The Evening Blues - 8-1-23
Hey! Good Evening!
This evening's music features r&b singer Betty Everett. Enjoy!
Betty Everett - Getting Mighty Crowded
"All these wars are similar in the way ideology is being used. It's the ideology of so-called humanitarian intervention. We don't want to do this, but we're doing this for the sake of the people who live there. This is, of course, a terrible sleight of hand because all sorts of people live there, and, by and large, they do it to help one faction and not the other."
-- Tariq Ali
News and Opinion
We’re Taught About Liberal And Conservative Bias In Media, But Not US Empire Bias
One of the biggest problems with the urgent push for “media literacy” we’ve been seeing in the west these last few years is that everyone’s being taught about liberal bias and conservative bias in media, but they’re not being taught about US empire bias.
Your average western news media consumer will have some general awareness that Fox News has a conservative bias and MSNBC has a liberal bias, and if you try to use one of them to prove a political point to someone of the opposing ideology they’ll probably hasten to inform you of the biased nature of your source. A somewhat smaller but still very large percentage of the population will be aware that an outlet like RT is going to have a bias in favor of the Russian government, and if you try to cite RT to prove some point about Ukraine or whatever you’ll probably get called out on that right away.
That’s about as far as “media literacy” goes among the general public in the western world, which just so happens to work out very nicely in favor of the western empire. The radius of awareness extends just far enough to pose no threat to the empire’s information interests, and stops there.
What relatively few westerners are aware of is that the entirety of mainstream western media — both liberal and conservative — are so biased in favor of the US and its empire-like global sphere of influence that they are almost worthless for forming an accurate understanding of what’s happening in the world.
Every foreign policy agenda of the US and its allies is reliably facilitated by the western media, because the western media do not exist primarily to report the news, they exist primarily to administer propaganda. The New York Times has reliably supported every war the US has waged. Western mass media focus overwhelmingly on foreign protests against governments the United States dislikes while paying far less attention to widespread protests against US-aligned governments. The only time Trump was universally showered with praise by the mass media was when he bombed Syria, while the only time Biden has been universally slammed by the mass media was when he withdrew from Afghanistan. US media did such a good job deceitfully marrying Saddam Hussein to the September 11 attacks in the minds of the public in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq that seven in ten Americans still believed he was connected to 9/11 months after the war began. To name just a few obvious glaring examples of far too many to list.
Kids aren’t being taught about this type of bias in school. Websites like AllSides and Media Bias/Fact Check set up to help improve “media literacy” and teach people about media biases focus only on biases of ideological partisanship, not international conflicts and foreign policy.
You’ve probably seen charts like this one from the Media Bias section of the AllSides website, where the biases of outlets are ranked from “Left” to “Center” to “Right.” [Click link to see graphic. -js]
What you’ve never seen anywhere is a chart that ranks outlets in terms of how sympathetic they are to the US-centralized empire, with outlets like The New York Times, The Guardian and Fox News being listed on the extreme end of one side and more US-critical outlets like Consortium News, Mintpress News and Antiwar toward the other side. Notice how the above chart is so completely uninterested in foreign policy that it lists militarist smut rag The Atlantic in the same category as outlets that are often critical of US foreign policy like Jacobin and The Nation.
Here’s what the Media Bias/Fact Check profile on my (currently malfunctioning) website looks like as of this writing. [Click link to see graphic. -js]
It places me on the far left ideologically, which is of course fair, but it doesn’t tell you anything about my attitude toward the US and its allies, which consumes a huge amount of my focus and commentary. Am I one of those “yay NATO” lefties or am I a “boo NATO” lefty? Am I one of those lefties who focuses on domestic issues and pretends foreign policy doesn’t exist? In international conflicts do I tend to side with the US, side with some other government, remain neutral, or some mixture of the above? It doesn’t say.
t doesn’t say for anyone else either. The New York Times is listed as having a “left-center bias” with a credibility rating of “high”. The New York Post is listed as having a “center-right” bias with a “mixed” credibility rating. It’s all about where they can be placed on the left-to-right ideology scale and some arbitrary determination about how “credible” they’re found to be, without any mention of the fact that they are both fiercely loyal to the US empire.
