The Evening Blues - 6-6-24



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The day's news roundup + tonight's musical feature: Bo Collins

Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features Detroit blues guitarist and songwriter Bo Collins. Enjoy!

Mr. Bo. & His Blues Boy's (Louis “Mr. Bo” Collins) - I Ain't Gonna Suffer, If Trouble Was Money

"Washington politicians basically view the People as a capricious and dangerous enemy, a dumb mob whose only interesting quality happens to be their power to take away politicians' jobs... When the government sees its people as the enemy, sooner or later that feeling gets to be mutual. And that's when the real weirdness begins."

-- Matt Taibbi


News and Opinion

Margaret Kimberley hits one out of the park. Worth a click and a full read:

Trump Derangement and the Phony Rule of Law

“No one is above the law.” - Joe Biden

“The ICC prosecutor’s application for arrest warrants against Israeli leaders is outrageous” - Joe Biden

Apparently some individuals and nations are above international law and are exempt from any requirements that it be obeyed. Joe Biden’s statement about no one being “above the law” was directed at Donald Trump when he was convicted on 34 counts of falsifying business records. The leaders of the Israeli government, a major U.S. client state, have no such need to follow laws, even those which prohibit the commission of war crimes. Of course Israel’s patron is no different, leaving an ignominious trail of carnage from Haiti to Iraq to Yemen to Libya to Afghanistan and to Somalia, a list of wrongdoing for only the last 20 years.

Cynical political calculus and manipulation of public opinion makes Donald Trump the object of scorn and derision after he was convicted of a 34-count crime of very dubious legitimacy. Trump, in his usual incompetent fashion, used his equally incompetent attorney to pay off an adult film actress with whom he had a tryst. This private peccadillo might have been worthy of finger wagging and smirks, but desperate democrats wanted to keep Trump from running for the presidency again. The case is one in which prosecutorial discretion might have won the day and kept Trump out of court. But Trump is public enemy number one for the simple reason that he refuses to go away and insists on running for president again.

As a former president himself, Trump should have been charged, but as a war criminal. To name but one such offense, his administration’s sanctions imposed against Venezuela deprived that nation’s citizens of access to food and medical care and killed an estimated 40,000 people in 2017 and 2018 alone. That type of crime is one for which Trump will never be punished, nor will any of his predecessors or his successors. United States presidents have de facto immunity for killing thousands of people with bombs, bullets, proxy wars, and sanctions too.

While Trump is pilloried for being caught in a scandal, Joe Biden has worked with the Israeli government to kill an estimated 40,000 people in Gaza. Along with his bipartisan accessories in congress, he has continued to allocate billions of dollars for genocide and war crimes. Occasionally he may engage in a public relations effort and pretend to be angry with Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel’s leadership or claim that a peace agreement is in the works when it isn’t, but he will always come up with political support and money, some $12.5 billion since October 2023. The genocide would end if the U.S. wanted it to, but supporting Israel has been a consistent position for every U.S. president since 1948, from Harry Truman to Joe Biden. ... It is disgraceful that Trump is the first president to be convicted of a crime because he should not be alone. There are many criminals among the 46 presidents of the United States but none of them had any reason to fear the long arm of justice.

Netanyahu threatens ‘extremely powerful’ response to Hezbollah attacks

Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has threatened an “extremely powerful” response to attacks by Hezbollah from Lebanon, which have escalated in recent days. A few hours after Netanyahu spoke, drones fired by Hezbollah from Lebanon struck the northern Israeli town of Hurfeish, in the Upper Galilee region, which has a largely Druze population, injuring 11 Israelis, one critically. There were several explosions and reports that air raid alarms had not been activated.

Earlier this week Hezbollah launched a wave of attacks that set off substantial fires, which were fanned by dry and powerful winds. Television footage from the area of Kiryat Shmona showed firestorms engulfing nearby forests. Emergency services struggled for two days to bring the fires under control. ...

“Anyone who thinks that they can harm us and we will sit on our hands is sorely mistaken,” Netanyahu said during a visit on Wednesday to Kiryat Shmona, which has been largely empty since Hezbollah began almost daily firing on Israel on 8 October. “We are prepared for a very strong action in the north. In one way or another we will restore security to the north.” ...

On Tuesday the Israeli war cabinet had discussed the situation on the Lebanese border amid a flurry of visits by senior officials to the area. The chief of the Israel Defense Forces, Herzi Halevi, said on a visit to the north on Tuesday: “We’re approaching the point at which we’ll have to make a decision. The IDF is ready for an offensive.”

Starvation already causing many deaths and lasting harm in Gaza, agencies say

Months of extreme hunger have already killed many Palestinians in Gaza and caused permanent damage to children through malnutrition, two new food security reports have found, even before famine is officially declared.

