Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features blues singer and harmonica player Buster Brown. Enjoy!

"Civilization has made man, if not always more bloodthirsty, at least more viciously, more horribly bloodthirsty."

-- Fyodor Dostoevsky

News and Opinion

Genocidal President, Genocidal Politics

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.

Prof. Jeffrey Sachs : Netanyahu Now Afraid to Fly

AMB. Chas Freeman : Netanyahu Instigating War with Iran

Joe Biden says Israel and Hamas on the brink of sealing ceasefire deal

Joe Biden has said his administration is on the brink of sealing a ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas that could pause the war after more than 14 months of fighting. In a speech in Washington meant to showcase his foreign policy achievements, the US president said on Monday that the contours of the deal matched a “proposal that I laid out in detail months ago”.

Senior Biden administration officials have said they believe the ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas may still be concluded before Donald Trump’s inauguration next week as the Israeli government has also confirmed progress in the talks.

The US national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said there was a “distinct possibility” the deal could be reached before Joe Biden left office, as the “pressure is building for Hamas”.

“We are close to a deal, and it can get done this week. I am not making a promise or prediction but it is there for the taking and we are going to work to make it happen,” Sullivan said at a briefing at the White House on Monday. ...

Bezalel Smotrich, a far-right member of the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling coalition, decried the emerging deal as a “catastrophe for the national security of the state of Israel”.

“We will not be part of a surrender deal that would include releasing terrorist hostages, stopping the war and dissolving its achievements that were bought with much blood, and abandoning many hostages,” Smotrich wrote on X.

Trump RAISES EYEBROWS, Shares Video Of Sachs TRASHING Netanyahu

Trump HUMILIATES Biden By FORCING Israel To Negotiate

Gaza Ceasefire Proves Biden Wanted Genocide

Trump famously said that he wanted the hostages released by January 20th or there’d be hell to pay.

Well, we now have what appears to be a ceasefire deal. All hostages won’t be released by the 20th, but it won’t be long afterwards.

As Ryan Grim states, Biden wasn’t “weak”, he was for the genocide. And as many of us noted, the war could always have been ended by the US with one phone call, because it could not be waged without US support. Israel is completely dependent on American weapons and ammunition shipments, as well as US economic aid.

Lots of stuff is still up in the air, including who will control Gaza afterwards, and we’ll see if Israel actually lets aid in. But the deal appears to be basically the same deal as the one offered in July which Netanyahu kiboshed. The difference now is that Trump, even if not officially President yet, is calling the shots. Biden could have ended it in July and saved a ton of lives.

SHOCKING 60 Minutes Segment Reveals Biden’s Israel Policy Disaster

In 60 Minutes Interview, Ex-State Dept. Officials Spotlight US Complicity in Gaza Assault

In a Sunday interview with 60 Minutes, former State Department officials spoke with journalist Cecilia Vega and offered a window into how the United States has greased the wheels of carnage in Gaza.

Hala Rharrit, an American diplomat who spent 18 years working on human rights and counterterrorism in the Middle East and elsewhere, left her post last spring—becoming the first State Department diplomat to publicly resign over the Biden administration's policies backing Israel's siege on Gaza, according to Democracy Now!.

Rharrit would send daily reports to senior leadership in Washington containing "gruesome images and her warnings," according to 60 Minutes. "I would show the complicity that was indisputable. Fragments of U.S. bombs next to massacres of... mostly children," Rharrit recounted.

Here's what else Rharrit had to say:

Cecilia Vega: When you tried to speak out, vocalize what you saw.... like you were told to shut up?

Hala Rharrit: Yes. I would show images of children that were starved to death. In one incident, I was basically berated, "Don't put that image in there. We don't wanna see it. We don't wanna see that the children are starving to death."

Cecilia Vega: Who told you that?

Hala Rharrit: A colleague.

