, if they promise to take Sarah Palin... -js]

Turkey Renews Threat to Block Sweden, Finland NATO Bids If Demands Aren’t Met

Turkey has reiterated that it will still block Sweden and Finland’s NATO memberships if they don’t fulfill obligations agreed to in a ten-point memorandum signed between the three nations.

“They have to comply with this document, if they don’t then we won’t allow them to join NATO,” Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said on Monday. Ankara lifted its objection to Sweden and Finland’s NATO applications after signing the memorandum at the NATO summit in Madrid last week.

Under the deal, Sweden and Finland agreed to respond to Turkey’s extradition requests, lift export controls on Turkey, and not support Kurdish militant groups, including the PKK. Ankara plans to ask Sweden for the extradition of 73 people, mostly suspected PKK members, but it’s not clear at this point if Stockholm will cooperate.

Norway pulling a Lithuania?

Russia's Speaker Asks Parliament to Look at Scrapping Norway Sea Treaty

The speaker of Russia's lower house of parliament asked a senior lawmaker on Tuesday to look into scrapping a treaty that establishes the country's maritime border with NATO member Norway.

The treaty, which was signed in 2010, aimed to put an end to disputes between Russia and Norway in the Barents Sea, the part of the Arctic Ocean adjoining the northern coasts of Norway and Russia.

Responding to comments in parliament accusing Norway of blocking food deliveries destined for Russian-populated settlements on the Svalbard archipelago, State Duma speaker Vyacheslav Volodin asked the head of the chamber's international affairs committee to look into "denouncing" the treaty. ...

Norway denies that it is blocking access to Svalbard, arguing that it is only applying international sanctions in response to Moscow's military campaign in Ukraine, and that Russia has other ways to supply the settlements.

Ukraine’s military plans to limit free movement to make conscription easier

Ukraine’s military has announced plans to introduce a system of permits that would prohibit men eligible for conscription from leaving the region where they are registered.

The move, based on legislation from 1992, was intended to enable the country’s armed forces to locate potential conscripts more easily, but it prompted an immediate backlash.

President Volodymyr Zelenskiy criticised the announcement in his nightly TV address to the nation on Tuesday, saying that the general staff should not make decisions without him. Two parliamentarians immediately filed draft legislation that would scrap the army’s initiative, which they described as “outdated”.

It remains unclear if movement permits for men will be introduced, but the army’s announcement highlights the precarious position facing Ukrainian men who could be conscripted to fight at any moment.

Since Zelenskiy declared martial law at the start of Russia’s invasion, Ukrainian men aged 18 to 60 are eligible for military service and are forbidden from leaving the country. There are a few exceptions such as men with poor health, or fathers of three or more children.

Russia Continues Advance in Donbass, Boris Johnson Falls in London

López Obrador to campaign to ‘tear down the Statue of Liberty’ if the US convicts Julian Assange

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has come out in defense of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, and has asked that US authorities drop the charges against him. “If they take him to the United States and he is sentenced to the maximum penalty and to die in prison, we must start a campaign to tear down the Statue of Liberty,” said the president, who often goes by his initials AMLO, at his news conference on Monday. The Mexican leader added that he will discuss the issue with his counterpart, Joe Biden, during his upcoming visit to Washington on July 12.

López Obrador’s comments followed information published this weekend by The Washington Post and the organization Reporters Without Borders, criticizing the situation of insecurity and violence experienced by members of the media in Mexico. Twelve journalists have been murdered in the country so far this year, at a rate of two murders each month. “It is a smear campaign against the government of Mexico,” the president asserted on Monday.

Convicting Assange would imply that the monument in New York “is no longer a symbol of freedom,” said AMLO. The Mexican president said that he had already discussed the issue with former US president Donald Trump. “There can be no silence,” he added.

Biden still blames Putin, exports US oil reserves

Yves at Naked Capitalism is worth a click and a full read:

The Coming Sanctions-Induced Economic Tsunami?

