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This evening's music features Chicago blues guitarist Hubert Sumlin. Enjoy!

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

-- Buckminster Fuller

News and Opinion

US targeted Black Lives Matter activists in bid to disrupt movement, report finds

The federal government deliberately targeted Black Lives Matter protesters via heavy-handed criminal prosecutions in an attempt to disrupt and discourage the global movement that swept the nation and beyond last summer after the Minneapolis police killed George Floyd, according to a new report.

Movement leaders and experts said the prosecution of protesters over the past year continued a century-long practice by the federal government, rooted in structural racism, to suppress Black social movements via the use of surveillance tactics and other mechanisms.

The report was released by the Movement for Black Lives, a coalition of more than 50 activism and advocacy civil rights groups and professional associations representing Black communities and published in partnership with the Creating Law Enforcement Accountability and Responsibility (Clear) clinic at City University of New York (Cuny) School of Law.

“The empirical data and findings in this report largely corroborate what Black organizers have long known intellectually, intuitively, and from lived experience about the federal government’s disparate policing and prosecution of racial justice protests and related activity,” the report stated. ...

“We want to really show how the US government has continued to persecute the Black movement by surveillance, by criminalizing protests, and by using the criminal legal system to prevent people from protesting and punishing them for being engaged in protests by attempting to curtail their first amendment rights,” said Amara Enyia, the Movement for Black Lives’ policy research coordinator.

“It is undeniable that racism plays a role,“ Enyia said. “It is structurally built into the fabric of this country and its institutions, which is why it’s been so difficult to eradicate. It’s based on institutions that were designed around racism and around the devaluing of Black people and the devaluing of Black lives.”

U.S. Imposes Sanctions on Three Cuban Officials Over Crackdown on Protests

The U.S. Treasury Department said on Thursday it had imposed sanctions on three Cuban officials it said were involved in the suppression of protests on the island that began on July 11. ...

The new sanctions were the fourth round of measures Washington has taken against Cuban officials and entities since the protests began.

Those newly sanctioned included the chief of the Central Army and the deputy chief of the General Staff Revolutionary Armed Forces, who Treasury said were connected to units deployed to suppress peaceful demonstrators.

Treasury also blacklisted a top prison official responsible for the treatment of more than 800 people detained in response to the protests, it said.

Spencer Ackerman: Today’s Crisis in Kabul Is Direct Result of Decades of U.S. War & Destabilization

The Oligarchic Empire Is Actually Simple And Easy To Understand

If you’re like me and spend entirely too much time on Political Twitter you may have recently observed a bunch of people saying you shouldn’t post your opinion about the Afghanistan situation unless you’re an expert who has studied the nation’s dynamics in depth. Like an empire invading a nation and murdering a bunch of people for decades is some super complicated and esoteric matter that you need a PhD to have an opinion about.

You see fairly simple abuses framed as highly complicated issues all the time by people who defend those abuses. War. Israeli apartheid. My abusive ex used to go around telling people what happened between us was more complicated than I was making it sound.

Before he became Trump’s National Security Advisor in 2018 John Bolton faced a contentious interview on Fox News where he was criticized for his role in Bush’s invasion of Iraq, and he responded that “the point I think you need to understand is, life is complicated in the Middle East. When you say ‘the overthrow of Saddam Hussein was a mistake,’ it’s simplistic.”

Bolton is now among the “experts” on Afghanistan doing mainstream media tours on CNN and NPR explaining to the public that the decision to end the 20-year military occupation was a mistake.

Yeah, don’t you worry your pretty little heads about war. It will just confuse you, because it’s far too complicated to understand. These important matters should be left to men like John Bolton, who are consistently wrong about every foreign policy issue.

This carefully promoted idea serves only the powerful, and entirely too many people buy into it. You’ll even see dedicated leftists shying away from commentary on western imperialism in favor of domestic policy because they don’t feel confident talking about something they’ve been trained to believe is very difficult and complex.

Which is silly, because war is actually the easiest aspect of the oligarchic empire to understand. Murdering people with military explosives for power and profit is plainly wrong. You don’t need to be an Ivy League university graduate to understand this, and given the track record of Ivy League university graduates on this matter it’s probably better if you are not. A globe-spanning power structure loosely centralized around the United States orchestrates murder at mass scale to ensure perpetual domination of the planet. It really is that simple.

Now, you can spend the rest of your life studying the details of precisely how this is the case, but they’re just that: details about how this dynamic is taking place. You can learn all about the various ways the oligarchic empire advances its geostrategic agendas using wars, proxy conflicts, coups, sanctions, special ops, cold war brinkmanship and the so-called “war on terror”, but you will only be discovering further details about this simple overarching truth.

