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The day's news roundup + tonight's musical feature: Cecil Gant

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Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features blues and boogie piano player Cecil Gant. Enjoy!

^{Cecil Gant - We're Gonna Rock}

"True patriotism hates injustice in its own land more than anywhere else."

-- Clarence Darrow

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News and Opinion

The US Empire Isn’t A Government That Runs Nonstop Wars, It’s A Nonstop War That Runs A Government

It clears up a lot of confusion when you understand that the US empire is not a national government which happens to run nonstop military operations, it’s a nonstop military operation that happens to run a national government.

The wars are not designed to serve the interests of the United States, the United States is designed to serve the interests of the wars. The US as a country is just a source of funding, personnel, resources and diplomatic cover for a nonstop campaign to dominate the planet with mass military violence and the threat thereof.

This campaign is not waged to benefit the American people or their security, but to benefit the loose international alliance of plutocrats and unelected empire managers whose wealth and power are premised on the world order of continuous violence, exploitation and extraction which the campaign of global domination upholds. This campaign of global domination and its manifestations as a whole may be referred to as the US empire, which has very little in common with the US as an individual nation.

Until you understand this, nothing the US government or the US war machine does will make sense. You won’t understand why military operations are being waged which don’t seem to benefit the American people in any way, and which if anything actually harm the national security interests of the United States. You won’t understand why US foreign policy remains the same no matter who’s in office, regardless of party or platform. You won’t understand why the US and its allies do crazy things that otherwise make no sense for governments to do, like backing an increasingly unpopular genocide in Gaza, starting a cold war with China, or tempting nuclear armageddon with Russia.

And the answer is that these aggressions are not happening because they benefit the US as a nation, or even because they serve the political agendas of any elected officials. The nonstop violence is a means to a completely different end, and is almost an end in and of itself — benefiting war profiteers, shoring up geostrategic control, and expanding the sphere of the US empire’s particular brand of global capitalism.

There’s the nonstop worldwide military operation, and then there’s the theatrical set pieces of an official government slapped together in the foreground which we’re all meant to pretend has something to do with all the wars and militarism we are seeing. In reality the war machine just does what it’s going to do while the official elected suits in Washington put on these performances where they argue about abortion and Donald Trump to make it look like the US has a real government that’s making real decisions.

It was decided long ago that war is too important to be left to the will of the electorate, so now there’s this fake dummy political system that the American people are given to play with so they won’t meddle with the gears of the imperial machine. The local inhabitants of the hub of the globe-spanning empire are kept too propagandized, entertained, distracted, busy, poor, and sick to have a truth-based relationship with what’s being done in their name around the world, and if they do make some space in their life to become politically engaged they are herded into a kayfabe two-party system where both factions support war, militarism, imperialism, plutocracy and ecocidal capitalism but put immense amounts of energy into empty culture warring over issues that nobody with any real power cares about.

Trying to talk about this to people who are still plugged into the mainstream imperial worldview is like if Amazon had a children’s cartoon show called Andy Amazon & Friends, and the public believed the cartoon show was Amazon — they didn’t know anything about the sprawling trillionaire megacorporation that’s devouring the global economy. You’d try to talk about the gargantuan e-commerce company and they’d think you were talking about the cartoon, and object that what you’re saying doesn’t line up with what they know about the show and its characters.

Once you see the corporation behind the cartoon, once you see the empire behind the performative puppet show of official politics, you see it everywhere. You see it in the movements of the imperial war machine. You see it in the news headlines. You see it in the phony justifications and narratives that are being spouted by the western political-media class. You see it in our education system. You see it throughout our vapid mainstream western culture of interminable diversion and capitalist indoctrination.

And you stop caring about the puppet show. You stop caring about presidential elections, about Stormy Daniels and Donald Trump, about the culture war wedge issue of the day and the latest hot topic that everyone’s saying you need to take a position on. It becomes as interesting to you as some Youtube video your kid has on in the background when you’re busy dealing with a home emergency.

And the behavior of the empire absolutely is an emergency. The escalations against Russia and China that these freaks are pushing have the world on a trajectory that’s going to get us all killed, and the horrors they are inflicting in Gaza and elsewhere are creating a nightmare on earth right here and now. The empire is only getting crazier and more violent as its planetary domination becomes more challenged, and until people can see it for what it really is, it’s going to be very hard to build up the necessary public opposition against it to use the power of our numbers to force them to stop.

