The Evening Blues - 10-7-25
Hey! Good Evening!
This evening's music features Memphis bluesman Frank Stokes. Enjoy!
Frank Stokes - Chicken You Can Roost Behind The Moon
“They call it the theatre of war for a reason. Nearly all wars are manipulated or arranged. The people who die and suffer are mostly the extras in the production. Those are the soldiers and the citizens. While the main players, the main actors, secretly meet backstage sipping champagne.”
-- Jack Freestone
News and Opinion
How Many Palestinian Lives Would It Take To Equal One Western Life?
British police report that one of the two fatalities in the Manchester synagogue attack was caused by gunfire from police. One of the reported injuries was also the result of a stray police bullet.
So he killed one person. The Manchester synagogue attacker killed one single person and the entire western world stopped in its tracks to mourn and grieve and weep and denounce, on the same day that Israel killed at least 57 Palestinians and it was completely ignored by western politicians and media.
Ever since I learned about this I’ve been wondering how many Palestinian deaths it would’ve taken to bump the synagogue attack off the front pages and become the main story. Fifty-seven Palestinians dying didn’t make a blip in the news.
So how many deaths would it have taken? How many Palestinians would have needed to be murdered for it to have risen to the level of interest and attention from western politicians, pundits, and news reporters that we saw them giving to the violent death of one western Jew?
A hundred deaths? Definitely not. A thousand? I doubt it. Ten thousand? Maybe. Maybe if Israel had actually deployed a tactical nuclear weapon in Gaza and killed thousands of people, maybe that would have eclipsed the one single death in the Manchester synagogue attack in the eyes of the western world. Maybe.
It’s an interesting question to contemplate. It’s just so incredible seeing how little value is assigned to Palestinian lives in the glaring disparity between the attention given to these easily quantifiable and comparable death tolls. Westerners really do think the lives of their house pets matter more.
Gaza 2 Years On: Yanis Varoufakis & Katie Halper on the Flotilla, Israel's PR Machine & What’s Next
Gaza flotilla members allege beatings and insults in Israeli detention
International activists, journalists and lawyers deported from Israel after attempting to breach the 16-year maritime blockade of Gaza as part of a humanitarian flotilla have alleged being subjected to brutal physical and verbal abuse by Israeli forces during their detention.
The alleged abuses included sleep and medication deprivation, beatings, having automatic rifles pointed at their heads, dogs set upon them, having to sleep on the floor, being subjected to insults and being made to watch footage of the Hamas attacks on Israel on 7 October 2023.
“I was beaten from the moment we entered the port until the very end,” said Saverio Tommasi, an Italian journalist. “Blows to my back, blows to my head – and they [the Israeli soldiers] laughed, laughed at all of it. Anyone who failed to keep their eyes down was punished with a hit to the head.”
Israeli forces intercepted all the boats of the Global Sumud flotilla (GSF), carrying more than 400 people including parliamentarians and the environmental campaigner Greta Thunberg, last week. Most of the people were held at Ketziot, a high-security prison in the Negev desert used primarily to detain Palestinians whom Israel accuses of involvement in terrorist activities.
Israel’s foreign ministry has dismissed all claims of mistreatment of members of the flotilla as “brazen lies”, posting on
“All the detainees’ legal rights are fully upheld.”
It's total silence as Greta Thunberg is abused
Thunberg Confirms Abuse by Israeli Abductors, But Urges World to Focus on Gaza Genocide
While confirming that she and other Global Sumud Flotilla members were abused by Israeli forces who abducted and jailed them, Swedish climate and human rights activist Greta Thunberg on Monday implored humanity to focus on the genocide in Gaza as it enters its third year.
"I could talk for a very, very long time about our mistreatment and abuses in our imprisonment. Trust me, but that is not the story," Thunberg said during a press conference at Athens Eleftherios Venizelos International Airport in Greece, where she and other flotilla participants released by Israel were greeted by a cheering crowd.
