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"Aggression is simply another name for government."

-- Benjamin Tucker

News and Opinion

The Single Dumbest Thing The Empire Asks Us To Believe

The single dumbest thing the US-centralized empire asks us to believe is that the military encirclement of its top two geopolitical rivals is a defensive action, rather than an act of extreme aggression.

We’re asked to believe many extremely stupid narratives by the manipulators who rule over us, but I really think this one might take the cake. The idea that the US militarily encircling Russia and China is an act of defense rather than aggression is so in-your-face transparently idiotic that anyone who thinks critically enough about it will immediately dismiss it for the foam-brained nonsense that it is, yet it’s the mainstream narrative in the western world, and millions of people accept it as true. Because that’s the power of US propaganda.

It gets more and more absurd the more you think about it. Their argument is basically, “No no you don’t understand, the US has been hurriedly surrounding its primary geopolitical competitors with war machinery because it wants to prevent them from doing something aggressive.” They’re like, “We can’t just have nations exerting military aggression willy nilly, that’s why we needed to move all this war machinery to the other side of the planet onto the borders of our primary strategic rivals.”

Can you think of anything more insane than that? Than all of the most powerful and influential figures in politics, government and media simultaneously claiming that a nation amassing heavily-armed proxy forces on the borders of their enemies is something that should be regarded as an action designed to prevent aggression, rather than an incendiary act of extreme aggression in and of itself?

In its attempts to propagandize Australians into consenting to war with China, Sky News Australia accidentally does the "look how close they put their country to our military bases" meme.pic.twitter.com/1lf2b4p7pH

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) February 16, 2023

I recently had someone tell me that the US has every right to expand its immense military presence near China, and to illustrate their point they said that if China set up a base in Mexico the US would have no business telling them not to. But that argument actually illustrates my point, not theirs: only the most propaganda-addled of minds would believe that the US would allow China to set up a military base in Mexico for even one second. There’d be kinetic warfare long before the foundations were even poured.

What this undeniably means is that the US is the aggressor in these conflicts. It was the aggressor when it expanded NATO and began turning Ukraine into a de facto NATO member, and it is the aggressor as it accelerates its encirclement of China and prepares to open the floodgates of weapons into Taiwan. If it is doing things on the borders of its geopolitical rivals that it would never permit those rivals to do to it, then it is the aggressor, and anything its rivals do is a defensive response to those aggressions.

This is how the US-centralized empire always acts. It continually attacks, starves and menaces nations which disobey the decrees it issues in its self-appointed role as the leader of the so-called “rules-based international order”, then as soon as its aggressions receive the slightest bit of pushback its spinmeisters feign Bambi-eyed innocence and pretend they’re just passive witnesses to unprovoked aggression by the disobedient nations.

But the empire is not passive, it is not innocent, and it is primarily responsible for the extremely dangerous current and emerging conflicts we are seeing on the world stage. The US empire is imperiling us all with its last-ditch frantic scramble to secure unipolar planetary hegemony before multipolarity takes over, engaging in freakishly aggressive actions on the borders of the nuclear-armed nations who challenge its power.

Zelensky TOLD Rupert Murdoch To Fire Tucker Carlson?

Key nations sit out U.S. standoff with Russia, China, leaks show

President Biden’s global agenda faces significant challenges as major developing nations seek to evade the intensifying standoff between the United States, Russia and China and, in some cases, exploit that rivalry for their own gain, classified American intelligence assessments show.

The documents, among a trove of U.S. secrets leaked online through the Discord messaging platform, provide a rare glimpse into the private calculations by key emerging powers, including India, Brazil, Pakistan and Egypt, as they attempt to straddle allegiances in an era when America is no longer the world’s unchallenged superpower. ...

Matias Spektor, a scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said developing nations are recalibrating at a moment when America faces potent new competition, as China projects new economic and military clout and Russia, though weakened by President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine, demonstrates its ability to deflect Western pressure.

“It’s unclear who will end up in a pole position in 10 years’ time, so they need to diversify their risk and hedge their bets,” Spektor said.