Will Israel Agree to "Israeli" Ceasefire Proposal? Confusion Reigns After Biden Presents New Plan

Netanyahu tries to avoid coalition implosion over Gaza ceasefire plan

Benjamin Netanyahu is once again trying to balance the demands of centrist and far-right members of his government after a threat from his extremist allies to collapse the coalition if Israel moves forward with a new ceasefire plan for Gaza announced by the US president, Joe Biden.

In an unexpected broadcast from the White House on Friday night, Biden urged Hamas to accept what he said was a new proposal from Israel for a three-phrase plan towards a permanent ceasefire in the nine-month war. “Israel has made their proposal. Hamas says they want a ceasefire. This deal is an opportunity to prove whether they really mean it. Hamas needs to take the deal,” he said.

But in remarks on Saturday, Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, immediately undermined Biden, reiterating that Israel seeks the complete destruction of the Palestinian militant group before it will agree to ending the war. Any deviation from that condition is a “non-starter”, he said.

Hamas provisionally welcomed the president’s announcement, although it also said as recently as Thursday that it still views a full withdrawal of Israeli troops as a precondition to talks. Hamas official Osama Hamdan told Al Jazeera: “Biden’s speech included positive ideas, but we want this to materialise within the framework of a comprehensive agreement that meets our demands.” ...

There is only one substantial difference between the new plan and previous proposals: the first phrase, which is a six-week ceasefire in which a limited number of Israeli hostages would be exchanged for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners, would be indefinitely extendable while negotiators thrash out the next stage. In phase two, all remaining hostages would be released, Israel would completely withdraw from Gaza, and both parties would commit to a lasting truce. The third phrase is supposed to implement as-yet unspecified plans for Gaza’s future, including administration and reconstruction.

Biden REBRANDS Gaza Cease-Fire, Kirby Disingenuously Tells MSM Israel Will Follow Through With Plan

Critics Warn Biden's Embrace of Israeli Cease-Fire Plan 'Will Likely Fall Flat'

Palestine defenders welcomed Israel's roadmap for a Gaza cease-fire—which U.S. President Joe Biden endorsed on Friday—as a necessary first step but warned that the plan does not address the root causes of the war and demanded that the United States stop sending military aid to the key Middle Eastern ally.

"It's time for this war to end, for the day after to begin," Biden told reporters in the White House State Dining Room on Friday, adding that "at this point, Hamas is no longer capable of carrying out another October 7."

In a three-part plan that Biden called "a road map to an enduring cease-fire," Israel has proposed an initial six-week truce during which Israeli military forces would withdraw from all populated areas of Gaza, while Hamas would release an unspecified number of hostages. Phase two of the plan would see a permanent cessation of hostilities, followed by a blueprint for the reconstruction of the obliterated Gaza Strip.

Israel rejected a similar Hamas cease-fire proposal earlier this month. Israel's plan has been sent to Hamas—whose political wing rules Gaza—for consideration.

"This is truly a decisive moment. Israel has made their proposal. Hamas says it wants a cease-fire," said Biden. "This deal is an opportunity to prove whether they really mean it."

The Uncommitted National Movement—which urges Americans to vote "uncommitted" to protest Biden's support for Israel's war on Gaza—called the president's embrace of a cease-fire proposal "a welcome development," but added that the move "will likely fall flat" as long as he keeps sending military aid and weapons that enable Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's war crimes.

Earlier this month, International Criminal Court Prosecutor Karim Khan said he is seeking arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, as well as three leaders of Hamas for alleged war crimes including extermination.

Israel—whose forces have killed, maimed, or left missing nearly 130,000 Palestinians in Gaza—is also the subject of an International Court of Justice genocide case brought by South Africa and backed by more than 30 countries and regional blocs.

"President Biden has had all the leverage to end Israel's genocide in Gaza from day one. At every turn, he has sent more and more weapons to Israel," the Institute for Middle East Understanding Policy Project said Friday on social media.

"Seventeen billion dollars," the group added. "You cannot call for peace while sending bombs that burn children sleeping in tents. Enough. Stop the weapons."

Alastair Crooke: How the West Must Change

Children die of malnutrition as Rafah operation heightens threat of famine in Gaza

Fayiz Abu Ataya was born into war and knew nothing else. Over his first and only spring, in a town stalked by hunger, he wasted away to a shadow of a child, skin stretched painfully over jutting bones. In seven months of life, he had little time to make a mark beyond the family who loved him. But when his death from malnutrition was reported last week, it sounded a warning around the world about a rapidly deepening crisis in central and southern Gaza, triggered by the Israeli military operation in the southern town of Rafah.

