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"I started studying what the nature of a monument is and what a monument should be. And for the World War III memorial I designed a futile, almost terrifying passage that ends nowhere."

-- Maya Lin

News and Opinion

This is an interesting article, here's a slice to get you started:

Patrick Lawrence: Our World of Wars, Our War of Worlds

It is some years now since a lot of people began imagining the specter of World War III in the near or middle distance. This kind of thinking has been especially common since the U.S., with determination and purpose, provoked Russia to intervene in Ukraine three years ago this coming February. A few weeks later President Joe Biden defended his decision to block the transfer of fighter jets to the Kiev regime by famously remarking, “That’s called World War III.” It is obvious now, if it wasn’t then, that the Biden White House had already begun playing a reckless game of footsie with the Russians. Kiev now has squadrons of F–16s in the air, Abrams tanks on the ground, and Patriot missiles standing guard. Same story.

When, in mid-November, Biden (or whoever makes decisions in his name) gave Ukraine permission to fire long-range missiles into Russia, warnings of World War III came quickly. “Joe Biden is dangerously trying to start WWIII,” Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia Republican, said on “X.” You heard similar remarks from the Kremlin and the Russian Duma.

The risk of a new global conflict could scarcely be more evident as 2025 begins. A sound survey of our geopolitical circumstances tells us the imperium, in an increasingly desperate state as its hegemony is challenged, is effectively spoiling for decisive confrontations with any power that threatens its longstanding but crumbling primacy. As I have argued severally these past few years, the policy cliques in Washington concluded they had reached a shoot-the-moon moment when they committed the U.S. to the proxy war in Ukraine, an all-out operation to bring down the Russian Federation.

We must now read this hubristic ambition as part of a larger story, a worldwide story, a story of war everywhere you look. But we need to get beyond all thoughts that we stand at the edge of a “World War III” of the kind that scarred the previous century. The phrase obscures more than it reveals. It prompts us to search the past for an understanding of our present, and — as is the case with so much about our new century — the past is not of much use to us. At some point — I would say after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 — we entered uncharted territory. The world is at war, yes, but ours are wars of a different kind by way of the technologies and methods used to wage them — to say nothing of the objectives of those who start them. The nature of power and how it is exercised have been transformed. When taken together, the sheer magnitude of our wars is — and I am ever cautious with this term — unprecedented.

Like it or not we are making history, to put this point another way. And when one’s age is making history there is no repeating or referencing history because the events of the age have no parallel in the past. The two world wars were waged in defense of democracy and ended with negotiations after decisive victories on battlefields. The wars we witness — let us be very clear about this — are destroying democracy, and those waging these wars make it bitterly plain they have no intention of negotiating anything with those they have turned into adversaries.

Biden's Gift To Israel On Way Out Of Office!

The Genocidal Legacy of Joe Biden Will Not Be Forgotten

When news broke over the weekend that President Biden just approved an $8 billion deal for shipping weapons to Israel, a nameless official vowed that “we will continue to provide the capabilities necessary for Israel's defense.” Following the reports last month from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch concluding that Israeli actions in Gaza are genocide, Biden’s decision was a new low for his presidency.

It’s logical to focus on Biden as an individual. His choices to keep sending huge quantities of weaponry to Israel have been pivotal and calamitous. But the presidential genocide and the active acquiescence of the vast majority of Congress are matched by the dominant media and overall politics of the United States.

Forty days after the Gaza war began, Anne Boyer announced her resignation as poetry editor of the New York Times Magazine. More than a year later, her statement illuminates why the moral credibility of so many liberal institutions has collapsed in the wake of Gaza’s destruction.

While Boyer denounced “the Israeli state’s U.S.-backed war against the people of Gaza,” she emphatically chose to disassociate herself from the nation’s leading liberal news organization: “I can’t write about poetry amidst the ‘reasonable’ tones of those who aim to acclimatize us to this unreasonable suffering. No more ghoulish euphemisms. No more verbally sanitized hellscapes. No more warmongering lies.”