The US-based famine early warning system network (Fews Net) said it was “possible, if not likely” that famine began in northern Gaza in April. Two UN organisations said more than 1 million people were “expected to face death and starvation” by mid-July.

War complicates the collection of data that would confirm famine has taken hold. But focusing only on whether Gaza had passed the moment when extreme hunger tips into an official declaration of famine risked obscuring the extremely high toll that food shortages had taken on Palestinians already, both organisations said.

“Regardless of whether or not the famine (IPC phase 5) thresholds have been definitively reached or exceeded, people are dying of hunger-related causes across Gaza,” the Fews Net report found. “Acute malnutrition among children is extremely high and this will result in irreversible physiological impacts. ...

The term famine, when used by food and emergency aid professionals, has a strict technical definition, with three conditions that must be met in an area. The high threshold means that by the time famine has been declared, many people will already have died of hunger.

Max Blumenthal, Chris Hedges & Chas Freeman on Why Israel instigates the US against Iran

Israel CAUGHT Manipulating US Officials in Psyop

Israeli Government Funded Covert Influence Campaign Targeting US Lawmakers: NYT

Israel's Ministry of Diaspora Affairs organized and paid for a digital campaign to influence U.S. lawmakers, especially Democrats who are Black, The New York Times reported on Wednesday.

The ministry allotted $2 million to the operation in October and hired Stoic, a Tel Aviv-based political marketing firm, to carry it out. Stoic established fake news websites and hundreds of fake accounts on X, Instagram, and Facebook that posted pro-Israeli messages, trying to push lawmakers such as Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), the House minority leader, Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.), and Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) to fund Israel's military and support its war efforts, the Times reported.

The influence campaign had been reported by a few news and nonprofit organizations in recent months, but the Times article, which drew from operation documents and interviews with current and former diaspora ministry officials, was the first to show that Israel's government was behind it. Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper, published a related story one hour later on Wednesday.

Critics condemned the Israeli government for its role in the disinformation campaign.

"So in addition to the pro-Israel lobby spending tens of millions to defame and defeat progressives in Congress, we now learn that Israel creates fake media to target friends and opponents by inundating with fake news supporting Israeli positions," James Zogby, co-founder of the Arab American Institute, wrote on social media.


The disinformation campaign comes amid other efforts by pro-Israel groups to influence U.S. politics during its assault on Gaza, notably the lobbying and campaign money spent by groups such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and its affiliates.

The Israeli disinformation campaign also drew comparisons to Russia's well-known attempt to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, which was a central focus of the U.S. political commentariat in the years that followed. Ishmael Daro, an editor at Democracy Now!, made a tongue-in-cheek prediction that the reaction from the U.S. political establishment would be similar this time.


Last week, both Meta and OpenAI issued reports on Stoic's disinformation campaign and said they had blocked the company's network from further activity. Meta said it had closed more than 500 fake Facebook accounts and OpenAI called Stoic a "for-hire Israeli threat actor," NBC News reported. Stoic's users remain active on X, the Times reported.

Many of the fake social media posts were generated using ChatGPT, the AI-powered chatbot owned by OpenAI, and much of the language in the posts was "stilted" and repetitive, the Times reported.

The covert scheme has also been characterized as "sloppy" and "ineffective," and it made little penetration with the general public or government figures. "We found and removed this network early in its audience building efforts, before they were able to gain engagement among authentic communities," Meta wrote in its report.

The Times did not explain that the covert influence campaign was discovered in February by the Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab) of the Atlantic Council, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, and by Marc Owen Jones, a professor in Middle East studies and digital humanities at Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Qatar, according to social media posts.

FakeReporter, an Israeli disinformation watchdog, followed up those initial discoveries with a March report on the campaign's activities, including the fake social media accounts and creation of the online platforms—Non-Agenda, The Moral Alliance, and Unfold Magazine—that created or republished news from a pro-Israel perspective, focusing on, for example, purported links between the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) and Hamas. The findings were reported in Haaretz at the time.

That Israel "ran an operation that interferes in U.S. politics is extremely irresponsible," Achiya Schatz, the executive director of FakeReporter, told the Times. He characterized it to Haaretz as "amateurish" and "anti-democratic."

FakeReporter in fact issued a second report on Wednesday showing that Stoic's influence network may have gone further than the Times reporting shows. The watchdog group uncovered four additional websites, apparently Stoic-affiliated, that contain Islamophobic and anti-immigrant content. DFRLab had issued a report in March which also cited pro-Israeli disinformation and Islamophobic rhetoric, in that case targeted largely at Canadians.

The new report concluded that the influence network has "apparently developed into a large-scale effort to target various groups, some outside the U.S., using Islamophobic and anti-immigrant content."

