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This evening's music features Texas blues piano player Mercy Dee Walton. Enjoy!

"The most effective way to silence our guilty conscience is to convince ourselves and others that those we have sinned against are indeed depraved creatures, deserving every punishment, even extermination. We cannot pity those we have wronged, nor can we be indifferent toward them. We must hate and persecute them or else leave the door open to self-contempt."

-- Eric Hoffer

News and Opinion

Peter Thiel Reveals How Scared Oligarchs Are Of The People

Billionaire Peter Thiel had a fascinating televised moment the other day when asked by Piers Morgan what he thought about the public making a hero of the man suspected of murdering health insurance CEO Brian Thompson. The way he stumbled and stuttered when trying to answer the question gives a lot of insight into how terrified such people are of the public turning against them one day.

“And to those who think this shooter is a hero, because he did it because he said this healthcare executive is presiding over a healthcare system which kills thousands of Americans by denying them cover, what would you say to them?” Morgan asked.

Thiel paused for a long time, and then stuttered for a long time, and then eventually got out the words, “It’s, I don’t know what, what to say? I, I think I still think you have, you should try to make an argument. And I, I think this is, this is you should, you know, there may be things wrong with our health care system, but you have, you have to make an argument, and you have to try to find a way to convince people and and change, change it by by that, and this is, you know, this is not going to work.”

For those who don’t know, Thiel is a proper deep state oligarch who owes his vast fortune to his enmeshment within the US military-intelligence machine. His company Palantir is a CIA-backed surveillance and data mining tech company with intimate ties to both the US intelligence cartel and to Israel, playing a crucial role in both the US empire’s sprawling surveillance network and Israeli atrocities against Palestinians. He backed Trump in 2016, and Vice President-Elect JD Vance was a protégé of his, so this man is thoroughly entrenched in the halls of power.

Thiel’s blustering response when asked what he thought about the public support we are seeing for the practice of assassinating health insurance CEOs reveals a lot about the kinds of things that keep men like Peter Thiel up at night.

Plutocrats like Thiel are constantly thinking about the fact that ordinary people vastly outnumber them and can kill them at any time. They think about it way more often than ordinary people do. It’s a point that they are acutely aware of at all times. It consumes their attention. They are always working on manipulating public consciousness to ensure that we don’t think as much as they do about how many more of us there are of them, and how we don’t have to put up with their domination of our society if we don’t want to.

As Michael Parenti once put it:

“I tell students when they say, ‘Oh they don’t care what we think. They ignore us’, and all that, and I say, ‘Oh no, no. That’s the only thing they care about you. The only thing they care about you is what you’re thinking. They don’t care if you eat correctly, they don’t care how your living conditions are, they don’t care that they’ve built up an inhuman and irrational traffic system that’s strangulating us and polluting our air, they don’t care about anything. The only thing about you they care about is what you’re thinking. In the morning, they start, ‘What’s going to be the story today? How do we manipulate, how do we control, how do we contain, how do we influence, how do we act upon what it is that they have in their minds?’”

Manipulating public consciousness is of existential importance to the ruling class, because no matter how many billions of dollars you amass, at the end of the day you’re still a soft skin sack of blood and bones like anybody else, and you share a society with huge numbers of people who can very easily hurt you if they want to. That’s why our minds are constantly being hammered with propaganda into accepting the status quo politics upon which our rulers have built their kingdoms.

But we’re seeing the propaganda losing its grip on our minds. Hollywood tried to train people to believe heroes look like soldiers and cops, or billionaires using their wealth to become Iron Man and Batman, and then the people chose as their hero a guy who was arrested for shooting a health insurance CEO. The other day a DJ threw up pictures of the suspected shooter Luigi Mangione during his concert and drew cheers from the crowd — and this was at a Disney-themed show. 

So that’s why the empire managers are pushing to get their killer robots up and running as quickly as possible.

Israel is reportedly preparing to deploy dozens of weapons systems in the West Bank which are capable of firing deadly rounds without human intervention, meaning fully autonomous killing machines as opposed to remote-controlled. These killer robots have already been in use on Israel’s border with Gaza.

Various military robots have been tested in Gaza since Israel’s onslaught on the enclave began last year, and now they’re expanding the field testing of their murderbots to the West Bank as well. Of all the horrible things Israel and its western backers do to the Palestinians, among the most evil is the way they use them as lab rats to field test new weapons systems so the rest of the empire can learn how effective those systems are.

You may be sure that empire managers like Peter Thiel are watching these developments with keen interest. Militarized robots are the anti-guillotine. They’re the final solution to the ancient “there are a lot more of us than there are of our rulers” problem. Everyone with wealth and power has been eyeing their incremental rollout with intense interest while trying to play it cool.

