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The day's news roundup + tonight's musical feature: Tampa Red

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Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features Delta and Chicago blues guitarist and songwriter Tampa Red. Enjoy!

^{Tampa Red And His Hokum Jug Band – Come On Mama, Do That Dance}

"The time has come for everybody -capitalists, communists, socialists- to ask themselves what 'civilization' really means. If not, whether a country calls itself capitalist or communists, in the pursuit of 'progress' , it will visit genocide either on its own people or on another people whose country must be plundered for resources to feed the Progress industry."

-- Arundhati Roy

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News and Opinion

Western Civilization Is Not Worth Saving

Western civilization is not worth saving. I think that’s been pretty well established by now.

That’s one of the silliest things about the way rightists are always babbling about how we need to protect our way of life from immigrants or Islam or “the trans agenda” or whatever. They’re beginning with the assumption that this train wreck of a society is worth saving at all.

I am not saying that westerners should die. I am not saying that all the ideals and values that westerners purport to hold are worthless. I am saying that this civilization, as it actually exists, is an indefensible disaster. Clearly.

Our way of living on this planet. The way we treat one another. The way we treat people on other continents. All the systems and social structures that give rise to the way things are. These things should not exist. We should not be the way that we are.

This civilization is genocidal. Ecocidal. Omnicidal. Imperialist. Racist. Dehumanizing. Degrading. Dystopian. Emotionally stunted. Culturally vapid. Spiritually impoverished. Intellectually enslaved. Why would any sane person want this to continue?

We don’t need to rescue western civilization from outside forces, we need to rescue ourselves from western civilization.

If we listen to our hearts we can understand that the call isn’t to save western civilization from corruption by foreign cultures or new ways of thinking, but to radically transform it from the murderous, tyrannical and oppressive nightmare that it has always been.

The western way of life doesn’t need to be preserved, it needs to end. We cannot keep doing this. We cannot go on this way. We cannot keep poisoning our planet, our minds, our hearts and our souls with the McGenocide ideology of the western empire. We are headed somewhere dark, somewhere none of us want to go, and we need to turn around.

Nothing about our old way of doing things has worked out for us. Everything we were doing before wound up bringing us to this terrible point. We don’t need to go backwards, and we don’t need to stay still. We need to evolve.

Gaza is a mirror. It’s showing us what we are. What we have always been.

It’s time to be real about what we are seeing.

Alastair Crooke : Trump and Violent Zionism

Israel committing genocide in Gaza, world’s top scholars on the crime say

The world’s leading genocide scholars’ association has backed a resolution stating that Israel’s actions in Gaza meet the legal definition of the crime.

Out of the International Association of Genocide Scholars’s (IAGS) 500 members, 28% took part in the vote. Of those who voted, 86% supported the resolution. The resolution states that “Israel’s policies and actions in Gaza meet the legal definition of genocide in article II of the United Nations convention for the prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide (1948).”

The three-page resolution passed by the body calls on Israel to “immediately cease all acts that constitute genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity against Palestinians in Gaza, including deliberate attacks against and killing of civilians including children; starvation; deprivation of humanitarian aid, water, fuel, and other items essential to the survival of the population; sexual and reproductive violence; and forced displacement of the population.”

The resolution said the IAGS recognised that “since the horrific Hamas-led attack of 7 October 2023, which itself constitutes international crimes”, the government of Israel had engaged in systematic and widespread crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide, including indiscriminate and deliberate attacks against the civilians and civilian infrastructure, including hospitals, homes and commercial buildings, of Gaza.

Melanie O’Brien, the IAGS president and a professor of international law at the University of Western Australia, said the resolution was “a definitive statement from experts in the field of genocide studies that what is going on on the ground in Gaza is genocide”.

As Scholars Declare Genocide in Gaza, "Will Western Powers Take Action?"