"Death to Arabs" Israeli Settlers RAMPAGE Through Jerusalem

"Apocalyptic": 40 Killed in Israeli Airstrike on U.N. School Sheltering Palestinians in Gaza

Jewish US Army Major Explains Why He Resigned Over Gaza

After Harrison Mann's resignation from the U.S. military was finalized on Monday, the Jewish U.S. Army major who worked in the Defense Intelligence Agency gave a pair of interviews this week explaining his decision to resign over American support for Israel's war on the Gaza Strip.

"We saw, even from the first days of the Israeli air campaign, willingness to inflict very high civilian casualties," Mann toldCBS News chief investigative correspondent Jim Axelrod in a conversation that aired Tuesday. ...

Journalists and human rights groups have documented Israel's use of U.S. arms to kill and injure civilians in Gaza. Asked by Axelrod whether Israeli forces were intentionally doing so, the Mann responded, "I don't know how you kill 35,000 civilians by accident."

During Mann's first televised interview, Axelrod also asked, "You felt your work was directly connected to starving children?"

The 13-year Army veteran simply said, "Yes." ...

In his CBS appearance, Mann read from his resignation letter, in which he notes his experience as a Jewish person, writing that "as the descendant of European Jews, I was raised in a particularly unforgiving moral environment when it came to the topic of bearing responsibility for ethnic cleansing—my grandfather refused to ever purchase products manufactured in Germany—where the paramount importance of 'never again' and the inadequacy of 'just following orders' were oft repeated." ...

Mann also appeared Wednesday on Mehdi Hasan's new show for Zeteo, the media platform that the journalist launched following the cancellation of his program at MSNBC after he aired content critical of Israel's assault on Gaza. ...

Mann told Hasan that he started his resignation process in November but revealed why in April, saying that "the war in Gaza and our role in it and my contribution to that was the straw that broke the camel's back and the reason I ultimately understood I could not do this work anymore."

By November, "I knew that as long as I stayed, I'd be contributing to this campaign that had already demonstrated basically it was going to be indiscriminately killing civilians at an industrial scale," Mann said. He added that it was clear that the U.S. would continue to provide Israel with "unwavering" support.

DC Insider: How AIPAC SHACKLES Dem Politicians

Palestinian-American engineer accuses Meta of firing him over Gaza content

A former Meta engineer on Tuesday accused the company of discrimination in its handling of content related to the war in Gaza, claiming in a lawsuit that Meta fired him for trying to help fix bugs causing the suppression of Palestinian Instagram posts.

Ferras Hamad, a Palestinian-American engineer who had been on Meta’s machine learning team since 2021, sued the social media giant in a California state court for discrimination, wrongful termination and other wrongdoing over his February dismissal.

In the complaint, Hamad accused Meta of a pattern of bias against Palestinians, saying the company deleted internal employee communications that mentioned the deaths of their relatives in Gaza and conducted investigations into their use of the Palestinian flag emoji.

The company launched no such investigations for employees posting Israeli or Ukrainian flag emojis in similar contexts, according to the lawsuit.

Prof. John J. Mearsheimer: What If Gaza and Ukraine Escalate?

Ukrainian Official Says Ukraine Launched Strikes on Russian Territory With US-Provided Rocket System

On Tuesday, a member of Ukraine’s parliament told The New York Times that Ukraine had launched strikes on Russian territory using US-provided HIMARS rocket systems after President Biden lifted restrictions on Kyiv’s use of the weapons.

Yehor Chernev, the deputy chairman of the Ukrainian parliament’s committee on national security, defense, and intelligence, claimed the strikes destroyed S-300 and S-400 missile systems about 20 miles inside Russia’s Belgorod Oblast.

Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk also hinted that Ukraine hit Russian territory with Western-provided weapons. ... If Chernev and Vereshchuk’s claims are true, the strikes risk a major response from Russia.

Putin confident, Zelensky unstable. Cuban missile crisis scheme

Putin warns that Russia could supply arms to other countries to strike west

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has slammed the west’s delivery of long-range weapons to Ukraine, warning Moscow could supply similar arms to other countries to attack western targets.

“If someone thinks it is possible to supply such weapons to a war zone to attack our territory and create problems for us, why don’t we have the right to supply our weapons,” Putin told a press conference in St Petersburg.

His comments came after a a US senator and a western official confirmed that Ukraine has recently used US weapons to strike inside Russia. ... The Republican senator Mike Rounds of South Dakota, a member of the Senate armed services committee, confirmed the strikes with US weapons, but did not say how he was briefed.

Aaron Maté: What Happens if US Troops Go to Ukraine?