This is entirely by design. The whole push to promote “media literacy” and improve online information has never actually been about training people to see and understand the biases of media outlets, it’s been about training people not to see and understand them. At least not where it matters.
Foreign policy is the single most consequential aspect of government behavior when it comes to the US and its allies, because it affects the most people to the greatest degree. Domestic policy has very real consequences for the kind of life people will have under the US power alliance, but you’re talking about questions like whether they’ll be able to afford healthcare or purchase legal cannabis, not whether they’ll be bombed, starved by crushing economic sanctions, or killed in a nuclear war. And yet our entire society is being trained not to look there when determining the biases of the sources we look to for information.
And this is exactly because foreign policy is so immensely consequential. Those who run the empire don’t care whether women can have an abortion or whether marginalized groups are abused by police, so they’re happy for the biases of their propaganda organs to be highlighted on such matters and for everyone to pour all their energy into debating them. What they absolutely do care about a very great deal is the operation of the globe-spanning empire, which is held together by nonstop violence and abuse and the threat thereof.
So we are indoctrinated into supporting the US empire’s agendas of war, militarism, manipulation and resource extraction around the world, and we are trained not to look at the fact that we are being indoctrinated by sources of information who are all wildly biased in favor of that empire.
By keeping the western media’s US empire bias out of the spotlight, imperial spinmeisters shrink the Overton window of acceptable opinion down to those foreign policy views which are promoted by mainstream information sources whose only criticisms of the empire come down to minor quibbles about the specifics of how the empire should be run, instead of whether a globe-spanning power structure should exist at all.
This is just one of the many sly little ways our perception of our world is tilted toward the interests of our rulers. It’s what Chomsky was talking about when he said, “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum — even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.”
A passive and obedient populace is exactly what the empire wants, so the imperial media keep the debate restricted to things like culture war issues and electoral politics, with the edges of the Overton window eclipsing out issues like capitalism, militarism, oligarchy and empire. In this way we are kept barking and snarling at each other, without ever turning our gaze upon our rulers, and without ever noticing how many more there are of us there are than them.
Russia Counterattacks Vremevka, Advances Kupiansk, Oskol; West, Nigeria Mull Intervention Niger
Worth a click and a full read:
Patrick Lawrence: The Bidens’ Burisma Bribery
My mind went back to those first Russiagate days last Thursday, when the tabloid that reported the Hunter Biden computer story just before the 2020 election dropped another in a series of big ones on us. “Biden $10M bribe file released: Burisma chief said he was ‘coerced’ to pay Joe, ‘stupid’ Hunter in bombshell allegations” was the headline on this latest New York Post piece. ...
We already knew V–P Biden intervened back in 2016, when Viktor Shokin, the prosecutor general, was at the front end of an official investigation into corruption at Burisma. Hunter was by then taking home $50,000 a month —the Post says $83,000 — for sitting on Burisma’s board and doing nothing other than being his father’s son. Joe stepped in to get Shokin fired — alleging, perversely, that Shokin had to go because he was corrupt. This was in 2016, when Joe was recorded in that infamous video bragging, at the Council on Foreign Relations no less, that he threatened to withhold $5 billion in U.S. aid if Shokin wasn’t removed. “And, son of a bitch, they fired him,” was Joe’s punchline on that occasion.
The just-released document now tells us pretty precisely what happened when the son of a bitch serving as Obama’s point man in Kiev made full use — fully corrupt use, I mean — of Washington’s leverage in post-coup Ukraine.
By February 2016 Shokin had warrants enabling him to seize Mykola Zlochevsky’s apparently extensive property holdings in Kiev. Zlochevsky, the corrupt jillionaire who founded Burisma Holdings in 2002, indeed wanted Shokin off his back and out of his books. He went to Hunter with this project, whereupon Hunter did his job and went to Pop. Whereupon they both let it be known — both, got it? — that getting the job done would cost Zlochevsky $10 million, $5 million apiece for Biden père et fils. Biden arrived in Kiev in March 2016, a month after Shokin got his warrants to go after Zlochevsky’s real estate. Shokin was dismissed on March 29.