And the same is true of the other aspects of the status quo power structure: they’re meant to look complicated, but what you actually need to know about them to orient yourself in our world is fairly simple.

The systems of capitalism are very complex by design, and a tremendous amount of thievery happens in those mysterious knowledge gaps on financial and economic matters where only the cleverest manipulators understand what’s going on. But the basics of our problem are quite simple: money rewards and uplifts sociopathy. The more willing you are to do whatever it takes to become wealthy, the wealthier you will be. Those who rise to the top are those who are sufficiently lacking in human empathy to step on whoever they need to step on to get ahead.

As a result we’ve had many generations of wealthy sociopaths using their fortunes and clout to influence governmental, media, financial and economic systems in a way that advantages them more and more with each passing year. This is why we are ruled by sociopaths who understand that money is power and power is relative, which means the less money everyone else has the more power they get to have over everyone else. They’ve been widening the wealth gap further and further over the years, a trend they seek to continue with the so-called “Great Reset” you’ve been hearing so much about lately.

You can spend the rest of your life learning to follow the money, studying the dynamics of currency, banking and economics, but what you’ll be learning is more and more details about the way the dynamic I just described is taking place.

Sociopaths rise to the top, the most powerful of whom understand that things like money, governments and the lines drawn between nations are all collective narrative constructs which can be altered in whatever way benefits them and ignored whenever it’s convenient. For this reason controlling the stories the public tell themselves about what’s going on in their world is of paramount importance, which is why so much wealth gets poured into buying up media and media influence in the form of advertising, funding think tanks and NGOs, and buying up politicians with campaign contributions and corporate lobbying.

These powerful sociopaths tend to form loose alliances with each other and with the heads of government agencies as often as possible since it’s always easier to move with power than against it. So what you get is an alliance of depraved oligarchs with no loyalty to any nation using powerful governments as tools to bomb, bully and plunder the rest of the world for their own power and profit, and using mass-scale media psyops to keep the public from rising up and stopping them.

And that’s it, really. So simple it can be summed up in a few paragraphs. Don’t let elitists use the illusion of complexity to cow you out of talking about what’s going on in your world. You can see what’s going on well enough to begin speaking out, and the more you learn the more detailed the picture will become.

Speak. You are infinitely more qualified to comment on the way power is moving in the world than the people who’ve been consistently wrong about everything throughout their entire careers yet remain widely platformed by the oligarchic media. If John Bolton gets a voice, so do you.

‘Taliban called me and informed I should continue my job’ | Kabul’s Mayor on the ongoing situation

Delaying US exit a month could have meant peace in Afghanistan, says negotiator

Joe Biden delaying the exit of American forces from Afghanistan by just a month could have made a significant difference to the outcome of continuing peace talks with the Taliban leadership, according to one of the negotiators. Fawzia Koofi, an Afghan politician and women’s rights activist, said the chaotic withdrawal undermined all leverage that the US and the Afghan government had had with the Taliban at the talks in Qatar.

“Afghanistan is the victim of back-to-back mistakes,” she said. From her home in Kabul, Koofi, who has been the subject of two assassination attempts, said: “President Biden could have delayed this to wait for a political settlement – for even just another month, just get the political settlement first. They could have come to a deal.” She said the abrupt departure had needlessly put many more people at risk.

“We all want international forces to leave,” she said. “It’s not sustainable or logical from any point of view to have a foreign force protecting your country, but this is so untimely for the US to have chosen now, in the middle of negotiations and before we get a settlement.

“If the Americans were to stick to their political leverage, pressing the Taliban and using all sources of pressure against them, then I think they would have come to a negotiated settlement.”

She said the lifting of UN travel sanctions, enabling the Taliban leadership to be in Doha for talks, had also been poorly managed and had allowed them to garner support. “They used the travel to strengthen their own position; they went to China, Russia, Iran [and] Turkey to bolster their support and enjoy the standing and the position they want. “That is why I think the world must watch the situation unfolding very carefully. To ensure there are no blank cheques as they ignore human rights.”

Hezbollah says Iran fuel tanker to sail to Lebanon

US hospitalizations of people under 50 at highest levels since start of pandemic

Hospitalizations of people under the age of 50 with Covid-19 are now at the highest levels seen in the US since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, the latest government data shows.

The largest increases in hospitalizations was among those in their 30s and the under-18s, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The previous peak in coronavirus patients under 50 needing to be hospitalized was in January this year.