Robert Fico blames Slovak opposition for ‘hatred’ that led to his shooting

In a pre-recorded speech posted on Facebook on Wednesday, in the run-up to the European elections, Fico described the shooter as an “activist of the Slovak opposition … a messenger of evil and political hatred that the politically unsuccessful and frustrated opposition has fanned to unmanageable proportions”.

“The opposition will have to think about this. If it continues as it is now, the horror of 15 May, which you all had the opportunity to see practically live, will continue and there will be more victims,” he added in a 14-minute speech posted on Facebook.

Seemingly in good shape, Fico promised to be back at work at the end of June or beginning of July, and said he felt “no hatred” towards his attacker. “I forgive him,” he said, adding that he planned no legal action against the assailant.

Fico has been recovering from multiple wounds after being shot in the abdomen as he greeted supporters on 15 May in the town of Handlová, about 140km (85 miles) north-east of the capital, Bratislava.

Political GOLD! Dems Try To Back GOP Against A Wall By Calling A VOTE On CONTRACEPTION

Senate Republicans block bill to recognize legal right to contraception

Senate Republicans on Wednesday blocked a bill that would have recognized a legal right to contraception, weeks after Donald Trump made – and quickly walked back – comments indicating he was willing to restrict access to birth control.

As expected, the Right to Contraception act fell short of garnering the 60 votes Senate Democrats needed to advance the bill. Before the vote, Democrats in effect acknowledged that they were daring Republicans to go on the record opposing the right to something that almost all American women use at some point in their lifetime.

“Senate Republicans just went on the record saying they do NOT support access to contraception,” the Democratic US senator for Washington state, Patty Murray, posted on X after the vote. “Yes, you read that right.”

Republicans argued that the legislation was unnecessary because, they say, contraceptives are not at political risk. In a Senate speech Wednesday, the Republican Iowa senator Joni Ernst accused Democrats of “fear-mongering in the name of politics”.

Several Republican senators, including Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Katie Britt of Alabama, JD Vance of Ohio and Mitt Romney of Utah, did not vote. Republicans Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who have previously broken with their party to support abortion rights, voted in favor of the Right to Contraception act.

Jack DORSEY, Ex-CEO Of Twitter Says ‘We are Being Programmed’ By Social Media



the horse race



"Propaganda Machine": NY Congressmember Jamaal Bowman on AIPAC's $25 Million Campaign to Unseat Him

Court pauses Trump’s Georgia election case as it mulls disqualifying prosecutor

The Georgia court of appeals has put a hold on the trial of Donald Trump and other defendants while it considers whether to disqualify the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, the lead prosecutor in the case.

Trump had appealed an order by the Fulton county superior court judge Scott McAfee that declined to disqualify Willis after bombshell revelations about a romantic relationship with her chosen special prosecutor. As part of their effort to dismiss the case, Trump and his co-defendants alleged Willis’s relationship meant she should be recused from the case.

On Monday, the appeals court selected a three-judge panel to hear the appeal and docketed the case to be heard in October. Then on Wednesday, the court paused the case while this argument plays out. ...

The order staying the case in Fulton county essentially ensures that the former president will not be tried on charges of election interference and racketeering in Georgia before the November election.

Supporters urge Trump to jail Manhattan district attorney if re-elected

Donald Trump’s key supporters are urging him to prosecute and jail Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney who led the criminal case resulting in his felony conviction, if the former president recaptures the White House in November.

The push to target Bragg, a Democrat, is being led by Steve Bannon, who served as Trump’s White House strategist early in his first term and is himself being prosecuted by the same district attorney over allegations that he defrauded donors to a scheme to fund a wall along the US-Mexico border.

It comes amid consistent signals from Trump that he plans to prosecute his political adversaries, including Joe Biden, if he returns to power. Republicans have further whetted Trump’s appetite for legal retribution by pushing the storyline that the Biden administration has “weaponised” the US justice department to deliberately persecute the ex-president.

BIDEN'S AGE In The News Again!! WSJ DEVASTATING Article On POTUS Acuity Slipping

Putin says Trump conviction ‘burns’ idea of US as leading democracy

Vladimir Putin has described the recent criminal conviction of Donald Trump as politically motivated and claimed that it had “burned” the idea that the US was a leading democracy. ...

In a press conference on Wednesday, Putin said: “It is obvious all over the world that the prosecution of Trump – especially in court on charges that were formed on the basis of events that happened years ago, without direct proof – is simply using the judicial system in an internal political struggle.”

“Their supposed leadership in the sphere of democracy is being burned to the ground,” Putin said.



the evening greens


The end of the great northern forests? The tiny tree-killing beetle wreaking havoc on our ancient giants

The giant sequoia is so enormous that it was once believed to be indestructible. High in California’s southern Sierra Nevada mountains, the oldest trees – known as monarchs – have stood for more than 2,000 years. Today, however, in Sequoia national park, huge trunks lie sprawled on the forest floor, like blue whale carcasses stranded on a beach. Many of these trees were felled by a combination of drought and fire. But among the factors responsible for the rising toll is a tiny new suspect: the bark beetle.

