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This evening's music features Chicago blues piano player Eddie Boyd. Enjoy!

"By their subjugation of the press, the political powers in America have conferred on themselves the greatest of political blessings -- Gyges' ring of invisibility. And they have left the American people more deeply baffled by their own country's politics than any people on earth. Our public realm lies steeped in twilight, and we call that twilight news.'"

-- Walter Karp

News and Opinion

Australia Agrees To Build US Missiles; US Dismisses Australian Concerns About Assange

Two different news stories about US-Australian relations have broken at around the same time, and together they sum up the story of US-Australian relations as a whole. In one we learn that Australia has agreed to manufacture missiles for the United States, and in the other we learn that Washington has told Australia to go suck eggs about its concerns regarding the US persecution of Australian journalist Julian Assange.

The relationship between Australia and the United States is all the more clearly illustrated by the way they are being reported by Australia’s embarrassingly sycophantic mainstream press.

In a Sydney Morning Herald article published Friday titled “‘Hugely significant’: Australia to manufacture and export missiles to US,” the US-educated war propagandist Matthew Knott exuberantly reports on the latest development on Australia’s total absorption into the American war machine.

“Australia is set to begin manufacturing its own missiles within two years under an ambitious plan that will allow the country to supply guided weapons to the United States and possibly export them to other nations,” Knott reports,” adding that the “joint missile manufacturing effort is being driven by the war in Ukraine, which has highlighted a troubling lack of ammunition stocks in Western nations including the US.”

Knott — perhaps best-known for being publicly told to “hang your head in shame” and “drum yourself out of Australian journalism” by former prime minister Paul Keating over his virulent war propaganda on China — gushes enthusiastically about the wonderful opportunities this southward expansion of the military-industrial complex will offer Australians.

“As well as creating local jobs, a domestic missile manufacturing industry will make Australia less reliant on imports and provide a trusted additional source of munitions for the US,” Knott writes ecstatically in what has somehow been presented by The Sydney Morning Herald as a hard news story and not an opinion piece.

An article published the next day, also in The Sydney Morning Herald and also by Matthew Knott, is titled “Assange ‘endangered lives’: Top official urges Australia to understand US concerns“.

It’s not unusual to see this type of propagandistic headline designed to convey a specific message above Knott’s reporting on this subject; in 2019 he authored a piece which was given the bogus title “‘A monster not a journalist’: Mueller report shows Assange lied about Russian hacking“.

“The United States’ top foreign policy official has urged Australians to understand American concerns about Julian Assange’s publishing of leaked classified information, saying the WikiLeaks founder is alleged to have endangered lives and put US national security at risk,” Knott writes. “In the sharpest and most detailed remarks from a Biden administration official about the matter, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Assange had been involved in one of the largest breaches of classified information in American history and had been charged with serious criminal conduct in the US.”

Blinken’s remarks came during a press conference for the Australia–US Ministerial Consultations (AUSMIN) forum on Saturday, in response to a question asked by Knott himself.

Here are Blinken’s comments in full:

“Look, as a general matter policy, we don’t really comment on extradition matters, extradition proceedings. And so, I really would refer you to our Department of Justice for any questions about the status of the criminal case, whether it’s with regard to Mr Assange or the other person in question. And I really do understand and can certainly confirm what Penny said about the fact that this matter was raised with us as it has been in the past. And I understand the sensitivities, I understand the concerns and views of Australians. I think it’s very important that our friends here understand our concerns about this matter. And what our Department of Justice has already said repeatedly, publicly, is this, Mr Assange was charged with very serious criminal conduct in the United States in connection with his alleged role in one of the largest compromises of classified information in the history of our country. The actions that he is alleged to have committed risked very serious harm to our national security, to the benefit of our adversaries and put named human sources at grave risk, grave risk of physical harm, grave risk of detention. So, I say that only because, just as we understand sensitivities here, it’s important that our friends understand sensitivities in the United States.”

The reason Blinken keeps repeating the word “risk” here is because the Pentagon already publicly acknowledged in 2013 that nobody was actually harmed by the 2010 Manning leaks that Assange is being charged with publishing, so all US officials can do is make the unfalsifiable assertion that they could have potentially been harmed had things happened completely differently in some hypothetical alternate timeline.