Zlochevsky — who, being a Ukrainian oligarch, seems to have been at ease discussing his own corruptions — related all this to an F.B.I. informant who had worked for the agency for more than a decade and earned, in addition to six figures in fees, an excellent reputation for reliability. The informant met or spoke by telephone with Zlochevsky on four occasions beginning in late 2015 or early 2016 and running through 2019. Some of these encounters occurred near Kiev; at least one took place at a Vienna coffeehouse. It was during the latter exchange, in 2016, that Zlochevsky told the F.B.I. informant, “It cost 5 [million] to pay one Biden, and 5 [million] to another Biden,” as this conversation is recorded in the F.B.I. file, which is designated FD–1023 and which, everything it reveals notwithstanding, contains redacted passages.
FD–1023 is rich with evidently authentic reporting from the agency’s informant. Describing the 2016 encounter in Vienna, the file quotes the informant thusly:
“Zlochevsky made some comment that although Hunter Biden ‘was stupid, and his (Zlochevsky’s) dog was smarter,’ Zlochevsky needed to keep Hunter Biden (on Burisma’s board) ‘so everything will be okay.’”
It then continues: “The source,” meaning the F.B.I. informant,
“asked whether Hunter Biden or Joe Biden told Zlochevsky he should ‘retain’ the younger Biden; Zlochevsky allegedly replied, ‘They both did.’”
...
Zlochevsky, as he recounted the Bidens’ bribery scheme, told the F.B.I. informant he had 17 recordings of conversations he had with Hunter and Joe as they arranged to take care of the Shokin matter and take Zlochevsky’s money for the favor. This is a smart guy. Zlochevsky also told the F.B.I. man he had “many text messages” and two written documents, financial records of the payments the Bidens received. Zlochevsky, by the F.B.I. informant’s account, considered this documentary proof of his “coercion.” There appears, then, to be a body of evidence awaiting examination and verification.
How the Biden family preyed on Ukraine corruption
The West sells out Ukraine as counteroffensive flops
Top US adviser to attend Saudi talks in bid to attract support for Ukraine plan
Jake Sullivan, the US national security adviser, is expected to attend a meeting in Saudi Arabia this weekend at which Ukraine and its allies will try to persuade countries from the global south to back Kyiv’s proposals for ending the war. According to officials involved in planning for the meeting, it is primarily aimed at drawing neutral countries such as Brazil and India off the fence in their approach to the Russian invasion.
The meeting has been called by Ukraine, and it is hoped the Saudi venue might attract Chinese participation, but there is so far no confirmation Beijing will send any representatives.
According to the Wall Street Journal, which first reported the planned talks, Saudi Arabia and Ukraine have invited 30 countries, including Indonesia, Egypt, Mexico, Chile and Zambia. ...
“We expect attendees will discuss the principles for peace and how we can achieve a just and durable peace in Ukraine,” a US official said.
US Announces $345 Million in Unprecedented Military Aid for Taiwan
The White House on Friday announced a $345 million military aid package for Taiwan, marking a significant escalation in US support for the island.
The US has sold weapons to Taiwan since Washington severed diplomatic relations with Taipei in 1979 but has never financed the purchases or provided arms free of charge.
The $345 million weapons package is being provided through the presidential drawdown authority, the primary way the US has been arming Ukraine. The authority allows President Biden to send weapons directly from US military stockpiles.
The White House said the $345 million includes “defense articles and services of the Department of Defense, and military education and training, to provide assistance to Taiwan.”
Niger coup leaders accuse France of plotting military intervention
The military junta that seized power in Niger has accused France of plotting military intervention to reinstate the deposed president, Mohamed Bazoum, as tensions in the region continued to grow in the wake of the coup. The junta said on national TV that France was searching “for ways and means to intervene militarily in Niger” and had held a meeting with the chief of staff of Niger’s national guard “to obtain the necessary political and military authorisation”.