LEAKED POWERPOINT Shows Trump Gaza Riviera Final Solution

Leaked ‘Gaza Riviera’ plan dismissed as ‘insane’ attempt to cover ethnic cleansing

A plan circulating in the White House to develop the “Gaza Riviera” as a string of high-tech megacities has been dismissed as an “insane” attempt to provide cover for the large-scale ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian territory’s population. On Sunday the Washington Post published a leaked prospectus for the plan, which would involve the forced displacement of Gaza’s entire population of 2 million people and put the territory into a US trusteeship for at least a decade.

Named the Gaza Reconstitution, Economic Acceleration and Transformation Trust – or Great – the proposal was reportedly developed by some of the same Israelis who created and set in motion the US- and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation with financial planning contributed by Boston Consulting Group.

Most controversially, the 38-page plan suggests what it calls “temporary relocation of all of Gaza’s more than 2 million population” – a proposal that would amount to ethnic cleansing, potentially a genocidal act.

Palestinians would be encouraged into “voluntary” departure to another country or into restricted, secure zones during reconstruction. Those who own land would be offered “a digital token” by the trust in exchange for rights to redevelop their property, to be used to finance a new life elsewhere. Those who stay would be housed in properties with a tiny footprint of 323 sq ft – minuscule even by the standards of many non-refugee camp homes in Gaza. ...

Examination of the map appears to suggest the plan would also involve the expropriation for an Israeli security buffer zone of much of Gaza’s agricultural land, which tends to be located at Gaza’s periphery close to the border with Israel. The small print is most damning, however, making no distinction in terms of sovereignty between Gaza, Israel and Egypt, suggesting no consideration has been made for Palestinian self determination. Under the plan, Israel would maintain vaguely defined “overarching rights” over Gaza “to meet its security needs”. There would be no Palestinian state but a “Palestinian polity” which would join Trump’s Abraham Accords.

Prof. Jeffrey Sachs : Should the UN Expel War Criminals?

Israeli airstrikes and gunfire have killed 30 around Gaza City, local officials say

Israeli airstrikes and gunfire killed at least 30 people in and around Gaza City, local health authorities said, as a 20-boat humanitarian aid flotilla carrying activists including Greta Thunberg set sail from Barcelona for the stricken territory.

Authorities said the toll from Israeli tank and gunfire included 13 people who died trying to get food near a distribution site in the Gaza Strip, two in a house in Gaza City and 15, including five children, in a strike on a residential building on Saturday.

Residents of Sheikh Radwan, one of Gaza City’s largest neighbourhoods, told reporters the area had been under Israeli tank shelling and airstrikes throughout Saturday, overnight and on Sunday morning, forcing many families to flee.

Witnesses said Israeli troops opened fire on crowds in the Netzarim corridor, an Israeli military zone bisecting Gaza. “We were trying to get food but were met with the occupation’s bullets,” said Ragheb Abu Lebda, from Nuseirat. “It’s a death trap.”

This Israeli regime has no future in the Middle East

‘Trump Zone’ Would See Southern Lebanon Occupied, Depopulated

The more information we get about the “Trump economic zone” proposal in southern Lebanon, the worse it seems for the people who live there. The latest reports reveal the plan to totally depopulate the south of the country, to place the whole area under US military control, and to grant Israel to right to build “permanent” bases in what are currently Lebanese towns and villages.

The plan first appeared a little over a week ago, with the US presenting it as their proposal while Israel maintains they came up with the idea. The broad strokes are that it is meant to replace border villages with Lebanese government-run industrial zones.

But the plan would involve no less than 27 villages being depopulated, spanning the Israel-Lebanon border from Naqoura to Marjayoun. Among those, Israel is demanding it be granted permission to construct permanent military sites within 14 of the former villages. ....

Underpinning the plan would be 1,500 to 2,000 US troops occupying the Trump Zone, which will be meant to “assure” Israeli settlers in northern Israel. It is unclear from the reports if these will be US military personnel or simply American military contractors. Either way though, Lebanon would be ceding all sovereign authority over the south of their country.