Today I am risking being too glib, but my excuse is aspiring to meet the Einstein standard, “Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.” It’s not hard to see that as rough as economic conditions are now, they are set to get worse. And it’s not hard to see that despite the considerable blowback from the sanctions against Russia, the West is not going to relent.

Here’s a simple baseline forecast. Russia wins in Ukraine. The West may try to define it somehow as not a victory, but it’s hard to see how Russia does not take the entire Black Sea coast plus Ukraine east of the Dneiper by the end of the year, and I hazard to guess sooner, say October-November. What Russia decides to do with the western part is path dependent and so in play (consider how possible military coup/Zelensky flight, Democratic November wipeout, rising political strife in Europe, Poland deciding to get expansionist could all factor into Russian decisions). Some Russians are already getting cocky:

Many of you asked for the capitulation of Zelensky with subtitles,so here it is...

ENJOY pic.twitter.com/t46YIxlUQl

— AZ (@AZmilitary1) July 5, 2022

The West will remain fixated on making Russia pay for taking Ukraine. But the West lacks the ability to do so via conventional warfare (see this devastating analysis, The Return of Industrial Warfare, which shows that the West lacks the manufacturing capacity to match, let alone beat, Russia). So the only means left is economic war. Despite the fact that the West is losing decisively there too, it is determined to escalate, no matter how much harm it does to itself.

Russia has been measured in its responses. Perhaps the Russian leadership hoped that the West would recognize the balance of power and cool off after Russia force a Minsk-Accords-type solution plus a guarantee of neutrality upon Ukraine, which seemed a possible outcome as of the end-of-March negotiations in Istanbul, which the UK and US got Zelensky to undo. Russia knows there’s no point in negotiating with the West, or at least not the current actors.

"The Inevitable Has Happened": Boris Johnson to Resign as PM After Mounting Scandals, Resignations

President Manchin has agreed to allow Medicare to negotiate the prices of a few drugs. What a great fellow he is.

With Manchin's Backing, Senate Dems Unveil Plan to Let Medicare Negotiate Drug Prices

Senate Democrats, including serial obstructionist Joe Manchin of West Virginia, have reportedly reached a deal on a plan that would allow Medicare to negotiate the prices of a small subset of prescription drugs directly with pharmaceutical companies, a change that is massively popular with voters across party lines.

On Wednesday, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) submitted 190 pages of legislative text to the chamber's parliamentarian, an unelected official tasked with opining on whether bill provisions comply with the arcane rules of budget reconciliation—the process Democrats are using to evade GOP opposition and the 60-vote filibuster rule.

The new text is in some ways weaker than the drug pricing plan that the House of Representatives passed in November as part of the broader Build Back Better package, which Manchin tanked just a month later. One critical difference, as Reuters points out, is that the new prices negotiated by Medicare under the updated Democratic framework "would not apply to people with private health insurance."

"It would allow the government to negotiate the price of up to 20 drugs, rather than the 250 drugs progressives had sought," the outlet added. ...

In its current form, Senate Democrats' drug pricing plan would cap Medicare Part D enrollees' out-of-pocket prescription medicine costs at $2,000 a year, penalize drug companies that raise prices at a faster rate than inflation, and allow Medicare to "negotiate and, if applicable, renegotiate maximum fair prices" for a limited number of costly drugs beginning in 2023.

Dem Insiders FREAK At Incompetent Biden

Kim Iversen: Biden Blames GOP For Food Bank Lines And Pandemic Unemployment

Biden planned to nominate anti-abortion lawyer to federal judgeship, emails show

The office of Kentucky’s governor, Andy Beshear, has shared emails confirming that Joe Biden intended to nominate Chad Meredith, a conservative lawyer who has previously defended anti-abortion legislation, to a federal judgeship. Reports of Meredith’s potential nomination have sparked outrage among progressives and abortion rights advocates, even as the White House has dodged questions about the matter. Biden is already seen by some as not taking a strong enough lead on defending abortion rights.

Beshear, a Democrat, shared the emails with the Louisville Courier-Journal, which broke the news of Meredith’s expected nomination last week.