The acclimatizing process soon became routine. It was most crucially abetted by President Biden and his loyalists, who were especially motivated to pretend that he wasn’t really doing what he was really doing.

For mainline journalists, the process required the willing suspension of belief in a consistent standard of language and humanity. When Boyer acutely grasped the dire significance of its Gaza coverage, she withdrew from “the newspaper of record.”

Content analysis of the war’s first six weeks found that coverage by the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times had a steeply dehumanizing slant toward Palestinians. The three papers “disproportionately emphasized Israeli deaths in the conflict” and “used emotive language to describe the killings of Israelis, but not Palestinians,” a study by The Intercept showed. “The term ‘slaughter’ was used by editors and reporters to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 60 to 1, and ‘massacre’ was used to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 125 to 2. ‘Horrific’ was used to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 36 to 4.”

After a year of the Gaza war, Arab-American historian Rashid Khalidi said: “My objection to organs of opinion like the New York Times is that they see absolutely everything from an Israeli perspective. ‘How does it affect Israel, how do the Israelis see it?’ Israel is at the center of their worldview, and that’s true of our elites generally, all over the West. The Israelis have very shrewdly, by preventing direct reportage from Gaza, further enabled that Israelocentric perspective.”

Khalidi summed up: “The mainstream media is as blind as it ever was, as willing to shill for any monstrous Israeli lie, to act as stenographers for power, repeating what is said in Washington.”

The conformist media climate smoothed the way for Biden and his prominent rationalizers to slide off the hook and shape the narrative, disguising complicity as evenhanded policy. Meanwhile, mighty boosts of Israel’s weapons and ammunition were coming from the United States. Nearly half of the Palestinians they killed were children.

For those children and their families, the road to hell was paved with good doublethink. So, for instance, while the Gaza horrors went on, no journalist would confront Biden with what he’d said at the time of the widely decried school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, when the president had quickly gone on live television. “There are parents who will never see their child again,” he said, adding: “To lose a child is like having a piece of your soul ripped away. . . . It’s a feeling shared by the siblings, and the grandparents, and their family members, and the community that’s left behind.” And he asked plaintively, “Why are we willing to live with this carnage? Why do we keep letting this happen?”

The massacre in Uvalde killed 19 children. The daily massacre in Gaza has taken the lives of that many Palestinian kids in a matter of hours.

While Biden refused to acknowledge the ethnic cleansing and mass murder that he kept making possible, Democrats in his orbit cooperated with silence or other types of evasion. A longstanding maneuver amounts to checking the box for a requisite platitude by affirming support for a “two-state solution.”

Dominating Capitol Hill, an unspoken precept has held that Palestinian people are expendable as a practical political matter. Party leaders like Senator Chuck Schumer and Representative Hakeem Jeffries did virtually nothing to indicate otherwise. Nor did they exert themselves to defend incumbent House Democrats Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush, defeated in summer primaries with an unprecedented deluge of multimillion-dollar ad campaigns funded by AIPAC and Republican donors.

The overall media environment was a bit more varied but no less lethal for Palestinian civilians. During its first several months, the Gaza war received huge quantities of mainstream media coverage, which thinned over time; the effects were largely to normalize the continual slaughter. Some exceptional reporting existed about the suffering, but the journalism gradually took on a media ambience akin to background noise, while credulously hyping Biden’s weak ceasefire efforts as determined quests.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu came in for increasing amounts of criticism. But the prevalent U.S. media coverage and political rhetoric—unwilling to expose the Israeli mission to destroy Palestinians en masse—rarely went beyond portraying Israel’s leaders as insufficiently concerned with protecting Palestinian civilians.

Instead of candor about horrific truths, the usual tales of U.S. media and politics have offered euphemisms and evasions.

When she resigned as the New York Times Magazine poetry editor in mid-November 2023, Anne Boyer condemned what she called “an ongoing war against the people of Palestine, people who have resisted through decades of occupation, forced dislocation, deprivation, surveillance, siege, imprisonment, and torture.” Another poet, William Stafford, wrote decades ago:

I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

Will ANY Administration Stop Supporting Israel?