FBI, Ukrainian Security COLLUDE To Censor 'Everything That Is AGAINST UKRAINE': Lee Fang Reports

Lawmakers deploy ‘Munich’ trope to push dangerously hawkish Ukraine resolutions

A bipartisan group of hawks in Congress announced a new resolution on Tuesday that calls for the U.S. to seek the restoration of Ukraine’s 1991 borders and to bring Ukraine into NATO after the war is over.

Reps. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) and Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) are co-sponsoring what they call the Ukrainian Victory Resolution, and have been framing it, perhaps not surprisingly, with the lofty rhetoric of World War II. So far the bill has 18 bipartisan co-sponsors.

“We must not repeat the error of Sept. 1, 1939,” Wilson told Yahoo News, referencing what is now held by many as the “Munich moment” and appeasement of Adolf Hitler before the Nazi invasion of Poland.

Senators Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) have also introduced their own, similar resolution in the Senate. This comes after three Senators and 16 House Republicans last week sent a letter to President Biden saying they would not support any new Ukraine aid if it was not paired with a clear diplomatic strategy to end the war.

This week’s resolutions are sure to stir debate over the extent of U.S. Ukraine policy and support ahead of an expected Ukrainian counteroffensive this spring. Furthermore, a signal from Congress that the U.S. is fully behind the retaking of Crimea and the Donbas would be exactly what the Ukrainian government wants to hear, but it is a dangerous message to send when Ukraine lacks the ability to achieve those goals on the ground.

Kirby's crazy 'Russian casualties' claim. Poland warned not to enter conflict

Ukraine ammunition depot reportedly hit in wave of Russian missile attacks

Russian missile strikes have injured 34 civilians and apparently damaged railway infrastructure and an ammunition depot in south-eastern Ukraine, hours before an explosion inside Russia derailed a freight train.

The attacks on both sides of the border on Monday apparently aimed to disrupt military logistics before a significant Ukrainian counteroffensive against occupying Russian troops, expected to start shortly in the south or the east. ...

The size of the fire in Pavlohrad suggests Russia may have hit an important arms depot, and the incident comes after Ukraine’s recent attack on an oil storage facility in Sevastopol, Crimea.

Army Info War Division Wants Social Media Surveillance to Protect “NATO Brand”

The U.S. Army Cyber Command told defense contractors it planned to surveil global social media use to defend the “NATO brand,” according to a 2022 webinar recording reviewed by The Intercept. The disclosure, made a month after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, follows years of international debate over online free expression and the influence of governmental security agencies over the web. The Army’s Cyber Command is tasked with both defending the country’s military networks as well as offensive operations, including propaganda campaigns.

The remarks came during a closed-door conference call hosted by the Cyber Fusion Innovation Center, a Pentagon-sponsored nonprofit that helps with military tech procurement, and provided an informal question-and-answer session for private-sector contractors interested in selling data to Army Cyber Command, commonly referred to as ARCYBER. Though the office has many responsibilities, one of ARCYBER’s key roles is to detect and thwart foreign “influence operations,” a military euphemism for propaganda and deception campaigns, while engaging in the practice itself. The March 24, 2022, webinar was organized to bring together vendors that might be able to help ARCYBER “attack, defend, influence, and operate,” in the words of co-host Lt. Col. David Beskow of the ARCYBER Technical Warfare Center. ...

At one point in the recording, a contractor who did not identify themselves asked if ARCYBER could share specific topics they plan to track across the web. “NATO is one of our key brands that we are pushing, as far as our national security alliance,” Beskow explained. “That’s important to us. We should understand all conversations around NATO that has happened on social media.” He added, “We would want to do that long term to understand how — what is the NATO, for lack of a better word, what’s the NATO brand, and how does the world view that brand across different places of the world?”Beskow said that ARCYBER wanted to track social media on various platforms used in places where the U.S. had an interest.

“Twitter is still of interest,” Beskow told the webinar audience, adding that “those that have other penetration are of interest as well. Those include VK, Telegram, Sina Weibo, and others that may have penetration in other parts of the world,” referring to foreign-owned chat and social media sites popular in Russia and China.