In reality, Assange is being persecuted by the United States for no other reason than the crime of good journalism. His reporting exposed US war crimes, and the US wishes to set a legal precedent that allows for anyone who reveals such criminality to be imprisoned in the United States — not just the whistleblowers who bring forth that information, but publishers who circulate it. This is why even mainstream press outlets and human rights organizations unequivocally oppose his extradition; because it would be a devastating blow to worldwide press freedoms on what is arguably the single most important issue that journalists can possibly report on.

So here is Australia signing up to become the Pentagon’s weapons supplier to the south — on top of already functioning as a total US military/intelligence asset which is preparing to back Washington in a war with China, and on top of being so fully prostrated before the empire that we’re not even allowed to know if American nuclear weapons are in our own country — being publicly hand-waved away by Washington’s top diplomat for expressing concern about a historic legal case in which an Australian citizen is being persecuted by the world’s most powerful government for being a good journalist.

You could not ask for a clearer illustration of the so-called “alliance” between Australia and the United States. It’s easy to see that this is not an equal partnership between two sovereign nations, but a relationship of total domination and subservience. I was only half-joking when I wrote the other day that our national symbol should be the star-spangled kangaroo.

Australia is not a real country. It’s a US military base with marsupials.

John Mearsheimer: Ukraine war is a long-term danger

The war is coming to Russia, Zelenskiy warns after latest drone attack

Three drones have been shot down over Moscow, Russia’s defence ministry said, as Volodymyr Zelenskiy warned that the war was coming to Russia. The attacks, which Ukraine did not directly acknowledge in keeping with its security policy, reflected a pattern of more frequent and deeper cross-border strikes Kyiv has launched since starting a counteroffensive against Russian forces in June. The most dramatic strike was in May on the Kremlin itself. ...

Photos and video showed that a drone had ripped off part of the facade of a modern skyscraper, IQ-Quarter, located 3.4 miles (5.5km) from the Kremlin. When the drone hit, sparks, flames and smoke emerged from the building, with debris falling on the pavement and street. Windows were blown out, and metal window frames were mangled. A security guard was injured, Russia’s state news agency Tass reported, citing emergency officials. The Ria-Novosti news agency reported that the building’s tenants included several government agencies. ...

A Ukrainian air force spokesman said the Russian people were seeing the consequences of Russia’s war in Ukraine. “All of the people who think the war ‘doesn’t concern them’ – it’s already touching them,” Yurii Ihnat said on Sunday. “There’s already a certain mood in Russia: that something is flying in, and loudly. There’s no discussion of peace or calm in the Russian interior any more. They got what they wanted.”

Rus Advance Kupiansk, Putin: Ukr Standstill, 415 Ukr Tanks Destroyed; Rus Mulls 2nd Mobilisation

Fans of Cluster Bombs Dominate WaPo’s Opinion Section

The Washington Post (6/23/22) describes its opinion section as a platform for articles that “provide a diversity of voices and perspectives for our readers.” Yet as the US and its allies pour military aid into Ukraine, escalating the already bloody conflict with ever-more deadly new weapons, the paper’s opinion pages begin to look less like a platform for diverse voices and more like a cheerleading squad for the military/industrial complex.

Post opinion journalism abounds with pieces advocating the sort of “light side vs. dark side” moral rhetoric characteristic of corporate media’s war coverage (FAIR.org, 12/1/22). A consequence of this binary worldview is the tendency to present the deployment of increasingly horrific means, like President Joe Biden’s recent decision to arm Ukraine with US cluster munitions, as essentially just and necessary to achieve the West’s always-noble ends.

Cluster munitions are a type of ordinance which can leave unexploded “bomblets” around for decades. Almost 50 years after the end of the US government’s war of aggression against Laos, unexploded cluster bombs continue to kill and maim innocent people—frequently children.

These weapons are rightly so reviled that, shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, then–White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki responded to the possibility that Russia had already begun using cluster munitions against Ukraine by calling it “potentially a war crime.” Even so, US cluster munitions have arrived in Ukraine, and are now being used by Kyiv (Washington Post, 7/20/23).