The United States has offered largely unchecked support for Israel since Hamas fighters attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, prompting Israel to launch attacks on the Gaza Strip. The U.S. has provided Israel with at least $17.9 billion in military aid to its ally in the Middle East, and in early January the State Department informed Congress of a planned $8 billion arms sale. Local health officials in Gaza say the death toll in the enclave stands at over 46,000. However, a recently published peer-reviewed analysis estimates that Israel's assault on Gaza had actually killed 64,260 people between October 7, 2023 and June 30, 2024—a figure significantly higher than the one reported by the enclave's health ministry.

Meanwhile, multiple human rights organizations have said that Israel's conduct in Gaza constitutes genocide or acts of genocide.

60 Minutes tallies that 13 officials in the White House, Army, and State Department have publicly resigned in protest.

"There is a linkage between every single bomb that is dropped in Gaza and the U.S. because every single bomb that is dropped is dropped from an American-made plane," Josh Paul, a former director in the State Department's Bureau of Political - Military Affairs who resigned shortly after October 7, told 60 Minutes.

"After October 7th, there was no space for debate or discussion. I was part of email chains where there were very clear directions saying, 'Here are the latest requests from Israel. These need to be approved by 3:00 pm,'" said Paul, who was involved in signing off on U.S. security assistance to other countries.

Andrew Miller, a former deputy assistant secretary of state for Israeli-Palestinian affairs, resigned last June to spend more time with his family, but has since gone public with concerns about U.S.'s role in the war—the highest ranking official to do so thus far, according to 60 Minutes.

In reference to 2,000-pound bombs that the U.S. has supplied to Israel, Miller said that "the Israelis were using those bombs in some instances to target one or two individuals in densely packed areas. And in enough instances, we saw that was in question, how Israel was using it. And those weapons were suspended."

The U.S. suspended a shipment of 2,000 pound bombs to Israel in spring 2024, though in general weapons have continued to flow.

Reacting to Miller’s comments that Israel bombed densely packed areas, one observer wrote Sunday: “60 Minutes is finally exposing the supply chain of genocide.”

Israeli Attacks Kill 45 More Palestinians Across Gaza

The Israeli military continued its relentless bombing of Gaza on Monday, killing at least 45 more Palestinians across the Strip, medical sources told Al Jazeera.

Israeli strikes on Monday included heavy attacks on Gaza City, including a strike on a school-turned-shelter for displaced Palestinians, which killed at least five. ...

The heavy attacks come amid reports of progress in the hostage and ceasefire talks between Israel and Hamas. “The more we’re hearing about a potential ceasefire, the higher the pace of the attacks and a surge in the airstrikes in Gaza City,” said Hani Mahmoud, an Al Jazeera reporter based in Deir el-Balah, central Gaza.

Ceasefire or Not, Palestinian Liberation is Inevitable w/ Ali Abunimah

Speeches by politicians banned at 80th anniversary of Auschwitz’s liberation

Monarchs, presidents and prime ministers are expected among the attenders at a commemoration event for the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz later this month, but none of them will be let near a microphone.

In a first for a “round” anniversary of the liberation, the Auschwitz museum has banned all speeches by politicians at the event on 27 January, which will mark 80 years since the day Soviet troops liberated the camp in 1945. Only Auschwitz survivors will speak, in what is likely to be the last big commemoration when many are still alive and healthy enough to travel.

“There will be no political speeches at all,” said Piotr Cywiński, director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial and museum, in a recent interview with the Guardian. “We want to focus on the last survivors that are among us and on their history, their pain, their trauma and their way to offer us some difficult moral obligations for the present,” he added.

Contemporary politics are nonetheless swirling around the buildup to the event, threatening to overshadow the remembrance ceremony. Earlier this month, Poland’s deputy foreign minister suggested authorities would be obliged to arrest the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, if he travelled to Poland for the ceremony, given the international criminal court warrant for his arrest on war crimes charges.

The prime minister, Donald Tusk, rowed back on that threat on Thursday, announcing that any Israeli politician, including Netanyahu, could visit the ceremony without fear of arrest, despite the fact that Poland is a signatory to the ICC.

Pro-Palestinian professor says she was forced out of Columbia University

A tenured law professor at Columbia University who advocated for pro-Palestinian students on campus says she was in effect forced out of the university, citing a “toxic and hostile environment for legitimate debate around the war in Israel and Palestine”.