The French foreign minister, Catherine Colonna, denied any alleged intention of military intervention in the west African country. “It’s wrong,” she told BFMTV news channel on Monday night, adding that it was still possible to return Niger’s democratically elected president to power. “And it’s necessary because destabilisation is perilous for Niger and its neighbours,” she said.
Bazoum, an ally of western powers, was toppled on 26 July in a coup by Niger’s elite presidential guard. Gen Abdourahamane Tchiani declared himself leader but his claim has been shunned internationally. On Monday, Bazoum’s party said several ministers in his ousted government had been arrested, including the mines minister. Niger is the world’s seventh-biggest producer of uranium, the radioactive metal widely used for nuclear energy and treating cancer. ...
The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) has given the junta a week to give back power, warning in a statement that if Bazoum was not reinstated it would take “all measures” to restore constitutional order, which “may include the use of force”. ECOWAS has suspended all commercial and financial transactions, while France, the EU and the US, which has about 1,000 troops in Niger, have either cut off support or threatened to do so.
Germany suspended financial aid and development cooperation, and UN humanitarian operations have been put on hold. Russia called for the swift return of “the rule of law” and “restraint from all parties so that this doesn’t result in human casualties”.
Did Western Military Presence Help Foster Coup in Niger, Where U.S. Has Drone Base & 1,000+ Troops?
Niger Coup Leader Joins Long Line of U.S.-Trained Mutineers
brig. gen. Moussa salaou barmou, the chief of Niger’s Special Operations Forces and one of the leaders of the unfolding coup in Niger, was trained by the U.S. military, The Intercept has confirmed. U.S.-trained military officers have taken part in 11 coups in West Africa since 2008.
“We have had a very long relationship with the United States,” Barmou said in 2021. “Being able to work together in this capacity is very good for Niger.” Just last month, Barmou met with Lt. Gen. Jonathan Braga, the head of U.S. Army Special Operations Command, at Air Base 201, a drone base in the Nigerien city of Agadez that serves as the lynchpin of an archipelago of U.S. outposts in West Africa.
On Wednesday, Barmou, who trained at Fort Benning, Georgia, and the National Defense University in Washington, joined a junta that ousted Mohamed Bazoum, Niger’s democratically elected president, according to Nigerien sources and a U.S. government official who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
A U.S. official tracking the coup, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, confirmed Barmou’s relationship with the U.S. military and said he was probably not alone. “I’m sure we will find out that others have been partners, have been involved in U.S. engagements,” he said of other members of the junta, noting that U.S. government agencies were looking into the matter.
U.S.-trained officers have conducted in at least six coups in neighboring Burkina Faso and Mali since 2012. They have also been involved in recent takeovers in Gambia (2014), Guinea (2021), Mauritania (2008), and Niger (2023).
Yellow trucking firm lays off its 30,000 US workers as it ceases operations
The embattled US trucking company Yellow ceased operations on Sunday, and it has laid off all 30,000 of its workers. Yellow, once one of America’s dominant shipping companies, intends to file for bankruptcy, said the Teamsters union, which represents employees of the firm. The filing would come after Yellow failed to reorganize and refinance more than a billion dollars in debt.
The company, whose customers included Walmart and Home Depot, has been financially imperiled for years. It received a $700m pandemic relief loan from the federal government in 2020, which loaded further debt on to a struggling service. Earlier this month, Yellow averted a threatened strike by 22,000 Teamsters-represented workers and last week it said it was exploring opportunities to divest its third-party logistics company.
“Yellow has historically proven that it could not manage itself despite billions of dollars in worker concessions and hundreds of millions in bailout funding from the federal government,” the Teamsters general president, Sean O’Brien, said in a statement.
Much more at the link.
Big business lobbies against heat protections for workers as US boils
Big-business lobbyists, including big agricultural and construction groups, are pushing to water down or stymie efforts at the federal and state levels to implement workplace heat protection standards.