Advocating for escalation, a Post editorial headlined “NATO’s Annual Summit Could Define a Decade of Western Security” (7/8/23) argued that NATO needs to “step up their game” in order to meet the threat of Putin’s regime in Moscow. It called Biden’s decision to arm Ukraine with cluster munitions a “tough but correct call.” The editorial board explained:

Their use is banned by some major NATO allies, because dud bombs left behind on the battlefield pose a threat to civilians. But Russia has used them intensively in Ukraine, and the Biden administration is legally required to export only shells that have a very low dud rate.

“Some” major allies? Out of the 31 NATO member states, the US finds company with only seven others in its refusal to join the Convention on Cluster Munitions. More than two-thirds of NATO countries, including “major” allies like Canada, Britain, Germany and France—and every European country west of Poland—have signed.

The editorial board cites the fact that the cluster munitions being sent by the US have a “very low dud rate,” and will therefore pose less of a risk to civilians. The Pentagon claims that the munitions it is sending have a dud rate of 2.35%; even if that’s accurate, it exceeds the 1% limit the Pentagon itself considers acceptable.

According to the New York Times’ John Ismay (7/7/23), a failure rate of 2.35% “would mean that for every two shells fired, about three unexploded grenades would be left scattered on the target area.” There is reason to believe that the true dud rate may be much higher—possibly exceeding 14%, by the Pentagon’s own reckoning.

Another Post op-ed, by columnist Max Boot (7/11/23), headlined “Why Liberals Protesting Cluster Munitions for Ukraine Are Wrong,” illustrates the “ends justify the means” rhetoric so pervasive in discourse over the war in Ukraine.

Boot acknowledged the devastating impact of cluster munitions, noting that “in Laos alone, at least 25,000 people have been killed or injured by unexploded ordnance since the US bombing ended.” He added:

Such concerns led more than 100 nations—but not the United States, Russia or Ukraine—to join the 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions abolishing the use of these weapons.

Of course, the United States is notorious for isolating itself from the rest of the world when it comes to the signing of international treaties—as the Council on Foreign Relations, where Mr. Boot is a senior fellow, has shown. The US signed but failed to ratify the 1996 Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (which has 178 state parties) and the 1979 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (which has 189 state parties). It refused to even sign the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty (which has 164 state parties).

Boot cited the probability that the dud rate of US cluster munitions is much higher than the given 2.35%, but immediately downplayed this fact on the basis that

Ukraine’s democratically elected leaders, whose relatives, friends and neighbors are in the line of fire, are more mindful of minimizing Ukrainian casualties than are self-appointed humanitarians in the West watching the war on television.

In other words, the Ukraine government should be allowed to decide how many Ukrainian civilians are acceptable to kill. This is a dubious principle even when you aren’t talking about a war against separatists; in the areas where the weapons are likely to be used, a large minority to a majority of the population identifies as ethnically Russian. Is the Iraqi government the best judge of how many Kurdish civilians are all right to kill?

“Using cluster munitions has the potential to save the lives of many Ukrainian soldiers,” Boot claimed, despite the fact that these same US munitions have a history of killing both civilians and US personnel alike.

Moreover, Boot argued,

cluster munitions remain a lawful instrument of warfare for countries that haven’t signed the 2008 convention, and Kyiv has shown itself a responsible steward of all the Western weaponry it has received.

Setting aside international norms, even countries who have not joined the cluster munitions convention must respect the Geneva Conventions, which prohibit indiscriminate attacks in civilian areas. That makes cluster munitions used in such areas illegal—yet “responsible steward” Ukraine has already used its own cluster munitions in the city of Izium, predictably resulting in civilian casualties (Human Rights Watch, 7/6/23).

Meanwhile, Post columnist David Ignatius (7/8/23) approvingly quoted National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan touting the deployment of cluster munitions as giving Ukraine a “wider window” for success, with no mention of any arguments against them. Ignatius later stated in his biweekly Q&A (7/17/23) that he was compelled by the Ukrainians’ reported “moral argument” for cluster bombs.