Reports of optimism about Gaza ceasefire and hostage release deal

Israel and Hamas appear to be edging closer towards a ceasefire and hostage release deal that could bring the bloodshed in the Gaza Strip to an end amid reports of optimism among decision makers.

The latest round of negotiations intended to broker a lasting truce in the 15-month-old conflict resumed in Qatar on Sunday. Hamas said on Monday that it had given mediators a list of 34 Israeli captives seized during the group’s attack on Israel on 7 October 2023, which triggered the war, who could be freed as part of the “first phase of a prisoner exchange deal”.

The list included the remaining women, children and older and injured people, Hamas said, although Israel said the militant group had yet to convey whether those named were alive or dead. A Hamas official told Agence France-Presse that the group needed at least a week of calm in Gaza to determine the hostages’ locations and communicate with captors about their status.

Despite the latest talks, Israel has stepped up airstrikes on the Palestinian territory that killed at least 100 people over the weekend, local health officials said. The Israeli military did not immediately comment on the toll. ...

Several rounds of talks mediated by the US, Egypt and Qatar have failed to produce a lasting ceasefire. Officials have repeatedly voiced optimism that a breakthrough was close only for the negotiations to founder.

"Requiem for a Refugee Camp": Mosab Abu Toha on Destruction of Jabaliya, Abduction of Doctors & More

.@LuluGNavarro: Do you worry you’ve been presiding over what the world will see as a genocide?

Blinken: No. It's not, first of all. Second, as to how the world sees it, I can't fully answer to that

No… He can’t even pretend to care. Seeing it is so much worse than reading it. pic.twitter.com/JGofIYivNs

— Assal Rad (@AssalRad) January 5, 2025

AMB. Chas Freeman : Is Israel Destroying Itself?

'Morally Bankrupt' Biden Blasted for $8 Billion More in Arms to Israel Amid Gaza Genocide

Human rights advocates in the United States and around the world on Monday condemned outgoing U.S. President Joe Biden for continuing to fuel Israel's genocidal assault on the Gaza Strip with a pending $8 billion weapons package.

Since Axios revealed late Friday that his administration had notified Congress of the deal, Biden has faced a fresh flood of outrage, with critics calling the president "morally bankrupt" and his decision to keep arming Israel "willful madness."

"Too many kids still alive in Gaza for Joe Biden's liking," Yousef Munayyer, a Palestinian American political analyst, said on social media. "This is an administration of cowards and criminals and will go down as a historic worst."

Two men who resigned from the Biden administration over U.S. support for Israel's assault on Gaza—which has killed at least 45,854 Palestinians and led to a genocide case at the International Court of Justice—shared sharp critiques on Monday.

"The Biden administration is ending its tenure as it has acted throughout it," said ex-U.S. State Department official Josh Paul, "with a complete disregard for Palestinian humanity, American laws, and American interests."

Paul and former Education Department official Tariq Habash launched the lobbying group A New Policy in October. Habash also took aim at Biden's new effort to arm Israel with missiles for fighter jets and attack helicopters, 155 mm artillery shells, small-diameter bombs, 50-pound warheads, bomb fuzes, and kits used to convert "dumb bombs" into precision-guided munitions.

"Americans continue to struggle here at home, so the notion that the Biden administration would push another $8 billion in weapons to Israel on the backs of American [taxpayers] demonstrates how unmoored this administration has become from its values and its commitments to the American people," said Habash. "The precedent set by the Biden administration will surely haunt our nation for many years to come."

UN World Food Program Denounces Israeli Attack on 'Clearly Marked' Convoy in Gaza

The United Nations World Food Program said Monday that Israeli forces opened fire on one of the organization's aid convoys at a checkpoint in central Gaza over the weekend, an attack that the organization condemned as "horrifying."

"This unacceptable event is just the latest example of the complex and dangerous working environment that WFP and other agencies are operating in today," the organization said in a statement, noting that the convoy was "clearly marked" and that it had "received all of the necessary clearances from Israeli authorities" prior to Sunday's attack.

