The Evening Blues - 11-1-22

Submitted by joe shikspack on Tue, 11/01/2022 - 2:18pm

eb1pt12

The day's news roundup + tonight's musical feature: Eddie Floyd

Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features Stax r&b singer Eddie Floyd. Enjoy!

^{Eddie Floyd - Bring It On Home To Me}

"A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him, saying, "You are mad; you are not like us.""

-- Anthony the Great

News and Opinion

'Military Madness': US to Deploy Nuclear-Capable B-52s to Australia, Provoking China

In what critics are calling a "dangerous escalation," the United States is reportedly preparing to deploy up to six nuclear-capable B-52 bombers to northern Australia, where they would be close enough to strike China.

"The ability to deploy U.S. Air Force bombers to Australia sends a strong message to adversaries about our ability to project lethal air power," the U.S. Air Force told "Four Corners," a television program of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), on Sunday.

Becca Wasser, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, a Washington D.C.-based think tank, told ABC that "having bombers that could range and potentially attack mainland China could be very important in sending a signal to China that any of its actions over Taiwan could also expand further."

Investigative journalist Peter Cronau, however, described the plan, which came with "no debate [or] discussion," as "military madness [that] is fanning tensions with China."

Cronau's message was echoed by David Shoebridge, an Australian Greens senator for New South Wales.

"This is a dangerous escalation," Shoebridge wrote on Twitter. "It makes Australia an even bigger part of the global nuclear weapons threat to humanity's very existence—and by rising military tensions it further destabilizes our region."

According to ABC, "Washington is planning to build dedicated facilities" for the nuclear-capable B-52 bombers at Royal Australian Air Force Base Tindal, less than 200 miles south of Darwin, the capital of the country's Northern Territory.

New Study Finds The Rest Of The World Supports China And Russia

The US is preparing to station multiple nuclear-capable B-52 bombers in northern Australia in what the mass media are calling a “signal to China,” yet another example of Australia’s forced subservience as a US military/intelligence asset.

“Having bombers that could range and potentially attack mainland China could be very important in sending a signal to China that any of its actions over Taiwan could also expand further,” Becca Wasser from the Centre for New American Security think tank told the ABC.

“This is a dangerous escalation. It makes Australia an even bigger part of the global nuclear weapons threat to humanity’s very existence – and by rising military tensions it further destabilises our region,” tweeted Greens Senator David Shoebridge of the incendiary provocation.

This is a dangerous escalation. It makes Australia an even bigger part of the global nuclear weapons threat to humanity’s very existence - and by rising military tensions it further destabilises our region https://t.co/OTSSfV25fJ

— David Shoebridge (@DavidShoebridge) October 30, 2022

A new Australian Financial Review article titled “Australia’s alliances in Asia are a tale of two regions” candidly discusses the Biden administration’s recent sanctions geared toward kneecapping the Chinese tech industry in what the author James Curran correctly says “is unambiguously a new cold war.” Curran describes the impossible task Australia has of straddling the ever-widening divide between its number one trading partner China and its number one “security” partner the US, while Washington continually pressures Canberra and ASEAN states toward greater and greater enmity with Beijing.

“ASEAN countries, as much as Australia, have much at stake in resisting the onset of a bifurcated world,” Curran writes.

But that bifurcation is being shoved through at breakneck pace, using both hard and soft power measures. Australians have been hammered with increasingly aggressive anti-China propaganda, and as a result nearly half of them now say they would be willing to go to war to defend Taiwan from an attack by the mainland, with a third saying they’d support a war against China over the Solomon Islands.

A recent Cambridge study found that this hostility toward China has been on the rise in recent years not just in Australia but throughout the “liberal democracies” of the US-centralized power alliance. But what’s interesting is that public opinion is exactly reversed in the much larger remainder of the Earth’s population, with people outside the US power cluster just as fond of China as those within that power cluster are hostile toward it. This relationship is largely mirrored with Russia as well.

“Among the 1.2bn people who inhabit the world’s liberal democracies, three-quarters (75%) now hold a negative view of China, and 87% a negative view of Russia,” the report reads. “However, for the 6.3bn people who live in the rest of the world, the picture is reversed. In these societies, 70% feel positively towards China, and 66% positively towards Russia.”

The report finds that in the “developing” world, approval of China is higher than approval of the US:

“For the first time ever, slightly more people in developing countries (62%) are favourable towards China than towards the United States (61%). This is especially so among the 4.6bn people living in countries supported by the Belt and Road Initiative, among whom almost two-thirds hold a positive view of China, compared to just a quarter (27%) in non-participating countries.”

The report finds that while Russia’s approval has plummeted in the west, it maintains broad support in the east despite the invasion of Ukraine:

“However, the real terrain of Russia’s international influence lies outside of the West. 75% of respondents in South Asia, 68% in Francophone Africa, 62% in Southeast Asia continue to view the country positively in spite of the events of this year.”

I first became aware of the Cambridge study via a Twitter thread by Arnaud Bertrand (who is a great follow if you happen to use that demonic app). Bertrand highlights data in the study showing that US-aligned nations’ opinion of China began plummeting not after the Covid outbreak in late 2019, but after 2017 when the US began ramping up its propaganda campaign against Beijing.

Apart from the fact that the USA’s immensely sophisticated propaganda machine naturally focuses primarily on where the world’s wealth and military firepower rests while pushing its global agendas, and apart from the fact that those in Belt and Road Initiative countries apparently believe they benefit from their economic relationships with China, the disparity between the “developed” and “developing” worlds in their perceptions of the US and its enemies may also be partly explained by another thought-provoking Arnaud Bertrand thread, which I will quote in its entirety here:

A puzzling observation in today’s world is that almost no Western leader has laid out a positive vision for the future.

Take Biden for instance. His big vision is “democracies vs autocracies”. Meaning his vision for the future of the world is conflict. How positive is that?

Contrast this with China: between “national rejuvenation” and “common prosperity” at home and the “global security initiative” as their vision for improved international relations; everyone is very clear on the journey they’re embarked on.

This is a key, if not the key reason why the “West” has no chance in hell to convince the “rest” to join them.

There’s simply nothing to join! Except conflict, I guess, but you join a conflict to fight for a vision – for a better world – the conflict itself cannot be the vision!

This reminds me of what George Kennan, the architect of the cold war, wrote: to win he said that America had to “create among the peoples of the world generally the impression of a country which knows what it wants, which is coping successfully with the problems of its internal life and with the responsibilities of a World Power, and which has a spiritual vitality capable of holding its own among the major ideological currents of the time”

Does America give this impression today?

Even in my own country, France. Ask any French person what Macron’s vision for the future of France and the world is, what the grand plan is, and you’ll get very puzzled looks. “Reform the pension system so we have to work longer?”

The truth is there’s nothing, nada, rien!

What we have essentially in the West are political operators. They think their jobs are to get reelected and to attempt to move whatever metrics the electorate cares about: GDP, unemployment, debt levels, CO2 emissions, etc. Actual leaders have gone extinct (or gone East).

It’s actually quite sad, really speaks to the levels of intellectual decrepitude in the West today. The time of the Enlightenment, the big revolutions is well and truly gone. We’re stuck with our mediocre operators.

It’s also why this is such a dangerous time. A positive vision brings confidence, it brings hope, it motivates, it makes people look forward to what’s to come. The West has none of that today.

The future is scary, the dominant feelings are fear and anger.

And when there’s a lot of fear and anger, these feelings need to be directed somewhere. And our operators certainly don’t want it to be them! So it’s China, Iran, all those “foreigners” who “hate our freedom”.

Perfect recipe for a very bad conflict…

Please, don’t get fooled!

Bertrand’s musings echo a recent quote by Professor Jeffrey Sachs at the Athens Democracy Forum: “The single biggest mistake of president Biden was to say ‘the greatest struggle of the world is between democracies and autocracies’. The real struggle of the world is to live together and overcome our common crises of environment and inequality.”

Indeed, we could be striving toward a positive vision for the future, one which seeks “common prosperity” and “improved international relations,” one which works to remedy inequality and address the looming environmental crisis. Instead the world is being bifurcated, split in two, which history tells us is probably an indication that something extremely terrible is on the horizon for our species unless we drastically change course.

It’s worth keeping all this in mind, as nuclear-capable bombers are deployed to Australia; as NATO weighs moving nuclear weapons to Russia’s border in Finland; as the Biden administration goes all in on economic warfare with China regardless of the consequences; as Russia accuses the US of “lowering the nuclear threshold” by modernizing the arsenal in Europe into “battlefield weapons”; as the Council on Foreign Relations president openly admits that the US is now working to halt China’s rise on the world stage; as China declares its willingness to deepen ties with Russia on all levels.