French high schoolers vs. 'dictator' Macron

At least 108 police injured and 291 held in May Day protests in cities across France

French police fired teargas and clashed with demonstrators in Paris and other cities on Monday after trade unions transformed their traditional Labour Day marches into anti-government demonstrations against the rise in the retirement age.

At least 108 police were wounded and 291 people detained across France as violence erupted in several cities on the sidelines of the main union-led marches, the interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, said. In Paris, 25 police were injured and 111 people were detained. One police officer suffered serious burns to his hands and face after being hit by a petrol bomb, he said.

Darmanin condemned protesters he described as being from the far-left, known as “black blocs”, saying they numbered around 2,000 in Paris and another 1,000 in the southeastern city of Lyon. He urged that “those who attacked the police and public property be severely punished”.

The prime minister, Élisabeth Borne, praised the earlier marches and said the responsible attitude shown earlier made the violence “all the more unacceptable”.

In Paris, the trade union-led demonstration began peacefully with many families joining in, holding banners calling for social justice and demanding Macron resign or withdraw his law to raise the minimum eligible pension age from 62 to 64.

Biden BLINKS In Debt Ceiling Standoff

What a bullshit drama. It's really hard to watch a show this stupid with such badly drawn characters.

Yellen Gives Hard Deadline for GOP to End Economic Hostage Situation

After months of taking "extraordinary measures" to prevent a first-ever U.S. default, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Monday warned that "our best estimate is that we will be unable to continue to satisfy all of the government's obligations by early June, and potentially as early as June 1, if Congress does not raise or suspend the debt limit before that time."

Amid calls for a clean bill to raise the nation's arbitrary borrowing limit to avert a default that economists say could be catastrophic for the U.S. and global economies, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and 216 other Republicans last week passed what critics called a "debt ceiling scam" containing "extreme, harmful cuts against average Americans to protect billionaire tax breaks."

McCarthy went ahead with the vote despite Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) warning that the House GOP's so-called Limit, Save, Grow Act is "dead on arrival" in the upper chamber, elevating concerns that congressional Republicans will continue risking a global economic crisis in hopes of forcing Democrats to agree to massive spending cuts.

"Given the current projections, it is imperative that Congress act as soon as possible to increase or suspend the debt limit in a way that provides longer-term certainty that the government will continue to make its payments," Yellen wrote to McCarthy on Monday, noting that "it is impossible to predict with certainty the exact date when Treasury will be unable to pay the government's bills."

"We have learned from past debt limit impasses that waiting until the last minute to suspend or increase the debt limit can cause serious harm to business and consumer confidence, raise short-term borrowing costs for taxpayers, and negatively impact the credit rating of the United States," she added. "If Congress fails to increase the debt limit, it would cause severe hardship to American families, harm our global leadership position, and raise questions about our ability to defend our national security interests."

As Yellen sent her notice to McCarthy, Schumer circulated a dear colleague letter declaring that with the vote last week on what Democrats have rebranded the Default on America (DOA) Act, "House Republicans sent a hard-right ransom note to the American people."

Pledging that "the Senate will show the public what this bill truly is" with "hearings to expose the true impact of this reckless legislation on everyday Americans," Schumer added:

Speaker McCarthy has surrendered to the far-right extremist members of his caucus and the DOA is their crown jewel. In backrooms, they pulled together a slew of unpatriotic and harmful policies that would take the country backwards. The DOA would cut critical funding to nearly all sectors of American life meaning fewer jobs, higher costs, and leaving policemen, first responders, border patrol, and our brave veterans all hanging out to dry. The DOA would repeal the historic green energy tax credits from the Inflation Reduction Act, threatening over $150 billion in investments and 18,000 jobs that have been announced since Democrats passed that bill. The DOA would hamper our international standing by gutting funding for critical State Department programs and cutting-edge research facilities and sending jobs overseas.

Let's be perfectly clear: The Republican Default on America Act does nothing to actually resolve the looming debt crisis, and it has no hope of ever becoming law. If anything, the MAGA House Republicans' actions have increased the likelihood of default. It locks the House into an unacceptable and extreme position that pulls us even further apart. If Speaker McCarthy was a serious good-faith negotiator, he would not have let extremists take him hostage and move this debate in the wrong direction.