Israel's Killing of Yemen's Houthi PM May Expand Regional War

Alarm in Texas as activist faces hate-crimes trial over anti-Israel graffiti

In early September, a jury trial will begin in North Texas for a 32-year-old activist named Raunaq Alam. He is accused of spray-painting “Fuck Israel” on the wall of a non-denominational church in Euless, a small city roughly 20 minutes from Fort Worth.

But it’s not the graffiti accusation that’s most troubling for Alam and his attorney. Using a hate-crimes statute, Tarrant county has enhanced its criminal mischief charges against Alam so he now faces between two and 10 years in prison. The county’s argument – and the charges – are the same for two other activists, who will face trial separately at later dates.

For Alam, the official indictment argues the activist has “bias or prejudice against a group identified by national origin and/or ancestry and/or religion, namely, the state of Israel or Jewish faith”.

Attorneys and experts interviewed by the Guardian say this is a legally questionable move that conflates the state of Israel with Judaism and infringes on the right to free speech. After all, the alleged graffiti specifically named “Israel”, not Israelis, and Israel is not a person, nor one of the protected classes that hate-crime laws ostensibly exist to protect. What’s more, the church wall that was allegedly defaced does not belong to a synagogue.

In a motion to quash the hate-crimes enhancement, Alam’s attorney, Adwoa Asante, points out that Texas’s criminal code “provides clear guidelines as to which protected classes can be used in the prosecution of hate crimes. Nowhere in the statute does it cite governmental entities such as states as part of protected persons or group,” Asante wrote. “If citizens and persons within the United States are allowed to say and express ‘Fuck America’, why would the condemnation of a foreign country garner more enhanced prosecution from the state of Texas?

Gerasimov, aggressive attrition

Xi Jinping criticises ‘bullying behaviour’ and Putin blames west for Ukraine war at Shanghai summit

Xi Jinping has criticised the “bullying behaviour” of other countries while Vladimir Putin has blamed the west for his war on Ukraine, on the second day of a major summit in China which seeks to challenge western-led multilateral blocs. The Shanghai Cooperation Summit (SCO) began in the city of Tianjin on Sunday, with Xi welcoming dozens of leaders from Eurasian member states and other partner and observer countries, including Putin, and Indian prime minister Narendra Modi.

In a speech to delegates on Monday, Putin claimed the war was not triggered by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, but was “a result of a coup in Ukraine, which was supported and provoked by the west”.

“The second reason for the crisis is the west’s constant attempts to drag Ukraine into Nato,” the Russian president added. ... Putin’s remarks followed a speech by Xi, who said “the security and development tasks facing member states have become even more challenging”, and urged them to “oppose cold war mentality, bloc confrontation, and bullying”.

“We must uphold the international system with the United Nations at its core and support the multilateral trading system with the World Trade Organization at its core.” Xi praised the growth of the SCO, saying they were building a new model of “true multilateralism”. He urged further cooperation of member countries in leveraging their “mega-scale markets” to boost trade and investment, and said China would provide 2bn yuan ($280m) of free aid to member states this year and a further 10bn yuan of loans to a SCO banking consortium.

The Tianjin summit is the biggest SCO meeting since it was formed in 2002, and is a key part of Beijing’s push to challenge the dominance of US or western-led groups such as Nato. That effort has been boosted by the global upheaval caused by US president Donald Trump’s tariffs and other foreign policy changes.

Washington masses warships near Venezuela as US officials warn of attack

A U.S. naval flotilla of at least eight warships and carrying some 4,500 personnel is currently massing near Venezuela’s coast amid open threats to attack the country, which boasts the largest oil reserves in the world. While officially the deployment has absurdly been cast as an “anti-narcotics” operation, the Trump administration is making it abundantly clear in statements to the media that the fleet is part of yet another regime-change operation against a Venezuelan government allied with Beijing and Moscow.