This summer, millions in the US have been exposed to some of the hottest days on record, inciting renewed urgency for federal protections from heat exposure for US workers. The Biden administration has proposed federal heat protections for workers. But those rules face stiff opposition and could take several years to be finalized under current rule-making processes and laws. They could even be scrapped depending on the outcome of 2024’s election.
Business groups and lobbyists have aggressively opposed efforts at state and federal levels to enact heat protection standards for workers, claiming employers already practice what a standard would mandate, expressing concerns about the burden on employers, and claiming the efforts take a “wrong approach”.
Business groups and lobbyists have aggressively opposed efforts at state and federal levels to enact heat protection standards for workers, claiming employers already practice what a standard would mandate, expressing concerns about the burden on employers, and claiming the efforts take a “wrong approach”.
Between 2011 to 2021, 436 workers died from heat exposure according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but that is most likely an undercount because heat-related deaths are often attributed to other accidents or health conditions. At present, no federal law protects workers specifically from extreme heat. Farm workers and advocacy groups are also pushing to include heat protections for farm workers in the 2023 farm bill currently being considered by Congress. But with Republicans in control of Congress, such a measure is unlikely to pass.
Texas prisoners say heatwave turns cells into ovens
In Texas, animal shelters are obliged by law to ensure that their ambient temperature does not rise above 85F (29C) for more than two hours, a measure designed to protect dogs and cats from extreme heat and provide for their “health and wellbeing”.
If only humans were so lucky.
Across the state, in prisons that have no cooling systems, up to 100,000 incarcerated people are baking in concrete and metal cells that act as heat traps. Inside temperatures are estimated to rise regularly above 115F (46C), and have even been recorded to reach as high as 149F, pushing individuals to the point of mental or physical breakdown, or even death.
With Texas set to enter the hottest part of the year over the next two weeks, and with a brutal climate-crisis-fuelled heatwave pummeling the US south, conditions inside its dilapidated and overcrowded penal institutions are reaching crisis point. Inmates have told the Guardian that they are stuck virtually around the clock inside cells they described as ovens. ...
Texas is one of at least 13 states without universal prison air conditioning. About 70% of its units have partial or no cooling systems.
Amite Dominick, president of Texas Prisons Community Advocates (TPCA) which works with inmates and their families, estimates that at capacity there would be more than 100,000 inmates baking in dangerously hot cells.
Dems ACCIDENTALLY Admit Biden LIES On Hunter
Trump increases Republican primary lead despite swirling legal peril
Fani Willis, the district attorney of Fulton county, Georgia, is “ready to go” with indictments in her investigation of Donald Trump’s election subversion. In Washington, the special counsel Jack Smith is expected to add charges regarding election subversion to 40 counts already filed over the former president’s retention of classified records.
Trump already faces 34 criminal charges in New York over hush-money payments to the porn star Stormy Daniels. Referring to Trump being ordered to pay $5m after being found liable for sexual abuse and defamation against the writer E Jean Carroll, a judge recently said Carroll proved Trump raped her. Lawsuits over Trump’s business affairs continue.
Yet a month out from the first debate of the Republican presidential primary, Trump’s domination of the field increases with each poll.
On Monday, the first 2024 survey from the New York Times and Siena College put Trump at 54% support. His closest challenger, Ron DeSantis, was at 17%. No one else – including Mike Pence, Tim Scott and Nikki Haley – was higher than 3%.
DeSantis’s hard-right campaign is widely seen to be out of fuel and on a glide path to destruction. Trump dominates early voting states and in national averages leads the Florida governor by more than 30 points.
U.S. War Machine Is KILLING The U.S. Middle Class – RFK Jr.