At least 30 child victims of malnutrition have been recorded in Gaza, but almost all died in the north, until recently the area with the most extreme shortages of food and medical care, where a top US aid official said famine had taken hold in some areas. The arrival of Israeli troops in Rafah in May shifted the grim calculus of threat in the strip.

“The ongoing situation in Rafah is a disaster for children,” said Jonathan Crickx, chief of communication for Unicef in Palestine. “If nutrition supplies, especially ready-to-use therapeutic food, used to address malnutrition among children, cannot be distributed, the treatment of more than 3,000 children with acute malnutrition will be interrupted.”

For months, northern Gaza, cut off by an Israeli military cordon, had been hungrier than the south. Aid mostly trickled into the strip through the Rafah crossing with Egypt, and the Kerem Shalom gateway from Israel. Now the border with Egypt is controlled by Israeli troops, the Rafah crossing is closed, and fighting has choked shipments of humanitarian aid through Kerem Shalom. The supply of humanitarian aid into Gaza overall has dropped by two-thirds since 7 May, when the operation began, UN figures showed last week.

Much of the food still getting into Gaza is shipped to the north through new crossings, meaning the crisis there has eased, but people in the south are running out of supplies, the World Food Programme chief for Palestine said.

Israeli Forces Now Operating in Most Areas of Rafah

On Friday, the Israeli military said it had expanded its operations to the central area of Rafah. Before the assault on the city, Rafah served as a refuge for over one million displaced Palestinians.

The Associated Press reported that the Israeli military confirmed its forces were now fighting throughout most of Rafah. President Joe Biden claimed that if Israel attacked the population centers in the city without a plan for the civilians living there, it would cross his “red line.”

However, as Israeli troops continue to push into the city, killing hundreds in the process and forcing over one million to flee, Biden administration officials have asserted that Tel Aviv has not crossed the red line.  After Israel used a US bomb to kill 45 people living in a tent camp in Rafah, White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said, “As a result of this strike on Sunday, I have no policy changes to speak to.” ...

As Israeli forces are pushing deeper into Rafah, the IDF announced the end of weeks of operations in the Jabalia refugee camp, located in northern Gaza. Tel Aviv initially devastated the city in the early months of the war on Gaza, but its forces returned in May. During the operations, the IDF dropped over 200 bombs.

Samantha Power: Israel is chief impediment to Gaza aid

USAID administrator Samantha Power said on Wednesday that the humanitarian situation in Gaza is “worse now than ever before” and acknowledged that “Israeli military operations & closed crossings” were the primary impediments to the delivery of American aid.

The post on X followed comments by Power that although Israeli operations in Rafah were “limited,” the “catastrophic consequences” of Israeli military actions in southern Gazan city were nonetheless taking place.

It is the latest and among the most direct examples of the Biden administration admitting that Israel is violating both international and U.S. law without saying so directly. As a result their policy remains largely unchanged.

Section 620I of the Foreign Assistance Act mandates that, “no assistance shall be furnished … to any country when it is made known to the President that the government of such country prohibits or otherwise restricts, directly or indirectly, the transport or delivery of US humanitarian assistance.”

Students walk out of University of Chicago graduation over Israel policies

Dozens of students protesting Israel’s ongoing military strikes in Gaza walked out of the University of Chicago’s commencement on Saturday as the school withheld the diplomas of four seniors over their involvement with a pro-Palestinian encampment.

The disruption to the rainy two-hour outdoor ceremony was brief, with shouts, boos and calls to “stop genocide”. A crowd of students walked out in between speeches and a demonstration followed the official ceremony. Some chanted as they held Palestinian flags while others donned traditional keffiyehs, black-and-white checkered scarves that represent Palestinian solidarity, over their robes.

Four graduating seniors, including Youssef Hasweh, were informed by email in recent days that their degrees would be withheld pending a disciplinary process related to complaints about the encampment, according to student group UChicago United for Palestine. “My diploma doesn’t matter when there are people in Palestine and in Gaza that will never walk a stage again, who will never receive a diploma,” Hasweh said in a statement on Saturday. “What about them? Who’s going to fight for them?” ...

Students have walked out of commencements at Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and others as protest camps have sprung up across the US and in Europe in recent weeks. Students have demanded their universities stop doing business with Israel or companies they say support its war in Gaza. Organizers seek to amplify calls to end Israel’s war with Hamas, which they describe as a genocide against the Palestinians.

