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The day's news roundup + tonight's musical feature: Guitar Slim

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Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features New Orleans guitarist Guitar Slim. Enjoy!

^{Guitar Slim - The Story Of My Life}

"I do the wrong, and first begin to brawl.
The secret mischiefs that I set abroach
I lay unto the grievous charge of others. ...
And thus I clothe my naked villainy
With odd old ends stol’n forth of Holy Writ,
And seem a saint when most I play the devil."

-- William Shakespeare

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News and Opinion

They Dupe People Into Debating War With Russia Vs War With China, Instead Of War Itself

One of the most brilliant propaganda maneuvers the managers of the US empire have pulled off lately is splitting the debate over US military policy along partisan lines, with one side supporting aggressions against Russia and the other preferring to focus aggressions on China. In this way they’ve ensured that mainstream discourse remains an argument over how US warmongering should occur, rather than if it should.

Senator Bernie Sanders has a new article out in The Guardian titled “The US and China must unite to fight the climate crisis, not each other,” in which he argues in favor of de-escalation measures comparable to those reached between Washington and Moscow after the Cuban Missile Crisis.

“Instead of spending enormous amounts of money planning for a war against each other, the US and China should come to an agreement to mutually cut their military budgets and use the savings to move aggressively to improve energy efficiency, move toward sustainable energy and end our reliance on fossil fuels,” Sanders argues.

Which is a fine sentiment as far as it goes, and it’s not the first time Sanders has expressed this view; last month in The Guardian he argued that the US government should be focused on resolving the climate crisis “instead of fomenting a new cold war with China.” But it’s worth noting that while acting as a dovish detente proponent with regard to China, Sanders has for years been acting as a hawkish cold warrior with regard to Russia.

Lol within about 15 hours from this tweet Bernie Sanders voted against a special inspector general audit of $117 billion in Ukraine war money/contractors. https://t.co/GCjRRDguxF

— Lee Fang (@lhfang) July 28, 2023

Sanders has unequivocally stated that he supports the Biden administration’s proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. Within hours of criticizing the “bloated and wasteful Defense Department that cannot even pass an independent audit” on Twitter last month, Sanders had voted against a special inspector general audit of billions of dollars in Ukraine war funding. Prior to the Ukraine war Sanders had spent years pushing cold war Russia hysteria and lending the illusion of credibility to the baseless mainstream conspiracy theory that the highest office of the US government had been infiltrated by the Kremlin.

It’s not uncommon to see mainstream liberals of the political/media class pushing back somewhat against the China hawks, even while they cheerlead fanatically for nuclear brinkmanship with Russia. Mass media pundits like CNN’s Fareed Zakaria have been vocally oppositional to the mad rush into a new cold war with China while remaining enthusiastically supportive of the proxy war in Ukraine and new cold war escalations against Moscow.

In the same way and to the same extent, you see the political/media class of the mainstream right pushing back against the war in Ukraine while enthusiastically advocating hawkish escalations against Beijing. Tucker Carlson has been one of the most virulent anti-China propagandists in the western world for years, but he’s been critical of US escalations against Russia and the Ukraine proxy war. Republican Senator Josh Hawley is always on conservative media arguing that the US needs to de-escalate against Russia in order to more effectively escalate against China. Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy has been campaigning on the platform of making peace with Russia to pull it away from its alliance with China, whom he paints as a tremendous threat and accuses of waging “a modern opium war against the United States of America” using fentanyl.

This partisan rhetoric from pundits and politicians has had an effect on the opinions of ordinary Americans. A recent CNN poll found a significant split between Republicans and Democrats over funding for the Ukraine war, with 71 percent of Republicans opposing additional proxy war funding and 62 percent of Democrats in favor of it.

We saw these two partisan warmonger positions clash head to head in a recent appearance by Ramaswamy on CNN Tonight with the reliably pathetic Jim Acosta. Ramaswamy said he would freeze the current lines of control in Ukraine leaving parts of the Donbass with the Russian Federation in exchange for Putin renouncing Moscow’s partnership with Beijing, while Acosta huffed indignantly and accused him of letting “authoritarian leaders off the hook”.

“That sounds like a win for Putin,” Acosta said of Ramaswamy’s plan.

“The real threat we face today is communist China, which is that much stronger when Vladimir Putin is in Xi Jinping’s camp,” Ramaswamy retorted.