US climate change reforestation plans face key problem: lack of tree seedlings
In an effort to slash carbon emissions and provide relief from extreme heat, governments across the nation and globally have pledged to plant trees. But the US is not equipped with the tree seedlings to furnish its own plans, according to a new study. US tree nurseries do not grow nearly enough trees to bring ambitious planting schemes to fruition, and they also lack the plant species diversity those plans require, according to research published in the journal Bioscience on Monday,
For the study, 13 scientists examined 605 plant nurseries across 20 northern states. Only 56 of them – or less than 10% – grow and sell seedlings in the volumes needed for conservation and reforestation. The team, led by two scientists at the University of Vermont’s Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, also found that forest nurseries tend to maintain a limited inventory of a select few species of trees, with priority placed on trees valued for commercial timber production. As a result, nurseries suffer from an “overwhelming scarcity of seedlings” that are well-suited for climate plans, the authors write.
“Despite the excitement and novelty of that idea in many policy and philanthropy circles – when push comes to shove, it’s very challenging on the ground to actually find either the species or the seed sources needed,” said Peter Clark, a forest ecologist at the University of Vermont, who led the new study.
The research comes as swaths of the US face relentless heatwaves. Phoenix, which has experienced record-shattering heat this summer, has said it intends to plant 200 trees a mile in select areas, and has invested $1.5m into the plan. Many US municipalities have made similar tree planting pledges.
On the federal level, the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act provided money for the US Forest Service to plant more than 1bn trees in the next nine years. And the World Economic Forum also aims to help plant 1tn trees around the world by 2030. But trees that can thrive amid local ecological and climate conditions are crucial to meeting such plans, and many nurseries the researchers examined had no stock available of seedlings that have adapted to local conditions. The researchers also found a dearth of “future-climate-suitable” varieties, or varieties that will survive amid worsening heat and extreme weather conditions.
PROOF The Establishment Doesn’t Actually Care About Climate Change!
Huge wildfire explodes in southern California and spreads into Nevada
A huge wildfire burning out of control in California’s Mojave national preserve is spreading rapidly amid erratic winds and high temperatures. The York Fire erupted on Friday near the remote Caruthers Canyon area of the wildland preserve. It crossed the state line into Nevada on Sunday and sent smoke further east into the Las Vegas Valley.
The fire is one of two major blazes burning in California as the region faces hot and dry weather. Firefighters said they had made progress battling the other blaze, the Bonny fire in Riverside county.
The York Fire was mapped at roughly 120 sq miles (284 sq km) on Monday with no containment.
Back in the Mojave desert, wind-driven flames that reached as high as 20ft (6m) in some spots charred tens of thousands of acres of desert scrub, juniper and Joshua tree woodland. The fire had scorched 120 sq miles by Monday and was at zero containment.
The US west has seen an unusually quiet fire season so far, as wet weather improved the devastating drought levels that have plagued the region and delayed the onset of fire weather conditions. But experts have warned that the reprieve would not be permanent. A historic heatwave began blasting the lower south-west US in late June, stretching from Texas across New Mexico and Arizona and into California’s desert.
Phoenix’s record streak of temperatures above 110F ends after 31 days
Phoenix’s record stretch of daily highs over 110F (43.3C) ended Monday as cooling monsoon rains slightly tempered the dangerous heatwave that suffocated the American south-west throughout July.
The region, from Texas across New Mexico and Arizona and into California’s desert, has been grappling with historic heat since June. Phoenix and its suburbs sweltered more intensely than most, with several records including the 31 consecutive days of 110F days. The previous record was 18 straight days, set in 1974.
The streak was finally broken Monday, when the high topped out at 108F (42.2C), the National Weather Service reported.
But the reprieve was expected to be brief, with the forecast calling for highs again above 110F for several days later in the week. And National Weather Service meteorologist Matthew Hirsch said August could be even hotter than July.
Also of Interest
Here are some articles of interest, some which defied fair-use abstraction.
Max Blumenthal SLAMS Biden After Admin REJECTS Australia's PLEA To Free Julian Assange
US admits to pushing Ukraine into a fight it can't win
Ukrainian Soldiers Tell Of High Losses For Little Gains
Mutiny Against the World Order
Chris Hedges: The Forgotten Victims of America’s Class War
Humans Might Be About to Break the Ocean? Don’t Stop the Presses
Quick Takes 5: The Year Climate Change Became Undeniable
Paul Reubens, actor best known for playing Pee-wee Herman, dies aged 70
A Little Night Music
Betty Everett - You’re No Good
Betty Everett - I've Got A Claim On You Baby
Betty Everett - Until You Were Gone
Betty Everett - I Can't Hear You
Betty Everett - I'll Be There
Betty Everett - My Love
Betty Everett & Jerry Butler - Love Is Strange
Betty Everett - Chained To Your Love
Betty Everett - The Shoop Shoop Song (It’s In His Kiss)
Comments
On media bias
.