"What happened here is that Israel, while continuing to worsen and escalate their genocide and mass destruction with genocidal intent, attempting to erase an entire population, an entire nation in front of our very eyes, they once again violated international law by preventing humanitarian aid from getting into Gaza while people are being starved," she continued.
"This genocide and other genocides are being enabled and fueled by our own governments, our institutions, our media, and companies. It is our responsibility to end that complicity... to use our privileges, our platforms, to take a stance against this, that is in every way unjustifiable," Thunberg asserted.
"I will never, ever comprehend how humans can be so evil that you would deliberately starve millions of people living trapped under an illegal siege as a continuation of decades and decades of suffocating oppression, apartheid, occupation," she added.
Thunberg's remarks came as Israeli forces continued their bombing and invasion of Gaza with the objective of conquering, occupying, and ethnically cleansing Palestinians from the strip. Israeli airstrikes—which have reportedly killed nearly 100 Palestinians over the past two days—continued despite US President Donald Trump's Friday exhortation to "immediately stop" bombing the embattled strip, citing Hamas' willingness to conditionally release the remaining Israeli and other hostages it has held since October 7, 2023.
Trump urged negotiators to "move fast" toward a ceasefire agreement ahead of Monday's indirect peace talks between Israel and Hamas in Egypt. ...
Thunberg and more than 400 other Global Sumud Flotilla members were intercepted last week by Israeli forces in international waters before being taken to Israel and jailed. Thunberg told Swedish officials Saturday that she had been "subjected to harsh treatment in Israeli custody."
“She informed of dehydration," a Swedish Foreign Ministry email noted. "She has received insufficient amounts of both water and food. She also stated that she had developed rashes which she suspects were caused by bedbugs. She spoke of harsh treatment and said she had been sitting for long periods on hard surfaces.”
Turkish flotilla activist Ersin Çelik said he witnessed Israelis abusing Thunberg.
"They dragged little Greta by her hair before our eyes, beat her, and forced her to kiss the Israeli flag," Çelik said. "They did everything imaginable to her, as a warning to others."
Italian journalist and flotilla member Lorenzo D’Agostino said that Thunberg was “wrapped in the Israeli flag and paraded like a trophy.”
Abducted flotilla members said they were humiliated by Israelis, including National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who called them "terrorists." This, from a man who in 2007 was convicted of incitement to racism and supporting the Kahanist terrorist group Kach.
D'Agostino told CNN Monday that “we were shocked by the level of humiliation and gratuitous cruelty that these people used on us."
"The way we were treated was... pushing the mistreatment and the humiliation to the limit that they could afford,” he said, explaining that his captors “knew that they couldn’t harm us physically” if activists were from countries like Italy.
“People coming from countries that are not allied [with Israel] were harmed physically,” D'Agostino added. “I was sharing my cell with a Turkish citizen whose arm was broken and he was left without painkillers for two days.”
Israel's Foreign Ministry said Sunday that flotilla members' claims of abuse are "brazen lies," and that “all the detainees’ legal rights are fully upheld.”
As of Monday, Israel had deported 341 of the 479 detained flotilla activists. The remaining detainees are either awaiting deportation or, in some cases—including one Spanish woman who allegedly bit an Israeli medic during a forced medical examination at Ketziot Prison—are facing extended detention.
The alleged abuse of flotilla detainees pales in comparison to what Palestinian prisoners have allegedly endured at the hands of their Israeli captors. Former detainees and Israeli personnel have described beatings, rape and sexual torture by male and female soldiers, routine amputations due to constant shackling, burnings, electrocutions, attacks by dogs, ice-water dousings, denial of food and water, sleep deprivation, constant loud music, and other abuse.
The Israeli military has launched investigations into the deaths of dozens of detainees at the notorious Sde Teiman prison, including one who died after allegedly being sodomized with an electric baton.
Another group of boats is currently en route from Europe in another attempt to break Israel's blockade of Gaza.
"As more ships set sail for Gaza, we are likely to see a repeat of these events," Amnesty International said Monday, referring to the alleged abuse of Global Sumud Flotilla activists. "States must act now and make clear to Israel that its suffocating blockade and its ongoing genocide against Palestinians must end now."