So at this point we’re essentially looking at a race to see if the oligarchic empire can manufacture the necessary environment to allow the use of robotic security forces to lock their power in place forever before the masses get fed up with the increasing inequalities and abuses of the status quo and decide to force a better system into existence.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

Craig Murray : My Recent Days In Lebanon

Assad denies planning to flee Syria before evacuation by Moscow

The former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad has said he had no plans to flee Syria before being evacuated by the Russian army after its base in western Syria came under attack. In his first comments since the fall of his brutal regime, Assad said he had planned to keep fighting rebel forces. “At no point during these events did I consider stepping down or seeking refuge, nor was such a proposal made by any individual or party. The only course of action was to continue fighting against the terrorist onslaught,” he said in a statement published on the Telegram channel belonging to the Syrian presidency and dated 16 December.

In the statement, Assad said he left Damascus on 8 December as opposition fighters closed in, moving to the Russian-controlled Khmeimim airbase in his stronghold in the Latakia province “to oversee combat operations”.

“Upon arrival at the airbase that morning, it became clear that our forces had completely withdrawn from all battle lines and that the last army positions had fallen,” he added. Assad claimed he was evacuated to Russia after the airbase had “itself come under intensified attack by drone strikes”.

“With no viable means of leaving the base, Moscow requested that the base’s command arrange an immediate evacuation to Russia on the evening of Sunday 8th December,” the statement said. Assad appeared to dismiss media reports alleging that his aides and relatives were misled and kept unaware of his plans to flee to Moscow. “First, my departure from Syria was neither planned nor did it occur during the final hours of the battles, as some have claimed,” he said.

Prof. Jeffrey Sachs : Can Netanyahu Steal Syria?

Turkey condemns Israel plan to double Golan Heights population

Turkey has denounced Israel’s plan to double the population living in the occupied Golan Heights at the south-western edge of Syria as an attempt to “expand its borders”, as international concern grows over Israel’s actions in Syria since the fall of the Assad regime. Israel captured about two-thirds of the Golan Heights from Syria during the 1967 six-day war. Last week, it moved troops and armour into a supposedly demilitarised buffer zone beyond the land it already occupies.

Israel has said the new positions Israeli forces have taken in Syria are a “temporary measure”, but recent statements appear to have undercut that assertion. Last week, Israel indicated that Israeli troops would remain in their new positions through the winter, while on Sunday the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, announced he had approved a plan to double Israeli settlement in the occupied Golan Heights.

“Strengthening the Golan Heights is strengthening the state of Israel,” said Netanyahu in a statement on Sunday evening, “and it is especially important at this time. We will continue to hold on to it, make it flourish and settle it.”

In a statement condemning the move, the Turkish foreign ministry said: “This decision is a new stage in Israel’s goal of expanding its borders through occupation. This step by Israel is a source of grave concern, taken together with Israel’s entry into the area of separation, in violation of the 1974 disengagement agreement, its advance into adjacent areas and airstrikes in Syria.” The move would “seriously undermine” efforts to bring stability to Syria after Bashar al-Assad’s fall, the ministry added.

Netanyahu Moves to Expand Illegal Israeli Settlements in Syrian Golan Heights

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday that Israel would move to expand settlements in the occupied and illegally annexed Golan Heights, exploiting the collapse of the Assad government to further entrench its control of Syrian land.

Netanyahu said in a statement Sunday that "strengthening" the Golan Heights is synonymous with "strengthening the state of Israel" and declared that "we will continue to hold onto it, make it flourish, and settle in it."

According to Netanyahu's office, the Israeli government "unanimously approved" the prime minister's push to double the settler population in the Golan Heights.

There are currently dozens of Israeli settlements housing roughly 20,000 people in the territory, the bulk of which Israel unlawfully annexed in 1981 after occupying it during the 1967 war.

Israel's settlement expansion plan sparked outrage from countries in the region, with Turkey's foreign ministry condemning the decision Sunday as "a new stage in Israel's goal of expanding its borders through occupation."

The foreign ministry of Saudi Arabia accused Israel of "sabotaging" Syria's "prospects for restoring its security and stability."

"The kingdom reaffirms that the occupied Golan is Syrian, Arab land," the ministry added.

Israel's military has wasted no time advancing on Syrian territory in the wake of Assad's fall. As Drop Site noted over the weekend, "Israeli tanks have advanced into villages and towns in Syria's Quneitra governorate, across from the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, damaging streets, cutting down trees, and destroying electricity poles."