Katherine Franke announced on Friday that she had reached an agreement with Columbia University that relieved her of her “obligations to teach or participate in faculty governance” after serving on the Columbia law faculty for 25 years. “While the university may call this change in my status ‘retirement’, it should be more accurately understood as a termination dressed up in more palatable terms,” she said. ...

Franke was investigated by Columbia University after complaints were made over comments she made on a Democracy Now! radio program in January 2024. In the radio program, Franke discussed an incident that took place on campus that month, which involved reports of a foul-smelling substance being released on pro-Palestinian protesters during a rally on campus. It was reported at the time that several students were hospitalized.

A student who was identified as a former member of the Israel Defense Forces was suspended in connection with the incident. (The student later sued the university and has since reached a settlement.)

In the radio interview, Franke said that she and others were concerned about Israeli students coming to Columbia “right out of their military service” and that “they’ve been known to harass Palestinian and other students on our campus”. ... Following her remarks, two colleagues at Columbia filed a complaint with the university’s office of equal employment and affirmative action, claiming her comments amounted to harassment of Israeli members of the Columbia community in violation of university policies.

Chinese officials reportedly discuss sale of TikTok in US to Elon Musk

Chinese officials are in preliminary talks about a potential option to sell TikTok’s operations in the United States to billionaire Elon Musk, should the short-video app be unable to avoid an impending ban, Bloomberg News reported on Monday. Beijing officials prefer that TikTok remains under the control of parent Bytedance, the report said, citing sources.

TikTok’s US operations could either be sold through a competitive process or an arrangement by the government, the report said, suggesting that the future of the app is no longer solely in ByteDance’s control. ...

Under one scenario, Musk’s social media platform X would take control of TikTok US and run the business together, the report said. Officials have yet to reach a consensus about how to proceed, according to Bloomberg News.

Yoon Suk Yeol impeachment: Trial of suspended South Korean president to begin

The impeachment trial of South Korea’s suspended president, Yoon Suk Yeol, begins on Tuesday, with the constitutional court set to weigh whether to strip him of his presidential duties over a failed martial law bid.

Yoon’s December 3 power grab plunged South Korea into its worst political crisis in decades, after he directed soldiers to storm parliament in an unsuccessful bid to stop lawmakers voting down his suspension of civilian rule.

He was impeached soon after and suspended from duty, but has gone to ground inside the presidential residence since, refusing summonses from investigators probing him on insurrection charges and using his presidential security team to resist arrest.

Lawmakers also impeached Yoon’s stand-in last month, Han Duck-soo, plunging the country further into political instability, and the current acting president, Choi Sang-mok, has appeared unwilling to wade into the standoff, instead urging all parties to negotiate for a solution.

The trial’s first hearing – out of five lasting until 4 February – is slated to begin at 2pm. The next hearings are scheduled to take place on 16, 21 and 23 January, and 4 February.

Democrats talk among themselves, get most of the facts wrong:

"The Party of War": Matt Duss on Biden, Gaza & How Democrats Lost Foreign Policy Argument to Trump

Dangerous winds expected to amplify California wildfires

Firefighters battling the disastrous wildfires around Los Angeles were prepared for a return of dangerous winds that could again stoke the flames as the death toll in the tragedy has hit at least 24. Fierce gusts known as Santa Ana winds have been largely blamed for turning the wildfires into devastating infernos that leveled huge tranches of neighborhoods around America’s second-largest city, which has also been hit by drought.

The National Weather Service has issued a rare warning of a “particularly dangerous situation”, beginning overnight on Monday into Tuesday with severe fire conditions through Wednesday. There could be sustained winds of up to 40mph (64km/h) and gusts in the mountains reaching 70mph.

“We are not in the clear as of yet. We must not let our guard down,” the LA fire department chief, Kristin Crowley, said during a Monday morning news briefing. ...