Along with wildfires and rising temperatures, scientists fear that the insects could contribute to the breakdown of Earth’s northern conifer forests, including the potential dieback of the taiga, the vast ecosystem that stretches across Canada, Scandinavia, Siberia and Alaska. The boreal forest spans 11.3m sq km (2,800m acres) and stores about 272 gigatonnes of carbon. Its possible collapse is considered a climate tipping point: the moment when an ecosystem that was previously a carbon store flips over to releasing huge amounts of carbon instead – through a forest fire, or the gases released by decaying trees and eroding soil.

“This is a global phenomenon but it is also a complicated story,” says Prof Diana Six, a forest entomologist at the University of Montana. “You have different beetles in different forests with different behaviour. The only commonality, and the reason we are seeing so many incidents all at once, is the influence of humans. Climate change is the main one, but we’ve also changed forests a lot.” ...

In Canada, just one species, the mountain pine beetle, affected 200,000 sq km – an area almost the size of Uganda – between 2000 and 2020, with other species causing outbreaks elsewhere across the country. In Europe, forest disturbances from bark beetles have soared, particularly affecting Norwegian spruce monocultures. In the Czech Republic, the centre of the most recent outbreak on the continent, between up to 5.4% of all spruces were damaged each year between 2017 and 2019, transforming their land sector from a carbon sink to a source, with disastrous consequences for the forestry industry.

In California, bark beetle species killed 163m trees between 2010 and 2019, according to the US Forest Service. Outbreaks in the vast taiga of Siberia have been recorded, but their impact is largely unknown. “You have these situations where beetles are way outside of the norm,” Six says. “Couple that with climate change altering the ability of these trees to regenerate, that’s where I think we’re going to see the biggest problems. If the beetles kill a bunch of trees and they grow back, it’s not such a big deal,” she says, but adds: “If the conditions won’t allow regeneration, that is not just serious for carbon sequestration – think about the wildlife that’s going to go: a big extinction.”

Rate of Global Warming Reaches All-Time High, Report Shows

Climate scientists published a report Wednesday showing that the rate of global warming reached an all-time high in the 10 years up to and including 2023 and that the record-breaking heat of last year was primarily due to that human-caused heating rather than other factors such as El Niño.

The scientists found that from 2014 to 2023, the Earth warmed 0.26°C—higher than any previous 10-year period. The report, published in Earth System Science Data, was completed by 57 scientists who used the methods of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which produces major reports only every five to 10 years, with the next one expected in 2027. The report authors sought to fill the gap and, at least in one case, to galvanize climate action.

"Rapidly reducing emissions of greenhouse gases towards net zero will limit the level of global warming we ultimately experience. At the same time, we need to build more resilient societies," lead author Piers Forster, a climate physicist at the University of Leeds in the U.K. and an IPCC author, said in a statement. "The devastation wrought by wildfires, drought, flooding, and heatwaves the world saw in 2023 must not become the new normal."

Over the course of 2023, temperatures were on average 1.43°C above preindustrial levels, Forster and co-authors found, with an estimated 1.31°C of that due to human-caused global warming, and the relatively small remainder due to variability from events such as El Niño and La Niña.

The report also shows that the Earth's remaining "carbon budget"—how much can be emitted before reaching 1.5°C of warming, the Paris agreement target—is now roughly 200 gigatonnes, which will take only five years or so for the global population to use. This is down from the 500 gigatonnes that the IPCC estimated remained in the budget as of 2020.

‘Godfathers of climate chaos’: UN chief urges global fossil-fuel advertising ban

Fossil-fuel companies are the “godfathers of climate chaos” and should be banned in every country from advertising akin to restrictions on big tobacco, the secretary general of the United Nations has said while delivering dire new scientific warnings of global heating.

In a major speech in New York on Wednesday, António Guterres called on news and tech media to stop enabling “planetary destruction” by taking fossil-fuel advertising money while warning the world faces “climate crunch time” in its faltering attempts to stem the crisis.

“Many governments restrict or prohibit advertising for products that harm human health, like tobacco,” he said. “I urge every country to ban advertising from fossil-fuel companies. And I urge news media and tech companies to stop taking fossil-fuel advertising.”

In his speech, Guterres announced new data from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) showing there is an 80% chance the planet will breach 1.5C (2.7F) in warming above pre-industrial times in at least one of the next five calendar years. The past 12 months have already breached this level, with the average global temperature 1.63C (2.9F) higher than the pre-industrial average from June 2023 to May of this year, following a string of months with record-breaking heat, according to the European Union’s Copernicus monitoring system. ...