Hamas Responds to Trump Gaza Plan
Israel and Hamas begin indirect talks as hopes rise of ending Gaza war
Israel and Hamas have begun indirect talks in Egypt on a US ceasefire proposal amid cautious optimism that the nearly two-year war in Gaza may be nearing its end, despite deep divisions between the two sides. Negotiations will focus on the release of hostages held by Hamas in exchange for Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, as well as the partial withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza. The three issues constitute the first phase of a 20-point plan presented by the US president, Donald Trump, last week that aims to end the war.
Though key points of the plan still need negotiation, Hamas’s acceptance of a hostage release and to relinquish power in the Gaza Strip has galvanised renewed momentum behind peace talks and Egyptian media reported that the first day of discussions ended “amid a positive atmosphere”. Trump on Sunday described the talks as “very successful and proceeding rapidly” and on Monday said Hamas was agreeing to “very important” issues. The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has said he expected the talks to last just a few days and that he hoped he could announce the release of all Israeli hostages in the coming days.
Despite the optimism, large gaps remain between Hamas and Israel. The Trump plan is large in scope but scant on details, and key points of the plan still need to be discussed.
The talks on Monday began with a meeting between Arab mediators and the Palestinian delegation after which mediators would then meet with the Israeli delegation. Egyptian and Qatari mediators would then discuss both sets of talks before meeting the US envoy Steve Witkoff, according to Egyptian media.
Negotiators have to agree which Palestinian prisoners will be released from Israeli jails. The Palestinian delegation is likely to ask for political figures, such as the Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouthi, who are widely popular in the West Bank and Gaza. Rightwing members of Netanyahu’s coalition have put pressure on to ensure such popular figures remain behind bars, Israeli media has reported.
Netanyahu HUMILIATES Trump Over His Order To Stop Bombing Gaza!
Israel Says No Gaza Ceasefire in Place Despite Trump’s Call for a Stop to the Bombing
The Israeli government said on Sunday that there is no ceasefire in place in Gaza despite President Trump’s calls for Israel to “immediately stop the bombing of Gaza” as the IDF continues to slaughter Palestinians across the Strip.
“While certain bombings have actually stopped inside of the Gaza Strip, there’s no ceasefire in place at this point in time,” said Israeli government spokeswoman Shosh Badrosian, according to The Associated Press.
Badrosian added that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is in “regular contact” with Trump and that the upcoming negotiations in Egypt aimed at securing the release of Israelis held by Hamas and implementing a ceasefire will “be confined to a few days maximum, with no tolerance for maneuvers that will delay talks by Hamas.” ...
The IDF killed at least 129 Palestinians in Gaza over the past two days, according to daily updates released by Gaza’s Health Ministry. The Health Ministry said in its latest release on Sunday that it recorded the deaths of 63 Palestinians and the injury of 153 over the previous 24-hour period.
AMB. Chas Freeman : Israel Near Collapse
Ben Gvir to blow up Netanyahu's coalition if Hamas 'continues to exist' after Trump deal
Israel's influential, extremist National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir threatened on 5 October that his Jewish Power (Otzma Yehudit) party would leave the coalition government if Hamas "continues to exist" after the release of Israeli captives under the Trump ceasefire plan.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has remained in power since late 2022 on the basis of his Likud Party's coalition with Ben Gvir's Otzma Yehudit and the Religious Zionism party, which are committed to continuing the war, ethnically cleansing Gaza, and ideally building settlements for Jewish Israelis in the devastated strip.
After the possibility emerged this weekend that a ceasefire and prisoner exchange based on Trump's so-called ‘peace’ plan could come into effect, Ben Gvir stated his party would not agree to a deal that would leave Hamas intact, which would be a "national defeat" and “eternal disgrace.”
Ben Gvir has threatened to leave Netanyahu's coalition multiple times since Israel's genocide in Gaza began in October two years ago, seeking to pressure the prime minister to continue the violence. He stepped down as National Security Minister when a ceasefire was reached in January, but rejoined Netanyahu's cabinet in March after Israel resumed the war.