"Security conditions in Gaza must urgently improve for lifesaving humanitarian assistance to continue," WFP said, urging "all parties to respect international humanitarian law, protect civilian lives, and allow safe passage for humanitarian aid."

At least 16 bullets struck the WFP convoy on Sunday, but none of the eight staffers traveling in the three vehicles that came under Israeli attack on Sunday were killed or wounded, WFP said.

It was nonetheless a "terrifying encounter" that underscored the dangers facing aid workers attempting to deliver food and other necessities to starving and desperate people across the Gaza Strip.

Israeli Attacks Kill 49 More Palestinians in the Gaza Strip

Gaza’s Health Ministry said Monday that Israeli attacks across the Gaza Strip killed 49 Palestinians and wounded 75 over the previous 24-hour period as the daily US-backed slaughter continues.

The ministry’s figures only account for dead and wounded Palestinians who were brought to hospitals. “A number of victims are still under the rubble and on the roads, and ambulance and civil defense crews cannot reach them,” the ministry wrote on Telegram.

Among those killed by Israeli strikes was Thabat Saleem, a 30-year-old neonatal doctor who volunteered at the al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, according to Middle East Eye. She was killed by a strike on her home in central Gaza’s Nuseirat refugee camp.

As Israel Flouts Lebanon Ceasefire, DM Says Deal May Be Scrapped Entirely

With just a few weeks left in the 60-day ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon, it seems increasingly that not only will the war resume after that, but the ceasefire may not last, even in pretense, for the whole 60 days.

Israel continues to commit dozens of violations daily, attacking southern Lebanon and invading new towns that they hadn’t occupied during the war itself. Maroun al-Ras and Burj al-Mukuk were the latest areas to be taken by Israeli troops.

Ironically, Israeli DM Israel Katz is claiming that the main ceasefire threat is Hezbollah not fulfilling requirements, and that “Israel will be forced to act.” Since they keep attacking targets in Lebanon throughout the ceasefire, it’s not clear what this would actually change, beyond rhetoric.

It’s increasingly likely that Israel won’t leave Lebanon within the 60 days, and indeed it is being reported Israel intends to inform the US of its intentions to stay in Lebanon past the deadline. They also will inform the US that they’ve decided that Lebanese civilians cannot be allowed to return to the border villages. Israel has been demolishing towns and villages in the border area, and has warned civilians to stay out.

Kursk Debacle Part 2. Zelensky Minsk deception

US transfers 11 Yemeni prisoners from Guantánamo to Oman

The United States has sent 11 Yemeni detainees at the Guantánamo Bay detention center to Oman, the Pentagon said on Monday, in a major resettlement that nearly halves the detention facility’s remaining number of prisoners.

The released men include Tawfiq al-Bihani, who had been cleared for transfer since 2010; Khalid Qassim, a long-term hunger striker who has spoken about spending most of his adult life in Guantánamo; and Hassan bin Attash, who was captured in a security raid in Pakistan in 2002. His older brother, Walid bin Attash, remains detained and is a defendant in a military tribunal, accused of helping to plot the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the US.

None of the men in the latest transfer out of the camp had been criminally charged or put on trial during their two decades of detention. All were approved for transfer through federal national security officials. The men had remained in detention despite being deemed by the US eligible for release for a number of years because they could not legally be returned to Yemen, which remains in the grip of a civil war and deemed by the US to be too unstable to rehabilitate such returnees.

Their release leaves just 15 prisoners at Guantánamo, the smallest number of detainees in the facility’s 22-year history. An estimated 780 people have passed through Guantánamo’s cells.

Austria’s far-right Freedom party tasked with forming coalition government

Austria’s president has tasked the anti-migration, pro-Kremlin Freedom party (FPÖ) with holding talks to form a ruling coalition, potentially paving the way for the far right to lead the government for the first time since the second world war. After meeting the FPÖ leader, Herbert Kickl, at the Hofburg palace in Vienna, Alexander van der Bellen said the party, which narrowly won the most votes in September’s general election, could begin negotiations with the conservative Austrian People’s party (ÖVP) on forming a governing alliance.