Meanwhile normal human beings whose brains haven’t been turned to clam chowder by propaganda from either mainstream faction would much prefer to avoid giant world-threatening confrontations between any nuclear-armed nations. Economic warfare between nations of immense economic consequence will hurt ordinary people all around the world, proxy conflicts will amass mountains of human corpses, and nuclear brinkmanship leaves us dangling over a horror too terrible to even imagine by a thread that gets thinner and thinner the more tensions escalate.

Which is precisely why so much propaganda manipulation goes into emphasizing the debate about how these conflicts should occur, rather than if they should. It’s not a normal human impulse to support such things, so manipulation is required to manufacture their consent.

And of course it’s really the same conflict; Russia and China are in an increasingly intimate partnership because they’re both being targeted by the US empire, as they both refuse to relinquish their national sovereignty and refuse to recognize Washington as the unofficial capital of the entire planet. Both nations are targeted for subversion and subjugation, and both will be the on the receiving end of US aggressions for the foreseeable future, while people are duped into cheering for one or the other by sociopathic empire managers who want to rule the world.

This manipulation by the way is exactly what Noam Chomsky was talking about when he said that the smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum. The empire will happily let everyone scream their heads off at each other all day long about whether to ramp up aggressions against Russia or China, so long as they don’t ever start questioning the need for aggressions at all.

Ukr Setback Rabotino; Rus BRICS Chair 2024, Erdogan Moscow; Neocon Post Edited Hiding US Ukr Talks

US Officials Criticize Ukraine’s Tactics, Say Troops are Too Spread Out

US and Western officials speaking to The New York Times blamed Ukraine’s struggling counteroffensive on Kyiv’s tactics, saying Ukrainian troops are too spread out.

US officials said that Ukraine’s primary goal is to sever Russia’s land bridge to Crimea but that Ukraine has placed its troops and firepower equally along the entire front, in the south and the east. ...

The Times report said that as a result of Ukraine’s tactics, there are more Ukrainian troops near Bakhmut and other eastern cities than in the south near Melitopol and Zaporizhzhia. The report said the US had advised Ukraine to focus on pushing toward Melitopol.

Polish President Says Russian Nukes in Belarus Change ‘Security Architecture’

Polish President Andrzej Duda said Tuesday that Russia has been moving nuclear weapons into Belarus and said the deployment changes the “security architecture” of the region.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said the first Russian nukes started arriving in Belarus back in June, but the deployment hadn’t been confirmed by the US or NATO. Duda made the comments at a joint press conference with Portuguese President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa.

“I was telling President (de Sousa) about the implementation of the declarations by Vladimir Putin that Russia’s tactical nuclear weapons will be moved to the territory of Belarus,” Duda said, according to The Associated Press. “Indeed, this process is taking place, we are seeing that.”

“It is changing the architecture of security in our immediate neighborhood, but also of the eastern flank of NATO, at the same time. So in fact it is changing the situation for all of the alliance,” Duda added.

Ukrainian Former Communist Leader Arrested

Leftist and progressive groups have condemned the arrest of veteran communist and leader of the Ukrainian Anti Fascist Committee, Georgi Buiko, by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU). On Aug. 16, the SBU announced that they had arrested Buiko, who is accused of participating in “anti-Ukrainian activities” and having communist and “pro-Russian” publications in his home. The arrest of Buiko was first reported on Telegram by Bruno Amaral de Carvalho, a CNN Portugal correspondent on the ground in Donbass.

The persecution of Buiko is a continuation of the crackdown unleashed by the post-Euromaidan regime in Ukraine which has been marked by de-communization attempts, and the banning of the communist party and its publication.

Georgi Vladimirovich Buiko, who turned 77 this August, was born in Zhytomyr and got acquainted with the Komsomol — the youth wing of the Communist Party of Soviet Union (CPSU) — during his student days at Donetsk State University. He became a member of the CPSU in 1967. He was active in the Donetsk regional committee and was a key figure in the Communist Party of Ukraine (KPU) in the post-Soviet period. He was the first secretary of the Donetsk Regional Committee, the editor-in-chief of the newspaper Communist Donbass, and was also elected as deputy in the Donetsk Oblast Council or the regional legislature. Between 1998 and 2006, he was elected twice as a member of the Ukrainian parliament.