We could have such a wonderful, healthy, collaborative world, and it’s being flushed down the toilet because an empire is using its leverage over the wealthiest populations on our planet to work toward dominating all the other populations. This stupid, insane quest to shore up unipolar planetary domination is costing us everything while gaining us nothing, and it’s going to be the poorest and weakest among us who suffer the most as a result.

Missiles Bring Ukraine to Catastrophe, Russia Advance in Vuhledar, Erdogan Tries to Save Grain Deal

Russia Says US Lowering ‘Nuclear Threshold’ By Upgrading Nukes in Europe

A Russian official said Saturday that the US is lowering the “nuclear threshold” by sending an upgraded version of its B61 nuclear bomb to NATO bases in Europe.

The B61 is the US’s primary thermonuclear gravity bomb, and it is being modernized into a newer weapon known as the B61-12. Politico reported last week that the US told NATO allies at a recent meeting that it is deploying the B-61-12 to Europe to replace older bombs by this December, a faster timeline than the originally planned spring deployment.

The US has approximately 100 B61s currently stored at air bases in Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, and Turkey. According to the Federation of American Scientists, the B61-12s carry a lower yield and are more accurate than older B61s.

“The United States is modernizing them, increasing their accuracy and reducing the power of the nuclear charge, that is, they turn these weapons into ‘battlefield weapons,’ thereby reducing the nuclear threshold,” Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko said.

Actors in charge. EU inflation surge. Lagarde, Mr. Putin is sick. Fantasy Russian gov in exile.

Kremlin Says Talks on Ukraine Should First Be Held With US

The Kremlin said Saturday that talks over the war in Ukraine must first be held with the US as Russian officials continue to signal that they’re open to negotiations with Washington.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that the US and its Western allies have a say over what Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky could agree to, citing earlier failed peace talks.

“Kiev has a president, a legitimate Ukrainian president, Mr. Zelensky, and it is theoretically possible to reach any agreements with him, but, bearing in mind the March experience, these agreements mean nothing because they can be immediately canceled at the dictation from outside,” Peskov said.

“The March situation” refers to talks between Ukraine and Russia that were held in Istanbul. Following the in-person meeting, a deal seemed possible, and the two sides reportedly reached a tentative agreement. But former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson then traveled in April and told Zelensky not to negotiate with Russia.

Biden SNAPS At Zelensky For Being Ungrateful

Guantanamo Bay: Oldest prisoner freed after being held for 17 years without charge

Human rights organisations have celebrated the release of the oldest illegally held prisoner at the Guantanamo Bay US detention site in Cuba.

Saifullah Paracha, 75, was returned to Pakistan according to the foreign ministry in Islamabad and the US Defence Department.

After more than 17 years in captivity, which Paracha has described as "being alive in your own grave", he was reunited with his family.

The British human rights group Reprieve said that Paracha's detention was an "injustice [that] can never be rectified", accusing US authorities of kidnapping him in the "prime of his life".

BREAKING: Oldest Guantánamo detainee released after almost 20 years detained without charge or trial.

This is a huge win but Saifullah Paracha, 75, returns to his family a frail old man, after being taken in the prime of his life. That injustice can never be rectified. pic.twitter.com/L4mErhHL7A

— Reprieve (@Reprieve) October 29, 2022

Paracha was arrested two years after the 11 September 2001 attacks on the US and accused of being an al-Qaeda sympathiser who financed the terrorist group. Paracha has always maintained his innocence, and the US has never provided any evidence to support its claims.

End the Occupation: Norwegian Refugee Council Warns Israeli Elections May Empower Extremist Parties

Israeli election too close to call as Netanyahu bids for comeback

With polls too close to call the day before Israel holds its fifth election in four years, even minute shifts in voter turnout could make or break the longtime prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s comeback attempt, for which he has allied with rightwing extremists.

Israeli politicians were busy making their final campaign pitches on Monday, after Friday’s final pre-election polls suggested that neither Netanyahu’s rightwing religious bloc, nor the opposing centre-left bloc, would win enough seats to form a government.

Surveys by Israel’s public broadcaster Kan, as well as Channels 12 and 13, put the Netanyahu bloc, which includes far-right extremists and two ultra-Orthodox parties, at 60 seats, one short of a majority in the 120-seat Knesset. The anti-Netanyahu camp, led by the incumbent prime minister, Yair Lapid, was predicted to win 56 seats. Another four should go to a pro-Arab rights alliance that may or may not lend its support to the centre-left bloc.

If the polls are right, Israel’s era of crippling political deadlock will continue, with a sixth election possible in the spring. But if the rightwing bloc keeps slowly gaining, as it has done for the past few weeks, and turnout in the disillusioned 20% of the population with Palestinian heritage is low, Netanyahu may be able to scrape by with a 61st seat. If that happens, the most extremist government in Israeli history will be sworn into office.

Brazil's Bolsonaro to speak today, won't contest election result

US abortions decrease by 10,000 since repeal of Roe v Wade in June

There have been at least 10,000 fewer abortions since the nationwide abortion rights established by Roe v Wade were repealed by the US supreme court in June.

New research from the national research project #WeCount shows that with federal abortion protections rolled back, there have been 10,570 fewer legal abortions – a 6% decline – than estimates in April before the June ruling.

#WeCount is a national abortion reporting project with the Society of Family Planning, an abortion and contraception science group. The research project has been tracking changes in abortion access since the overturning of Roe v Wade, collecting data from medical offices, hospitals, telemedicine providers and clinics.

The data does not include self-managed abortions, which could lower the overall decrease in terminations, according to the New York Times. The recent statistics are a net calculation, meaning the total loss accounts for a decreased number of abortions in some states as well as an increase in abortions in other areas, for people who traveled out of state to terminate their pregnancies.

Supreme Court Poised to Strike Down Affirmative Action in Cases Brought By Conservative Activist

Affirmative action appears in jeopardy after US supreme court hearing

The survival of affirmative action in higher education appeared to be in serious trouble on Monday at a conservative-dominated US supreme court after hours of debate over difficult questions of race. The court is weighing challenges to admissions programs at the University of North Carolina and Harvard University that use race among many factors in seeking a diverse student body.

The court’s six conservative justices all expressed doubts about the practice, while the three liberals defended the programs, which are similar to those used by many other private and public universities.

Following the overturning of the half-century abortion precedent of Roe v Wade in June, the cases offer a big new test of whether the court, now dominated 6-3 by conservatives, will jolt the law to the right on another of the nation’s most contentious cultural issues.

AIPAC Super PAC Throws in Against Progressive Democrat Summer Lee

Having tried and failed to prevent Summer Lee from winning the Democratic nomination for the open U.S. House seat in Pennsylvania's 12th Congressional District earlier this year, a super PAC formed by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee is now spending against the progressive candidate in her race against Republican Mike Doyle.

According to new federal filings, the United Democracy Project (UDP) has dropped nearly $80,000 on mailers opposing Lee, who overcame millions in UDP spending to win the district's May primary over corporate lawyer Steve Irwin.

During that race, UDP—which is funded by prominent Republican billionaires—attempted to cast Lee as insufficiently loyal to the Democratic Party. In one ad, AIPAC's group slammed Lee for "fighting Democrats," pointing to her past criticism of the party's leadership and direction.

But UDP's campaign to ensure Lee's defeat to a Republican in the general election further exposes its primary attacks as cynical.

As Haaretz reported Monday, UDP's general election intervention represents the group's "first-ever spend in a Democrat vs. Republican election battle."

"UDP came under significant scrutiny during the primary cycle for its tactics, all while being significantly bankrolled by gifts from Republican megadonors," the newspaper observed. "It spent a total of $26.2 million—exclusively on Democratic primaries—with $10.5 million funding attack ads in the nine races in which it directly involved itself, making UDP among the greatest spenders this cycle."

Usamah Andrabi, candidate communications director for Justice Democrats, wrote in response to news of UDP's spending against Lee that it "seems like AIPAC and the GOP have the same agenda."

UDP's general election spending was disclosed just over a week before the November 8 midterms, in which Democrats are looking to keep their majorities and expand their margins in the U.S. House and Senate.

