Bulletin N° 829
“Princess Mononoke”
(1997)
http://www1.putlockers.uno/princess-mononoke-1997-gijfb.html
Subject : Life & Death
Struggles in Class Society: What Future for Violence?
10 January 2019
Grenoble,
France
Dear
Colleagues and Friends of CEIMSA,
Language,
we are taught, can be used in one of two ways: either to conceal
information, or to expose information. We do it all the time, and some of us are
more adept than others. But to what extent are we all prisoners of our language?
Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner’s 1966 book, Linguistics,
a Revolution in Teaching have suggested that we should look at language
like a musical instrument and ideas as being analogues to the sounds from an instrument. Just as we cannot make a clarinet sound like a trombone or a
trumpet sound like a drum, so it is that the language we use constrains our
thinking; certain ideas are simply not accessible or appear, at best,
as rough approximations. (pp.197-200)
I was invited last week to a festive
New Year’s party and fell into a political conversation with an Asian-American
guest who had flown over from New York City. It was a party mostly attended by
middle-management people and some teachers and students. The music was loud, and the dancing
furious; but we managed to find a corner in the kitchen where we sat and talked
for a while. The woman was totally disillusioned with the Republican Party in the U.S. and
thoroughly repulsed by Trump. The twin threats of climate catastrophe and
thermo-nuclear war made it evident to her that it was time to actively
support the Democratic Party. At this moment, in an atmosphere of holiday joy and
conviviality, her world and mine collided and linguistic sparks gently lit up
the corner of the kitchen where we were sitting.
I told her that I believed that
removing Trump from office would do little to solve the grave problems the
world is now facing and that both political parties in my opinion have proven themselves to be
in the service of the same corporate interests. For one thing, I pointed out, the military
industry dominates the political economy of the United States and that
guarantees continuous wars for no other reason than wars represent the most
profitable investment opportunities for U.S. capital. Also, since CEOs
of large corporations in the United States are legally obliged to maximize
profits for their investors, I continued, regardless of the “collateral damages” - such as
environmental devastation or massive violations of human rights - they (or their
replacements, in case they choose to violate federal law and pioritize society and the environment) will always be obliged to
destroy sectors of society and regions of the environment when they stand in the way of increasing
private profits. In addition, corporations are legally recognized as
“individuals,” with the rights of individuals; but they are never held accountable for
breaking the law. It is only the individual office holders in the corporation
who can be held liable and, as stated above, these real people are all replaceable. The
corporation is immortal and amoral, and people are
expendable.
The capitalist society, I continued,
seemed to be much like a spider web,
and all of us are like insects trapped in the same fatal condition, doomed so long as
the system holds together. The challenge is for
us to find a way to deconstruct this predatory network and free ourselves collectively from
bondage and imminent destruction.
This view is not new, of course, but
the point I wanted to make to my compatriot in the kitchen was that to dismantle a spider web
from within requires more than compulsive struggle and a desire to escape, more even than moral outrage and
mortal combat on the surface of the web; it requires specific knowledge of how the web is put
together and secured in place, and how its separate parts are joined to
serve a particular function – in other words, required is a knowledge of its structure and its system.
To create a new political
architecture that could accommodate society more successfully, I suggested, would
require appropriate tactics and strategies, and any such development must take
into account the difference between digital
and analog thinking: the former being governed by
a code that asserts no
permanent constraints on the latter, while the latter eventually determins the qualities of former, by providing meaning, i.e. "the reason for reason."
My new acquaintance in the kitchen
corner worked as a manager in a large transnational firm in New York City. She told
me that she was in it for the money and looked forward to retiring to some
far-off corner of the earth. Nevertheless, the spider web metaphor caught her
attention: Yes! We are all struggling against the same dangers and there’s
really no escape, but we don’t seem to recognize this trap. We try to alleviate our problems by attacking other people caught in the same circumstances;
we usually direct our hostility towards them instead of at the cause of our
misery. It’s hard to conceptualize the system we are caught in as a whole and
to fully appreciate its capacity to entrap all of us. Meanwhile, those of us who are conscious of
this predicament, as well as those who are not conscious, are
struggling to live a decent life.
