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The day's news roundup + tonight's musical feature: John Mooney

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Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features New Orleans slide guitarist John Mooney. Enjoy!

^{John Mooney - Please Don't Go}

"In the 38th chapter of Ezekiel, it says that the land of Israel will come under attack by the armies of the ungodly nations, and it says that Libya will be among them. Do you understand the significance of that? Libya has now gone Communist, and that's a sign that the day of Armageddon isn't far off."

-- Ronald Reagan

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News and Opinion

There’s No Good News In The Unfolding Of Armageddon

The decay of western civilization is unfolding in real time right in front of our eyes.

Israel has ramped up its assault on the West Bank with an incursion the likes of which has not been seen since 2002, at the same time we learn that the Biden administration has been scrambling to increase its weapons shipments to Israel. Haaretz reports that August has been the second-busiest month for weapons shipments from the US to Israel’s Nevatim Airbase, second only to October 2023.

This is the same Biden administration that Americans have been assured is working “tirelessly” and “around the clock” for a ceasefire in Gaza. They’re committing genocide and lying about it while laughing and grinning and celebrating the “joy” of the Kamala Harris campaign.

Meanwhile in the UK the government is going insane arresting critics of Israel’s western-backed atrocities for speech crimes. Prominent pro-Palestinian voices Richard Medhurst, Sarah Wilkinson and Richard Barnard have all been targeted by counter-terrorism police in recent days under the British Terrorism Act on the allegation that they have been too supportive of forbidden groups in their expression of political opinion about recent events in the middle east. They join British journalist Kit Klarenberg and former British ambassador Craig Murray, who came under attack for speech crimes under the same law last year.

Something similar is happening in Australia, where high-profile journalist Mary Kostakidis faces charges of violating the Racial Discrimination Act for two retweets about Israel and Hezbollah which offended the Zionist Federation of Australia. This move came shortly after the Australian government appointed its first “anti-semitism envoy”, a move many feared would lead to crackdowns on speech that is critical of Israel.

And in France President Emmanuel Macron has refused to honor the results of an election, which saw the left-wing New Popular Front alliance win a plurality in July, by appointing a new prime minister. Many have accused the president of orchestrating a coup, and Macron’s actions are being widely cited as proof that the so-called “centrists” of western liberalism will always side with fascists to stop any movement toward socialism. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who leads the largest party in New Popular Front, recently vowed to recognize Palestine “as quickly as possible”.

While all this is happening, the Russians are warning of a third world war as the western empire’s proxy war in Ukraine continues to escalate. Zelenskyites have been citing the Ukrainian invasion of Kursk as evidence that Moscow has been bluffing about all its red lines, saying the largest invasion of Russia since the second world war proves that the only real danger is NATO’s unwillingness to escalate further with more attacks deeper into Russian territory.

Sure, throw all caution to the wind and keep on ramping up brinkmanship with a nuclear superpower. What’s the worst that could possibly happen?

One step closer to regional war

Israeli military launches fatal airstrike on humanitarian aid convoy in Gaza

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have said they carried out an airstrike on a humanitarian aid convoy in Gaza aimed at “armed assailants” trying to hijack it but the charity that organised the aid said people killed in the strike were employees of the transport company it was working with.

The convoy, organised by the US-based NGO Anera, was carrying medical supplies and fuel to an Emirati-run hospital in Rafah on Thursday evening at the time of the attack. Its route had been coordinated in advance with the IDF, under a deconfliction process intended to prevent aid vehicles being bombed.

Anera’s Palestine country director, Sandra Rasheed, said: “This is a shocking incident. The convoy, which was coordinated by Anera and approved by Israeli authorities, included an Anera employee who was fortunately unharmed.

“Tragically, several individuals, all employed by the transportation company we work with, were killed in the attack. They were in the first vehicle of the convoy.” Unconfirmed reports from Gaza said five people were killed in the airstrike. ...

The airstrike on the convoy came hours after Israeli soldiers opened fire on a World Food Programme (WFP) vehicle clearly marked with UN insignia, travelling in a convoy of two.

WHO says Israel has agreed pauses in Gaza fighting to allow polio vaccinations

The World Health Organization has announced it has “a preliminary commitment” for humanitarian pauses in fighting in the Gaza Strip to allow for the vaccination of children against polio, with the first vaccinations to begin as early as this weekend.