Joe Rogan: A RED WAVE Like 'The Shining' Will WIPE OUT Dems This November

the evening greens

Lula ally pays tribute to Dom Phillips and vows to protect the Amazon

The politician tipped to become Brazil’s new environment minister has paid tribute to the murdered British journalist Dom Phillips and said Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s incoming government will battle to honour the memory of the rainforest martyrs killed trying to safeguard the Amazon. Speaking to the Guardian after Lula’s historic election victory on Sunday, Marina Silva said Brazil now had the chance to build “a new democratic ecosystem” in which conservation, sustainability and the climate crisis will take centre stage after Jair Bolsonaro’s era of Amazon destruction. ...

In his first speech as president-elect, Lula pledged to make the environment one of his government’s top priorities, telling journalists: “We are going to fight for zero deforestation in the Amazon.” Lula, who managed to dramatically reduce deforestation during his two-term government, said Brazil would retake a lead role in the fight against the climate crisis and that he was open to international collaboration to protect its environment.

On Sunday Norway’s environment minister said the Amazon Fund – a billion-dollar international kitty designed to support Amazon protection efforts – would be reactivated, having been frozen as a result of the “head-on collision with Bolsonaro” over deforestation.

Lula is expected to send a high-level delegation to next month’s Cop27 climate summit in Egypt.

Biden Floats NEW TAX For Oil Companies, REPEATS False Claim That He Inherited Gas At $5/Gal

Windfall Profits Tax 'Is Sorely Needed' But More Oil Is Not, Groups Warn Biden

While welcoming U.S. President Biden's newly confirmed support for a windfall profits tax targeting fossil fuel giants, advocacy groups on Monday also argued against incentivizing more oil production in the United States, especially given the worsening climate emergency.

In brief remarks at the White House Monday afternoon, Biden decried the "outrageous" third-quarter profits of oil companies such as ExxonMobil and Shell, asserting that "their profits are a windfall of war, a windfall from the brutal conflict that's ravaging Ukraine."

Flanked by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, Biden called on oil companies to cut prices at the pump and boost domestic production—and warned that "if they don't, they're gonna pay a higher tax on their excess profits and face other restrictions." He pledged his administration will work with Congress on relevant policies.

"President Biden is getting it wrong," declared Robert Weismann, president of the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen. "America needs a windfall profits tax; we don't need Big Oil to ramp up production. Oil prices have been high—and Big Oil profits have skyrocketed—because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The solution to that is simple: a windfall profits tax that extracts Big Oil's unjust enrichment and returns the money to the people."

[Or, gosh, they could just end the war and the sanctions and really screw the oil companies. -js]

Two-thirds of US money for fossil fuel pours into Africa despite climate goals

Joe Biden will head to Egypt next week to tout America’s re-emergence as a leader on the climate crisis at the Cop27 talks. But he will be landing in a continent that the US continues to pour billions of dollars into for fossil fuel projects, with seemingly no end in sight despite the president’s promises.

The US government has funneled more than $9bn (£7.7bn) into oil and gas projects in Africa since it signed up to restrain global heating in the 2015 Paris climate agreement, a tally of official data shows, committing just $682m (£587m) to clean energy developments such as wind and solar over the same period.

Two-thirds of all the money the US has committed globally to fossil fuels in this time has been plowed into Africa, a continent rich in various minerals but also one in which 600 million people live without electricity and where floods, severe heatwaves and droughts are taking an increasingly devastating toll as the planet heats due to the combustion of coal, oil and gas.

Last year, the Biden administration ordered a halt to investments in “carbon-intensive fossil fuel-based energy projects” globally, promising to usher in a new era of renewables. But sources close to the main agencies involved said that there was no plan as yet to adhere to the president’s goal, risking further greenhouse gas emissions.

“I was thrilled with the promises from the Biden administration but over the last two years its been a slow walk back to the point where you couldn’t tell the difference between Biden and [Donald] Trump on overseas fossil fuel finance,” said Kate DeAngelis, international finance program manager at Friends of the Earth, who said it was “absurd” that wealthy oil companies were supported by US taxpayers.

Also of Interest

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

The Pentagon builds a network in our (Australian) Department of Defence amidst media silence

Russia Accuses West of Trying to Replicate Ukraine Strategy in Armenia

Drone Attack On Sevastopol

Chris Hedges: Death of an Oracle

UK Think Tank Behind Truss’ Program Lives On

John Kiriakou: American Gulag

The year’s best mangrove photographs – in pictures

Biden Supports Brazil’s New Left Wing President – WHY?

Robby Soave: LEAKED Docs Reveal DHS Plotting To Criminalize MISINFORMATION Online

A Little Night Music

Eddie Floyd - Knock On Wood

Eddie Floyd - Big Bird

Eddie Floyd - Got To Make A Comeback

Eddie Floyd - Linda Sue Dixon

Eddie Floyd - Things get better

Eddie Floyd - 634-5789

Eddie Floyd - Holding on with both hands

Eddie Floyd - Something You Got

Eddie Floyd & Mavis Staples - Never, Never Let You Go

Eddie Floyd - Can I change my mind

Tags:

The Evening Blues

Open Thread

Eddie Floyd

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Comments

Submitted by gjohnsit on Tue, 11/01/2022 - 2:47pm

Colbert being funny for a change

cutting to the good stuff

Submitted by joe shikspack on Tue, 11/01/2022 - 7:44pm

evening gj...

@gjohnsit

i pretty much stopped watching colbert a long time ago, but it is heartening to see that he can still deliver a good joke once in a while. thanks for the clip!

Submitted by lotlizard on Tue, 11/01/2022 - 3:24pm

Danish parliamentary election returns live here:

https://www.dr.dk/nyheder/politik/folketingsvalg/live-foelg-folketingsva...

Note the choice of fourteen (!) parties, with effort apparently made to give each one its due.

No, I don’t grok spoken Danish, I just like the sound of it—but hold it, I think I did just understand some text on the screen: “[According to exit polls] the Venstre (V) party is headed for its worst result in 34 years.”

The parties are apparently grouped into a “red” (center-left) alliance and a “blue“ (center-right) alliance — except for the non-affiliated Moderates (M) party, who seem headed for a kingmaker role where they can choose which block they want to form a government with.

Submitted by joe shikspack on Tue, 11/01/2022 - 7:48pm

evening lotlizard...

@lotlizard

the website doesn't seem to like my browser, but i suppose it's ok since i can't understand danish at all, well, except for those lovely danish at the bakery.

i hope that the danes manage to elect themselves a decent government that protects them from the predations of the eu lunatics.

Submitted by lotlizard on Wed, 11/02/2022 - 3:01am

Center-left bloc seems to have pulled off a narrow 1-seat win

@joe shikspack
I’m afraid they’re all in on NATO, EU, and Ukraine, although re the EU, the Danes have mixed attitudes. They have so far resisted joining the common-currency euro zone. Also, even much of the left-green bloc has now switched to a harder line against immigration.

As a small country with its own unique national culture and language, they tend to resist the kind of EU free-trade globalist prescriptions that would have foreign owners gobbling up Danish businesses, farmland, etc. and have migrants displacing Danes in the workforce.

Submitted by dystopian on Tue, 11/01/2022 - 4:52pm

Hi bluesters

Hi all, Hey Joe! Hope all is well out there!

Great singer, that song Big Bird is really good. I'm not just sayin' that 'cause there is 'bird' in the title. Do you know what year this 'Change My Mind' was? I see it listed in daWiki as first released in '68 by someone else. This is a GREAT version here. Sounds older.

Re: the Saturday albums... that Mayall was very popular in coastal socal in its day. Like revered. Those tones in Supernatural blew peoples minds. The live Savoy was good too... thanks!

So here we are at the stage where grandma is arrested for feeding homeless, and the duopoly wants the people to fight over who to fight. Vote Blue to fight Russia, vote Red to fight China. Just as long as you vote for war, so they can continue their soul-sucking kabuki.

Didja see Kanye's clothes got dumped by the Gap? His new per him 'homeless inspired' line of fashion, that was displayed in bags that looked like those of the homeless, is now homeless!?! Would that fall under karma, irony, or schadenfreude? Or are they not mutually exclusive?

Thanks for the great soundscape!

be well all!

—

We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.
Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.
both - Albert Einstein

Submitted by joe shikspack on Tue, 11/01/2022 - 7:58pm

evening dystopian...

@dystopian

well, the original version was by tyrone davis in 1968 (and well worth a listen). i don't know the release date for floyd's single, but i can tell you that it was released on a 1969 album by him - so it's probably reasonably soon after the original.

yep, there are a lot of localities that arrest people for feeding the homeless. apparently they worry that it might keep the homeless from moving along. the milkman of human kindness appears to have been diverted by the princes of greed who have a hard time having to put up with homeless people in their communities.

heh, i didn't see the story about kanye. i saw some headlines suggesting that he'd stuck his foot in his mouth again, but i never read stories about anything even tangentially related to the kardashians - i believe that it leads to mind rot.

have a great evening!