But not all the residents of the
web, she quickly added, are in the same situation. After all, the spider built
the web for a purpose, and he/she is the big beneficiary, along with spider’s family.
Yes, I replied, following the
analogy, the spider did build the web out of an instinct to acquire food and
secure its existence; but in human society, these aims can be achieved by a variety of means. Unlike the micro society on a spider web, the predatory web of
capitalism and the behavior produced by it can be eliminated without
necessarily causing the destruction of individual members of the community.
The day after this discussion,
on January 2, I took out my old torn copy of Anthony Wilden’s
book, System and Structure, Essays
in Communication and Exchange (1972) and turned to chapter 7,
“Analog and Digital Communication: On Negation, Signification, and Meaning.”
Between my heavy notations in red and blue ink and my illustrations in the
margins, I found what I was looking for. [Additional discussions of Anthony Wilden's books can be found at the following CEIMSA links:
Wilden begins chapter 7 of "System and Structure" by
quoting from G. Spencer Brown’s book, Laws of Form:
‘To
explain, literally to lay out in a plane where
particular’s can be readily seen. Thus to place or plan in flat land, sacrificing
other dimensions for the sake of appearance. Thus to expound
or put out at the cost of ignoring the reality or richness of what is so put
out. Thus to take a view away from its prime reality
or royally, or to gain knowledge and lose the kingdom.’(cited in Wilden, p.155)
He then provides definitions of the terms he will employ, giving examples before entering into the discussion of distinctions within the forms and functions
of communication:
All natural systems of communication
employ both analog and digital communication at some level in the system. It is
useful to make a methodological distinction between these two modes of
information transmission. The distinction is modeled on the way information is
transmitted and used in certain manmade primitive ‘organisms’: cybernetic
devices, control mechanisms, computers. It is equally applicable to or
derivable from the way information is transmitted within the human organism, or
in an ecosystem, or from the way it is transmitted between human organisms.
.
. .
An analog computer is defined
as any device which ‘computes’ by means of an analog between real, physical,
CONTINUOUS (sic) qualities and some other set of variables. These real
qualities may be the distance between points on a scale, the angular
displacement, the velocity, or the acceleration of a rotating shaft, a quantity
of some liquid, or the electrical current in a conductor. Examples of the
analog computer thus include a number of common devices: the flyball governor . . . , the map, the clock . . . , the ruler,
the thermometer, the volume control, the accelerator pedal, the sextant, the
protractor.
. . .
The central feature . . . is that
they are ‘continuous function computers’. In this sense the human system of the
body, dependent upon the release of ‘more or less’ of something into the
bloodstream, is an analog system.
The digital computer differs
from the analog in that it involves discrete elements and discontinuous scales.
Apart from our ten fingers, the abacus was probably the first digital computer
invented. Pascal’s adding machine, the Jacquard punch-card loom, and Babbage’s
difference engine are further historic examples. Any device employing the
on/off characteristic of electrical relays or their equivalents (such as teeth
on a gear wheel) is a digital computer. Thus the thermostat, although it
depends upon continuous analog quantities (the bending of its thermocouple in
response to temperature) involves a digitalization at a second level, because the
thermo-couple is connected to a switch which either turns the furnace off or
turns it on. Similarly, the central nervous system involves neurons which
receive quanta or packages of information via the axons and through the
connecting synapses. Upon arrival at the synapses on the body of the neuron these
quanta are said to be summated, the result of which is either a firing or the
inhibition of the firing of the neuron. That is to say, at the moment of
‘summation’ . . . the neuron either fires or does not fire. Thus the neurons
may be said to operate digitally, but the synapse and axon which connect them
appear to be complex analog devices.(pp.155-157)
It is impossible to represent the
truth function of symbolic logic in an analog computer, because the
analog computer cannot say ‘not-A’. Negation in any language or simulated
language depends upon SYNTAX, which is a special form of combination, and the
analog computer has no syntax beyond the level of pure sequence (and that only
in a positive direction). There is no ‘either/or’ for the analog computer because
everything in it is only ‘more or less’, that is to say :
everything in it is ‘both-and’ . . . . The analog computer cannot represent
nothing (no-thing) because it is directly or indirectly related to ‘things”,
whereas the ‘language’ of the digital computer is essentially autonomous and
arbitrary in relation to ‘things’ (except in so far as all information requires
matter-energy in the form of markers for its transmission).