Since 2007, he has been the chairman of the Anti-Fascist Committee of Ukraine and from 2008 was the secretary of the Central Committee of the KPU. Buiko was also an active member of the Union of Journalists of Ukraine and the International Federation of Journalists.

With the onset of the Russia-Ukraine war in February 2022, the Volodymyr Zelensky regime intensified its attack on communists and critics within Ukraine, labeling them as Russian collaborators.

China's BRICS Plan To BREAK Dollarization

Putin says Brics should become trading bloc representing ‘global majority’

Vladimir Putin has told a summit of the Brics group of countries in South Africa that it should become a trading bloc representing the “global majority”.

However, differences among the group – comprising Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – have become apparent at the summit over accepting new members, and whether to turn Brics into a geopolitical counterweight to the west.

Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, insisted on Tuesday that it was not the group’s aim to compete with western institutions.“We do not want to be a counterpoint to the G7, G20 or the United States,” he said on Tuesday. “We just want to organise ourselves.” ...

In his recorded remarks to the meeting, Putin blamed the volatility in global markets for food and other commodities on western sanctions, and said that Brics would be a force for fairness in international relations.

“We cooperate on the principles of equality, mutual support and respect for each other’s interests,” he said. “This is the essence of the future-oriented strategic course of our association, a course that meets the aspirations of the main part of the world community, the so-called global majority.”

“It’s Always About Oil”: CIA & MI6 Staged Coup in Iran 70 Years Ago, Destroying Democracy in Iran

Algerian Radio Report Says France Is Planning Intervention in Niger

Algeria’s national radio reported on Monday that France is planning a military intervention in Niger if Nigerian President Mohamed Bazoum is not released by the junta that ousted him in a July 26 coup.

The radio report cited a government source who said Algeria is opposed to any intervention in Niger over fears it will destabilize the region and lead to a migrant crisis, as the disastrous US and NATO intervention in Libya did. ...

The Algerian report also said that Algeria denied a request from France to use its airspace as part of a potential Niger intervention. “The military intervention is said to be imminent, with all the military apparatus in place,” the radio report said. “Algeria, which has always rejected the use of force, has given a negative response to the French request to fly over its national territory to attack Niger. Algiers’ response is firm and unequivocal.”

“They Fired On Us Like Rain”: Saudis Accused of Killing Hundreds of Ethiopian Refugees at Border

Saudi massacres of refugees: Mass murder by key US ally

Border guards in Saudi Arabia, armed and trained by the imperialist powers, especially the United States, have committed sadistic crimes against humanity, according to a report by Human Rights Watch (HRW) released Monday. The report documents the systematic murder of hundreds of migrants, mainly from Ethiopia, at the Yemen-Saudi border between March 2022 and June 2023.

Based on eyewitness, video and satellite evidence, the report, headlined, “They Fired on Us Like Rain,” found that large groups of migrants were targeted with mortars, rockets and tanks, leaving “scenes of horror: women, men, and children strewn across the mountainous landscape severely injured, dismembered, or already dead.” ...

Sometimes upwards of 100 people were killed in a single assault. Mass killings continued as the victims fled back toward Yemen. Mass graves are being dug at crossing points along the border.

'Stop Cop City' Referendum Organizers Call Atlanta's Verification Regime 'Voter Suppression'

Organizers of an Atlanta referendum on the proposed Public Safety Training Center—widely known as "Cop City"—said Monday that they've gathered more than twice as many signatures as needed to qualify for November's ballot, while slamming the Georgia city's newly announced verification process as a tried-and-true form of voter suppression.

The Vote to Stop Cop City Coalition said Monday that its hundreds of paid and volunteer canvassers have collected 104,000 signatures for its proposed referendum that would let Atlanta voters decide whether to build the $90 million, 85-acre training facility in the Weelaunee Forest just outside Atlanta city limits in DeKalb County.

The city requires 58,000 valid signatures—15% of registered voters—for a measure to qualify for the ballot. However, organizers typically collect many more signatures than needed, knowing a significant number of them could be disqualified.

The coalition initially planned on submitting the petition on Monday. However, members are sounding the alarm on what they say may be an attempt by city officials to thwart their effort. Organizers say they now plan to continue collecting petition signatures through September 23, a deadline set last month by a federal judge.