Guterres, known for his strident language on the climate crisis, told an audience underneath a suspended 94ft model of a blue whale at the American Museum of Natural History. “We need an exit ramp off the highway to climate hell.” In a nod to the venue of his speech, Guterres said that “like the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs, we’re having an outsized impact. In the case of climate, we are not the dinosaurs – we are the meteor. We are not only in danger – we are the danger.”


Also of Interest

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

Israel Threatening to Take on Hezbollah After Cross-Border Attacks Produce Intense Wildfires

NATO plans Europe-wide escalation of war against Russia

Why Is Mexico’s Sheinbaum Framed as an AMLO Clone?

‘How can they treat people like this?’ Faiza Shaheen on Labour – and why she’s running as an independent

‘How could they mine here?’ New Zealand grapples with new push for resource riches

Yanis Varoufakis and Francesca Albanese on Palestine, Europe, and more — with Federico Dolce

"Where Olive Trees Weep": Dr. Gabor Maté & Ashira Darwish on New Film Exploring Trauma in Palestine

CRUEL And Unusual Punishment?! Prisoners In The South Face Extreme Heat Without Air Conditioning

DC IGNORES Housing Crisis, TOP ISSUE For Gen Z

Max Blumenthal : Defending Grayzone Against WaPo Slander


A Little Night Music

Louis "Mr. Bo" Collins - Born In The Country

Mr Bo and his Blue Boys - Baby Your Hair Looks Bad

Mr. Bo - Plenty Fire Below

Mr. Bo - I'm Leaving This Town

Mr. Bo - Live My Life All Over

Mr. Bo - I Ain't Gonna Suffer

Mr. Bo. & His Blues Boys - Let's Go To The Party

Mr. Bo - The Things You Put Me Through

Mr. Bo - Early In The Morning

Mr. Bo & His Blues Boys - Lost Love Affair

Mr. Bo - Until The Day I Die

Mr Bo - Heartache & Troubles


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Pluto's Republic's picture

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As a former president himself, Trump should have been charged, but as a war criminal. To name but one such offense, his administration’s sanctions imposed against Venezuela deprived that nation’s citizens of access to food and medical care and killed an estimated 40,000 people in 2017 and 2018 alone. That type of crime is one for which Trump will never be punished, nor will any of his predecessors or his successors. United States presidents have de facto immunity for killing thousands of people with bombs, bullets, proxy wars, and sanctions too.

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The failure to charge a president with war crimes is why this nation is doomed. It is why the US is a shithole of crime from top to bottom. It is experiencing exactly what it should.

This is why I pay no attention to the clueless Trump deranged. They are too dumb and immoral to pay attention to. It is they who have doomed the people on all sides to terminal stupidity.

Imagine people thinking they can vote their way out of crimes and atrocities that their prior votes made possible. Yes. People really think they can ! Americans suffer from a bottomless form of ignorance.
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Congratulations, Americans! You choice for "the leader of the free world" is between a senile old coot whose son is a drug addict and who has stolen millions of government money via the Ukraine, China, and, who can doubt, a host of other countries yet to be named and another old coot, not senile but now a convicted felon for having his attorney (who is, by the way, a self-confessed thief) give a bit of money to a porn star to have her keep her filthy mouth shut over having had sex with said old coot (she didn't keep quiet either) and — here's the actual crime — having his staff label the payment to his attorney as "legal fees" rather than "political campaign spending." Meanwhile, what America really needs is someone willing to do the truly heroic: strip naked, smear himself from head to toe in his own feces, roll around in freshly plucked chicken feathers and run through the streets of Washington screaming "I am your president!" I think that at this point most Americans would agree with him because he'd fit the bill.

— Dmitry Orlov, in a fit of pique, moving out of range of NATO rockets aimed at civilian targets

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IMAGINE if you woke up the day after a US Presidential Election and headlines around the the world blared, "The Majority of Americans Refused to Vote in US Presidential Election! What Does this Mean?"
joe shikspack's picture

@Pluto's Republic

yep, presidential impunity for war crimes will eventually lead to an accountability moment for all americans as the rest of the world ceases to accept being bullied and bands together to stop the crimes.

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studentofearth's picture

creating the environment for starvation? Nervousness about potential consequences is a major factor.

Proud of the Oregon Food Bank. First, they have done an amazing job over the decades bringing food to all corners of Oregon and Southwest Washington state. Second, they take their mission statement seriously. No one should go hungry.

Our mission

To eliminate hunger and its root causes… because no one should be hungry.

We cannot eliminate hunger without eliminating the root causes of hunger. That’s why we work across systems to achieve our mission, and why we center racial and social justice in everything we do. ...