.
. .
The interest of the distinction
between analog and digital machines is even more striking if we consider the
relationship between semantics and syntax in these two forms of communication.
. . . It is impossible to translate the rich semantics of the analog into any
digital form for communication to another organism. This is true both of the
most trivial sensations (biting you tongue, for example) and the most enviable
situations (being in love). It is impossible to precisely describe such events
except by recourse to unnamable common experience (a continuum). But this imprecision
carries with it a fundamental and probably essential ambiguity: a clenched fist
[for example] may communicate excitement, fear, anger, impending assault,
frustration, ‘Good morning’, or revolutionary zeal. The digital, on the other
hand, because it is concerned with boundaries and because it depends upon
arbitrary combination, has all the syntax to be precise and may be entirely
unambiguous. Thus what the analog gains in semantics it loses in syntactics, and what the digital gains in syntactics it loses in semantics. Thus it is that because
the analog does not possess the syntax necessary to say ‘No’ or to say anything
involving ‘not’, one can REFUSE or REJECT in the analog but one cannot DENY or
NEGATE.(pp.162-163)
. . .
He goes on to discuss the unique
qualities of humans, as distinct from other organisms, in the functional use of
these two processes of communication, analog and digital.
If we leave the computers from which
the distinction [of forms or processes] was originally drawn and look at
communication between organisms, it seems that human beings are the only
organisms to use the FUNCTIONS of both processes for communication with peers.
Moreover, humans seem to be the only animals capable of using one mode in place
of the other, for natural language and human communication are both digital and
analog in both form and function. Formally, the poet may employ devices such as
alliteration or onomatopoeia or association to make the digital elements on the
page or in his reading into analogs or in order to evoke analog sensations.
Functionally, the politician may employ the analog context of his digital text
to obscure or replace the text, as we saw in the television campaign for the 1970 US elections, for
example. He may in other words be apparently conveying denotative information
about issues and events when in fact he is actually talking about his
relationship to his audience and their relationship to the image and images he
projects. In such a context, the ‘conceptual’ value of the digital information
is zero . . . .
This is in essence the prime
distinction between the function of the digital and that of the analog. The digital
mode of language is denotative : it may talk about
anything and does so in the language of objects, facts, events, and he like.
Its linguistic function is primarily the sharing of nameable information (in
the non-technical sense). The analog on the other hand talks only about
relationships. In human communication these are often serious problems of
translation between the two.
Analog communication thus accurately
describes all that we know about the function of macroscopic animal
communication, for we know of little, if anything, approaching denotation in
the animal world. Such rudimentary systems of food calls, danger calls, as so
forth as do exist do not seem to involve anything beyond the level of the
signal or the rudimentary sign, and it seems at first to be unnecessarily
anthropomorphic to suggest that such and such a noise ‘signifies’ SOME-THING
when it is clear that it only signals something about the relationship of the
animal calling to
his environment and thence about his relationship to the receivers of the
message.
But in order to avoid confusion
about the term ‘form’ and ‘function’, a further clarification is necessary.
Since a food call is a metacommunication about an
analog relationship, it is not quite correct to say that it does not signify
something. Since it sets up a boundary between one state of a system (‘the
absence of food’) and another state (‘presence of food’), it is a FORM of
digitalization. We need therefore to introduce at least two main levels of
semiotic freedom in the form of the digital:
1)
The level of the signal or sign,
which is arbitrary in one sense and fixed in another (a noise has not essential
connection with food but all gibbons make the same set of noises to indicate
food). Like the firing of a neuron, such a first-level digital message has only
to do with decisions about the differences between presence and absence (a
continuum), and cannot be substituted for the overall analog function of the
communication. At this level, it would appear that no metacommunication
about the message is possible.