The vast majority of Americans being hospitalized are unvaccinated and rates of people taking the vaccine decline with age – the youngest eligible Americans also tend to be the least vaccinated. Children under 12 are not yet eligible to get the shots.

Hospitalizations could reach a new height across all ages within a month if the latest surge of the disease, with infections currently being driven by the Delta variant, is not curbed, the CDC noted.

US renews fight with Facebook, arguing company holds monopoly

The Federal Trade Commission on Thursday refiled its antitrust case against Facebook, arguing the company holds monopoly power in social networking and renewing the fight to rein in big tech. The agency also dismissed a request from Facebook that its chair, Lina Khan, step aside in the case because of her criticism of them in the past.

It was the second try by the FTC in its antitrust attack against Facebook. In June, a federal judge dismissed antitrust lawsuits brought against the tech giant by the agency and a broad coalition of state attorneys general. In its dismissal, the court cited a lack of evidence that Facebook is indeed a monopoly. The decision marked a stunning setback for the FTC and others who favor antitrust action against the social media giant.

The refiling cited daily and monthly user metrics to demonstrate how Facebook since at least 2011 has maintained “a dominant share” of US social networking and maintains “durable monopoly power in social networking services”.

“Lacking serious competition, Facebook has been able to hone a surveillance-based advertising model and impose ever-increasing burdens on its users,” the FTC said in the refiling. ...

The complaint cited the company’s acquisitions of competing platforms such as Instagram, Path and Foursquare as evidence that it has used monopolistic practices to keep competitors at bay. It shared internal communications from Facebook about potential acquisitions – including that of Twitter and Snapchat – to show the company’s intent to ruthlessly scoop up competitors.

Amazon reportedly plans to open department stores

Amazon is planning to open department stores after years of competing against, and in some cases helping to destroy, the very same traditional brick-and-mortar retailers. The company’s latest move to bricks and mortar, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, comes after Amazon earlier this week eclipsed even Walmart in overall sales to become the world’s largest retail seller outside China.

Although Amazon already operates physical retail locations, including bookstores and tech-focused shops, they are often found in high-traffic urban areas. The plan comes four years after Amazon purchased Whole Foods as part of an attempt to remake consumer-facing food industry, using the chain for walk-through shopping and as home-food delivery and returns hubs.

Last year, Amazon opened its first cashier-less supermarket, with no checkout lines, that uses technology to add items that a customer picks up to their Amazon online basket account. With the opening of Amazon department stores, that strategy is set to expand to sales of Amazon’s private-label clothing, household items and electronics as well as independent brands. According to Wells Fargo Amazon is already the largest seller of clothing in the US. ...

According to the Journal, some of the first Amazon department stores are expected to be located in Ohio and California. The retail spaces will be a relatively modest in department store terms of around 30,000 sq ft, matching scaled-down formats that existing department store chains, Bloomingdale’s Nordstrom, have developed. Amazon’s strategy of recreating what it had once destroyed will come across as deeply ironic. Department stores, founded in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were once crucial to the growth of consumer-facing economy and of shopping as a pastime in its own right.

Court upholds Texas law banning common abortion method

A Texas law outlawing an abortion method commonly used to end second-trimester pregnancies has been upheld by a federal appeals court in New Orleans. The 2017 law in question has never been enforced. It seeks to prohibit the use of forceps to remove a fetus from the womb without first using an injected drug or a suction procedure to ensure the fetus is dead.

Abortion rights advocates argued that the law, known as SB8 in court records, in effect outlaws what is often the safest method of abortion for women in the second trimester of pregnancy – a procedure medically known as dilation and evacuation.

They also argued that fetuses cannot feel pain during the gestation period affected by the law, and that one alternative outlined by the state, the use of suction to remove a fetus, also results in dismemberment, not just the forceps method.

A three-judge panel of the fifth US circuit court of appeals blocked enforcement of the law last year. But Texas sought, and was granted, a re-hearing by the full court. A majority among the 14 appellate judges who heard arguments in January sided with Texas on Wednesday.

Country Music Star Leaves $1000 Tip For Mother

US to erase student loan debt for borrowers with severe disabilities

The Biden administration announced Thursday it will automatically erase student loan debt for more than 300,000 Americans with severe disabilities that leave them unable to earn significant incomes.

The move will wipe out more than $5.8bn in debt, according to the education department, and it marks the start of a broader overhaul of a program that has been criticized for having overly burdensome rules.

The federal government offers student debt relief for people who are “totally and permanently disabled” and have limited incomes. But the current rules require them to submit documentation of their disability and undergo a three-year monitoring period to prove they’re earning little pay.