The Post’s sole “Counterpoint” piece  (7/7/23) on cluster munitions, authored by Sen. Jeff Merkley and former Sen. Patrick Leahy, justly pointed out the “unsupportable moral and political price” of supplying Kyiv with cluster munitions. Unfortunately, the Post didn’t seem to have much time for such considerations, with the only other traces of criticism within the opinion section being found amidst the letters to the editor.

This was true even months before Biden made his decision. A March piece by columnist Josh Rogin (3/2/23) framed the weapons as a sort of necessary evil as the Ukrainian forces are “running out of options.” Rogin referred to concerns from human rights groups and deemed the use of cluster munitions as “not to be taken lightly,” but did not dwell on these concerns, arguing, similar to Boot, that “more innocent lives will be saved if Ukrainian forces can kill more invading Russians faster.” Rogin concluded: “Because it is their lives on the line, it is their risk to take, and we should honor their request.”

In total, the Post has published five pieces in its opinion section (including Ignatius’ Q&A) that take a direct stance in favor of arming Ukraine with US cluster munitions, and only one opposed to it. Meanwhile, a recent poll by Quinnipiac University concluded that 51% of Americans disapprove of the president’s decision, while only 39% approve (The Hill, 7/19/23).

With so much preference for escalation and so little toward military restraint, one thing seems clear: There aren’t many Einsteins in the Washington Post op-ed section.

Police clash with protesters in Peru as President Boluarte calls for broader legislative powers

Spain stalemate drags on as Pedro Sánchez’s socialist party loses crucial seat

Spain’s socialist party has suffered a setback in its efforts to form a new leftwing coalition government after this month’s inconclusive election as a count of overseas votes handed a crucial seat across to the opposition conservatives. The result means the left and right blocs are now neck and neck as MPs prepare for a vote in congress that will determine who gets to govern.

The left’s hopes of remaining in power now rest even more firmly on Junts, the centre-right Catalan pro-independence party led by Carles Puigdemont, the former Catalan regional president who fled Spain to avoid arrest over his role in the failed unilateral bid for independence almost six years ago.

Although the rightwing People’s party (PP) won the snap election, it fell well short of expectations and only narrowly beat the Spanish Socialist Workers’ party (PSOE), led by the acting prime minister, Pedro Sánchez.

Faced with another hung parliament, the PSOE had appeared to be the major party most likely to be able to cobble together the parliamentary numbers to win an investiture vote. But the overseas vote, which was counted and factored into the overall result on Saturday, means the right and the left bloc now each have 171 seats in the 350-seat congress. ...

The new arithmetic means that the abstention of Junts will no longer be enough to see the PSOE and its partners in the new Sumar alliance into power through the second-round simple majority vote. Instead, Sánchez will need at least one Junts MP to vote for his coalition government. Junts has made it abundantly clear that its support will come at a price. It has already called for an amnesty for those still facing charges over the secessionist push, such as Puigdemont, and for a binding referendum on Catalan independence.

Senate Dems BLOCK Audit On Ukraine Aid, Incl. 'Progressives' Bernie Sanders And Liz Warren

Senate Passes $886 Billion NDAA

The Senate on Thursday night passed its version of the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act in a vote of 86-11. The bill authorizes a record $886 billion in military spending.

The debt ceiling deal reached between House Republicans and the White House set the NDAA at $886 billion, which is the amount President Biden requested. Hawks in Congress are planning to increase that figure even more by passing “emergency” supplemental funding, which is not limited by the debt ceiling deal.

The Senate rejected amendments to the NDAA that would have increased oversight of the tens of billions in weapons and other aid that the US has been pouring into Ukraine.

“YOU Will Own NOTHING!” - The Global Economic War Aimed At YOU!

Houston school district to turn libraries into disciplinary centers

The largest school district in Texas announced its libraries will be eliminated and replaced with discipline centers in the new school year.

Houston independent school district announced earlier this summer that librarian and media-specialist positions in 28 schools will be eliminated as part of superintendent Mike Miles’s “new education system” initiative.

Teachers at these schools will soon have the option to send misbehaving students to these discipline centers, or “team centers’” – designated areas where they will continue to learn remotely.

News of the library removals comes after the state announced it would be taking over the district, effective in the 2023-24 school year, due to poor academic performance. Miles was appointed by the the Texas Education Agency in June. ...