"Israel ordered residents to evacuate their homes. When many refused, Israeli forces destroyed water supply networks and power lines in an attempt to force them out," the outlet added.

Scott Horton : How DC Provoked the New Cold War

LtCol Karen Kwiatkowski : Who Is Biden Fooling?

US Launches More Airstrikes in Syria, Claims 12 ISIS Fighters Killed

US Central Command (CENTCOM) said Monday that its forces launched airstrikes in Syria, claiming the attacks targeted ISIS camps and killed 12 ISIS fighters.

CENTCOM said in a press release that the strikes “were conducted as part of the ongoing mission to disrupt, degrade, and defeat ISIS, preventing the terrorist group from conducting external operations and to ensure that ISIS does not seek opportunities to reconstitute in central Syria.” ...

US officials justify the strikes by saying they don’t want ISIS to reconstitute itself following the regime change. But on the other hand, the US has supported the HTS takeover even though the group is designated by the US as a terrorist organization and has a similar ideology to ISIS.

Activist CNN Reporter Rescues Syrian Prisoner: Is It Propaganda?

Scandal deepens around CNN’s Clarissa Ward staging Syria prison scene

Footage showing CNN’s regime change-crazed correspondent supposedly freeing a forgotten prisoner from a Syrian jail has been exposed a scandalous fraud, yet the network continues to re-air it, while defending its correspondent.

“In nearly twenty years as a journalist, this was one of the most extraordinary moments I have witnessed.” That’s how veteran CNN journalist Clarissa Ward described her foray into a Syrian prison on December 12, where she promptly claimed to have rescued a forgotten inmate after three months in jail. But there was just one problem with the “extraordinary moment”: a review of a dramatic story depicted by CNN reveals a number of glaring inconsistencies, the greatest of which is that the man stands accused of being an impostor.

After countless social media users shredded CNN’s story, a fact-checking organization with ties to the US government has exposed the prisoner seemingly liberated in Ward’s theatrical performance turns out to have been a low level Syrian intelligence official jailed for corruption and abuse charges. CNN finally addressed the deepening scandal on December 15, declaring that it would investigate the subject of Ward’s piece. However, the network continues to protect the correspondent responsible for the journalistic flim-flam, while rebroadcasting the staged report for its views day after day.

With Ward still stationed in jihadist-held Damascus, it appears that her bosses are refusing to allow any editorial standards or professional ethics get in the way of a successful Western-backed regime change operation.

CNN is still airing this staged segment despite it being exposed as a fraud and community noted. Zero editorial standards necessary when advancing regime change, and no consequences for news actors like @clarissaward. https://t.co/mH3H6yWE13

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) December 15, 2024

Alex Gibney on "The Bibi Files," Netanyahu's Corruption Case & How Endless War Keeps Him in Power

German chancellor Olaf Scholz loses confidence vote, triggering early elections

Olaf Scholz has lost a historic vote of confidence in the German parliament, paving the way for early national elections following the collapse of his government. The German chancellor had called the vote in order to deliberately lose it, urging the Bundestag, or lower house of parliament, to declare its lack of confidence in him so that the first formal step could be made towards triggering new elections.

Scholz will now ask the president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, to dissolve parliament, and to formally call new elections which have to take place within 60 days and have been pencilled in for 23 February. The embattled chancellor required 367 votes of no confidence on Monday to succeed in his aim, and in the end 394 MPs obliged him. There were 207 yes votes, and 116 abstentions.

“My goal is to bring the federal election forward,” Scholz had told a packed chamber in a forceful speech. “This is about having trust in our country and not putting our future at risk.” Scholz said his aim was to shore up confidence in the future of the country, insisting: “Germany’s best days lie ahead of us.”

Scholz’s three-way “traffic light” coalition collapsed in November after the pro-business Free Democrats (FDP) quit in protest over the chancellor’s sacking of the finance minister, Christian Lindner, over deep disagreements around debt management.

Canada's Ukronazi finance minister steps down:

Canada’s deputy PM resigns from cabinet as tensions with Trudeau rise over Trump tariffs

Canada’s deputy prime minister and minister of finance has resigned amid growing tensions with the prime minister, Justin Trudeau, over the looming threat posed by Donald Trump’s “America First” economic nationalism. Chrystia Freeland stood down on Monday, just hours before she was due to release the country’s first economic plan ahead of the change of administration in Washington.

The move stunned the country, left Trudeau without a key cabinet ally, and raised fresh doubts over the prime minister’s political survival. Political observers were closely reading the resignation letter by Freeland, who has previously served as foreign affairs minister and was once a journalist, and is seen as a ready replacement for Trudeau.