MATT HOH : Ukraine Military Near Collapse. + OCT-7 What We Know Now!
Trump ENDS Venezuela Diplomacy, Preps For WAR
US shutdown enters second week as Senate again rejects rival funding bills
The US government shutdown entered its second week as the Senate again rejected rival bills to restart funding and Donald Trump suggested he might be open to negotiating with Democrats over the healthcare subsidies they have put at the heart of the stalemate.
A fifth Senate vote to advance a Republican-written bill that would reopen the government failed on a 52-42 tally – well below the 60-vote threshold needed for advancement. The Democrats’ proposal was defeated in a 50-45 party-line vote. No lawmakers changed their votes from recent days, though there were a handful of absences.
Many agencies and departments closed their doors and told employees to stay home last Wednesday, after Congress failed to approve legislation to continue the government’s authority to spend money. The Trump administration warned it was prepared to move forward with plans to slash the federal workforce.
Trump, speaking from the Oval Office on Monday, said he might be willing to strike a deal with Democrats on the ACA subsidies, though he also echoed the conservative claim that “billions and billions” of dollars are being wasted. “We have a negotiation going on right now with the Democrats that could lead to very good things,” Trump told reporters. “And I’m talking about good things with regard to health care.”
Schumer denied any outreach from the president, and the top House Democrat, Hakeem Jeffries, said the White House has been “radio silent” since a meeting with the president last week.
Thomas Massie Reveals REAL REASON The Gov’t Is Shut Down!
Judge refuses to block Trump’s deployment of national guard to Illinois
A federal judge will not immediately block national guard troops from being deployed in Illinois after a lawsuit from the state against the president on Monday. Troops from Texas could be deployed to Chicago on Tuesday or Wednesday, and Trump is also seeking to federalize the Illinois national guard. A similar effort to deploy troops to Portland was blocked by a judge in Oregon.
Illinois sued the Trump administration on behalf of the state and the city of Chicago on Monday after the president ordered national guard troops to deploy in the state against the governor’s wishes. The Illinois attorney general, Kwame Raoul, filed a lawsuit seeking to stop Donald Trump from calling up the state’s national guard or sending in troops from other states “immediately and permanently”.
“The American people, regardless of where they reside, should not live under the threat of occupation by the United States military, particularly not simply because their city or state leadership has fallen out of a president’s favor,” the lawsuit says.
Trump has gone after Democratic-led cities, sending in military to clamp down on protests and aid in his deportation agenda. He has declared war on Chicago, threatening for weeks to send in more troops while immigration agents scoured the city for people to deport, and local residents protested against his crackdown. Raoul argues that these efforts to send in guard troops against a state’s will infringe upon the state’s sovereignty and self-governance while leading to unrest and harm for the state’s residents.
“It will cause only more unrest, including harming social fabric and community relations and increasing the mistrust of police. It also creates economic harm, depressing business activities and tourism that not only hurt Illinoisians but also hurt Illinois’s tax revenue,” Raoul wrote.
Outcry as Trump plots more roads and logging in US forests
In 1999, Bill Clinton ascended one of the highest summits in Virginia to announce that “the last, best unprotected wild lands anywhere in our nation” would be shielded by a new rule that banned roads, drilling and other disturbances within America’s most prized forests. But today, this site in George Washington national forest, along with other near-pristine forests across the US that amount to 58m acres, equivalent to the size of the UK, could soon see chainsaws whir and logging trucks rumble through them amid a push by Donald Trump to raze these ecosystems for timber.
The Trump administration has said it will rescind Clinton’s roadless rule, more than two decades after its introduction appeared to mark the end of the bitter battle between environmentalists and loggers over the future of America’s best remaining woodland. The rule is “overly restrictive” and an “absurd obstacle” to development, according to Brooke Rollins, Trump’s secretary of agriculture, as she outlined its demise in June. The administration is in a hurry – an unusually short public comment period of 21 days for this rescission has just ended, following a Trump “emergency” order to swiftly fell trees across the US’s network of national forests, spanning 280m acres.