The UN is preparing to vaccinate an estimated 640,000 children in Gaza, where the UN’s global health body confirmed on 23 August that at least one baby has been paralysed by the type 2 polio virus, the first such case in the territory in 25 years. ...

In a statement, Netanyahu’s office denied an Israeli television report that there would be a general truce during the vaccination campaign, which begins at the weekend, but said it had approved the “designation of specific places” in Gaza.

“This has been presented to the security cabinet and has received the support of the relevant professionals,” the statement said.

The terse statement may well have been deliberately vague. Far-right elements of the coalition are adamantly opposed to any form of truce or relief for Gaza’s Palestinian population, but aid agencies have made it clear that the polio outbreak, the first in Gaza for 25 years, would almost certainly spread to Israel if not contained immediately.

COL. Lawrence Wilkerson : US Empire Failing

Special relationship at risk if UK bans arms sales to Israel, says Trump adviser

Labour risks a serious rift in the UK’s special relationship with the US if it goes ahead with a ban on arms sales to Israel, Donald Trump’s last national security adviser has warned.

Robert O’Brien, still one of the key security voices in the Trump circle, said the UK was endangering its future role in the F-35 project as well as facing the risk of US congressional counter-embargos. The F-35 fighter jets are made in part by British arms firms and are used by Israel’s air force as part of its bombing of Gaza.

The Labour government has yet to decide whether to suspend licences for arms exports to Israel over concerns that international humanitarian law may have been breached in the war in Gaza.

Speaking to the Policy Exchange thinktank, O’Brien also urged the UK government to do everything it could to shut down the international criminal court’s (ICC) investigation of Israel, accusing the body – which is headed by a British prosecutor, Karim Khan – of being highly selective over which leaders it chose to prosecute.

It is the first public sign of the scale of potential tensions facing a Labour government if it pursues a human rights-based foreign policy with the US under a Trump administration.

US support for Israel’s war on Gaza has led to an ‘awakening’ in Chicago’s Little Palestine

Israel Claims Five Palestinian fighters killed in West Bank mosque as assault continues

The Israeli military said it had killed five Palestinian fighters inside a mosque in the West Bank city of Tulkarm, in the midst of one of the largest assaults on the occupied territory for months. The overall toll of 16 Palestinians killed in less than two days would make it the deadliest Israeli operation in the West Bank since the 7 October Hamas attack in Israel which killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and ignited the Gaza war.

The latest fighting came as the EU foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, said on Thursday he had formally asked the bloc’s members to consider imposing sanctions on some Israeli ministers for “hate messages” against Palestinians that he said broke international law. Borrell did not name any of the Israeli ministers to whom he was referring, nor specify which messages he had in mind. But in recent weeks he has publicly criticised Israel’s security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, and the finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, for statements he described as “sinister” and “an incitement to war crimes”.

Inside Nur Shams refugee camp near Tulkarm, residents told the Guardian Israeli troops had gone house to house, detaining Palestinian men as they went. Mohammed Aisha, a 42-year-old Nur Shams resident, speaking at a mosque just outside the camp, said: “The soldiers asked us to leave our house at 10am this morning and the Israelis made a big hole through the walls from one house to another. They handcuffed us with plastic strips and we were taken to a military base outside the city.”

Aisha described a scene of desolation left by the raid, adding: “All of our male neighbours were taken to the military base. The roads inside the camp were totally destroyed, sewerage pipes, water pipes were destroyed. The streets became hills of rubble, many houses are totally burned, this is not the camp we knew any more.”

On the outskirts of Nablus, 14 miles (23km) to the east, residents were told that some roads in and out of the city would be closed on Thursday, and the sound of drones – locally nicknamed “samiras” – could be heard overhead amid fears the operation would also target the city. “People are saying that tonight it will be Nablus’s turn,” one resident called Ghassan said.

Aaron Maté : Israel Collapsing; Ukraine Invading

Israel Steps Up Assault on the West Bank, at Least 18 Palestinians Killed

Israeli operations expanded in the West Bank on Thursday during the second day of Israel’s largest attack on the occupied territory since the Second Intifada.

According to the Palestinian news agency WAFA, at least 18 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank since Israel launched the assault early Wednesday.

The attack is focused on the northern areas of the West Bank. WAFA reported that Israeli forces withdrew from Tublus but expanded the assault in Jenin and Tulkarm, and raids were also reported in southern parts of the territory, including Hebron and near Bethlehem.