Speaking to Axios, one administration official said Friday: “This could be Noriega part 2… The president has asked for a menu of options. And ultimately, this is the president’s decision about what to do next, but Maduro should be s***ting bricks.” The official was referring to the 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama with 27,000 troops to capture one man, President Manuel Noriega, a long-time CIA “asset”, based upon allegations of drug trafficking. The operation, which bombed working-class areas of Panama City, killed hundreds and possibly thousands of civilians.

Earlier this month, with similar accusations of being the leader of the nonexistent “Cartel de los Soles,” the White House doubled its reward for the arrest of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro from $25 million to an unprecedented $50 million. Shortly before, the U.S. Treasury had designated the alleged cartel as a foreign terrorist organization. Further merging the long-planned overthrow of Maduro with unfounded drug claims, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt responded to a question about the mission’s goals by declaring Maduro the “fugitive head of a drug cartel” and not Venezuela’s legitimate President.

Another U.S. official told Axios, “This is 105 percent about narco-terrorism, but if Maduro winds up no longer in power, no one will be crying.” The operation has nothing to do with drug interdictions. Only a tiny fraction of drugs moving northward from South America are shipped from Venezuela, as acknowledged by numerous experts, including from the UN and even U.S. intelligence agencies.

In the context of years of economic crisis following a drop of oil prices, the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations had already subjected Venezuela to devastating economic sanctions. These policies were the prime cause for wiping out over 80 percent of the economy, provoking an exodus of over 7 million Venezuelans and causing tens of thousands of deaths from poverty and disease. As Washington imposes shattering tariffs against India, Brazil and other countries aimed largely at isolating China and Russia, the potential for a military operation against Venezuela long demanded by Trump and his circle of fascist advisers cannot be ruled out, despite the catastrophic consequences for South America and beyond.

Appeals Court Strikes Down Trump's Tariffs, SCOTUS Could Rule Next

Soldiers are doing landscaping in DC parks

If soldiers are going to be deployed to your city, what would you prefer they do: point a rifle in your face or mow your grass? This is not a question I ever expected to have to consider in my days on this planet, but life is full of surprises. As part of Donald Trump’s military deployment to address Washington DC’s so-called “crime emergency”, national guard troops are being tasked with various groundskeeping duties around the United States capital. These duties include spreading mulch around cherry trees, picking up trash and general maintenance of public spaces. The president must have been too embarrassed to get Four Seasons Total Landscaping involved again, so he got the military to do it instead.

It’s a real “swords into ploughshares” moment, or in this case, “M4 rifles into those grabber sticks you use to pick up plastic bottles full of piss.” It’s almost sweet, if you separate the move from literally all outside context and just think about a part-time soldier pruning your bush. The national guard is actually trained for sanitation and groundskeeping, but they are usually deployed for such purposes in a crisis like a natural disaster or even during the height of the Covid pandemic. Except: there’s no natural disaster, no stay-at-home orders due to a deadly virus, no wildfires, no floods. The only crisis here is man-made.

It’s usually the responsibility of the National Parks Service to beautify spaces in DC, but amid recent cuts by the Trump administration, the number of parks employees in the city fell from 200 to a mere 20, according to the Washington Post. Still, the guard wasn’t deployed to toss cigarette butts. This is happening because of alleged rampant crime in a city where the violent crime rate before Trump’s deployment was down by about 20% over the same period in earlier years. Some estimates place the cost of the DC military deployment at around a $1m a day. I will happily rake your leaves for half that.

Grand Jury Votes NOT TO INDICT DC Sandwich Thrower

Hundreds of ‘Workers Over Billionaires’ Labor Day rallies take place across US

As Labor Day rallies took place across the US, the Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson sharply denounced the Trump administration’s threat to deploy federal troops to the city as part of an immigration crackdown. ... Protesters also met outside the Trump Tower in the city’s River North neighborhood, carrying anti-Trump posters and chanting “Lock him up”, according to footage posted to social media.