The president has slapped tariffs on lumber imports, and the recent Republican spending bill requires more wood to come from American forests – a 78% increase in the amount of timber sold from national forests in the next nine years, an escalation that could trigger a frenzy of new cutting. “We are freeing up our forests so we are allowed to take down trees and make a lot of money,” Trump has said. “We have massive forests. We just aren’t allowed to use them because of the environmental lunatics who stopped us.” ...
The Trump administration and the logging industry claim the prohibition of roads impedes fire suppression activities, although vehicles and other human activity on roads can cause new wildfires in forests which are becoming more prone to blazes due to the climate crisis. Since the 1990s, wildfires have been nearly four times as likely to start in forests that have roads compared with roadless areas, according to a recent analysis by the Wilderness Society.
Global renewable energy generation surpasses coal for first time
The world’s wind and solar farms have generated more electricity than coal plants for the first time this year, marking a turning point for the global power system, according to research. A report by the climate thinktank Ember found that in the first six months of 2025, renewable energy outpaced the world’s growing appetite for electricity, leading to a small decline in coal and gas use.
The world generated almost a third more solar power in the first half of the year compared with the same period in 2024, meeting 83% of the global increase in electricity demand. Wind power grew by just over 7%, allowing renewables to displace fossil fuels for the first time. The milestone represents “a crucial turning point”, according to Małgorzata Wiatros-Motyka, a senior electricity analyst at Ember and the author of the report.
She said: “Solar and wind are now growing fast enough to meet the world’s growing appetite for electricity. This marks the beginning of a shift where clean power is keeping pace with demand growth.”
China and India were largely responsible for the surge in renewables, according to the Ember report, in contrast with the US and Europe, which relied more heavily on fossil fuels.
Also of Interest
Here are some articles of interest, some which defied fair-use abstraction.
Patrick Lawrence: Power & Justice
A 20-Point Peace Plan Without US-UK Colonialism
Israeli Actions Encourage the Formation of the Coalition That Will Ultimately Defeat It
UK Grants Police New Powers to Crush Peaceful Protests as Palestine Action Demonstrations Continue
Intrigue — and Confusion — Reign Over Ukraine
France’s New PM Lecornu Reveals New Cabinet … And Resigns
Jane Goodall said she would launch Trump and Musk on one-way trip into space
Trump To 'Look Into' Ghislaine Maxwell Pardon
Trump's DHS SHOOTS US Citizen: Story IS COLLAPSING
Candace Owens Reveals Charlie Kirk’s Anti-Israel Texts!
A Little Night Music
Frank Stokes - Downtown Blues
Frank Stokes - How Long
Frank Stokes - Taint Nobody's Business If I Do - Part 1
Frank Stokes - You Shall
Frank Stokes - Frank Stokes' Dream
Frank Stokes - I Got Mine
Frank Stokes - Stomp That Thing
Frank Stokes - It's a Good Thing
Frank Stokes - It Won't Be Long Now
Comments
Just maybe if the democrat wing
.
.
drops demands for a $ million for trans frogs research
or a $ billion to fund projects that have absolutely no
pertinence to our country, the two sides could sit down
and negotiate? Common ground is not uncommon.
Thanks for the EB's joe!
Zionism is a social disease
heh...
perhaps the dems could find some items in the military budget that are unnecessary, they could actually be useful for once.
doubtful
.
but there is always hope?
Zionism is a social disease
heh...
oh, i doubt that it could ever happen, too. but a fella can dream.
Hope without a lot of Cope
....can lead to widespread denial and delusions.
We've endured forty years of that. And it has left us much diminished as a society.
War war war
They're using this label "fascism" especially now. I will no longer reject this label, though some of my caveats remain:
1) There are two filters, though: Trump's model is Mileikowski/ Netanyahu, and said creature's model is Hitler. So we have two levels of wannabe separating us from a genuine fascism.