In all, four fires have consumed more than 62 sq miles (160 sq km), an area larger than San Francisco. The Eaton fire near Pasadena and the Palisades fire, in a wealthy enclave along the Pacific coast, alone accounted for 59 sq miles. Early estimates suggest they could be the nation’s costliest ever, as much as $150bn, according to an AccuWeather estimate.

LA Water Chief KNEW About Empty Reservoirs & Broken Hydrants!

Where there’s fire, there’s smoke: Los Angeles blazes raise fears of ‘super toxic’ lung damage

The Los Angeles wildfires have claimed the lives of at least 24 people and have burned more than 100,000 structures. While the focus is understandably on avoiding the flames, another immediate danger lurks across the county and beyond, one more difficult to escape: smoke.

The most dangerous component of wildfire smoke is fine particle pollution, also known as PM2.5 or soot. These tiny particles, smaller than one 20th the width of a human hair, can, if inhaled, become embedded in the bloodstream and lungs. It is estimated that about one-third of all particulate matter pollution in the US now comes from wildfire smoke.

“Wildfire smoke is super toxic to the lungs, more so than ‘regular’ smoke, because of the concentrations of fine particulates,” said Don McKenzie, an assistant professor at the University of Washington’s School of Environmental and Forest Sciences.

“People with compromised lung function are at higher risk of harm,” he added. “Damage from smoke exposure of any type is cumulative, but especially with the high concentrations of the fine particulates, because they can lodge themselves in small spaces within the lungs.”

It is estimated that air pollution kills about 100,000 people in the US each year. A significant portion of these deaths come from inhaling smoke from the burning of fossil fuels, wood and other materials (including from wildfires) that release toxins into the air.

Just Stop Oil activists spray-paint ‘1.5 is dead’ on Charles Darwin’s grave

Just Stop Oil (JSO) supporters have spray-painted “1.5 is dead” on Charles Darwin’s grave after confirmation that last year was the first to breach the important global warming threshold. Two people used chalk paint on the naturalist’s grave in Westminster Abbey, London, at about 9.30am on Monday, the climate protest group said.

Alyson Lee, 66, a retired teaching assistant from Derby, and Di Bligh, a 77-year-old former chief executive of Reading council, from Rode in Somerset, were involved in the action, JSO added. The Metropolitan police confirmed two women were arrested on suspicion of causing criminal damage “with what is believed to be powdered paint at Westminster Abbey”. ...

Lee said: “We are trying to get the government to act on climate change. They are not doing enough.”

Bligh said: “We’ve done this because there’s no hope for the world, really. We’ve done it on Darwin’s grave specifically because he would be turning in that grave because of the sixth mass extinction taking place now.”

Lee added: “I believe he would approve because he was a good scientist and he would be following the science, and he would be as upset as us with the government for ignoring the science.”

Also of Interest

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

Fifteen months of Israeli bombardment leave conditions in Gaza ‘unimaginable’

Cuba files to join South Africa’s genocide case at ICJ against Israel

US diplomat told not include starving Gaza children in government reports

Sanctions - Trump's Only Old/New Iran Policies

Musk, Meloni, and the AfD: Trump’s Plan for Reorganizing EU Vassals Comes into Focus

Skripal poisoning victim disputed UK narrative, official inquiry reveals

When It Comes to Wealth Retention in Retirement, Concrete May Be the New Gold

US Supreme Court Rejects Big Oil Attacks on Hawaii Climate Lawsuit

How the climate crisis fuels devastating wildfires: ‘We have tweaked nature and pissed it off’

‘It’s ironic’: how climate crisis is driving Trump push on Greenland and Panama

MAGA Movement’s Problem With Israel & AIPAC! – w/ Greg Foreman

Biden White House closes in on Gaza ceasefire

A Little Night Music

Buster Brown - John Henry

Buster Brown - Is You Is Or Is You Ain't My Baby

Buster Brown - I Get The Blues When It Rains

Buster Brown - Madison Shuffle

Buster Brown - Sugar Babe

Buster Brown & Sonny Terry - Slow Drag Part 1

Buster Brown - Don't Dog Your Woman

Buster Brown - Good News

Buster Brown – Blueberry Hill

Buster Brown – I'm Gonna Make You Happy