Submitted by snoopydawg on Tue, 11/01/2022 - 6:42pm

Surprise….

"A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him, saying, "You are mad; you are not like us.""

That ship sailed long ago. How many Hitler’s have we fought since Russia defeated the original one?

Remember that bumper sticker that said, 'if you can’t stand behind our troops then stand before them'? Pffft…

—

Scientists are concerned that conspiracy theories may die out if they keep coming true at the current alarming rate.

Submitted by joe shikspack on Tue, 11/01/2022 - 8:03pm

evening snoopy...

@snoopydawg

yep, mass delusion has been around for quite a while and unfortunately it's not the divine madness that leads to random acts of beauty and sudden outbreaks of love for the fellowman.

oh well. will the next hitler in line please step forward and introduce yourself!?!

Submitted by lotlizard on Wed, 11/02/2022 - 6:22am

Speaking of regularly recurring Hitler avatars…

@joe shikspack @joe shikspack
Given that, decades after Sleeping Beauty, Disney took its evil Maleficent character and turned her into a heroic protagonist property instead…

And likewise, there was a hit Broadway musical that re-imagined the Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz as a heroically valiant protagonist figure…

… I guess it’s just a matter of time before some big studio comes up with a new twist on the Hitler mythos, whereby we will learn that the real Hitler was misunderstood and — behind an elaborate masquerade of appearing evil, necessitated by an unimaginably-high-stakes cosmic gambit that secretly saves the world from endless, even worse evil — was actually a pretty good guy, a kind of Ted Lasso character even.

Submitted by ggersh on Tue, 11/01/2022 - 6:50pm

Thanks for EB's Joe!

I imagine that Chris Hedges would be considered mad.

https://roundtable.io/

https://www.laprogressive.com/war-and-peace/my-war-never-ends

As this century began, I was writing War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, my reflections on two decades as a war correspondent, 15 of them with the New York Times, in Central America, the Middle East, Africa, Bosnia, and Kosovo. I worked in a small, sparsely furnished studio apartment on First Avenue in New York City. The room had a desk, chair, futon, and a couple of bookshelves — not enough to accommodate my extensive library, leaving piles of books stacked against the wall. The single window overlooked a back alley.

The super, who lived in the first-floor apartment, smoked prodigious amounts of weed, leaving the grimy lobby stinking of pot. When he found out I was writing a book, he suggested I chronicle his moment of glory during the six days of clashes known as the Stonewall Riots, triggered by a 1969 police raid on the Stonewall Inn, a gay club in Greenwich Village. He claimed he had thrown a trash can through the front window of a police cruiser.
Screen-Shot-2022-10-20-at-12.14.20-PM

It was a solitary life, broken by periodic visits to a small antique bookstore in the neighborhood that had a copy of the 1910-1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, the last edition published for scholars. I couldn’t afford it, but the owner generously let me read entries from those 29 volumes written by the likes of Algernon Charles Swinburne, John Muir, T.H. Huxley, and Bertrand Russell. The entry for Catullus, several of whose poems I could recite from memory in Latin, read: “The greatest lyric poet of Rome.” I loved the certainty of that judgment — one that scholars today would not, I suspect, make, much less print.

Buy the Book

There were days when I could not write. I would sit in despair, overcome by emotion, unable to cope with a sense of loss, of hurt, and the hundreds of violent images I carry within me. Writing about war was not cathartic. It was painful. I was forced to unwrap memories carefully swaddled in the cotton wool of forgetfulness. The advance on the book was modest: $25,000. Neither the publisher nor I expected many people to read it, especially with such an ungainly title. I wrote out of a sense of obligation, a belief that, given my deep familiarity with the culture of war, I should set it down. But I vowed, once done, never to willfully dredge up those memories again.

To the publisher’s surprise, the book exploded. Hundreds of thousands of copies were eventually sold. Big publishers, dollar signs in their eyes, dangled significant offers for another book on war. But I refused. I didn’t want to dilute what I had written or go through that experience again. I did not want to be ghettoized into writing about war for the rest of my life. I was done. To this day, I’m still unable to reread it.
The Open Wound of War

Yet it’s not true that I fled war. I fled my wars but would continue to write about other people’s wars. I know the wounds and scars. I know what’s often hidden. I know the anguish and guilt. It’s strangely comforting to be with others maimed by war. We don’t need words to communicate. Silence is enough.

I wanted to reach teenagers, the fodder of wars and the target of recruiters. I doubted many would read War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. I embarked on a text that would pose, and then answer, the most basic questions about war — all from military, medical, tactical, and psychological studies of combat. I operated on the assumption that the simplest and most obvious questions rarely get answered like: What happens to my body if I’m killed?

I hired a team of researchers, mostly graduate students at Columbia University’s School of Journalism, and, in 2003, we produced an inexpensive paperback — I fought the price down to $11 by giving away any future royalties — called What Every Person Should Know About War.

I worked closely on the book with Jack Wheeler, who had graduated from West Point in 1966 and then served in Vietnam, where 30 members of his class were killed. (Rick Atkinson’s The Long Gray Line: The American Journey of West Point’s Class of 1966 is the story of Jack’s class.) Jack went on to Yale Law School after he left the military and became a presidential aide to Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush, while chairing the drive to build the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington.

He struggled with what he called “the open wound of Vietnam” and severe depression. He was last seen on December 30, 2010, disoriented and wandering the streets of Wilmington, Delaware. The next day, his body was discovered as it was dumped from a garbage truck into the Cherry Island Landfill. The Delaware state medical examiner’s office said the cause of death was assault and “blunt force trauma.” Police ruled his death a homicide, a murder that would never be solved. He was buried in Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors.

The idea for the book came from the work of Harold Roland Shapiro, a New York lawyer who, while representing a veteran disabled in World War I, investigated that conflict, discovering a huge disparity between its reality and the public perception of it. His book was, however, difficult to find. I had to get a copy from the Library of Congress. The medical descriptions of wounds, Shapiro wrote, rendered “all that I had read and heard previously as being either fiction, isolated reminiscence, vague generalization or deliberate propaganda.” He published his book, What Every Young Man Should Know About War, in 1937. Fearing it might inhibit recruitment, he agreed to remove it from circulation at the start of World War II. It never went back into print.

The military is remarkably good at studying itself (although such studies aren’t easy to obtain). It knows how to use operant conditioning — the same techniques used to train a dog — to turn young men and women into efficient killers. It skillfully employs the tools of science, technology, and psychology to increase the lethal force of combat units. It also knows how to sell war as adventure, as well as the true route to manhood, comradeship, and maturity.

The callous indifference to life, including the lives of our soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines, leapt off the pages of the official documents. For example, the response to the question “What will happen if I am exposed to nuclear radiation but do not die immediately?” was answered in a passage from the Office of the Surgeon General’s Textbook of Military Medicine that read, in part:

Fatally irradiated soldiers should receive every possible palliative treatment, including narcotics, to prolong their utility and alleviate their physical and psychological distress. Depending on the amount of fatal radiation, such soldiers may have several weeks to live and to devote to the cause. Commanders and medical personnel should be familiar with estimating survival time based on onset of vomiting. Physicians should be prepared to give medications to alleviate diarrhea, and to prevent infection and other sequelae of radiation sickness in order to allow the soldier to serve as long as possible. The soldier must be allowed to make the full contribution to the war effort. He will already have made the ultimate sacrifice. He deserves a chance to strike back, and to do so while experiencing as little discomfort as possible.

Our book, as I hoped, turned up on Quaker anti-recruitment tables in high schools.
51923609891_7efd4e59c9_k

Against ALL Wars ! by Alisdare Hickson is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 / Flickr
“I Am Sullied”

I was disgusted by the simplistic, often mendacious coverage of our post-9/11 war in Iraq, a country I had covered as the Middle East bureau chief for the New York Times. In 2007, I went to work with reporter Laila Al-Arian on a long investigative article in the Nation, “The Other War: Iraq Veterans Bear Witness,” that ended up in an expanded version as another book on war, Collateral Damage: America’s War Against Iraqi Civilians.