Houston’s mayor, Sylvester Turner, condemned the district’s move and said the solution to the problem of behavioral conduct was not to revoke access to books, especially in these underserved communities.

Florida universities hit by brain drain as academics flee

With the start of the 2023-24 academic year only six weeks away, senior officials at New College of Florida (NCF) made a startling announcement in mid-July: 36 of the small honors college’s approximately 100 full-time teaching positions were vacant. The provost, Bradley Thiessen, described the number of faculty openings as “ridiculously high”, and the disclosure was the latest evidence of a brain drain afflicting colleges and universities throughout the Sunshine state.

Governor Ron DeSantis opened 2023 with the appointment of six political allies to the college’s 13-member board of trustees who vowed to drastically alter the supposedly “woke”-friendly learning environment on its Sarasota campus. At its first meeting in late January, the revamped panel voted to fire the college president, Patricia Okker, without cause and appoint a former Republican state legislator and education commissioner in her place.

Over the ensuing weeks, board members have dismissed the college’s head librarian and director of diversity programs and denied tenure to five professors who had been recommended for approval.

In a statement given to 10 Tampa Bay about faculty vacancies that was issued earlier this month, NCF officials said that six of the openings were caused by staff resignations and one-quarter of the faculty member departures “followed the changes in the New College board of trustees”. ...

Many scholars across the state are taking early retirement, voting with their feet by accepting job offers outside Florida or simply throwing in the towel with a letter of resignation. Hard figures for turnover rates will not be available until later this year, and none of the other 11 state-run universities are expected to match New College’s exceptionally high percentage of faculty vacancies. ... Andrew Gothard, the state-level president of the United Faculty of Florida labor union, predicts a loss of between 20 and 30% of faculty members at some universities during the upcoming academic year in comparison with 2022-23, which would signify a marked increase in annual turnover rates that traditionally have stood at 10% or less.

Judge blocks Arkansas law allowing librarians to be charged over ‘harmful’ books

Arkansas is temporarily blocked from enforcing a law that would have allowed criminal charges against librarians and booksellers for providing “harmful” materials to minors, a federal judge ruled on Saturday.

US district judge Timothy L Brooks issued a preliminary injunction against the law, which also would have created a new process to challenge library materials and request that they be relocated to areas not accessible by kids. The measure, signed by the state’s Republican governor, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, earlier this year, was set to take effect on 1 August.

A coalition that included the Central Arkansas Library System (CALS) in Little Rock had challenged the law, saying fear of prosecution under the measure could prompt libraries and booksellers to no longer carry titles that could be challenged. The judge also rejected a motion by the defendants, which include prosecuting attorneys for the state, seeking to dismiss the case.

The ACLU of Arkansas, which represents some of the plaintiffs, applauded the court’s ruling, saying that the absence of a preliminary injunction would have jeopardized the free speech rights enshrined in the US constitution’s first amendment.

“The question we had to ask was – do Arkansans still legally have access to reading materials?” Holly Dickson, the executive director of the ACLU in Arkansas, said in a statement. “Luckily, the judicial system has once again defended our highly valued liberties.”

Alito ‘stunningly wrong’ that Senate can’t impose supreme court ethics rules

Senator Chris Murphy has dismissed claims by the supreme court justice, Samuel Alito, that the Senate has “no authority” to create a code of conduct for the court as “stunningly wrong”.

The Connecticut Democrat made those remarks in an interview on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday, adding that Alito “should know that more than anyone else because his seat on the supreme court exists only because of an act passed by Congress”.

“It is Congress that establishes the number of justices on the supreme court,” Murphy said. “It is Congress that has passed in the past requirements for justices to disclose certain information, and so it is just wrong on the facts to say that Congress doesn’t have anything to do with the rules guiding the supreme court.”

He continued: “It is even more disturbing that Alito feels the need to insert himself into a congressional debate.”

Murphy’s comments came after the Wall Street Journal published an interview with Alito on Friday in which he said: “I know this is a controversial view, but I’m willing to say it. No provision in the constitution gives them the authority to regulate the supreme court – period.”