2)
The level of the linguistic
signifier, which is arbitrary in one sense and has a high degree of semiotic
freedom in another sense (there are many ways to indicate the presence or
absence of food in language). Unlike the on/off decisions of the neuron or of
animal signals about food, danger, territorial boundaries, and so on, this second
level in the form of the digital is capable of more than simply labeling a
certain difference as distinct. This is the level of double articulation
(duality of patterning) and negation. It is capable of taking over or replacing
the analog in terms of both form and function. At this level, messages about
messages (logical typing) are clearly possible.(pp.164-165)
Toward the end of this complex
chapter on analog and digital communication, Wilden concludes with
a reference to communication as it pertains to human survival.
The analog/digital distinction gives
us for the first time perhaps an entirely scientific way of distinguishing
meaning and signification. We can define meaning in terms of the value system
of the ecosystem, that is, in terms of long-range survival. All open systems
are goalseeking and adaptive, each with a greater or
lesser ‘phase-space’ of possibilities depending on its level of organization.
If only because in French, English, and German, the equivalent terms are
related to sensation, direction, desire, intention, and purpose, ‘meaning’ is
the obvious choice for the semantics of survival, the macroscopic domain of
adaptation. Meaning can be defined as what real material senders and receivers
do with information in order to achieve some goal or other (the goal may, of
course, be counter-adaptive). Information organizes the work to be done to this
end.
We can restrict ‘signification’ for
the denotative and concept-transferral operations of
digital systems, conceived of as composed of signs and or signifiers. The
meaning is not simply the use, as Wittgenstein put it, but the use in terms
of an end and in relation to a real context. Signification may or may not
be involved in a real context, for it can create its own context. Signification
(Bedeutung) is effectively restricted to names, but
to names in the widest sense of systems of names and naming. Meaning is mainly
concerned with both-and differences, signification with distinctions,
some of which are either-or oppositions. In the terminology of Lacan and of Levi-Strauss, meaning is of the domain of
symbolic exchange, signification belongs to the imaginary.
Because of the difficulty of
defining the line between the analog and the two levels of the digital,
especially in play, we should reserve the word ‘sign’ as a mediator between
them. Thus the distinction will allow signals and signs in the analog, and
signs and signifiers in the digital.(*) The same
distinction applies to that between analog information and digital
information.(pp.184-185)
___________
(*)NOTE:
Signs
= According to
Ferdinand de Saussure the sign relation consists only of a form of the sign
(the signifier) and its meaning (the signified). A sign depends on an object in
a way that enables (and, in a sense, determines) an interpretation, an interpretant, to depend on the object as the sign depends
on the object.
Signals
= Communication (both conscious and unconscious) between individuals, both
within species and across species.
Signifiers
= The signifier is the pointing finger, the word, the
sound-image. A word is simply a jumble of letters. The pointing finger is not
the star. It is in the interpretation of the signifier that meaning is created.
The signified is the concept, the meaning, the thing indicated by the signifier.
The 20 + items below offer readers a critical look at the syntax of our political culture in transformation. The shell of the past contains the seeds of the future which are struggling to be born. Today, cognizance of communication skills has never been more important, if we are to free ourselves from the old structures of domination/subjugation and predatory exploitation and enter voluntarily into a new system of political economy premised on self-fulfillment and collective well-being. Such a change can only come from below, from a purposeful mass movement that is enriched by a multitude of conversations, excluding no one. Let the "gatekeepers" be notified . . . !
Francis Feeley
-------
Professor emeritus of American Studies
University Grenoble-Alpes
Director of Research
University of Paris-Nanterre
Center for the Advanced Study of American Institutions and
Social Movements
The University of California-San Diego
a.