We spent hundreds of hours interviewing 50 American combat veterans of Iraq about atrocities they had witnessed or participated in. It was a damning indictment of the U.S. occupation with accounts of terrorizing and abusive house raids, withering suppressing fire routinely laid down in civilian areas to protect American convoys, indiscriminate shooting from patrols, the large kill radius of detonations and air strikes in populated areas, and the slaughter of whole families who approached military checkpoints too closely or too quickly. The reporting made headlines in newspapers across Europe but was largely ignored in the U.S., where the press was generally unwilling to confront the feel-good narrative about “liberating” the people of Iraq.

For the book’s epigraph, we used a June 4, 2005, suicide note left by Colonel Theodore “Ted” Westhusing for his commanders in Iraq. Westhusing (whom I was later told had read and recommended War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning) was the honor captain of his 1983 West Point class. He shot himself in the head with his 9mm Beretta service revolver. His suicide note — think of it as an epitaph for the global war on terror – read in part:

Thanks for telling me it was a good day until I briefed you. [Redacted name] — You are only interested in your career and provide no support to your staff — no msn [mission] support and you don’t care. I cannot support a msn that leads to corruption, human right abuses and liars. I am sullied — no more. I didn’t volunteer to support corrupt, money-grubbing contractors, nor work for commanders only interested in themselves. I came to serve honorably and feel dishonored.

The war in Ukraine raised the familiar bile, the revulsion at those who don’t go to war and yet revel in the mad destructive power of violence. Once again, by embracing a childish binary universe of good and evil from a distance, war was turned into a morality play, gripping the popular imagination. Following our humiliating defeat in Afghanistan and the debacles of Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen, here was a conflict that could be sold to the public as restoring American virtue. Russian President Vladimir Putin, like Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein, instantly became the new Hitler. Ukraine, which most Americans undoubtedly couldn’t have found on a map, was suddenly the front line in the eternal fight for democracy and liberty.

The orgiastic celebration of violence took off.
The Ghosts of War

It’s impossible, under international law, to defend Russia’s war in Ukraine, as it is impossible to defend our invasion of Iraq. Preemptive war is a war crime, a criminal war of aggression. Still, putting the invasion of Ukraine in context was out of the question. Explaining — as Soviet specialists (including famed Cold War diplomat George F. Kennan) had — that expanding NATO into Central and Eastern Europe was a provocation to Russia was forbidden. Kennan had called it “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era” that would “send Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.”

In 1989, I had covered the revolutions in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Romania that signaled the coming collapse of the Soviet Union. I was acutely aware of the “cascade of assurances” given to Moscow that NATO, founded in 1949 to prevent Soviet expansion in Eastern and Central Europe, would not spread beyond the borders of a unified Germany. In fact, with the end of the Cold War, NATO should have been rendered obsolete.

I naively thought we would see the promised “peace dividend,” especially with the last Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev reaching out to form security and economic alliances with the West. In the early years of Vladimir Putin’s rule, even he lent the U.S. military a hand in its war on terror, seeing in it Russia’s own struggle to contain Islamic extremists spawned by its wars in Chechnya. He provided logistical support and resupply routes for American forces fighting in Afghanistan. But the pimps of war were having none of it. Washington would turn Russia into the enemy, with or without Moscow’s cooperation.

The newest holy crusade between angels and demons was launched.

War unleashes the poison of nationalism, with its twin evils of self-exaltation and bigotry. It creates an illusory sense of unity and purpose. The shameless cheerleaders who sold us the war in Iraq are once again on the airwaves beating the drums of war for Ukraine. As Edward Said once wrote about these courtiers to power:

Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort. And, sadder still, there always is a chorus of willing intellectuals to say calming words about benign or altruistic empires, as if one shouldn’t trust the evidence of one’s own eyes watching the destruction and the misery and death brought by the latest mission civilizatrice.

I was pulled back into the morass. I found myself writing for Scheerpost and my Substack site, columns condemning the bloodlusts Ukraine unleashed. The provision of more than $50 billion in weapons and aid to Ukraine not only means the Ukrainian government has no incentive to negotiate, but that it condemns hundreds of thousands of innocents to suffering and death. For perhaps the first time in my life, I found myself agreeing with Henry Kissinger, who at least understands realpolitik, including the danger of pushing Russia and China into an alliance against the U.S., while provoking a major nuclear power.

Greg Ruggiero, who runs City Lights Publishers, urged me to write a book on this new conflict. At first, I refused, not wanting to resurrect the ghosts of war. But looking back at my columns, articles, and talks since the publication of War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning in 2002, I was surprised at how often I had circled back to war.

I rarely wrote about myself or my experiences. I sought out those discarded as the human detritus of war, the physically and psychologically maimed like Tomas Young, a quadriplegic wounded in Iraq, whom I visited recently in Kansas City after he declared that he was ready to disconnect his feeding tube and die.

It made sense to put those pieces together to denounce the newest intoxication with industrial slaughter. I stripped the chapters down to war’s essence with titles like “The Act of Killing,” “Corpses” or “When the Bodies Come Home.”

The Greatest Evil Is War has just been published by Seven Stories Press.

This, I pray, will be my final foray into the subject.
vietnamWar ReportingWar Economyptsdafghanistan wariraq war
Chris Hedges
By
Chris Hedges

Chris Hedges was a war correspondent for two decades in Central America, the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans, 15 of them with the New York Times, where he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. He is the author of 14 books, including War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should Know About War, and the just-published The Greatest Evil Is War (Seven Stories Press). You can find him at chrishedges.substack.com.

—

I never knew that the term "Never Again" only pertained to
those born Jewish

"Antisemite used to be someone who didn't like Jews
now it's someone who Jews don't like"

Heard from Margaret Kimberley

Submitted by joe shikspack on Tue, 11/01/2022 - 8:04pm

evening ggersh...

@ggersh

yeah, but it's a better sort of madness than his accusers harbor.

thanks for the essay!