I read about the yellow bankruptcy on WSWS and they pointed out that the Biden Administration lifted not a finger to find a way to keep 30,000 Americans off the unemployment rolls unlike the billions that they gave to the failing banks so they wouldn’t fail. And they pointed out how Joe Biden the most pro union president evah screwed the railroad workers. Oh yeah and there is still almost a train derailment a day.
This is a must read on how Zelensky has sold his country to various oligarchs while screwing the thousands of small Ukrainian farmers.
Putin called Zelensky a traitor for selling his country out to oligarchs while sending tens of thousands of his people to their deaths. After reading this I agree with him.
I’m posting this Obama article again so people can see how many off the books government NGOs the CIA uses to do its wet work in countries all over the globe just like the oligarchs in the Ukraine article use their non profit to keep from paying taxes when they do asset stripping and calling for murderous austerity measures on the population.
It also shows how Obama’s deep history with the CIA proves that he never had any intention to do what he ran on and that he was always a puppet for the real owners of the world’s financial institutions. I thought that I couldn’t despise him anymore than I did, but boy was I wrong! Especially how he’s screwing the people of Chicago with his bogus presidential library. And boy is it awful.
“When out of fear you twist the lesser evil into the lie that it is something good, you eventually rob people of the capacity to distinguish between good and evil.”
~ Hannah Arendt
evening snoopy...
yep, every country needs "leaders" that will sell out to the appropriate bidder and screw the little people. america has been truly blessed in that regard.
Oops, there goes any hope for peace
Jake Sullivan, the US national security adviser, is expected to attend Saudi talks
Thought it was funny how Mexico's ALMO said no to those 'talks' as Russia needs
to be a participant, which apparently is not on the table. One sided peace
negotiations do not work Jake.
thanks for the music too!
truth is considered foreign influence, world peace is a threat to national security
evening qms...
don't worry, jake sullivan can't do much to harm progress towards peace there. the process is designed to make the chance of peace even more remote.
Thanks for the news and blues as always!
Lots of great information tonight. Unfortunately a lot of it is showing where we are heading and I sometimes feel the hopelessness of what can I do to bring any change. Jury for me is still out on RFK but his conversation with Jimmy Dore in tonight’s Evening Blues was quite informative.
Hope you have a great evening and thanks for keeping up informed!
Life is what you make it, so make it something worthwhile.
This ain't no dress rehearsal!
evening jb...
heh, yep, there doesn't seem to be much that one can do as an individual except to be informed and ready to to move in the right direction when a critical mass of others wants to go that way with you.
for me, rfkjr is not what i'm looking for, i see him as a traditional democrat unlikely to step far enough out of the footprint of conventional politics to do what needs to be done. on the other hand, i do think that he is giving lots of other democrats and republicans something to think about, which is not a bad thing.
have a great evening!
Peace plan and seedlings
Not good news about seedlings. But not being an expert but could foresters go into established forests and harvest seedlings from what is a available? Seems countries with large numbers of greenhouses could be used to grow the seedlings. Just brainstorming. I was thinking of the Netherlands which grows winter veggies for Europe but had to shut down for awhile because energy too expensive due to Russian gas embargo. Maybe subsidies.
Dang it man, if the Russians can grow watermelons in the Antarctica, we smart Westerns can grow them seedlings somewhere.