Palestinian Islamic Jihad confirmed some of their fighters were killed in Tulkarm’s Nur Shams refugee camp, saying they died “after a heroic battle against the soldiers of the occupation.”

INTEL Roundtable w/ Johnson & McGovern - Early Edition Weekly Wrap

No Policy Change: In CNN Interview, Harris Refuses to Condition U.S. Military Support for Israel

Suspending Israel From the UN

Israel’s devastating onslaught on Gaza, now approaching the one-year mark, and increasing settler outrages in the West Bank are giving fresh urgency to moves to suspend the Jewish state from the United Nations General Assembly. Palestinian civil society has long been calling for such a step, and the Gaza war, along with the two major pronouncements from the International Court of Justice (ICJ) about Israel this year, have given the initiative new traction.

The idea is to use the same mechanism against the Jewish state that was used in 1974 to freeze apartheid South Africa’s participation in the General Assembly. The action contributed to the white minority government’s isolation and its eventual collapse. It was the new, democratic South African state that brought the genocide application against Israel in the ICJ, resulting in an interim judgment by the court in January broadly supporting South Africa’s case. ...

Saleh Hijazi, a BNC [Palestinian BDS National Committee] adviser on apartheid-free policy, said he expected calls for Israel’s suspension to intensify next month with the opening of the 79th session of the General Assembly. UNGA, as it is known, begins on Sept. 10.

France’s Neoliberal Coup – with French MP Danièle Obono

CEOs with lowest-paid US workers ‘focused on own short-term windfall’ – report

The CEOs of some of the largest employers with the lowest-paid workers in the US are more “focused on their own personal short-term windfall” – spending significantly more money on stock buybacks than capital investments and contributions to employee retirement plans, according to a new report released by the Institute for Policy Studies.

Between 2019 to 2023, the 100 largest low-wage employers in the US, the 100 corporations in the S&P 500 with the lowest median worker pay, spent $522bn on stock buybacks. Lowe’s and Home Depot spent the most on stock buybacks, with Lowe’s spending $42.6bn during this period and Home Depot spending $37.2bn.

The report cites that Lowe’s could have used those funds to give every one of its 285,000 employees an annual $29,865 bonus for five years, and Home Depot could have used those funds to give five annual $16,071 bonuses to each of the retailer’s 463,100 employees.

“The data in this report reveals how CEOs are focused on their own personal short-term windfall, rather than a long-term prosperity for their workers or even for their own companies,” said Sarah Anderson, director of the Global Economy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies and author of the report. “They’ve blown over half a trillion dollars, these 100 companies, on really what amounts to a financial scam to inflate CEO pay while many of their workers were struggling to put food on the table.”

Elon Musk CENSORED?!?: BRAZIL Tells X To SHUT DOWN

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Is Palestine activism possible in the Democratic Party?

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How Exxon chases billions in US subsidies for a ‘climate solution’ that helps it drill more oil

When the oil giant ExxonMobil sponsored an event at the re-energizing Democratic national convention (DNC) in Chicago last week, it was disrupted by climate activists outraged that big oil was invited on to an influential political platform. “Exxon lies, people die,” protesters shouted before being evicted.

The event included a “fireside chat” with Vijay Swarup, the company’s senior climate strategy and technology director. Swarup is a 30-year Exxon veteran who headed the company’s research and development team for just under a decade, and oversaw initiatives on biofuels, carbon capture and storage (CCS) and hydrogen.

Speaking at the DNC event, Swarup said: “We need new technology and we need policy to support that technology. We need governments working with private industry.” The Exxon executive also praised the Biden administration’s landmark climate legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), passed in 2022, for helping the company pursue new CCS and hydrogen projects. He is not alone in that regard. At an oil summit in Houston earlier this year, Exxon’s CEO, Darren Woods, said, “I am very supportive of the IRA” and acknowledged the legislation “especially benefited” the company. Exxon is set to receive billions in public subsidies because of the legislation.

The US multinational has not always been such a strong advocate for the technology, but now argues that CCS is crucial in the climate fight and works, in theory, by capturing carbon dioxide from hard-to-abate heavy industries, like steel or cement, and pumping it underground to be stored indefinitely. Exxon champions itself as a “global leader” in CCS, maintaining it is driving “meaningful change” in the fight against global heating.