"In recent days, the coalition began to hear from reporters and sources inside City Hall that the city of Atlanta is planning to argue for a higher-than-previously-reported legal minimum signature count for ballot access," the coalition said in a statement.

"More concerning were reports that they also plan to utilize 'signature match'—an archaic and widely abandoned tool of voter suppression that has been widely condemned across the political spectrum, including by the Republican-controlled Georgia State Legislature—in their verification process," the coalition added.

The Atlanta City Council on Monday passed a resolution authorizing the hiring of an independent consultant to help verify the petition signatures.

"In an effort to ensure that adequate resources are dedicated to this project, the city of Atlanta—through the adoption of the Atlanta City Council—has developed a step-by-step process to conduct the audit of the documents, of which the signature verification process may be a critical element," Interim Municipal Clerk Vanessa Waldon said in a statement.

"We are committed to a transparent process that meets the requirements of the law and builds public confidence and trust," she added.

The city said that process will include a manual line-by-line review, "which will also include double-checking of each line" on the petition.

Stephanie Jackson Ali, policy director at the voting rights group New Georgia Project Action Fund, toldFox 5 Atlanta that "it's an unscientific process."

"People's signatures from different times are matched from when you first got your driver's license to when you filled out that form," Ali continued. "So you're going [to] find people who mismatch their own signature."

DaMareo Cooper, co-executive director of the Center for Popular Democracy, toldThe Intercept that "signature matching is a Republican-style voter suppression tactic that will disenfranchise thousands of predominantly Black and working-class voters."

"It's clear that the city of Atlanta knows that they will lose a vote over Cop City, so now they are trying to prevent it," he added. "It's outrageous and shameful."

‘Inhumane’: judge hears arguments about anti-migrant buoys in Rio Grande

A federal judge heard arguments on Tuesday about whether state authorities should remove huge buoys installed to stop migrants crossing the river that divides Texas from Mexico. The court hearing in Austin came a day after Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott, and a group of hardline Republican governors gathered on the riverbank to defend local militarization of the US-Mexico border – while also acknowledging that the 1,000ft (305-meter) floating barrier had been adjusted after complaints that it had mostly drifted into Mexican territory.

Texas is defending itself against a lawsuit brought by the Department of Justice against the use of the buoys in the Rio Grande without federal approval and in violation of the Rivers and Harbors Act. Mexico also wants the barrier removed and has called the buoys, which have netting beneath and saw-like blades between the floats, “inhumane”.

Many different bodies have complained that the buoys and miles of razor wire installed on the riverbank by Texas state authorities, as well as the aggressive turning back of migrants by state troops, are dangerous and a threat to life and the environment.

In court on Tuesday a US state department official said that the Mexican government had repeatedly raised concerns “at the highest level” with the US about the buoys, and that agreements between the two countries could suffer if the floating barrier remains in place.

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HALF Of Americans Don’t Trust Hunter Biden Investigation

Hunter Biden Prosecutor Considers POTUS' Son 'A GOOD FRIEND,' Per NEW Emails

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Climate crisis made spate of Canada wildfires twice as likely, scientists find

The conditions that caused Canada’s extreme spate of wildfires this year, which resulted in parts of the US and Canada to be blanketed in toxic smoke, were made at least twice as likely due to the human-caused climate crisis, scientists have found.

The 2023 Canadian wildfire season has been the largest, and most devastating, on record, with nearly 14m hectares (34m acres) burned, an area larger than Greece. ...

Scientists have now analyzed the conditions that caused the fires that raged in the Canadian province of Quebec between May and July and found that the climate crisis, driven by the burning of fossil fuels, made them at least twice as likely, and the fire-prone weather at least 20% more intense.

The attribution study, conducted by a coalition of scientists in Canada, the UK and the Netherlands, found that while the fire-prone weather conditions were unprecedented, they are no longer unexpected and will become more commonplace as the world continues to heat up.

“The word ‘unprecedented’ doesn’t do justice to the severity of the wildfires in Canada this year,” said Yan Boulanger, research scientist at Natural Resources Canada and part of the World Weather Attribution study team. “From a scientific perspective, the doubling of the previous burned area record is shocking. Climate change is greatly increasing the flammability of the fuel available for wildfires – this means that a single spark, regardless of its source, can rapidly turn into a blazing inferno.”