In a 23 June email to one of Beshear’s advisers in DC, the White House aide Kathleen M Marshall said, “To be nominated tomorrow: … Stephen Chad Meredith: candidate for the United States district court for the eastern district of Kentucky.” But Meredith’s nomination was not announced the following day, 24 June, when the supreme court released its decision to overturn Roe v Wade, ending the federal right to abortion access.

Instead, Marshall sent a follow-up email on 29 June, telling Beshear’s aide, “Sorry for not including this in the original e-mail, but I wanted to clarify that the e-mail I sent was pre-decisional and privileged information.” ...

But the emails released by Beshear’s office confirm that the White House had planned to soon submit Meredith’s nomination. According to reports, the nomination was part of a deal with the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, to avoid holding up Biden’s other judicial nominations.

Dems Rig Ballot To BAN Green Party Senate Candidate

Krystal Ball: BONKERS GOP Does DAMNDEST To Rescue Dems

Revealed: US water likely contains more ‘forever chemicals’ than EPA tests show

A Guardian analysis of water samples from around the United States shows that the type of water testing relied on by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is so limited in scope that it is probably missing significant levels of PFAS pollutants.

The undercount leaves regulators with an incomplete picture of the extent of PFAS contamination and reveals how millions of people may be facing an unknown health risk in their drinking water.

The analysis checked water samples from PFAS hot spots around the country with two types of tests: an EPA-developed method that detects 30 types of the approximately 9,000 PFAS compounds, and another that checks for a marker of all PFAS.

The Guardian found that seven of the nine samples collected showed higher levels of PFAS in water using the test that identifies markers for PFAS, than levels found when the water was tested using the EPA method – and at concentrations as much as 24 times greater.

“The EPA is doing the bare minimum it can and that’s putting people’s health at risk,” said Kyla Bennett, policy director at the advocacy group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.

Dutch Farmers Spray Manure On Government Buildings In Protest

Scientists puzzled by toads squatting in dormouse nests high in trees

Scientists hunting for dormice have been surprised to find toads sleeping in their nest boxes, high up in the trees. A study has for the first time revealed the frequency with which the common toad nests and breeds in the trees. These toads were found dwelling as high as 3 metres above ground in trees, with a record of 50 found living in dormouse nest boxes. ...

The breakthrough was made by researchers at Froglife and the University of Cambridge. Originally on the hunt for dormice and bats, volunteers were surprised to find toads residing in hollow tree cavities. They say the discovery highlights the importance to wildlife of protecting natural woodland habitats, especially ancient trees with features such as hollows, cracks and other natural cavities. ...

The discovery of arboreal behaviour in common toads suggests that tree cavities may be a much more critical ecological feature than conservationists originally thought. The reason the common toad is finding refuge in trees and nest boxes is unknown, but the researchers suggest they may be searching for food or hiding from predators and parasites.

Also of Interest

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

Germany Is Being Crushed By “Anti-Russia” Sanctions

Boris Johnson Death Watch

"Boris Johnson is but a turd spewed to the top of the gushing sewer of British decline."

The Corporatization of Just About Everything

Global dismay as supreme court ruling leaves Biden’s climate policy in tatters

WILD Oil Price Swings Mean Chaos For Consumers

Kamala’s Incredibly Vapid Speech In Highland Park

Goodbye Boris. Mike Pompeo's Ukraine doctrine w/Gonzalo Lira

A Little Night Music

Rosco Gordon - Just a Little Bit

Rosco Gordon - Booted

Rosco Gordon - Roscoe's Boogie

Rosco Gordon - What you got on your mind

Rosco Gordon - You look Bad When You're Naked

Rosco Gordon - Surely, I Love You

Rosco Gordon - You Got My Bait

Rosco Gordon - Sally Jo

Rosco Gordon & Wayne Bennett - Hello Baby (Jelly, Jelly)

Rosco Gordon - The Dilly Bop

Rosco Gordon - T-Model Boogie