Uniparty HONORS Bibi After War Crime Warrants

WW3: Russia Threatens NUKES After US Greenlights Ukraine Strikes

Stoltenberg Shrugs Off Putin’s Warnings About NATO Weapons Striking Targets Inside Russia

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg on Friday shrugged off warnings from Russian President Vladimir Putin against NATO countries allowing Ukraine to strike Russian territory with Western weapons.

“This is nothing new. It has … been the case for a long time that every time NATO allies are providing support to Ukraine, President Putin is trying to threaten us to not do that,” Stoltenberg told reporters during a NATO foreign ministers meeting in Prague. “And an escalation – well, Russia has escalated by invading another country.” ...

Russia has already significantly escalated its operations in Ukraine in response to Ukrainian attacks on its territory. For example, Russia did not begin major strikes on Ukrainian infrastructure until after the first bombing of the Crimean Bridge in October 2022.

Putin has also said that Russia’s new offensive in Kharkiv is a response to Ukrainian attacks on Russia’s Belgorod Oblast, which borders Kharkiv. He said the purpose of the offensive was to create a “buffer zone” to prevent attacks on Belgorod.

WSJ: US actively preparing for war with China

Mexico prepares to elect first female president as violence erupts at polling centers

Two people were killed in violence at polling centers on Sunday in the midst of Mexico’s historic election expected to make leftist Claudia Sheinbaum, the ruling party candidate, the country’s first female president.

Voting was suspended at one polling place after a person was killed in a shooting in Coyomeapan, a town in the state of Puebla, the state electoral authority reported in the afternoon. The state attorney general confirmed another death at a polling center in Tlapanala, also in Puebla.

Mexico’s largest-ever elections have also been the most violent in modern history, with the murders of 38 candidates, including a local candidate who was fatally shot on Saturday night. The deadly violence has stoked concerns about the threat of warring drug cartels to democracy.

Sheinbaum, who has led in opinion polls over her main competitor Xochitl Galvez, will be tasked with confronting organized crime violence, if elected. More people were killed during the mandate of outgoing President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador than during any other administration in Mexico’s modern history. ...

There were long lines of voters outside polling places, even before they opened at 8am local time, with some reports of delayed openings. ... Almost 100m Mexicans are eligible to vote in Sunday’s election. Other positions up for grabs include Mexico City’s mayor, eight governorships and both chambers of Congress. About 20,000 elected positions are on ballots, the most in Mexico’s history.

Final results in seismic South Africa election confirm ANC has lost majority

Final results from Wednesday’s seismic South Africa elections have confirmed that the African National Congress (ANC) party has lost its majority for the first time in 30 years of full democracy, firing the starting gun on unprecedented coalition talks.

The ANC, which led the fight to free South Africa from apartheid, won just 159 seats in the 400-member national assembly on a vote share of just over 40%. High unemployment, power cuts, violent crime and crumbling infrastructure have contributed to a haemorrhaging of support for the former liberation movement.

The pro-business Democratic Alliance (DA) won 87 seats, uMkhonto weSizwe (MK) - a new party led by President Cyril Ramaphosa’s bitter rival, the former president Jacob Zuma – took 58, and the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), a Marxist-Leninist party led by the ousted ANC youth leader Julius Malema, took 39.

Much more detail at the link:

A supreme court case about fisherman is flying under the radar, but could soon ‘create chaos’

The US supreme court is poised to decide the fate of a decades-old legal framework that has helped determine how the federal government regulates everything from pollution to financial markets. With cases on abortion, homelessness and Donald Trump grabbing the spotlight, the so-called Chevron deference doctrine has flown somewhat under the radar. But it could be among the court’s most influential decisions this year, upending the way Congress legislates, how bureaucrats carry out presidential directives and how courts rule when conflicts arise over the regulatory process.

Named for a landmark 1984 case, the ruling upheld federal agencies’ authority to interpret laws when they are unclear. Defenders of the doctrine argue that it places important and complicated decisions in the hands of qualified agency experts, instead of potentially politicized regional courts and judges. ...

For the last four decades, the Chevron doctrine provided a simple test with two distinct questions for judges to evaluate whether the agencies under the executive branch are rightly going about things the way Congress intended: (1) Is a statute ambiguous? (2) Is the agency’s interpretation reasonable? If both answers are yes, under the deference doctrine judges are to side with agencies when disputes arise.

The ruling clarified how the courts were already largely operating but it also helped direct lower courts on how to rule in challenges when expertise is crucial or written laws don’t cover every possible future scenario. For example, the doctrine empowers agencies to adjust regulations when better information comes to light, if unexpected emergencies arise (like the Covid pandemic), or when circumstances shift, knowing that they have a better chance of winning in court. ...