"FBI-Orchestrated Conspiracy": Judge Orders Release of 3 of Newburgh 4 Tied to Fake NY Bomb Plot

Trump Employee FLIPS On Mar A Lago Coverup?

Hunter Biden’s CLOSE Friend To Give DAMNING TESTIMONY On Joe's INVOLVEMENT In Burisma Schemes

‘Something weird is going on’: search for answers as Antarctic sea ice stays at historic lows

In February, the floating sea ice around Antarctica hit a record low for the second year running. Since satellites started tracking the region’s ice in 1979, there had never been less ice. As it does every year, as the temperatures around the continent plunged towards winter, the sea ice started to return. But the moderate alarm from scientists at that record low – coming only a year after a previous record low – is now being overlaid with astonishment. Some are worried they could be witnessing the start of a slow collapse of Antarctica’s sea ice.

By now there would usually be about 16.4m square kilometres of Antarctic sea ice. But this week, there was just 14.1m sq km. An area bigger than Mexico has failed to freeze.

“There’s a sense that something weird is going on. It’s dropping way below anything we have seen in our record,” says Dr Walt Meier, a senior scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC) at the University of Colorado. Meier’s job is to help collate and present data from US satellites that have been recording sea ice since November 1978. ...

Every day a defence satellite passes over the region with an instrument onboard which – through clouds and at night – can detect whether the ocean surface is covered by ice or water. Every morning about 7am in Boulder, Colorado, an automated system pulls the data, runs an algorithm and spits out how much ice has been around the continent, averaged over the past five days. “In terms of it being relative to normal, we are even further behind where we were in February,” Meier says. “It’s quite remarkable and there are moments we look and say: wow, this is strange.” Not only is there less ice, but the reduction is being seen almost all the way around the continent’s 18,000km coastline.

International talks end without go-ahead for deep-sea mining

An international meeting in Jamaica to negotiate rules over deep-sea mining has ended with no green light to start industrial-scale mining and with an 11th-hour agreement to hold formal discussions next year on the protection of the marine environment.

The agreement ended intense week-long negotiations at the International Seabed Authority (ISA), an intergovernmental body based in Kingston that regulates sea-bed extraction, over a proposal spearheaded by Chile, France and Costa Rica and backed by a dozen countries to discuss a precautionary pause on deep-sea mining to ensure the protection of the marine environment.

China, which is keen to see mining go ahead, had blocked the motion for a discussion all week, but finally agreed to allow it on the agenda in 2024. ...

In a speech on Wednesday, the French secretary of state for seas, Hervé Berville, reinforced France’s call for a ban on deep-sea mining: “We cannot and must not embark on a new industrial activity when we are not able to fully measure its consequences and therefore risk irreversible damage to our marine ecosystems.”

More than 20 countries in the assembly have called for a pause or ban. They argue that not enough is known about mining’s impact on deep-sea ecosystems to proceed. Brazil has called for a pause of 10 years, and several other countries have resisted.

Also of Interest

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

Blinken Slams Door on Australian Bid for Assange

Scott Ritter: Requiem for NATO’s Nightmare

NATO Failed in Ukraine Against Russia. Now It’s Targeting China

Seymour Hersh: Opera Buffa in Ukraine

Ukraine’s baby factories rake in record profits amid chaos of war

Santa Monica decimated a thriving Black community

Billionaires yearn for a life free of human contact – and they are imposing this on the rest of us

France prepares airstrikes, Niger. EU ready to seize Russia assets. Blinken, threat to humanity.

German industrial economy collapse. EU economic collapse

EMAILS: Biden CENSORED Lab Leak On Facebook

60% Americans DISAPPROVE Of Biden, Two-Thirds Say Economy Is BAD As Admin Touts 'Bidenomics'

A Little Night Music

Eddie Boyd - Drifting

Eddie Boyd - The Hotel Blues

Eddie Boyd - Third Degree

Eddie Boyd & Peter Green- Too Bad

Eddie Boyd & Peter Green- Just The Blues

Eddie Boyd - Five Long Years

Eddie Boyd - I'm A Prisoner

Eddie Boyd with Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac - You Are My Love

Eddie Boyd - Blue Monday Blues

Eddie Boyd with Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac - Ten To One

Eddie Boyd & Group - I Love You