Tens of thousands of people have been dropped from the program and had their loans reinstated simply because they failed to submit proof of their earnings, however, and critics say the complex rules deter some from applying. ...

Starting in September, the education department will start erasing student debt for 323,000 Americans identified in social security records as being permanently disabled. Borrowers will be notified once they have been approved for relief. All of the loans are expected to be discharged this year. The department also plans to eliminate the program’s three-year monitoring period, which was previously suspended during the pandemic.

Media Libs Humiliate Themselves Over Cuomo

Progressives Re-evaluate Messaging, Political Strategy After The Left's DEVASTATING Nina Turner Loss

US judge throws out Trump-era approval for giant Alaska oil project

A federal judge on Wednesday threw out Trump administration approvals for a large planned oil project on Alaska’s North Slope, saying the federal review was flawed and didn’t include mitigation measures for polar bears. US district court Judge Sharon Gleason in Anchorage, in a 110-page ruling, vacated permits for ConocoPhillips’ Willow Project in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska.

The Trump administration approved the project in late 2020, and the Biden administration defended the project in court.

Rebecca Boys, a ConocoPhillips spokesperson, said the company would review Gleason’s decision “and evaluate the options available regarding this project”.

Spokespersons for the US Bureau of Land Management and the interior department said their agencies had no comment. The BLM conducted the environmental review of the project that Gleason found flawed.

Conservation groups and Sovereign Inupiat for a Living Arctic, described as a grassroots organization, had challenged the adequacy of the review process.

A billion children at ‘extreme risk’ from climate impacts – Unicef

Almost half the world’s 2.2 billion children are already at “extremely high risk” from the impacts of the climate crisis and pollution, according to a report from Unicef. The UN agency’s head called the situation “unimaginably dire”.

Nearly every child around the world was at risk from at least one of these impacts today, including heatwaves, floods, cyclones, disease, drought, and air pollution, the report said. But 1 billion children live in 33 countries facing three or four impacts simultaneously. The countries include India, Nigeria and the Philippines, and much of sub-Saharan Africa.

The report is the first to combine high-resolution maps of climate and environmental impacts with maps of child vulnerability, such as poverty and access to clean water, healthcare and education. “It essentially [shows] the likelihood of a child’s ability to survive climate change,” said Nick Rees, one of the report’s authors. ...

The Unicef report said the impacts of the climate crisis were “deeply inequitable” and very likely to get worse. Rees said: “The top 10 countries that are at extremely high risk are only responsible for 0.5% of global emissions.”

The report found 920 million children are highly exposed to water scarcity, 820 million to heatwaves, and 600 million to vector-borne diseases such as malaria and dengue fever, which are likely to get worse as suitable climate conditions for mosquitoes and pathogens spread.

Also of Interest

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

The All-American Base World

As Kabul Is Retaken, Papers Look Back in Erasure

‘Defeat was inevitable’: Guardian panel weighs in on the Afghanistan catastrophe

Taliban Calls for Unity as Protests Spread in Afghanistan

Trump team thought UK officials ‘out of their minds’ aiming for herd immunity, book says

Sanders Traveling to Indiana and Iowa to Pitch $3.5 Trillion Spending Plan to Working Americans

How California's Top Democrats Paved the Way for a Republican Governor This Fall

Why is life on Earth still taking second place to fossil fuel companies?

One airport, 1,300 snakes: San Francisco helps to save endangered species

Woman condemned in Salem witch trials on verge of pardon 328 years later

Jimmy Dore: Snopes Founder CAUGHT Plagiarizing & Deceiving Readers

David Sirota: Sackler Family Threatens To WITHDRAW $4.5B Pledge, Demands Immunity In Opioid Crisis

Richard Wolff: Biden SNAP Program PROVIDES $1/Day To Nation’s POOREST, Child Tax Credit NECESSARY

A Little Night Music

Hubert Sumlin - You Got to Help Me

Hubert Sumlin - Blues for Henry

Howlin' Wolf - Highway 49

Hubert Sumlin & David Johansen - Smokestack Lightning

Hubert Sumlin - I'm Ready

Hubert Sumlin - Sometimes I'm Right

Hubert Sumlin, Robert Cray Band, Jimmie Vaughan - Sitting on top of The world

Hubert Sumlin - Poor Me , Pour Me

Hubert Sumlin - Still a Fool (ft. Keith Richards)

Eric Clapton, Robert Cray, Hubert Sumlin, Jimmie Vaughan - Killing Floor

Hubert Sumlin - Hidden Charms