Economy & Labor
https://truthout.org/section/economy-and-labor/
&
+
Richard
Wolff: We Need a More Humane Economic System,
Not
One That Only Benefits the Rich
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/50837.htm
(Video
and Transcript)
+
The
World Paul Volcker Made
From the beginning of recorded history through the end of WWII the term “war” was understood as armed conflict between states or governments. This definition obtained through the Korean and Vietnam wars, gradually losing precision by adoption of such terms as “conflict” and “insurgency”, presumably so as not to dignify grossly unbalanced contests with the glorious name bestowed on mutual slaughter by giant, equal adversaries.
Since Vietnam--with the shameful, degrading brutality involved in the Grenada, Panama, Nicaragua, Haiti and other “police actions”--and signally since the Iraq/Kuwait Turkey Shoot, the old, abused term has lost any solid relation to its original meaning and is pathetically applied to any violent rape by the American War Machine of any putative “enemy”, regardless of the incommensurate forces involved, often when the victim--not even a legitimate adversary--has no capacity at all to strike back or defend itself.
===========
b.
“Crime + Punishment” Exposes Racial Quotas in the
NYPD & Retaliation Against Officers
Who Speak Out
https://www.democracynow.org/2019/1/8/crime_punishment_exposes_racial_quotas_in
(watch)
A group of New York Police Department officers are challenging what they call a racially charged policy of quotas for arrests and summonses. Known as the ”NYPD 12,” they risked their reputations and livelihoods to confront their superiors, fight illegal quotas and demand a more just police force. We look at a film following their story called “Crime + Punishment.” It has just been shortlisted for an Academy Award for Best Documentary. We speak with Stephen Maing, the film’s director and producer, and Lieutenant Edwin Raymond, the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit filed by the NYPD 12.
===========
c.
From: "Jim O'Brien via H-PAD" <h-pad@lists.historiansforpeace.org>
Sent: Wednesday, 2 January, 2019
Subject: H-PAD Notes 1/2/19: AHA plans; links to recent articles
of interest
Note for those planning to attend
the AHA convention: See the Historians for
Peace and Democracy home page for
locations and other details on H-PAD activities at the AHA on Friday and
Saturday Jan. 4 and 5. They include a panel on "Two More Years of Trump:
What Is To Be Done" (Friday, 10:30-12:00), a
literature table (Friday, 11:30-2:30), and an organizing meeting (Saturday,
12:00-1:30).
Links to Recent Articles of Interest
"The Collapse
of the 'War on Terror' Paradigm"
By Juan Cole, Informed
Comment blog, posted January 2
The author teaches Middle East
history at the University of Michigan.
C.I.A.'s Afghan
Forces Leave a Trail of Abuse and Anger"
By Mujib
Mashal, New York Times, posted December 31
A detailed account of one aspect of
the longest US war
"On Boys,
Frogs, and the Weekly Standard"
By Jim Lobe, LobeLog, posted December 31
On the now-defunct conservative
journal's consistent support for aggressive US overseas policies
"Why Trump
Reigns as King Cyrus"
By Katherine Stewart, New
York Times, posted December 31
This article article
argues that a biblical/historical analogy with the first emperor of Persia
sheds light on the appeal of the non-religious Donald Trump to right-wing
evangelicals.
"United States: First in War,
Trailing in Modern Civilization"
By Lawrence S. Wittner, LA Progressive, posted December 29
The author is a professor emeritus
of history at SUN Y Albany.
"When
'Trashing Our Allies' Was All the Rage"
By Andrew J. Bacevich,
The American Conservative, posted December 28
"The same neocons
who gush about alliances today were telling anyone not on board with the Iraq
invasion to 'go to hell.'" The author is a professor emeritus of history
and international relations at Boston University.
"Trump vs Mattis: Watch Out When Men of
War Come to the Rescue"
By Robert Fisk, The
Independent, posted December 27
A critical view of Secretary Mattis's policies, with analogies to generals in other
nations who have exercised political power.