But an estimated two-thirds to three-quarters of the carbon currently captured in the US is used to extract hard-to-reach reserves, a practice known as enhanced oil recovery (EOR). And the reputation of CCS has largely been one of “underperformance” and “unmet expectations”, the International Energy Agency said in 2023. And Exxon’s shift to promoting CCS – or any climate solution – is relatively recent. For much of Swarup’s three decades at Exxon, the oil giant was accused by civil society and climate scientists as being behind a vast network of neoliberal organizations that have denied evidence about the climate emergency, manufactured scientific doubt and delayed regulatory action.

No Ban on Fracking: Kamala Harris Doubles Down on Fossil Fuels in Shift from 2019

Canada’s 2023 wildfires released more greenhouse gases than most countries

Wildfires that swept Canada’s woodlands last year released more greenhouse gases than some of the largest emitting countries, a study found on Wednesday, calling into question national emissions budgets that rely on forests as carbon stores.

At 647 megatonnes, the carbon released in last year’s wildfires exceeded those of seven of the 10 largest national emitters in 2022, including Germany, Japan and Russia, the study published in the journal Nature found.

Only China, India and the United States released more carbon emissions during that period, meaning that if Canada’s wildfires were ranked alongside countries, they would have been the world’s fourth-largest emitter.

Typical emissions from Canadian forest fires over the last decade have ranged from 29 to 121 megatonnes. But the climate crisis, driven by the burning of fossil fuels, is leading to drier and hotter conditions, driving extreme wildfires. The 2023 fires burned 15m hectares (37m acres) across Canada, or about 4% of its forests.

The findings add to concerns about dependence on the world’s forests to act as a long-term carbon sink for industrial emissions when instead they could be aggravating the problem as they catch fire.

US leads wealthy countries spending billions of public money on unproven ‘climate solutions’

A handful of wealthy polluting countries led by the US are spending billions of dollars of public money on unproven climate solutions technologies that risk further delaying the transition away from fossil fuels, new analysis suggests. These governments have handed out almost $30bn in subsidies for carbon capture and fossil hydrogen over the past 40 years, with hundreds of billions potentially up for grabs through new incentives, according to a new report by Oil Change International (OCI), a non-profit tracking the cost of fossil fuels.

To date, the European Union (EU) plus just four countries – the US, Norway, Canada and the Netherlands – account for 95% of the public handouts on CCS and hydrogen. The US has spent the most taxpayer money, some $12bn in direct subsidies, according to OCI, with fossil fuel giants like Exxon hoping to secure billions more in future years. The industry-preferred solutions could play a limited role in curtailing global heating, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and are being increasingly pushed by wealthy nations at the annual UN climate summit.

But carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects consistently fail, overspend or underperform, according to previous studies. CCS – and blue hydrogen projects – rely on fossil fuels and can lead to a myriad of environmental harms including a rise in greenhouse gases and air pollution.

“The United States and other governments have little to show for these massive investments in carbon capture – none of the demonstration projects have lived up to their initial hype,” said Robert Howarth, professor of ecology and environmental biology at Cornell University. “It is instructive that industry itself invests very little in carbon capture. This whole enterprise is dependent on government handouts.”

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Also of Interest

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

Craig Murray: Pavel Durov & the Abuse of Law

Patrick Lawrence: The Sound of Enforced Silence

Rob Urie: Kamala Harris is the New Face Being Put on America’s Wars

‘The river is free’: Klamath dam removal nears completion

New Orleans solar panel program turns eateries into hurricane shelters

Week in wildlife in pictures: a sea lion takeover, an unlucky caiman and a hungry gull

TikTok Censors Accurate Criticism Of Kamala Video By Chris Hedges!

Biden admin exploiting negotiations to prolong the war?

Israeli American donor boasts of owning Trump

Point of No Return in Middle East & Ukraine - John Mearsheimer, Alexander Mercouris & Glenn Diesen

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A Little Night Music

John Mooney - Son's Blues

John Mooney - Traveling Riverside Blues

John Mooney - Country Boy Down In New Orleans

John Mooney - Late On In The Evening

John Mooney - Cypress Grove

John Mooney - Country Gal

John Mooney - Lil' Queen O' Spades

Jimmy Thackery & John Mooney - Niagra Falls

John Mooney - Sacred Ground

John Mooney - Oh Louise

Jimmy Thackery & John Mooney - Jitterbug Swing

John Mooney & Bluesiana - Full Set - 2023

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