After reiterating that "the real solution is bipartisan support for a clean bill to increase the debt limit," Schumer concluded that "a reckless Republican-forced default could plunge the country into a deep and painful recession and destabilize the global economy. We will do everything we can to protect the American people and prevent a default."

Meanwhile, President Joe Biden also called out GOP leadership on Monday, saying during a National Small Business Week event that "we pay our bills, and we should do so without reckless hostage-taking from some of the MAGA Republicans in Congress."

Citing two unnamed sources, Politico reported Monday evening that Biden has invited McCarthy, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), Schumer, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.)—who has said the speaker and president need to reach an agreement—to "meet at the White House on May 9 to discuss the impending breach of the U.S. debt limit."

In a joint statement Monday, Schumer and Jeffries urged Republicans to "put aside partisan interests and do what is right and necessary for the American people," emphasizing that "we do not have the luxury of waiting until June 1 to come together, pass a clean bill to avoid a default, and prevent catastrophic consequences for our economy and millions of American families."

JP Morgan Becomes WAY TOO BIG TO FAIL

JP Morgan boss plays down risk of crisis after second biggest bank failure in US history

Jamie Dimon, the boss of JP Morgan, has played down the risk of a spiralling banking crisis after America’s biggest bank stepped in to buy most of collapsed lender First Republic in a $10.6bn (£8.5bn) takeover hurriedly brokered by US regulators. ... First Republic’s failure is the second largest in US banking history, beaten only by the 2008 demise of Washington Mutual – which was also seized by the FDIC and sold to JP Morgan.

Speaking on a conference call, Dimon played down any other similarities with the 2008 crash, which triggered the start of an international financial crisis that plunged the global economy into recession. He said the US banking system was “extraordinarily sound”, adding that the takeover meant the sector was “getting near the end” of the spate of bank collapses and would “hopefully help stabilise everything”.

The failure of First Republic follows that of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and Signature Bank. The sequence has prompted concerns about a repeat of the contagion that characterised the global banking crisis. Dimon said conditions were “nothing like 2008 and 2009 for a lot of different reasons”. However, he conceded that if the US economy went into recession and high interest rates persisted, that could lead to “other cracks in the system”. ...

After the previous two banking collapses of 2023, the Federal Reserve admitted in a report it had been slow to consider the strain on US banks from a steep rise in interest rates, which has lowered the value of banks’ financial assets even though it has increased their profitability.

US rail companies grant paid sick days after public pressure in win for unions

US freight rail companies nearly spurred a nationwide railroad strike last fall by refusing to grant paid sick days, but in a surprise move welcomed by workers, those railroads have recently granted paid sick days to almost half their workforce.

After being roundly criticized for not offering paid sick days, the leading rail companies – BNSF, CSX, Norfolk Southern and Union Pacific – have granted many of their 93,000 workers four paid sick days a year through labor negotiations, with an option of taking three more paid sick days from personal days.

“We’re very happy about this. We’ve been trying to get this for decades,” said Artie Maratea, president of the Transportation Communications Union. “It was public pressure and political pressure that got them to come to the table.”

When Joe Biden and Congress enacted legislation in December that blocked a threatened freight rail strike, many workers angrily faulted Biden for not ensuring that the legislation also guaranteed paid sick days. But since then, union officials says, members of the Biden administration, including the transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, and labor secretary, Marty Walsh, who stepped down on 11 March, lobbied the railroads, telling them it was wrong not to grant paid sick days.

60 Years Ago: Police Attack Children’s Crusade with Dogs & Water Cannons in Birmingham, Alabama

‘A budget is a moral document’: why does the NYPD need $29m a day?

Whatever a New Yorker’s grievance of choice with the city may be – our shambolic farce of a transit system, overdrawn social services on their way to complete collapse, the rapid vanishing of state-subsidized third spaces – everybody’s really talking about the same thing.