“I didn’t take this decision lightly,” said the president, who under the constitution formally names the chancellor. “I will continue to make sure that the principles and rules of our constitution are respected and upheld.” Months-long negotiations by mainstream parties to form a coalition to block the far right collapsed at the weekend because of differences on how to revive the ailing Austrian economy and manage public finances.

The chancellor, Karl Nehammer of the ÖVP, announced his intention to resign on Saturday after the talks broke down. He had repeatedly ruled out becoming junior partner to the FPÖ with Kickl as the head of government. Some commentators said the U-turn by Nehammer’s party bordered on voter fraud.

The ÖVP said on Sunday it had nominated its general secretary, Christian Stocker, to act as interim leader. Stocker has expressed his willingness to negotiate with the FPÖ and has received his party’s blessing to do so.

Permanent contraception surged after Roe v Wade overturned

In the months after the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, permanent contraception in the form of tubal sterilizations and vasectomies surged among young adults living in states likely to ban abortion, new research released on Monday found.

Compared to May 2022, when the opinion overturning Roe leaked, August 2022 saw 95% more vasectomies and 70% more tubal sterilizations performed on people between the ages of 19 and 26, according to the study, which was conducted by researchers at the George Washington University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Michigan.

In addition to analyzing data about medical visits for permanent contraception before and after the opinion’s leak, the researchers also examined survey responses from more than 600 people between the ages of 14 and 24 who were asked about the fall of Roe.

“It has made me want to be sterilized more,” said one 24-year-old female survey respondent from the US south. “The pill isn’t 100% effective and I’m afraid of losing access to it, and I do not want children in the future and would much rather be sterilized. I’m afraid of getting pregnant and not being able to make decisions for myself.”

Minneapolis agrees to court-supervised police reform after George Floyd’s killing

The Minneapolis city council on Monday approved an agreement with the federal government in response to the murder of George Floyd that would require reforms within the city’s police department under longterm court supervision.

The agreement was not immediately released publicly, but it was expected to incorporate and build on changes the police department has already made to its policies on the use of force and training of officers following Floyd’s death in 2020.

The city attorney Kristyn Anderson said it would become public after it was filed in federal court, which she said would happen “promptly” after city and federal officials gave their final signatures.

The agreement, known as a consent decree, had been under negotiation since the Department of Justice issued a scathing critique of the city’s police in June 2023.

The report alleged that police systematically discriminated against racial minorities, violated constitutional rights and disregarded the safety of people in custody for years before Floyd, a Black man, was killed by a white Minneapolis officer. Floyd’s death prompted a national reckoning with police brutality and entrenched racism.

Frontrunners to lead DNC emerge as defeated Democrats aim to bounce back

As Republicans prepare to seize the reins of power in Washington, a low-profile race to head the Democrats’ national governing body is being flagged up as the first milestone on the party’s agonising road to electoral recovery. Two middle-aged men from the northern midwest have been tipped as frontrunners to succeed the outgoing Jaime Harrison as chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), a post from which the groundwork for the recapture of Congress and the White House is expected to be undertaken.

They are Ken Martin, 51, of Minnesota and Ben Wikler, 43, of Wisconsin, both leaders of the Democrats in their respective states. The DNC will elect its new leader on 1 February. Neither appears to have generated widespread excitement, according to party elders, and only Wikler has attracted the endorsement of a leading Democrat. Chuck Schumer, the Democratic minority leader in the Senate, has thrown his support behind Wikler.

“Had Kamala [Harris] or [Joe] Biden made a call and said, ‘Look, we want to rally around X, Y and Z,’ I may have taken an interest in someone,” Donna Brazile, a veteran DNC member and previous interim party chair, told the New York Times. “Other than giving state parties more resources, which is as old as the Republic itself, I haven’t heard anything new.”

Her comment was an apparent reference to Martin’s campaign platform of returning power to the state parties. Martin’s supporters have assailed Wikler as a representative of wealthy Democratic donors and party consultants in Washington.