2) The Nazis tried to hide what they were doing; the Zionists don't. This is far worse. It is also far worse that it took public opinion two years to recognize what is in fact going on. What is also far worse is that we should oppose genocide, at a fundamental level, because we might be next. We still might be next, while the rate of waking up to this fact remains painfully slow. The goal is to kill them all, and then say "take THAT, you two-state solution people."
3) What will ultimately happen will be that they will all be dead, while three-wars-at-once provide the final cover. And America's position when the smoke clears? Guilt. Hey liberals -- you want some of that liberal guilt for which you have become famous? Here it is, overflowing on a billion silver platters. The world will look at American liberals, and say with one voice: "You fkn KNEW, or you fkn SHOULD HAVE KNOWN, and yet you raised the pom-poms for Senile Joe or Can't Give an Interview Harris for President!" There will be enough guilt here for a million suicides -- it will be as cheap as the US Dollar when all is said and done.
4) Katie Halper, who I love, is far too optimistic about the existing train of thought in the conversation below. There is no serious "Left" in America. Exhibit one: Ukraine Solidarity Network: Complete List of Endorsements. Enormous sums of brainpower, the creme de la creme of intellectual thought in this country, confounded into less than nothing before a psyop that killed hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian troops in an entirely preventable military action. I'm discussing these people in my own forthcoming book, but of course for other reasons than for the completely forgettable one that they did this. The whole of the value of this thing is that Susan Abulhawa identifies, outside of starvation, how they've been dying.
The video of Van Jones toward the end reveals what we should call these people, and it's far, far less than anything on the political spectrum. They were once nice liberals with big egos, and I ridiculed them for that in 2020. Now they are mere creatures of money.
5) Mearsheimer mentions "the lobby." You've got IDF soldiers marching through the Pentagon, right now as you read this message, telling the brass what to do. It's not just the lobby. John.
"It hasn't been okay to be smart in the United States for centuries" -- Frank Zappa
evening cass...
heh, wars and rumors of wars?
i suspect that the "left" is not a place that we should look to for any sort of pushback against the corporatist right. oddly enough, the only (and it's pretty minimal) effective pushback these days is coming from the wingnut right. go figure.
frankly, i don't see anyone capable of organizing regular people (average americans) coming from the left.
i guess we'll see.
Oh, I'm not that pessimistic.
But, yes, thank you for responding!
The "Left" is capable of a lot of things, just as the "Right" is also capable of those same things. Michael Franti had it wrong: the key is not to "stay human," but rather to stop being inhuman. (To stay human, you have to have been staying human in the first instance, especially not a happening proposition for Zionists.) I propose, then, the total abandonment of the National-Assembly-seating-chart political spectrum.
from Castoriadis' essay "Imaginary and Imagination at the Crossroads":
The new renaissance could happen at any time -- it's just so painful waiting for it...
"It hasn't been okay to be smart in the United States for centuries" -- Frank Zappa
I’m wondering if this isn’t a characteristic of hope
It really shouldn't be that difficult to activate, or so I think?
What inhibits our capacity for creative solutions
gets a lot of names. We are certainly creative about naming what inhibits us. Useful, practical imagination is harder than it looks. There is, for instance, creative politics, but very few people seem interested outside of, I don't know, tiny groups here and there, at least on the West Coast of the US, the place with which I am familiar. Maybe at some point the French will figure it out.
Castoriadis thought the dead-end of creativity in our civilization was "postmodernism," an idea which certainly confounds the various modernisms which emerged in the period after the world wars. See his essay "The Retreat from Autonomy." I would call our dead end pseudo-conservatism, a term which I would say encompasses neoliberalism, neoconservatism, and the other uncreative political formations which dominate us in the absence of dissent at the highest levels of our social pyramids. The creative cul-de-sac of neoliberalism, for instance, is laid out in painful fashion in Philip Mirowski's book Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste.
One must suspect, also, that the main reason BRICS+ is taking so painfully long to present an alternative to subservience to the West is that ruling-class formations such as Putin's Russia, Xi's China, and Modi's India were and are merely at this time better versions of economic oldness than what we have in the West. One thinks of how painfully long it took Putin, the smartest of the bunch on an individual level, to realize that, no, he can't really make a deal with Europe or the US. And somebody please explain to me how the Chinese system of "social credit" improves Chinese society from the creative standpoint I am advocating here.