The issue at the heart of every societal ill is budgeting, and the issue at the heart of budgeting is the misallocation of funds to the staggeringly swollen coffers of the New York Police Department. Burning through upwards of $10bn annually, the NYPD’s waste causes vaster, more insidious damage than the program of person-to-person violence and systemic harassment that’s sparked protests of greater frequency and passion in recent years. By hoarding such a hefty fraction of the taxpayers’ money, they’re sending the people and city they claim to protect into the poorhouse.

The Museum of Broken Windows, a free exhibition from the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) and the social justice-oriented creative agency Soze, zeroes in on the economic dimension of police reform with their new show 29 Million Dreams. Every day, the NYPD uses up $29m that could be redirected toward forms of betterment imagined by the eclectic collection of politically conscious artworks that fill the pop-up exhibition at 216 Lafayette Street.

Co-curators Daveen Trentman and Terrick Gutierrez have wallpapered the foyer (and, they add with a chuckle, the bathroom) with printouts of damning bar graphs and news articles chronicling the innumerable measures by which current mayor and former NYPD captain Eric Adams has funneled the power of capital toward his old buddies. But within, the creative personal statements in an array of mediums emphasize the human stakes of a public debate many still treat as an intellectual exercise. As one wall declares in bold red text, the police are defunding us, and we can’t afford to wait much longer to turn those tables.

“We wanted to focus on the dreams that are deferred when we’re spending $29m on police every day,” says Johanna Miller, director of the NYCLU’s education policy center. “When the mayor tells us we don’t have money for this or for that – we have so much money! It’s just been spent already. As they say, a budget is a moral document.”

Bernie Sanders Supports Joe Biden For President & Gets NOTHING For It!

E Jean Carroll says she sued for rape on advice of Trump adviser’s husband

The advice columnist E Jean Carroll sued Donald Trump for rape after she was encouraged to take legal action by George Conway, the husband of a top aide to the then president.

On her third day on the witness stand, Carroll told the jury hearing her lawsuit for battery and defamation over the alleged sexual assault in a New York department store changing room in 1996 that she did not intend to sue Trump until he called her a liar when she went public with her accusations more than two decades later.

Shortly afterwards she met Conway, a lawyer who was at the time married to Kellyanne Conway, one of the Trump White House’s most visible officials. George Conway was a vocal critic of the then president, to the embarrassment of his wife.

Carroll said that they spoke at a party where Conway laid out the difference between criminal and civil cases. “George said: you should seriously think about this,” she told the jury of six men and three women. Two days later, Carroll filed her first lawsuit against Trump, for defamation, after he called her a liar in denying the alleged rape at the luxury Bergdorf Goodman store.

Brazil’s battle to reclaim Yanomami lands from illegal miners turns deadly

Brazil’s battle to reclaim its largest Indigenous territory from tens of thousands of illegal miners has taken a deadly turn after at least five people were reportedly killed during 36 hours of violence in the Amazon’s sprawling Yanomami territory.

The bloodshed began on Saturday afternoon when masked illegal miners allegedly launched an attack on a Yanomami village called Uxiu. The Yanomami leader, Júnior Hekurari, said he had received reports that between 15 and 20 heavily armed miners had arrived by boat and opened fire on locals. Three Yanomami men – aged 36, 31 and 24 – were shot. The oldest, an Indigenous health worker named as Ilson Xiriana, died early after being shot in the head.

“This barbarity will not go unanswered,” Brazil’s human rights minister, Silvio Almeida, tweeted as the government sent a high-level delegation of ministers and police chiefs to the region in response.

On Sunday, there was further violence in another part of the Portugal-sized Yanomami enclave in which at least four miners were killed as special forces members of the environmental protection group Ibama and the federal highway police (PRF) – the two groups leading the charge against illegal miners – raided an illegal cassiterite and gold field called “Garimpo do Ouro Mil”. Their arrival prompted a series of gun battles as gunmen – some wearing camouflage fatigues – challenged the government forces. ...

The fatalities underline the challenges and dangers involved in government efforts to evict thousands of illegal miners who have devastated the Yanomami territory in recent years, causing what Brazil’s new president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has called “an attempted genocide” of the Indigenous group.

Plastic is already in blood, breast milk, and placentas. Now it may be in our brains

Researchers at the University of Vienna have discovered particles of plastic in mice’s brains just two hours after the mice ingested drinking water containing plastic.