Climate crisis ‘wreaking havoc’ on Earth’s water cycle

The climate crisis is “wreaking havoc” on the planet’s water cycle, with ferocious floods and crippling droughts affecting billions of people, a report has found. Water is people’s most vital natural resource but global heating is changing the way water moves around the Earth. The analysis of water disasters in 2024, which was the hottest year on record, found they had killed at least 8,700 people, driven 40 million from their homes and caused economic damage of more than $550bn (£445bn).

Rising temperatures, caused by continued burning of fossil fuels, disrupt the water cycle in multiple ways. Warmer air can hold more water vapour, leading to more intense downpours. Warmer seas provide more energy to hurricanes and typhoons, supercharging their destructive power. Global heating can also increase drought by causing more evaporation from soil, as well as shifting rainfall patterns.

Deadly flash floods hit Nepal and Brazil in 2024, while river flooding caused devastation in central Europe, China and Bangladesh. Super Typhoon Yagi, which struck south-east Asia in September, was intensified by the climate crisis, as was Storm Boris which hit Europe the same month. Droughts also caused major damage, with crop production in southern Africa halving, causing more than 30 million people to face food shortages. Farmers were also forced to cull livestock as their pastures dried up, and falling output from hydropower dams led to widespread blackouts.

“In 2024, Earth experienced its hottest year on record and water systems across the globe bore the brunt, wreaking havoc on the water cycle,” said the report’s leader, Prof Albert van Dijk. He said 2024 was a year of extremes but that was not an isolated occurrence. “It is part of a worsening trend of more intense floods, prolonged droughts, and record-breaking extremes.” The report warned of even greater dangers in 2025 as carbon emissions continued to rise .

Biden bans new drilling in US coastal waters weeks before Trump handover

Joe Biden has banned offshore drilling across an immense area of coastal waters, weeks before Donald Trump takes office pledging to massively increase fossil fuel production.

The US president’s ban encompasses the entire Atlantic coast and eastern Gulf of Mexico, as well as the Pacific coast off California, Oregon and Washington, and a section of the Bering Sea off Alaska.

A White House statement said the declaration protected more than 253m hectares (625m acres) of waters. Trump said he would “unban it immediately” as soon as he re-enters the White House on 20 January, although it is unclear whether he will be able to do this easily.

“As the climate crisis continues to threaten communities across the country and we are transitioning to a clean energy economy, now is the time to protect these coasts for our children and grandchildren,” Biden said in a statement. ...

The ban does not have an end date and could be legally – and politically – tricky for Trump to overturn. Biden is taking the action under the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act of 1953, which gives the federal government authority over the exploitation of offshore resources. A total of eight presidents have withdrawn territory from drilling under the act, including Trump himself who barred oil and gas extraction off the coasts of Florida, Georgia and South Carolina. However, the law does not expressly provide for presidents to unilaterally reverse a drilling ban without going through Congress.

Also of Interest

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

Leaked emails expose ‘collaborative efforts’ between Israeli govt and Center for Countering Digital Hate

Video Surfaces of Syria’s New Justice Minister Overseeing Executions of Women in 2015

Shrinking trees and tuskless elephants: the strange ways species are adapting to humans

Justin Trudeau just DESTROYED Canada this morning, it's over

AOC's Blatant January 6th LIES

Musk Building X Into MASSIVE Surveillance Tool! w/ Whitney Webb

Recent Terror Attacks Have CIA Fingerprints All Over Them! w/ Whitney Webb

A Little Night Music

Percy Mayfield – Stranger In My Own Home Town

Percy Mayfield – My Story About A Woman

Percy Mayfield – Memory Pain

Percy Mayfield – Are You Out There?

Percy Mayfield – I Don't Want To Be The President

Percy Mayfield – Freeway

Percy Mayfield – Hit The Road Jack

Percy Mayfield - Louisiana

Percy Mayfield & Phillip Walker ~ Two Years Of Torture & My Jug And I