"Fleeing a
Hell the US Helped Create: Why Central Americans Journey North"
By Julian Borger, The
Guardian, posted December 21
A country-by-country rundown by The Guardian's world affairs editor
"A Torrent of
Ghastly Revelations: What Military Service Taught Me about America"
By Lyle Jeremy Rubin, The
Guardian, posted December 18
An eloquent and detailed personal
account of basic training and of service in Afghanistan
Thanks to John Marciano and an
anonymous reader for suggesting articles included in the above list.
Suggestions can be sent to jimobrien48@gmail.com.
+
Some interesting new information about 9/11
https://truepublica.org.uk/global/some-interesting-new-information-about-9-11/
+
Weaponizing
the Term « Conspiracy Theory »
Disinformation Agents and the CIA
by
Dr. Gary G. Kohls
+
Yellow
Vests, Modern Junk Politics and Robespierre
https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/01/04/yellow-vests-modern-junk-politics-and-robespierre/
by Daniel Warner
During
the recent holidays, I had the opportunity to listen to my French friends extol
the virtues of the yellow vests (gilets jaunes) movement. “We have had enough of the elitist rule
that has left most of the French working class economically desperate,” Pierre
said. “People have gone into the streets out of dire frustration.” Jean added;
“This is not just a complaint about taxes, rather it is an uprising
against the oligarchy that has destroyed democracy.”
I
listened to their complaints with empathy, fully accepting their descriptions
of what the French middle and lower classes are living through. Their emotions
seemed genuine; I had no reason to question their analysis of the underlying
causes of the recent protests. Where we differed was their inability to answer
my simple question: “What is the solution?”
+
6 January 2019
Violence Surges as Yellow Vests Attack French
Government Ministry
===========
d.
John Pilger Pilger Special - Look Back at 2018, Look Forward to 2019
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/50893.htm
(watch)
John Pilger discusses the events of 2018, including the world’s worst humanitarian crisis in Yemen, events in Syria, Brexit, the Integrity Initiative, and more!
From: David Swanson via WarIsACrime.org <info@sg.actionnetwork.org>
Date: Tue, Jan 8, 2019 at 2:29 PM
Subject: Anything War Can Do, Peace Can Do Better
|
===========
e.
“RISK”
https://ww.gomovies.sc/movie/risk-2016-free-10/watching/?ep=2#mv-info
(1h30 mins)
+
WikiLeaks on Twitter: "WikiLeaks is interested in unpublished
secret documents on the US opioid crisis.”
https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/1080242570888916993
+
Ecuador
to audit Julian Assange’s asylum & citizenship
as country eyes IMF bailout
https://www.rt.com/news/448012-ecuador-audit-assange-citizen-imf/
===========
d.
Giuliani
Says Assange Should Not Be Prosecuted
https://consortiumnews.com/2018/12/31/giuliani-says-assange-should-not-be-prosecuted/
by Joe Lauria
Donald Trump’s lawyer said on Monday that WikiLeaks
publisher Julian Assange should not be prosecuted and
he compared WikiLeaks publications to the Pentagon
Papers.
Rudy
Giuliani, a lawyer for President Donald Trump, said Monday that WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange
had not done “anything wrong” and should not go to jail for disseminating
stolen information just as major media does.
“Let’s take the Pentagon Papers,” Giuliani told Fox News. “The Pentagon Papers were stolen property, weren’t
they? It was in The New York Times and The
Washington Post. Nobody went to jail at The New
York Times and
The Washington Post.”
Giuliani said there were “revelations during the Bush
administration” such as Abu Ghraib. “All of
that is stolen property taken from the government, it’s against the law. But
once it gets to a media publication, they can publish it,” Giuliani said,
“for the purpose of informing people.”
“You can’t put Assange in a different
position,” he said. “He was a guy who communicated.”
Giuliani said, “We may not like what [Assange]
communicates, but he was a media facility. He was putting that information
out,” he said. “Every newspaper and station grabbed it, and published it.”
The U.S. government has admitted that it has indicted Assange for publishing classified information, but it is battling in court to keep the details of the indictment secret. As a lawyer and
close advisor to Trump, Giuliani could have influence on the president’s and
the Justice Department’s thinking on Assange.