Monday’s rally in Chicago was one of hundreds of protests organized across the country as part of the national “Workers Over Billionaires” effort, a mass action calling for the protection of social safety nets such as Social Security; the funding of public schools, healthcare, and housing; amid other demands. “Together we will demand a country that puts workers over billionaires,” said the May Day Strong group, a coalition to labor unions, in a statement about the event.

Demonstrations took place in cities large and small, including New York, Houston, Washington DC, and Los Angeles. Smaller cities such as Cleveland, Ohio and Greensboro, North Carolina, held rallies of their own as a part of the nationwide action.

The May Day Strong group, a coalition to labor unions, organized Monday’s efforts, along with AFL-CIO, the US’s largest federation of unions; the One Fair Wage, a non-profit advocating for fair wages for restaurant workers; and other labor groups. “This is about organic, grassroots organizing, and we intentionally wanted it to be outside of Washington DC, because that’s where the impacts are being felt,” said Liz Shuler, president of the AFL-CIO, about Monday’s efforts.

In New York, hundreds gathered across the street from Trump Tower in the city’s Midtown district, USA Today reported. Separate protests were held throughout New York state, including in Albany, the state’s capital.

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Utah emerges as a pivotal battleground amid race to redraw congressional maps

In the fast-escalating national arms race over redistricting, Utah has emerged as an unexpected and potentially pivotal battleground. The campaign began in Texas, where Donald Trump openly declared he was “entitled to” five additional Republican House seats. It quickly expanded to California, where Democratic lawmakers are asking voters to retaliate with new congressional maps drawn to “neutralize” Texas.

At least half a dozen other states have been recruited into what has is now an unprecedented push to redraw their congressional boundaries in ways that could lock in political advantage ahead of next year’s midterms. The president has been candid about his aims: to safeguard Republicans’ fragile hold on the House. A loss of the speaker’s gavel would derail Trump’s legislative ambitions in the second half of his term – and open the door to a wave of investigations, from his administration’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files to its mass detention and deportation policies.

Deeply conservative Utah, by contrast, has been pulled into the redistricting fray not by the president but by a judge. This week, Judge Dianna Gibson tossed out Utah’s current congressional map and gave the Republican-led state legislature until 24 September to submit a new one.

The existing boundaries fracture Salt Lake City – a splash of blue in a sea of red – across all four congressional districts, effectively diluting Democrats’ political influence. A redrawn map could consolidate more of Utah’s capital city into one district, giving Democrats a rare opening in one of the nation’s most reliably Republican states.

“There’s no doubt that any map that complies with this ruling would be more competitive than the current map,” said David Wasserman, senior editor and elections analyst at the non-partisan Cook Political Report. But he cautioned that lawmakers could still carve up Salt Lake City in ways that would maintain a Republican edge.

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Mexico’s jaguar numbers up 30% in conservation drive

In 2010, Gerardo Ceballos and a group of other researchers set out to answer a burning question: how many jaguars were there in Mexico? They knew there weren’t many. Hunting, loss of habitat, conflict with cattle ranchers and other issues had pushed the population to the brink of extinction. Ceballos and his team from the National Alliance for Jaguar Conservation (ANCJ) thought there were maybe 1,000 jaguars across the country. They decided to carry out the country’s first census of the animal to find out exactly how many there were. They found 4,100. ...

Fast-forward 15 years and the news has got even better. The group’s latest census found that in 2024 there were 5,326 jaguars in Mexico, a 30% increase compared with 2010. “The fact that the country has managed to maintain and increase its population over the last 14 years is extraordinary,” Ceballos said. “For me it’s great news for the country. ...

Ceballos credits three main factors for the population increase: maintaining natural protected areas where jaguars can roam freely, reducing the conflict between cattle ranchers and jaguars, and a publicity campaign that has put the jaguar on the map. ... Still, at the current rate of population increase it would take 25 to 30 years for the jaguar to no longer be considered at risk of extinction in Mexico. Ceballos and his team aim to reduce that time to just 15 years.