Critics, including current conservative justices, have raised concerns that the doctrine effectively gives law-making power to federal agencies that should be left only to Congress. “It has made it too easy for agencies to revise regulatory requirements and too difficult for courts to police the boundaries of agency authority,” Jonathan Adler, a professor of law at Case Western Reserve University wrote for the CATO Institute, a conservative thinktank.

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It’s the most perilous moment in world history, says George Galloway

Trump REACTS to Potential Jail Time, Says He’s FINE With It (!)

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New US rules aim to crack down on toxic air pollution by steelmakers

New Environmental Protection Agency rules aim to crack down on toxic air pollution from US steelmakers by limiting pollutants such as mercury, benzene and lead that have long poisoned the air in neighborhoods surrounding the plants. The rules target contaminants released by steel facilities’ coke ovens. Gas from the ovens creates an individual cancer risk in the air around steel plants of 50 in 1,000,000, which public health advocates say is dangerous for children and people with underlying health problems.

The chemicals do not travel far from the plant, but advocates say they have been devastating for public health in “fenceline” low income neighborhoods around steel facilities, and represent an environmental justice issue. “People have long faced significant health risks, like cancer, due to coke oven pollution,” said Patrice Simms, Earthjustice’s vice-president for healthy communities. The rules are “crucial for safeguarding communities and workers near coke ovens”.

Coke ovens are chambers that heat up coal to produce coke, a hard deposit used to make steel. Gas produced by the ovens is classified by EPA as a known human carcinogen and contains a mix of hazardous chemicals, heavy metals and volatile compounds. Many of the chemicals are linked to serious health issues, including severe eczema, respiratory problems and digestive lesions.

Amid increasing evidence of the gas’s toxicity in recent years, the EPA did little to rein in the pollution, critics say. Environmental groups have been pushing for new limits and better monitoring and Earthjustice in 2019 sued the EPA over the issue.

California firefighters battle wind-driven wildfire near San Francisco

California firefighters aided by aircraft battled a wind-driven wildfire that began Saturday and continued burning early Sunday morning in an area straddling the San Francisco Bay Area and central California, authorities said.

The Corral Fire began Saturday afternoon near the city of Tracy, 60 miles (96km ) east of San Francisco, and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the city of Livermore, according to the California department of forestry and fire protection, or Cal Fire.

Dark plumes of smoke traveled high into the sky over the fire area comprised mostly of grassy hills, where strong winds were expected to continue overnight. On Sunday morning, Cal Fire announced that the fire had spanned 12,500 acres and was 15% contained. “Strong winds and dry grass have made it difficult to contain,” it added.

Speaking to Fox 7, Cal Fire battalion chief Josh Silveira said: “We had an extremely wet couple of years, which allowed the grass to grow in really tall, really thick. We call it a light, flashy fuel because it is so fine. It’s very receptive to the fire,” Silveira said.

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Also of Interest

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

'No One Is Above the Law'—Oh Really, Mr. Biden?

They Can’t Control The Gaza Narrative Because Too Much Has Been Seen

Congress Trains Academia to Deny Genocide

Invited by Congress, Outraged Critics Say Netanyahu 'Should Be Arrested on the Spot'

Funding Attacks on the Pro-Palestine Student Movement

'The New McCarthyism': NY Hospital Fires Nurse for Empathizing With Gaza Mothers

Robert Fico’s failed assassination raises specter of Western plotting

Florida deputy who killed Black air force member in his own home fired

‘Yes, Lego car!’: why small electric cars could be about to break the grip of SUVs

Irish MP: 'I hope Benjamin Netanyahu burns in hell'

"Divest from Genocide": 1,000+ Protest Brooklyn Museum for Israel Ties; NYPD Arrests 34

Pro-Ceasefire MP Candidate Banned by U.K. Labour Party for "Liking" Jon Stewart Skit on Israel

Libertarian Presidential Candidate Chase Oliver on Rising: Voters SICK of Two-Party ‘WAR MACHINE’

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A Little Night Music

Cecil Gant - When You Left Me Baby

Cecil Gant Trio - Train Time Blues

Cecil Gant - Playing Myself the Blues

Cecil Gant - Rock Little Baby

Cecil Gant - I'm A Good Man But A Poor Man

Cecil Gant - It Ain't Gonna Be Like That

Cecil Gant - Blues In L. A.

Cecil Gant - What's On Your Worried Mind

Cecil Gant - Boozie Boogie

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