I imagine that Chris Hedges would be considered mad. https://roundtable.io/ https://www.laprogressive.com/war-and-peace/my-war-never-ends As this century began, I was writing War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, my reflections on two decades as a war correspondent, 15 of them with the New York Times, in Central America, the Middle East, Africa, Bosnia, and Kosovo. I worked in a small, sparsely furnished studio apartment on First Avenue in New York City. The room had a desk, chair, futon, and a couple of bookshelves — not enough to accommodate my extensive library, leaving piles of books stacked against the wall. The single window overlooked a back alley. The super, who lived in the first-floor apartment, smoked prodigious amounts of weed, leaving the grimy lobby stinking of pot. When he found out I was writing a book, he suggested I chronicle his moment of glory during the six days of clashes known as the Stonewall Riots, triggered by a 1969 police raid on the Stonewall Inn, a gay club in Greenwich Village. He claimed he had thrown a trash can through the front window of a police cruiser. Screen-Shot-2022-10-20-at-12.14.20-PM It was a solitary life, broken by periodic visits to a small antique bookstore in the neighborhood that had a copy of the 1910-1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, the last edition published for scholars. I couldn’t afford it, but the owner generously let me read entries from those 29 volumes written by the likes of Algernon Charles Swinburne, John Muir, T.H. Huxley, and Bertrand Russell. The entry for Catullus, several of whose poems I could recite from memory in Latin, read: “The greatest lyric poet of Rome.” I loved the certainty of that judgment — one that scholars today would not, I suspect, make, much less print. Buy the Book There were days when I could not write. I would sit in despair, overcome by emotion, unable to cope with a sense of loss, of hurt, and the hundreds of violent images I carry within me. Writing about war was not cathartic. It was painful. I was forced to unwrap memories carefully swaddled in the cotton wool of forgetfulness. The advance on the book was modest: $25,000. Neither the publisher nor I expected many people to read it, especially with such an ungainly title. I wrote out of a sense of obligation, a belief that, given my deep familiarity with the culture of war, I should set it down. But I vowed, once done, never to willfully dredge up those memories again. To the publisher’s surprise, the book exploded. Hundreds of thousands of copies were eventually sold. Big publishers, dollar signs in their eyes, dangled significant offers for another book on war. But I refused. I didn’t want to dilute what I had written or go through that experience again. I did not want to be ghettoized into writing about war for the rest of my life. I was done. To this day, I’m still unable to reread it. The Open Wound of War Yet it’s not true that I fled war. I fled my wars but would continue to write about other people’s wars. I know the wounds and scars. I know what’s often hidden. I know the anguish and guilt. It’s strangely comforting to be with others maimed by war. We don’t need words to communicate. Silence is enough. I wanted to reach teenagers, the fodder of wars and the target of recruiters. I doubted many would read War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. I embarked on a text that would pose, and then answer, the most basic questions about war — all from military, medical, tactical, and psychological studies of combat. I operated on the assumption that the simplest and most obvious questions rarely get answered like: What happens to my body if I’m killed? I hired a team of researchers, mostly graduate students at Columbia University’s School of Journalism, and, in 2003, we produced an inexpensive paperback — I fought the price down to $11 by giving away any future royalties — called What Every Person Should Know About War. I worked closely on the book with Jack Wheeler, who had graduated from West Point in 1966 and then served in Vietnam, where 30 members of his class were killed. (Rick Atkinson’s The Long Gray Line: The American Journey of West Point’s Class of 1966 is the story of Jack’s class.) Jack went on to Yale Law School after he left the military and became a presidential aide to Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush, while chairing the drive to build the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington. He struggled with what he called “the open wound of Vietnam” and severe depression. He was last seen on December 30, 2010, disoriented and wandering the streets of Wilmington, Delaware. The next day, his body was discovered as it was dumped from a garbage truck into the Cherry Island Landfill. The Delaware state medical examiner’s office said the cause of death was assault and “blunt force trauma.” Police ruled his death a homicide, a murder that would never be solved. He was buried in Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors. The idea for the book came from the work of Harold Roland Shapiro, a New York lawyer who, while representing a veteran disabled in World War I, investigated that conflict, discovering a huge disparity between its reality and the public perception of it. His book was, however, difficult to find. I had to get a copy from the Library of Congress. The medical descriptions of wounds, Shapiro wrote, rendered “all that I had read and heard previously as being either fiction, isolated reminiscence, vague generalization or deliberate propaganda.” He published his book, What Every Young Man Should Know About War, in 1937. Fearing it might inhibit recruitment, he agreed to remove it from circulation at the start of World War II. It never went back into print. The military is remarkably good at studying itself (although such studies aren’t easy to obtain). It knows how to use operant conditioning — the same techniques used to train a dog — to turn young men and women into efficient killers. It skillfully employs the tools of science, technology, and psychology to increase the lethal force of combat units. It also knows how to sell war as adventure, as well as the true route to manhood, comradeship, and maturity. The callous indifference to life, including the lives of our soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines, leapt off the pages of the official documents. For example, the response to the question “What will happen if I am exposed to nuclear radiation but do not die immediately?” was answered in a passage from the Office of the Surgeon General’s Textbook of Military Medicine that read, in part: Fatally irradiated soldiers should receive every possible palliative treatment, including narcotics, to prolong their utility and alleviate their physical and psychological distress. Depending on the amount of fatal radiation, such soldiers may have several weeks to live and to devote to the cause. Commanders and medical personnel should be familiar with estimating survival time based on onset of vomiting. Physicians should be prepared to give medications to alleviate diarrhea, and to prevent infection and other sequelae of radiation sickness in order to allow the soldier to serve as long as possible. The soldier must be allowed to make the full contribution to the war effort. He will already have made the ultimate sacrifice. He deserves a chance to strike back, and to do so while experiencing as little discomfort as possible. Our book, as I hoped, turned up on Quaker anti-recruitment tables in high schools. 51923609891_7efd4e59c9_k Against ALL Wars ! by Alisdare Hickson is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 / Flickr “I Am Sullied” I was disgusted by the simplistic, often mendacious coverage of our post-9/11 war in Iraq, a country I had covered as the Middle East bureau chief for the New York Times. In 2007, I went to work with reporter Laila Al-Arian on a long investigative article in the Nation, “The Other War: Iraq Veterans Bear Witness,” that ended up in an expanded version as another book on war, Collateral Damage: America’s War Against Iraqi Civilians. We spent hundreds of hours interviewing 50 American combat veterans of Iraq about atrocities they had witnessed or participated in. It was a damning indictment of the U.S. occupation with accounts of terrorizing and abusive house raids, withering suppressing fire routinely laid down in civilian areas to protect American convoys, indiscriminate shooting from patrols, the large kill radius of detonations and air strikes in populated areas, and the slaughter of whole families who approached military checkpoints too closely or too quickly. The reporting made headlines in newspapers across Europe but was largely ignored in the U.S., where the press was generally unwilling to confront the feel-good narrative about “liberating” the people of Iraq. For the book’s epigraph, we used a June 4, 2005, suicide note left by Colonel Theodore “Ted” Westhusing for his commanders in Iraq. Westhusing (whom I was later told had read and recommended War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning) was the honor captain of his 1983 West Point class. He shot himself in the head with his 9mm Beretta service revolver. His suicide note — think of it as an epitaph for the global war on terror – read in part: Thanks for telling me it was a good day until I briefed you. [Redacted name] — You are only interested in your career and provide no support to your staff — no msn [mission] support and you don’t care. I cannot support a msn that leads to corruption, human right abuses and liars. I am sullied — no more. I didn’t volunteer to support corrupt, money-grubbing contractors, nor work for commanders only interested in themselves. I came to serve honorably and feel dishonored. The war in Ukraine raised the familiar bile, the revulsion at those who don’t go to war and yet revel in the mad destructive power of violence. Once again, by embracing a childish binary universe of good and evil from a distance, war was turned into a morality play, gripping the popular imagination. Following our humiliating defeat in Afghanistan and the debacles of Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen, here was a conflict that could be sold to the public as restoring American virtue. Russian President Vladimir Putin, like Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein, instantly became the new Hitler. Ukraine, which most Americans undoubtedly couldn’t have found on a map, was suddenly the front line in the eternal fight for democracy and liberty. The orgiastic celebration of violence took off. The Ghosts of War It’s impossible, under international law, to defend Russia’s war in Ukraine, as it is impossible to defend our invasion of Iraq. Preemptive war is a war crime, a criminal war of aggression. Still, putting the invasion of Ukraine in context was out of the question. Explaining — as Soviet specialists (including famed Cold War diplomat George F. Kennan) had — that expanding NATO into Central and Eastern Europe was a provocation to Russia was forbidden. Kennan had called it “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era” that would “send Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.” In 1989, I had covered the revolutions in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Romania that signaled the coming collapse of the Soviet Union. I was acutely aware of the “cascade of assurances” given to Moscow that NATO, founded in 1949 to prevent Soviet expansion in Eastern and Central Europe, would not spread beyond the borders of a unified Germany. In fact, with the end of the Cold War, NATO should have been rendered obsolete. I naively thought we would see the promised “peace dividend,” especially with the last Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev reaching out to form security and economic alliances with the West. In the early years of Vladimir Putin’s rule, even he lent the U.S. military a hand in its war on terror, seeing in it Russia’s own struggle to contain Islamic extremists spawned by its wars in Chechnya. He provided logistical support and resupply routes for American forces fighting in Afghanistan. But the pimps of war were having none of it. Washington would turn Russia into the enemy, with or without Moscow’s cooperation. The newest holy crusade between angels and demons was launched. War unleashes the poison of nationalism, with its twin evils of self-exaltation and bigotry. It creates an illusory sense of unity and purpose. The shameless cheerleaders who sold us the war in Iraq are once again on the airwaves beating the drums of war for Ukraine. As Edward Said once wrote about these courtiers to power: Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort. And, sadder still, there always is a chorus of willing intellectuals to say calming words about benign or altruistic empires, as if one shouldn’t trust the evidence of one’s own eyes watching the destruction and the misery and death brought by the latest mission civilizatrice. I was pulled back into the morass. I found myself writing for Scheerpost and my Substack site, columns condemning the bloodlusts Ukraine unleashed. The provision of more than $50 billion in weapons and aid to Ukraine not only means the Ukrainian government has no incentive to negotiate, but that it condemns hundreds of thousands of innocents to suffering and death. For perhaps the first time in my life, I found myself agreeing with Henry Kissinger, who at least understands realpolitik, including the danger of pushing Russia and China into an alliance against the U.S., while provoking a major nuclear power. Greg Ruggiero, who runs City Lights Publishers, urged me to write a book on this new conflict. At first, I refused, not wanting to resurrect the ghosts of war. But looking back at my columns, articles, and talks since the publication of War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning in 2002, I was surprised at how often I had circled back to war. I rarely wrote about myself or my experiences. I sought out those discarded as the human detritus of war, the physically and psychologically maimed like Tomas Young, a quadriplegic wounded in Iraq, whom I visited recently in Kansas City after he declared that he was ready to disconnect his feeding tube and die. It made sense to put those pieces together to denounce the newest intoxication with industrial slaughter. I stripped the chapters down to war’s essence with titles like “The Act of Killing,” “Corpses” or “When the Bodies Come Home.” The Greatest Evil Is War has just been published by Seven Stories Press. This, I pray, will be my final foray into the subject. vietnamWar ReportingWar Economyptsdafghanistan wariraq war Chris Hedges By Chris Hedges Chris Hedges was a war correspondent for two decades in Central America, the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans, 15 of them with the New York Times, where he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. He is the author of 14 books, including War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should Know About War, and the just-published The Greatest Evil Is War (Seven Stories Press). You can find him at chrishedges.substack.com.