There are many challenges in their way. Deforestation and loss of habitat continue to be a major issue: Mexico has lost 600,000 hectares of forest and jungle in the last six years. In the Yucatán peninsula alone, the country loses 60,000 hectares of forest and jungle each year, vastly reducing the areas in which the jaguar can live and hunt.

“On the one hand it’s a travesty,” said Ceballos. “But on the other hand, it means that where there are still jungles and forests, the populations are growing.”

A report tied Iowa’s water pollution to agriculture. Then the money to promote it mysteriously disappeared

When a team of scientists embarked two years ago on a $1m landmark study of Iowa’s persistent water-quality problems, they knew that the findings would be important to share. High cancer rates amid the state’s inability to stem the tide of pollutants flowing into rivers and lakes was a growing public concern. But now, after the completed study pointed to agricultural pollution as a significant source of the key US farm state’s water problems, public officials have quietly stripped funding from plans to promote the study findings, according to sources involved in the project.

The report, the results of two years of data analysis, has been highly controversial in Iowa because of the large amount of evidence it cites linking water pollution – and resulting human and environmental health risks – to the state’s economically and politically powerful farm industry. Supporters of the report said the agricultural industry and allied public officials have tried to downplay the findings for months, and they fear this move is another impediment to change.

When the report was finalized earlier this year, there was a little more than $400,000 left in the budget, with some of that money earmarked for communications and “public awareness” work, travel and other costs associated with promoting the findings, records show. Jennifer Terry, the project lead on the water report, had planned in-person meetings with scientists and community groups to focus on recommendations made in the report. But those funds were recently “zeroed out” with no explanation, according to email communications. ...

The water report, authored by a team of 16 scientists, focuses on pollution patterns in two “essential” rivers fed from a watershed running from southern Minnesota through the central part of Iowa to Des Moines. The rivers are the primary source of drinking water for roughly 600,000 people and considered important recreational state assets, but they’re commonly laden with harmful contaminants that include phosphorus and nitrogen, bacteria from animal and human waste, pesticides and other chemicals. This summer, nitrate levels in key drinking-water sources were measured in quantities far higher than is allowed under federal safety standards.

Much, though not all, of the contamination is tied to agriculture, according to the report. Among multiple recommendations, the report calls for the top US corn-growing state to diversify into production of crops that require fewer chemical inputs, and for limits on the density of livestock. The water report comes alongside growing concerns about the prevalence of cancer across the state. For the last few years, Iowa has had the second-highest rate of cancer in the nation, and is one of only two US states where cancer is increasing. Pesticides and nitrates both are scientifically shown to cause cancers.

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Also of Interest

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

Jonathan Cook: The Media’s Israeli Atrocity Treadmill

US Lawmakers Urged to Follow Merkley and Van Hollen's Lead After Senators Denied Access to Gaza

Global Sumud Flotilla: Over 50 Ships to Set Sail for Gaza

Prominent Ukrainian Fascist Shot Dead In Lviv

A New Global Governance - But What Will, Or Can, It Do?

Scientists breathe new life into climate website after shutdown under Trump

Deep Dive: From Venezuela to Serbia & Indonesia, NED-Funded Color Revolution Continues Under Trump

Israel BLOCKS US Senators From Gaza Flyover

Internet EXPLODES With Trump Health RUMORS

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A Little Night Music

Tampa Red - Bumble Bee Blues

Tampa Red – Stockyard Fire

Tampa Red – You Got To Reap What You Sow

Tampa Red - Let Me Play With Your Poodle

Tampa Red - I'm Gonna Get High

Tampa Red – Things Bout Coming My Way

Tampa Red – Seminole Blues

Tampa Red - The Way To Get The Lowdown

Tampa Red - Green and Lucky Blues

Tampa Red Feat Johnny Jones – Come On If You're Coming

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