April 30th they released a public statement calling for a ceasefire in response to attacks of food workers and potential for starvation of Gaza residents.

Oregon Food Bank Statement Calling for a Ceasefire of Israel’s Violence against Palestinians

Oregon Food Bank calls for an immediate and permanent ceasefire of Israel’s war against Palestine — as well as free and unobstructed access to humanitarian relief efforts to deliver water, food, clothing, medicine and shelter to the people of Palestine. We also call for the release of all hostages by Hamas and condemn all acts of violence that disregard the respect for human dignity and right to life. In response to feedback from our communities stressing the importance of our stance, we acknowledge the delayed release of this statement and regret Oregon Food Bank's prior silence. ...

The push for silence.

Jewish orgs pull support from Oregon Food Bank over Gaza war statement Oregon Public Broadcasting May 31, 2024

In a letter issued Friday, the Jewish organizations — which include five synagogues and multiple nonprofits — said they would withhold any financial support for the Oregon Food Bank until it retracted its statement, which was heavily critical of the Israeli military’s operations in Gaza.
...
Oregon Food Bank also consulted with community groups before publishing the letter, including the Jewish Federation of Oregon, she said.

Bob Horenstein, director of community relations at the Jewish Federation of Oregon, said his organization had raised concerns about the Food Bank’s statements before its release. It did not change much after their conversations, he said.

“What we would hope is that an organization like the Food Bank… would not weigh in with a statement,” Horenstein said. “It won’t do anything to help.”

Oregon Food Bank won’t retract statement in dispute with 12 Jewish organizations the Oregonian June 6, 2024

The food bank said it was “touched by the overwhelming support” it has received from other community groups. Oregon Public Broadcasting reported the statement was the first time the nonprofit took such a position in an international conflict.

This conflict is rippling throughout the USA in unexpected ways.

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Still yourself, deep water can absorb many disturbances with minimal reaction.
--When the opening appears release yourself.

joe shikspack's picture

@studentofearth

good for the oregon food bank for having the integrity to stand up for what is right in the face of consequences from those who support evil.

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What did Jill say to him?

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joe shikspack's picture

@humphrey

biden doesn't look well in the first video in a way that makes one wonder if he will make it to the elections in the fall.

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9 users have voted.
snoopydawg's picture

@humphrey

It looks like Biden was just getting a head start on sitting down.

Smile

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5 users have voted.

There were problems with running a campaign of Joy while committing a genocide? Who could have guessed?

Harris is unburdened of speaking going forward.

QMS's picture

.
.
The US Empire Isn’t A Government That Runs Nonstop Wars,
It’s A Nonstop War That Runs A Government

snip/

Until you understand this, nothing the US government or
the US war machine does will make sense.

snip/

It was decided long ago that war is too important to be left to the will of the electorate, so now there’s this fake dummy political system that the American people are given to play with so they won’t meddle with the gears of the imperial machine.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2024/06/01/the-us-empire-isnt-a-governme...

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8 users have voted.
joe shikspack's picture

@QMS

yep, it's a great article, if you're looking for it, i posted it monday. i like the title, it competes and vanquishes mccain's quip about russia being a gas station masquerading as a nation.

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5 users have voted.
snoopydawg's picture

.

we now learn that Israel creates fake media to target friends and opponents by inundating with fake news supporting Israeli positions

Guess they’re only concerned with taking down actual true stories that go against government narratives.

Shitlibs finally called out Israel’s funding of the government and said that if we’re against Russia and China doing it then why be okay with Israel doing?
Best response was:

I can’t believe that you are comparing Israel to Russia’s hacking the DNC computers and giving it to Julian Assange! And their placing ads on Facebook telling people to vote for Trump.

Sigh. Both were debunked years ago.

Maybe next time a school shooter gathers students in one room we should use the Israeli doctrine and drop a bomb on the school. Got him before he could threaten more schools. Caitlin nailed it again. And no words from Blinken or Kirby about how careful Israel is not to kill civilians?

Wow…70,000 thousand tons of bombs dropped on Gaza, more than London, Dresden and Hamburg. Putin called the alliies out on that. And the chemical weapons used in Vietnam.

Indeed.

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9 users have voted.

There were problems with running a campaign of Joy while committing a genocide? Who could have guessed?

Harris is unburdened of speaking going forward.

joe shikspack's picture

@snoopydawg

oh, my. i am shocked, shocked i tell you, to hear that israel is spreading disinformation, interfering in u.s. elections and governance processes.

i like putin much better now that he seems to have dropped the diplomatic hesitation to call out the u.s. on it's bullshit.

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7 users have voted.
snoopydawg's picture

.