Submitted by mimi on Wed, 11/02/2022 - 4:08am

thanks for posting this, truth can't be told often enough /nt

@ggersh

I imagine that Chris Hedges would be considered mad. https://roundtable.io/ https://www.laprogressive.com/war-and-peace/my-war-never-ends As this century began, I was writing War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, my reflections on two decades as a war correspondent, 15 of them with the New York Times, in Central America, the Middle East, Africa, Bosnia, and Kosovo. I worked in a small, sparsely furnished studio apartment on First Avenue in New York City. The room had a desk, chair, futon, and a couple of bookshelves — not enough to accommodate my extensive library, leaving piles of books stacked against the wall. The single window overlooked a back alley. The super, who lived in the first-floor apartment, smoked prodigious amounts of weed, leaving the grimy lobby stinking of pot. When he found out I was writing a book, he suggested I chronicle his moment of glory during the six days of clashes known as the Stonewall Riots, triggered by a 1969 police raid on the Stonewall Inn, a gay club in Greenwich Village. He claimed he had thrown a trash can through the front window of a police cruiser. Screen-Shot-2022-10-20-at-12.14.20-PM It was a solitary life, broken by periodic visits to a small antique bookstore in the neighborhood that had a copy of the 1910-1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, the last edition published for scholars. I couldn’t afford it, but the owner generously let me read entries from those 29 volumes written by the likes of Algernon Charles Swinburne, John Muir, T.H. Huxley, and Bertrand Russell. The entry for Catullus, several of whose poems I could recite from memory in Latin, read: “The greatest lyric poet of Rome.” I loved the certainty of that judgment — one that scholars today would not, I suspect, make, much less print. Buy the Book There were days when I could not write. I would sit in despair, overcome by emotion, unable to cope with a sense of loss, of hurt, and the hundreds of violent images I carry within me. Writing about war was not cathartic. It was painful. I was forced to unwrap memories carefully swaddled in the cotton wool of forgetfulness. The advance on the book was modest: $25,000. Neither the publisher nor I expected many people to read it, especially with such an ungainly title. I wrote out of a sense of obligation, a belief that, given my deep familiarity with the culture of war, I should set it down. But I vowed, once done, never to willfully dredge up those memories again. To the publisher’s surprise, the book exploded. Hundreds of thousands of copies were eventually sold. Big publishers, dollar signs in their eyes, dangled significant offers for another book on war. But I refused. I didn’t want to dilute what I had written or go through that experience again. I did not want to be ghettoized into writing about war for the rest of my life. I was done. To this day, I’m still unable to reread it. The Open Wound of War Yet it’s not true that I fled war. I fled my wars but would continue to write about other people’s wars. I know the wounds and scars. I know what’s often hidden. I know the anguish and guilt. It’s strangely comforting to be with others maimed by war. We don’t need words to communicate. Silence is enough. I wanted to reach teenagers, the fodder of wars and the target of recruiters. I doubted many would read War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. I embarked on a text that would pose, and then answer, the most basic questions about war — all from military, medical, tactical, and psychological studies of combat. I operated on the assumption that the simplest and most obvious questions rarely get answered like: What happens to my body if I’m killed? I hired a team of researchers, mostly graduate students at Columbia University’s School of Journalism, and, in 2003, we produced an inexpensive paperback — I fought the price down to $11 by giving away any future royalties — called What Every Person Should Know About War. I worked closely on the book with Jack Wheeler, who had graduated from West Point in 1966 and then served in Vietnam, where 30 members of his class were killed. (Rick Atkinson’s The Long Gray Line: The American Journey of West Point’s Class of 1966 is the story of Jack’s class.) Jack went on to Yale Law School after he left the military and became a presidential aide to Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush, while chairing the drive to build the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington. He struggled with what he called “the open wound of Vietnam” and severe depression. He was last seen on December 30, 2010, disoriented and wandering the streets of Wilmington, Delaware. The next day, his body was discovered as it was dumped from a garbage truck into the Cherry Island Landfill. The Delaware state medical examiner’s office said the cause of death was assault and “blunt force trauma.” Police ruled his death a homicide, a murder that would never be solved. He was buried in Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors. The idea for the book came from the work of Harold Roland Shapiro, a New York lawyer who, while representing a veteran disabled in World War I, investigated that conflict, discovering a huge disparity between its reality and the public perception of it. His book was, however, difficult to find. I had to get a copy from the Library of Congress. The medical descriptions of wounds, Shapiro wrote, rendered “all that I had read and heard previously as being either fiction, isolated reminiscence, vague generalization or deliberate propaganda.” He published his book, What Every Young Man Should Know About War, in 1937. Fearing it might inhibit recruitment, he agreed to remove it from circulation at the start of World War II. It never went back into print. The military is remarkably good at studying itself (although such studies aren’t easy to obtain). It knows how to use operant conditioning — the same techniques used to train a dog — to turn young men and women into efficient killers. It skillfully employs the tools of science, technology, and psychology to increase the lethal force of combat units. It also knows how to sell war as adventure, as well as the true route to manhood, comradeship, and maturity. The callous indifference to life, including the lives of our soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines, leapt off the pages of the official documents. For example, the response to the question “What will happen if I am exposed to nuclear radiation but do not die immediately?” was answered in a passage from the Office of the Surgeon General’s Textbook of Military Medicine that read, in part: Fatally irradiated soldiers should receive every possible palliative treatment, including narcotics, to prolong their utility and alleviate their physical and psychological distress. Depending on the amount of fatal radiation, such soldiers may have several weeks to live and to devote to the cause. Commanders and medical personnel should be familiar with estimating survival time based on onset of vomiting. Physicians should be prepared to give medications to alleviate diarrhea, and to prevent infection and other sequelae of radiation sickness in order to allow the soldier to serve as long as possible. The soldier must be allowed to make the full contribution to the war effort. He will already have made the ultimate sacrifice. He deserves a chance to strike back, and to do so while experiencing as little discomfort as possible. Our book, as I hoped, turned up on Quaker anti-recruitment tables in high schools. 51923609891_7efd4e59c9_k Against ALL Wars ! by Alisdare Hickson is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 / Flickr “I Am Sullied” I was disgusted by the simplistic, often mendacious coverage of our post-9/11 war in Iraq, a country I had covered as the Middle East bureau chief for the New York Times. In 2007, I went to work with reporter Laila Al-Arian on a long investigative article in the Nation, “The Other War: Iraq Veterans Bear Witness,” that ended up in an expanded version as another book on war, Collateral Damage: America’s War Against Iraqi Civilians. We spent hundreds of hours interviewing 50 American combat veterans of Iraq about atrocities they had witnessed or participated in. It was a damning indictment of the U.S. occupation with accounts of terrorizing and abusive house raids, withering suppressing fire routinely laid down in civilian areas to protect American convoys, indiscriminate shooting from patrols, the large kill radius of detonations and air strikes in populated areas, and the slaughter of whole families who approached military checkpoints too closely or too quickly. The reporting made headlines in newspapers across Europe but was largely ignored in the U.S., where the press was generally unwilling to confront the feel-good narrative about “liberating” the people of Iraq. For the book’s epigraph, we used a June 4, 2005, suicide note left by Colonel Theodore “Ted” Westhusing for his commanders in Iraq. Westhusing (whom I was later told had read and recommended War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning) was the honor captain of his 1983 West Point class. He shot himself in the head with his 9mm Beretta service revolver. His suicide note — think of it as an epitaph for the global war on terror – read in part: Thanks for telling me it was a good day until I briefed you. [Redacted name] — You are only interested in your career and provide no support to your staff — no msn [mission] support and you don’t care. I cannot support a msn that leads to corruption, human right abuses and liars. I am sullied — no more. I didn’t volunteer to support corrupt, money-grubbing contractors, nor work for commanders only interested in themselves. I came to serve honorably and feel dishonored. The war in Ukraine raised the familiar bile, the revulsion at those who don’t go to war and yet revel in the mad destructive power of violence. Once again, by embracing a childish binary universe of good and evil from a distance, war was turned into a morality play, gripping the popular imagination. Following our humiliating defeat in Afghanistan and the debacles of Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen, here was a conflict that could be sold to the public as restoring American virtue. Russian President Vladimir Putin, like Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein, instantly became the new Hitler. Ukraine, which most Americans undoubtedly couldn’t have found on a map, was suddenly the front line in the eternal fight for democracy and liberty. The orgiastic celebration of violence took off. The Ghosts of War It’s impossible, under international law, to defend Russia’s war in Ukraine, as it is impossible to defend our invasion of Iraq. Preemptive war is a war crime, a criminal war of aggression. Still, putting the invasion of Ukraine in context was out of the question. Explaining — as Soviet specialists (including famed Cold War diplomat George F. Kennan) had — that expanding NATO into Central and Eastern Europe was a provocation to Russia was forbidden. Kennan had called it “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era” that would “send Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.” In 1989, I had covered the revolutions in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Romania that signaled the coming collapse of the Soviet Union. I was acutely aware of the “cascade of assurances” given to Moscow that NATO, founded in 1949 to prevent Soviet expansion in Eastern and Central Europe, would not spread beyond the borders of a unified Germany. In fact, with the end of the Cold War, NATO should have been rendered obsolete. I naively thought we would see the promised “peace dividend,” especially with the last Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev reaching out to form security and economic alliances with the West. In the early years of Vladimir Putin’s rule, even he lent the U.S. military a hand in its war on terror, seeing in it Russia’s own struggle to contain Islamic extremists spawned by its wars in Chechnya. He provided logistical support and resupply routes for American forces fighting in Afghanistan. But the pimps of war were having none of it. Washington would turn Russia into the enemy, with or without Moscow’s cooperation. The newest holy crusade between angels and demons was launched. War unleashes the poison of nationalism, with its twin evils of self-exaltation and bigotry. It creates an illusory sense of unity and purpose. The shameless cheerleaders who sold us the war in Iraq are once again on the airwaves beating the drums of war for Ukraine. As Edward Said once wrote about these courtiers to power: Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort. And, sadder still, there always is a chorus of willing intellectuals to say calming words about benign or altruistic empires, as if one shouldn’t trust the evidence of one’s own eyes watching the destruction and the misery and death brought by the latest mission civilizatrice. I was pulled back into the morass. I found myself writing for Scheerpost and my Substack site, columns condemning the bloodlusts Ukraine unleashed. The provision of more than $50 billion in weapons and aid to Ukraine not only means the Ukrainian government has no incentive to negotiate, but that it condemns hundreds of thousands of innocents to suffering and death. For perhaps the first time in my life, I found myself agreeing with Henry Kissinger, who at least understands realpolitik, including the danger of pushing Russia and China into an alliance against the U.S., while provoking a major nuclear power. Greg Ruggiero, who runs City Lights Publishers, urged me to write a book on this new conflict. At first, I refused, not wanting to resurrect the ghosts of war. But looking back at my columns, articles, and talks since the publication of War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning in 2002, I was surprised at how often I had circled back to war. I rarely wrote about myself or my experiences. I sought out those discarded as the human detritus of war, the physically and psychologically maimed like Tomas Young, a quadriplegic wounded in Iraq, whom I visited recently in Kansas City after he declared that he was ready to disconnect his feeding tube and die. It made sense to put those pieces together to denounce the newest intoxication with industrial slaughter. I stripped the chapters down to war’s essence with titles like “The Act of Killing,” “Corpses” or “When the Bodies Come Home.” The Greatest Evil Is War has just been published by Seven Stories Press. This, I pray, will be my final foray into the subject. vietnamWar ReportingWar Economyptsdafghanistan wariraq war Chris Hedges By Chris Hedges Chris Hedges was a war correspondent for two decades in Central America, the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans, 15 of them with the New York Times, where he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. He is the author of 14 books, including War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should Know About War, and the just-published The Greatest Evil Is War (Seven Stories Press). You can find him at chrishedges.substack.com.