In considering his challenge to our ways of doing things, one must also think with Castoriadis against Castoriadis. Castoriadis' creativity as a philosopher had some rather severe limits, and so for instance he might advocate ecological thinking without doing any of it. Or take his critique of Marx: he argued in his essay "The Pulverization of Marxism-Leninism" that "Marx's idea that one could eliminate the market and money is an incoherent utopia" (69), but, seriously, have we really tried all the alternatives before giving up?
"It hasn't been okay to be smart in the United States for centuries" -- Frank Zappa
An interesting perspective
.
or thought experiment as it were.
Do like the idea of creativity on a human
level to percolate the ideation of politics
although it seems to be more on an individual
level or small grouping. How does that manifest
to a societal awareness?
Zionism is a social disease
The book I know on the topic of creative politics --
-- pulls up this set of websites when you look it up on a search engine. It's all over the place, but maybe some of it gets your attention, I don't know.
"It hasn't been okay to be smart in the United States for centuries" -- Frank Zappa
Hi Cass
Your comment includes much that is far beyond my level of knowledge or capacity to understand, and respond to. I think one of the things we could do is to value more the act of kindness in ones everyday experience, and look to artists of all varieties as well, to contribute to a change in social, environmental, and political life.
We appear stuck.
America: two right-wing parties peddling nonsense while education, health care, and real estate or rental prices fly out of sight. We could have China's (or Japan's) high-speed rail, Finland’s education system, Canada's universal health care, Germany's solar power, or Europe's mass transit. But we don't have any of that. In fact, what we have are cuts to bus service, SNAP, Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security. Our political system is based on universal conformity: the politicians lie about the economy, lie about our values, fool the public, take the money. The public votes for party A to avoid electing party B and avoids taking responsibility for the outcomes. The rest of the world might have a better process than we do in the US, with better outcomes (especially in places like China), but it's still not good enough because what they do is still based on the continuation of old ideas.
I am suggesting that we look for creative solutions in a creative politics. I hope that helps.
"It hasn't been okay to be smart in the United States for centuries" -- Frank Zappa
Hi Cass
How does one initiate a shift, in a culture and government that is so self-centred?
I'm sure we all have a list of places to start, but where can we find the power?
Evening joe and bluesters
Great quote by (I assume) author, surfer, and crypto enthusiast, Jack Freestone. Interesting combination of interests and skills.
https://jack-freestone-author.blogspot.com/
https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/21646730.Jack_Freestone
Preach it Caitlin, another Australian author and … maybe surfer ; ).
evening janis...
yep, every now and then when i am searching for a quote because there was nothing that just leapt to mind i run across some interesting quotes from people whom i don't know and have never read - hence tonight's quote.
have a good one!
Good evening Joe, thanks for the EBs. It's sort of amusing
watching the US endlessly play arbiter of foreign elections and foreign government leaders, but I doubt that the end results will be at all funny for anybody involved. Sure would be nice to see some Chinese heavy lifters landing in Caracas.
be well and have a good one
That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --
evening el...
heh, the chinese are apparently somewhat involved in venezuela, particularly in the energy sector. i can't remember where i heard it, but in the past few days i listened to a video that suggested that the chinese navy was present in venezuela.
Hey, joe!
I also read that some Chinese Navy ships were floating in the waters at Venezuela. I can't remember where I read it, either.
I have just started on the videos, thought the article by Ian Welsh was amazing, and if history continues to repeat itself, Israel is doomed.
Great eb, dear friend!
Now, I must watch some vids!
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981
evening otc...
i think that i heard it in a video, probably either one of danny haiphong's or nima's dialogue works. it's been a couple of days ago, though. i suppose if it's important to the flow of events, it will come up again.
On a different battlefield
...
...yet another banquet of consequences.
evening pluto...
ooops! i guess all of that outsourcing that was done by western capitalists to break the back of labor demand for wages was a net loss for the war horny west. too bad.