Russian scientists have grown watermelons in the coldest place on Earth
As for the Ukraine peace plan meeting in Saudi Arabia. Peace plan without the Russians? I read the proposed Zelensky 10 point peace plan proposal and my summary would be for the Russians to eat shit and die. I have a feeling this meeting is one those meetings where you get a free meal if you listen to a sales pitch on timeshares. Or more likely a meeting with Al Capone about "bidness".
evening mr w...
currently, there are probably enough seeds to get started on growing out seedlings. part of the problem though is capitalist-managed forests which, instead of growing a diversity of trees and plants, grows the trees that are most profitable (have characteristics like fast growth and high-market-demand) and then harvests them just as they are beginning to reach the peak of their ability to sequester carbon. there is only so much undisturbed forest land and we need to add a lot more if we are to make a dent in carbon emissions.
i think that your assessment of the peace plan and the attendant conference is spot on.
have a great evening!
Good Evening Joe, thanks for the EBs.
The Bonny Fire, in CA, was only 20% contained as of yesterday, but it is in open country about half way between the pacific coast and the NW corner of the Salton Sea up in the mountains to the North East of Palomar.
The York fire, which is huge, is even further out into nowhere. There's not much out in the Mojave Preserve and the fire is about half way between Needles and Pahrump, mostly west of the Nevada border somewhat NW of Searchlight.
Meanwhile, Alexander was discussing the likelihood of Russians jamming Starlink, so I thouoght I'd post evidence of Russian jamming>
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...
now that's the sort of russian jamming i think that we all can support!
have a great evening!
FWIW,
Betty Everett is just wonderful! Hadn't had the Shoop Shoop song in my head for decades, but I do now.
Man, let me get out of town for 3 days, I come back to court, mediation, more court, more mediation...
Some days, I think I should ease out of this and into something without so many rules, timelines...and just live a life.
Well, I asked for it. All entirely on me.
Have a great evening, and I hope to watch some vids you feature.
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981
evening otc...
um, retirement has no rules. just sayin'
have a great evening!
gotta say --
Tonight's Simplicius is a doozy:
https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/sitrep-8123-the-hegemon-begins-to
“One of the things I love about the American people is that we can hold many thoughts at once” - Kamala Harris
I wonder how the floods in Beijing will disrupt the supply chain
"… yet it’s the West themselves who are hugely reliant on the natural resources that Russia/China produce, as well as those found in Africa.”
Their way or else
One of the objectives of former South Korean President Moon Jae-in's overtures to North Korea was to open up North Korea's mineral resources to link them to the South's industrial capacity. In it's ever wrong headed ideological hard line approach to foreign policy the US just blew that off. At the time it was noted by South Korean observers that North Korea had huge estimated reserves of rare earth minerals.
I found this article with a quick search:
Trillions at Stake: The Next Battle In Asia Is Over North Korea's Rare Earth Resources
Trillions in minerals. Oct 2020
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/trillions-stake-next-battle-asia-...
In the report it says it was originally written a year earlier, which would put it about the time, John Bolton and the MICIMATT blew off North Korea at Hanoi with their bogus negotiating strategy, "sometimes you gotta walk." I believe the numbers on the estimated mineral deposits in this article are on the conservative side. Even so, the potential is still great.
US policy makers are almost invariably wrong in their ideological approach to Asian policy. Sometimes it seems they couldn't do something that was actually in the "national interest" if our lives depended on it.
Retired USAF LTG Leaf, former deputy PACCOM commander, spoke at the peace rally in DC concerning the past due date on a peace agreement with North Korea. This guy is no dove, but he emphasized that currently the US which has a huge military organization in northeast Asia organized for war against North Korea, has no dedicated resources or government organization dedicated to finding a pathway to peace in the region particularly with respect to the division of Korea, and getting past the 70 year old armistice. You can't get there from here if you don't have a diplomatic plan.
There are a couple of Korean war personal stories starting at about the 11 min mark. Before that the three US representatives from Congress speak, starting with Barbara Lee.
語必忠信 行必正直
Yuo might want to consider doing a stand alone essay
I never knew that the term "Never Again" only pertained to
those born Jewish
"Antisemite used to be someone who didn't like Jews
now it's someone who Jews don't like"
Heard from Margaret Kimberley