—

https://www.euronews.com/live

Submitted by dystopian on Tue, 11/01/2022 - 8:10pm

didn't know I needed it...

I did not think I needed to hear this lead solo again, but it turns out I did... this is incredible, and hopefully bluesy enough to fit here... this guy is like whammer jammer...

https://www.reddit.com/r/nextfuckinglevel/comments/yj9u34/free_bird_solo...

—

We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.
Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.
both - Albert Einstein

Submitted by joe shikspack on Tue, 11/01/2022 - 8:37pm

heh...

@dystopian

he's certainly got some chops. cool stuff!

Submitted by jakkalbessie on Tue, 11/01/2022 - 8:11pm

Thanks for the news and blues!

Thanks as always for the work you put into giving us to Evening Blues! Not so much hopeful as much as madness in the news, the blues were quite enjoyable. Nice to meet new artists for me in your work

Really did like the pictures of the mangroves. The village of Puerto Jiminez in Costa Rica that Divine Order and I discovered has some excellent mangroves to explore by kayak. Lots of birds, iguanas, and the occasional monkey troupe passing through. Hope to head down there this February to check them out.

—

Life is what you make it, so make it something worthwhile.

This ain't no dress rehearsal!

Submitted by joe shikspack on Tue, 11/01/2022 - 8:40pm

evening jb...

@jakkalbessie

it's indeed a crazy world and getting crazier. i hope that you get to visit the mangroves in february, it sounds like a great trip.

speaking of eddie floyd, later in the week, i'll be featuring one of his first groups.

have a great evening!

Submitted by enhydra lutris on Tue, 11/01/2022 - 8:28pm

Good evening Joe, thanks for the evening blues.

Some awfully good mangrove photos there. Most people don't realize how important they are, maybe the photoessay will help. There is an organization dedicated to their preservation, repair and restoration, the Mangrove Action Project, but I'll bet they're largely unknown outside of the areas where they work.

had a little rain today, but only a couple of hours worth. Good to hear Eddie Floyd again.

be well and have a good one

—

That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

Submitted by joe shikspack on Tue, 11/01/2022 - 8:42pm

evening el...

@enhydra lutris

glad to hear that california is getting some rain. take care and have a great evening!

Submitted by snoopydawg on Tue, 11/01/2022 - 9:33pm

Good lord why?

Thread

1) Boston University
2) University of Texas Medical Branch-Galveston
3) US Food and Drug Administration
4) Imperial College-London

— Richard H. Ebright (@R_H_Ebright) October 28, 2022

NEW: After Boston University created a new COVID with an 80% kill rate, it’s now been revealed Imperial College London has done nearly the same thing, merging the deadly original virus with the highly contagious Omicron. Critics are calling it “insanity” and “playing with fire.”

— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) October 29, 2022

Children play with fire usually only once, but we have adults playing with viruses that have already caused a worldwide pandemic. I burned a plastic straw that clung to my finger and I got a burn blister that hurt like hell. I stopped burning plastic straws after that because I leaned my lesson. But then it wasn’t illegal for me to do it either.

Boston used a level 3 bio lab to create a level 4 virus. Dumb dumb dumb! Place your bets on whether we go extinct from nuclear war or from stupid people playing with viruses.

—

Scientists are concerned that conspiracy theories may die out if they keep coming true at the current alarming rate.

Submitted by joe shikspack on Tue, 11/01/2022 - 10:09pm

heh...

@snoopydawg

there seem to be many potential doom-creators stalking humanity and the planet. out front in the lead appears to be human stupidity, which as einstein told us is likely limitless.

Submitted by on the cusp on Tue, 11/01/2022 - 10:38pm

Thanks for the mangroves.

I have seen them here and there in C. America.
These are dark days. I am hoping if the Rs sweep, they may yank the Ukraine money chain, but they poured $ into iraq, back in the day.
Ah, hope you and everyone had a pleasant dinner, and are experiencing good music, and sanity.
We are getting a little rain, more rain this weekend. Too late for lots of trees and shrubbery, but hope springs eternal.
Take good care, joe!

—

"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981

Submitted by joe shikspack on Tue, 11/01/2022 - 10:46pm

evening otc...

@on the cusp

i am not too hopeful about the likelihood of republicans yanking the plug on vast military expenditures in ukraine. sure, there might be an increased mumbling and shuffling of feet in the congressional coatroom, but when it comes down to it, the mic just pays too well for the republicans to ignore their demands. i am guessing that the best we could hope for is a certain amount of cutback on the non-military funding should the republicans run rampant.

enjoy the rain and have a great evening!

Submitted by on the cusp on Tue, 11/01/2022 - 10:50pm

And I hope the same

@joe shikspack for the released Gitmo prisoner.
We are a cruel nation.
Maybe we will achieve some worthwhile meaning when the Empire falls.

—

"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981