IMG_6429.jpeg

Great job, Joe. We went from fighting Nazi Germany to arming, funding and supporting Ukraine Nazis.

They finally took a break from Trump.

IMG_6428.jpeg

I wonder who she pissed off? I couldn’t understand the story behind the headline.

Don’t fall on the floor and laugh your ass off…

What would the editors of The Wall Street Journal do if Convicted Felon Donald Trump went to them and said I can get Putin to send home his American hostage, your reporter Evan Gershkovich? What would the editors then do if Trump paused and added "I would like you to do us a favor, though."

And what would the editors do if Trump then paused again and said ‘you need to help get me elected. i need you to join our Biden Age Plot. I need you to write a piece that restarts this Biden Age thing. I'm a convict. I need to change the topic immediately. I need you to publish this by Wednesday.’

And then the Wall Street journal printed a piece on President Biden's age; a piece that is as journalistically bankrupt as anything I’ve ever read in American media; a piece which quoted ONLY Republicans,

Just so sad how much Keith and Rachel have changed since 2008. Maybe they were always this crazy and I just didn’t see it because i agreed with what they said…I hope not. Seems they were truthful and reporting on Bush about things I knew were true.

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9 users have voted.

There were problems with running a campaign of Joy while committing a genocide? Who could have guessed?

Harris is unburdened of speaking going forward.

Pluto's Republic's picture

@snoopydawg

Who wrote the unbelievably delusional rant? And who is upset about what?

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5 users have voted.
IMAGINE if you woke up the day after a US Presidential Election and headlines around the the world blared, "The Majority of Americans Refused to Vote in US Presidential Election! What Does this Mean?"
snoopydawg's picture

@Pluto's Republic

I deleted some of my comment that I thought was redundant.

Keith Olbermann wrote the screed.
It’s not often I see a dem rag write such a drastic headline like the one on Hochul. I’m guessing she went against big money somehow. The story has disappeared from the site.
Good news though, Trump’s mug is back on it.

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6 users have voted.

There were problems with running a campaign of Joy while committing a genocide? Who could have guessed?

Harris is unburdened of speaking going forward.

joe shikspack's picture

@snoopydawg

i'll have it in tomorrow's eb, but here's the story behind hochul's sins:

‘Slap in the face’: outrage after New York governor halts congestion pricing

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5 users have voted.
snoopydawg's picture

.

The one on the eastern front committed by Russia.

https://consortiumnews.com/2024/06/06/the-d-day-of-the-eastern-front/

Sadly for over 50 years I believed that America and its allies won the war against Germany. And I find it considerably rude that Russia is no longer invited to the event or the role they played in winning the war.

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8 users have voted.

There were problems with running a campaign of Joy while committing a genocide? Who could have guessed?

Harris is unburdened of speaking going forward.

joe shikspack's picture

@snoopydawg

as a kid i grew up hearing a lot of propaganda about wwii, it wasn't until i got to college that i learned about the significance of the russian role in defeating the nazis and the scale of their national sacrifice.

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8 users have voted.
snoopydawg's picture

@joe shikspack

The notion that the men who gave their lives on D-Day, and thereafter across Europe on the way to war’s end in 1945, did so in order to give birth to a continent dependent on Washington and in fear of Moscow, is preposterous. The devastation that Russia suffered in the war, the magnitude of the losses the country incurred, demands the respect and reverence of everyone interested in drawing the right lessons from this epic struggle of world-historical importance.

A Europe liberated from fascism but divided by a Cold War afterwards reminds us that, although so much was sacrificed and won by so many during the war, so much was thrown away and lost by so few after it.

Ain’t that the truth? And when Russia finally pulled out of Germany, nato was no longer needed and we should have been on our way to peace. Instead Clinton turned his back on Putin and started expanding nato and here we are on the precipice of www3 and nuclear annihilation.

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10 users have voted.

There were problems with running a campaign of Joy while committing a genocide? Who could have guessed?

Harris is unburdened of speaking going forward.

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6 users have voted.

it ain’t been entertaining
if somewhat repetitive what is
it with europe that they gotta run
into the wall every thirty-forty years?
at full speed?

weren’t it rus that finally booted
the mongols to Form a country?

too bad we never really threw
off the yoke of colonialism from
Ourselves let alone anybody else

as the man said I can only show
you the door . . .

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7 users have voted.

Ya got to be a Spirit, cain't be no Ghost. . .

Explain Bldg #7. . . still waiting. . .

If you’ve ever wondered whether you would have complied in 1930’s Germany,
Now you know. . .
sign at protest march

joe shikspack's picture

@Tall Bald and Ugly

heh, history shows that europeans are a bunch of greedy, fractious pricks that periodically need a larger enemy to distract them from killing each other.

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6 users have voted.