Relations between Canada and the US have been upended by Trump’s pledge to slap a 25% levy on all Canadian goods and services.

“For the past number of weeks, you and I have found ourselves at odds about the best path forward for Canada,” said Freeland in a letter to the prime minister. “Our country today faces a grave challenge. The incoming administration in the United States is pursuing a policy of aggressive economic nationalism, including a threat of 25% tariffs.

“We need to take that threat extremely seriously.”

Freeland wrote that Canada needs to keep its “fiscal powder dry today” so they have the reserves for a “coming tariff war”. She warned Trudeau that “costly political gimmicks” need to be done away with as they can make Canadians doubt whether the government understands the “gravity of the moment”.

NY Governor Talks about setting up HOTLINE for NERVOUS Executives

Fundraiser for health insurance CEO murder suspect raises more than $120,000

An online fundraiser created for the suspect arrested in the New York murder of Brian Thompson, the UnitedHealthcare CEO, has raised more than $120,000 for his legal defense. Luigi Mangione, 26, was arrested on 9 December in Altoona, Pennsylvania, in connection with Thompson’s killing outside a Manhattan hotel five days earlier.

He has since been charged with second-degree murder, forgery and three gun charges by prosecutors in New York. He faces separate charges in Pennsylvania for carrying a gun without a license, forgery, falsely identifying himself to the authorities and possessing “instruments of crime”.

Mangione’s defense attorney in Pennsylvania, Thomas Dickey, has said that his client will plead not guilty to the charges against him in Pennsylvania and he has been fighting extradition to New York. Mangione is being held in a Pennsylvania jail without bond.

As of Monday morning, an anonymous fundraiser titled “December 4th Legal Committee”– a reference to the date of the shooting – hosted on the GiveSendGo crowdsourcing platform had raised more than $125,000 meant to cover Mangione’s legal fees, with a target goal of $200,000.

The fundraiser states: “This is a preemptive legal fundraiser for the suspect allegedly involved in the shooting of the UnitedHealthcare CEO. We are not here to celebrate violence, but we do believe in the constitutional right of fair legal representation.”

Police in New York suburb routinely used unnecessary strip searches, report finds

A suburban New York police department had a practice of routinely violating residents’ civil rights, including making illegal arrests and using unnecessary strip and cavity searches, according to a new US justice department report. ...

No single incident prompted the investigation into Mount Vernon’s approximately 160-officer force. But the illegal strip-search in 2020 of two women, one age 65 and the other 75, were emblematic of the department’s shortcomings, said the report, which was released at the end of last week. Arrested on suspicion of buying drugs, officers searched the women’s car, found nothing, and hauled them into a police station in handcuffs, the report said. Supervisors there approved a fully nude strip-search by detectives who “told them to bend over and cough”.

After an internal investigation found that the officers had lied about the pair buying drugs, those involved were docked a few vacation days, the report said. ...

Until at least the fall of 2022, it was the Mount Vernon force’s practice to strip-search every person it arrested, according to the report. Officers also strip-searched people they did not arrest, detained and interrogated people without formally arresting them, and arrested people for verbally criticizing police officers. Illegal strip and cavity searches continued into at least 2023, the report found. The investigators said that while the practice was “curtailed” during its investigation, “we are not confident that these practices have ended”.

Among a catalog of unconstitutional arrests, the justice department identified a case where officers took the mother of a shooting victim to a police station and interrogated her, even as her dying daughter was rushed to the hospital. The daughter, struck by a stray bullet, died while her mother was in custody. Officers did not articulate probable cause for her detention. Officers also arrested people for cursing at police, violating their right to free speech, the justice department said.

“Donald Trump Is Smarter Than All Of Us!” – Van Jones

Democrats eye Harris 2028 presidential run as they devise political comeback

Democratic party aides have begun to float ideas for a Kamala Harris political comeback, reportedly eyeing another run at the US’s highest office even as the party continues to grapple with the electoral messages contained in the vice-president’s decisive defeat in November’s White House race against Donald Trump.

Harris, who has reportedly not ruled out a second run for the presidency, is now reported to be considering a run for the California governorship, currently held until 2027 by Gavin Newsom. Newsom was a rumoured presidential contender during the chaotic summer that saw Joe Biden step down from a rematch with Trump – whom he defeated in the 2020 election – and then endorse Harris as his replacement.

According to the Washington Post on Monday, some Democratic party aides believe Trump – who, among other things, overcame a criminal conviction and other such charges to win – has sufficiently overturned the norms of losing White House candidates’ not attempting a second bite at the proverbial apple to give Harris the opportunity of a repeat bid in 2028, this time for the full cycle.