Once in the brain, “Plastic particles could increase the risk of inflammation, neurological disorders or even neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s,” Lukas Kenner, one of the researchers, said in a statement, although more research is needed to determine the relationship between plastics and these brain disorders. In addition to potentially severe degenerative consequences, the researchers also believe that microplastic contamination in our brains can cause short-term health effects such as cognitive impairment, neurotoxicity and altered neurotransmitter levels, which can contribute to behavioral changes.

In the course of their research, the team gave mice water laced with particles of polystyrene – a type of plastic that’s common in food packaging such as yoghurt cups and Styrofoam takeout containers.

Using computer models to track the dispersion of the plastics, researchers found that nanoplastic particles – which are under 0.001 millimeters and invisible to the naked eye – were able to travel into the mice’s brains via a previously unknown biological “transport mechanism”. Essentially, these tiny plastics are absorbed into cholesterol molecules on the brain membrane surface. Thus stowed away in their little lipid packages, they cross the blood-brain barrier – a wall of blood vessels and tissue that functions to protect the brain from toxins and other harmful substances.

While the Vienna study focused on the effects of plastics consumed in drinking water, that’s not the only way humans ingest plastic. A 2022 Chinese study concentrated on how nasally inhaled plastics affect the brain, with researchers reporting “an obvious neurotoxicity of the nanoplastics could be observed”. In basic terms, the inhaled plastics lead to reduced functioning of certain brain enzymes that also malfunction in the brains of patients with Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s.

Private jet sales likely to reach highest ever level this year, report says

Sales of private jets are likely to reach their highest ever level this year, placing an increasing burden on the planet, while many of the owners escape aviation taxes, and there are few curbs on the greenhouse gases emitted, according to a report.

The global fleet of private jets has more than doubled in the last two decades, and more private flights were made last year than ever before, according to a thinktank report published on Monday. Greenhouse gas emissions from private aviation have increased by nearly a quarter since the pandemic, when flying of all types nearly ceased in many countries for an extended period.

There were 5.3m private flights globally in 2022, according to the report compiled by the US Institute for Policy Studies thinktank and the Patriotic Millionaires US group, which is made up of wealthy individuals pushing for higher wealth taxes. Last year was the first time that private aviation surpassed its previous peak, which came in 2007, before the financial crisis of 2008-09 and global recession. Sales of pre-owned and new private jets are forecast to reach $34.6bn (£27.6bn) this year, up from $34.1bn last year.

Although private jet travel makes up only 4% of the global aviation market, it produces about 10 times as much greenhouse gas per passenger. ...

In the US, still the global leader in private and business jet travel, passengers on commercial flights are in effect subsidising private flying. Taxes on private aviation raised only 2% of the tax revenue that is the primary funding for the Federal Aviation Administration, which operates air traffic control, even though private jets accounted for 17% of the flights handled.

Also of Interest

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

Steven Donziger: Biden is still not doing nearly enough about the climate crisis

The Collapse in Operational Capabilities in the West and Some Knock-On Effects

Why Is the US Wiring Ukraine With Radiation Sensors to Detect Nuclear Blasts?

US Supreme Court Puts Chevron Doctrine 'Squarely In the Crosshairs'

‘I thought they’d kill us’: how the US navy devastated a tiny Puerto Rican island

Indigenous community in Colombia gets its day in court over ‘ancestral land’

Couple unearths one of world’s greatest fossil finds in mid-Wales

DeSantis FREAKS Over Guantanamo Torture Allegations

They All Ignored THIS At The White House Correspondents Dinner

A Little Night Music

Mary Ann Fisher - Wild As You Can Be

Mary Ann Fisher - Give

Ray Charles feat. Mary Ann Fisher - What Kind of Man Are You

Mary Ann Fisher - Forever More

Mary Ann Fisher - It's A Man's World

Mary Ann Fisher - I Can't Take It

Ray Charles - Mary Ann

Mary Ann Fisher - Can´t Take the Heartbreaks

Mary Ann Fisher - I Keep Comin' Back For More

Mary Ann Fisher - Cloudy Weather Blues