G20 poured more than $1tn on fossil fuel subsidies despite Cop26 pledges

The G20 poured record levels of public money into fossil fuels last year despite having promised to reduce some of it, a report has found. The amount of public money flowing into coal, oil and gas in 20 of the world’s biggest economies reached a record $1.4tn(£1.1tn) in 2022, according to the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) thinktank, even though world leaders agreed to phase out “inefficient” fossil fuel subsidies at the Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow two years ago.

The report comes ahead of a meeting of G20 countries in Delhi next month that could set the tone for the next big climate conference, which takes place in the United Arab Emirates in November.

It is crucial that leaders put fossil fuel subsidies on the agenda, said Tara Laan, a senior associate with the IISD and lead author of the study. “These figures are a stark reminder of the massive amounts of public money G20 governments continue to pour into fossil fuels – despite the increasingly devastating impacts of climate change.” ...

The total amount was more than double what they had provided in 2019, the authors found.

Japan Plans to Discharge Water From Fukushima Nuclear Plant This Week

Local fishers, Greenpeace, and others shared fresh concerns Tuesday as Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida announced that the release of treated radioactive water from the Fukushima nuclear facility into the Pacific Ocean may start as soon as Thursday, more than a dozen years after an earthquake caused a tsunami that triggered reactor meltdowns.

Over the next three decades, Japan plans to discharge about 1.34 million gallons of water—or enough to fill over 500 Olympic swimming pools—into the ocean after using an advanced liquid processing system (ALPS) to remove most radionuclides.

The Tokyo Electric Power Company said Tuesday that "as the entity responsible for the safe and steady decommissioning of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, TEPCO is strictly abiding by the government's decision and request, and shall quickly make preparations to commence discharge with the utmost vigilance in accordance with the implementation plan."

Greenpeace Japan project manager Hisayo Takada declared that "we are deeply disappointed and outraged by the Japanese government's announcement," and stressed that the discharge decision has been made "despite concerns raised by fishermen, citizens, Fukushima residents, and the international community, especially in the Pacific region and neighboring countries."

Thousands lose power as Texas braces for deluge from Tropical Storm Harold

The skies began to darken over southern Texas on Tuesday as Tropical Storm Harold hurtled toward the state, just as California began cleanup from the historic storm system Hilary. Texas, still grappling with the effects of one of the hottest and driest summers on record, is now bracing for a deluge. As Harold continued on its westward trajectory after sweeping through the Gulf of Mexico, forecasters warned it could drop up to 7in of rain in some areas with risks of flash flooding.

“Tropical storm force winds will accompany the system as it progresses inland, as well as rough surf along the coast,” the National Weather Service said in a discussion on Tuesday. The meteorologists added that as the system pushes into other areas of the south-west there may be “additional flash flooding concerns, especially near the more flood-prone slot canyons in Utah on Thursday”.

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Also of Interest

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

Matt Taibbi: Tracking Orwellian Change: The Aristocratic Takeover of ‘Transparency’

Six Tropes to Look Out for That Distort Israel/Palestine Coverage

Trump Indictment Distraction

The Democrats Biden Problem

No OB-GYNs left in town: what came after Idaho’s assault on abortion

Biden launches ‘most affordable ever’ student loan repayment plan

Bacteria that ‘eat’ methane could slow global heating, study finds

'Climate Scam': 180+ Groups Tell Biden to Drop Support for Hydrogen

As Offshore Wind Ramps Up, Scientists Flag Potential Impacts

Tucker Carlson: Zelensky PLANTED By Deep State To Lead Ukraine, PUSHED TOWARDS WAR By Biden

Fox News Sounds Like MSNBC Covering Maui Fire

Biden JEERED During SHAMEFUL Maui Visit, Trip Cut Short For Prez To Go BACK ON VACATION?!

Tulsi Exposes Gov’t’s Complete Abandonment of Maui Victims!

NO SHOW' Biden Slammed By East Palestine Residents After 170+ Days Pass W/O VISIT

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A Little Night Music

Guitar Slim - Well I Done Got Over It

Guitar Slim - Guitar Slim

Guitar Slim - Oh Yeah

Guitar Slim - Sufferin' Mind

Guitar Slim - You Give Me Nothing but the Blues

Guitar Slim - The Cackle

Guitar Slim - Trouble Don't Last

Guitar Slim - When there's no way out

Guitar Slim - Down Through the Years

Guitar Slim - The Things That I Used to Do

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