“Since Donald Trump has rewritten the rules – the norms – I don’t believe Kamala Harris or anyone should try to go with precedent, ever,” said Donna Brazile, a Harris ally, Al Gore 2000 presidential campaign manager and political commentator. “There are no rule books.”

"It Broke Him": Mother Who Lost Son in "Kids for Cash" Slams Biden's Clemency for Corrupt Judge

Anxious scientists brace for Trump’s climate denialism: ‘We have a target on our backs’

As the world’s largest gathering of Earth and space scientists swarmed a Washington venue last week, the packed halls have been permeated by an air of anxiety and even dread over a new Donald Trump presidency that might worsen what has been a bruising few years for science. The annual American Geophysical Union (AGU) meeting drew a record 31,000 attendees this year for the unveiling of a slew of new research on everything from seismology to climate science to heliospheric physics, alongside a sprawling trade show and bouts of networking as scientists jostle to advance their work.

As grad students and grizzled researchers huddled around pin-boarded presentations in a cavernous exhibition space, however, one person dominated muttered conversations: Trump. The president-elect has called climate science a “giant scam” and when last in office sought to gut US scientific funding and sidelined or even punished scientists deemed unfriendly to the interests of the chemical and fossil fuel industries.

The prospect of an even more ideologically driven Trump administration slashing budgets and mass-firing federal staff has given America’s scientific community a sort of collective anxiety attack. “We all feel like we have a target on our backs,” said one National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientist, who added that agency staff are already seeking to “pivot” by replacing mentions of the climate crisis with more acceptable terms such as “air quality”.

“Some of the signals coming out right now make people nervous about what’s going to happen to their jobs, their livelihoods, let alone what their science is,” said Ben Zaitchik, a climate scientist who will be president-elect of the AGU next year. “You could say people are feeling beleaguered or besieged, but many are also motivated. At the same time, it’s a time of transition. So we just don’t know.”

‘Like a giant bird box’: the volunteers building huge snowdrifts for Finland’s pregnant seals

Eight hours shovelling snow in -20C might not sound like the ideal day out, but a committed team of volunteers in Finland are working dawn to dusk building enormous snow drifts for one of the world’s most endangered seals. The Saimaa ringed seal was once widespread across Finland but is now confined to Lake Saimaa in the south-east of the country, where just 495 of them remain. The seals make “snow caves” inside snow drifts where they raise their young and protect them from the elements and predators such as red foxes – but as the climate warms, the snow is disappearing.

To save these rare seals, 300 volunteers spend days shovelling snow into piles 7m long and 1.5m high around the edge of the frozen lake. Last winter they made 200, and the seal population is growing as a result. “It’s kind of a snow cave,” says Vincent Biard, a PhD student and volunteer from the University of Eastern Finland. “The seals come from under and dig into the snow drifts to create a cave where they can give birth and raise their young.” ...

More than 300 pups have been born in artificial snowdrifts since they started making them in 2014. “We are on a rising growth curve, so things still look pretty nice,” says Jari Ilmonen, coordinator of Our Saimaa Seal Life, which is an EU-funded programme. “We are doing what we can, so we have to have hope and positive thoughts.”

Saimaa seals are less than 1.5 metres long and each one has a unique fur pattern – individual to each animal, like human fingerprints. In the late 1980s their population dwindled to its lowest point, with fewer than 200 left, driven by hunting and deaths caused by fish traps. Accidental deaths in fishing nets remain a challenge.

Also of Interest

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

UnitedHealthcare & Corporate Rule

Michael Moore responds to Luigi Mangione’s manifesto

The UR Rule Of Civilizations Worth Living In

South Korea - Impeached Coup President 'Aligned With Washington's Values'

$663 Billion in Cash Assets Have Gone Poof at the Largest U.S. Banks

Vijay Prashad: The Eighth Continent of Sleaze

Congressional Report Warns of Climate Threat to US Insurance, Housing Markets

Toxic ‘Forever Chemicals’ Taint Rural California Drinking Water, Far From Known Sources

Can Colombia’s ‘crazy’ cattle ranchers make beef an eco-friendly choice?

'DEFIED GRAVITY': Ro Khanna DEBUNKS Dem Cope

A Little Night Music

Mercy Dee Walton - The Main Event

Mercy Dee Walton - My Woman And The Devil

Mercy Dee Walton - One Room Country Shack

Mercy Dee Walton - Bird Brain Baby

Mercy Dee Walton - Red Light

Mercy Dee Walton - Pauline

Mercy Dee Walton - After The Fight

Mercy Dee - Stubborn Woman

Mercy Dee Walton - Get To Gettin'