Giuliani also said there was no coordination between the Trump
campaign and WikiLeaks. “I
was with Donald Trump day in and day out during the last four months of
the campaign,” he said. “He was as surprised as I was about the WikiLeaks disclosures. Sometimes surprised to the
extent of ‘Oh my god, did they really say that?’ We were wondering if it was
true. They [the Clinton campaign] never denied it.”
Giuliani said: “The thing that really got Hillary is not so much
that it was revealed, but they were true. They actually had people as bad as
that and she really was cheating on the debates. She really was getting from
Donna Brazile the questions before hand. She really
did completely screw Bernie Sanders.”
“Every bit of that was true,” he went on. “Just like the
Pentagon Papers put a different view on Vietnam, this put a different view on
Hillary Clinton.”
Giuliani said, “It was not right to hack. People who did it should go to jail, but no press person or person
disseminating that for the purpose of informing did anything wrong.”
Assange has been holed up as a refugee in the Ecuador embassy in London
for the past six years fearing that if he were to leave British authorities
would arrest him and extradite him to the U.S. for prosecution.
You can watch the entire Fox News interview with Giuliani here:
+
The Wikileaks Documentary
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YL-fxvhbiA&feature=youtu.be
(1h)
===========
f.
Banishing
Truth
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/banishing-truth/
by Chris Hedges
The
investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, in his memoir “Reporter,”
describes a moment when as a young reporter he overheard a Chicago cop admit to
murdering an African-American man. The murdered man had been falsely described
by police as a robbery suspect who had been shot while trying to avoid arrest. Hersh frantically called his editor to ask what to do.
“The
editor urged me to do nothing,” he writes. “It would be my word versus that of
all the cops involved, and all would accuse me of lying. The message was clear:
I did not have a story. But of course I did.” He describes himself as “full of
despair at my weakness and the weakness of a profession that dealt so easily
with compromise and self-censorship.”
Hersh, the
greatest investigative reporter of his generation, uncovered the
U.S. military’s chemical weapons program, which used thousands of soldiers and
volunteers, including pacifists from the Seventh-day Adventist Church, as
unwitting human guinea pigs to measure the impact of biological agents
including tularemia, yellow fever, Rift Valley fever and the plague. He broke
the story of the My Lai
massacre. He exposed Henry Kissinger’s wiretapping of his closest
aides at the National Security Council (NSC) and journalists, the CIA’s funding
of violent extremist groups to overthrow the Chilean President Salvador Allende, the CIA’s spying on domestic dissidents within the
United States, the sadistic torture practices at the Abu Ghraib
prison in Iraq by American soldiers and contractors and the lies told by the
Obama administration about the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Yet he begins
his memoir by the candid admission, familiar to any reporter, that there are
crimes and events committed by the powerful you never write about, at least if
you want to keep your job. One of his laments in the book is his decision not
to follow up on a report he received that disgraced President Richard Nixon had
hit his wife, Pat, and she had ended up in an emergency room in California.
+
What
the Believers Are Denying
https://www.theatlantic.com/author/ibram-x-kendi/
by Ibram X.
Kendi
The
denial of climate change and the denial of racism rest on the same foundation:
an attack on observable reality.
===========
g.
Inside
the Integrity Initiative
the UK Gov's Information War on the
Public
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/50853.htm
(58 mins.)
Journalists
Max Blumenthal and Ben Norton discuss Britain's Integrity Initiative and the
information war it is waging on the public, with propaganda expert Professor
David Miller.
We address the
scandal surrounding this UK government-funded think tank, which has attacked
Jeremy Corbyn and the anti-war left and laundered
disinformation through the corporate media under the guise of countering
Russia.
===========
h.
January 1, 2019
2018:
Year of the Rats and the Sinking Ships
https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/01/01/2018-year-of-the-rats-and-the-sinking-ships/
by
Jeffrey
St. Clair
January 12
I
am listening to Trump’s incendiary speech in Seoul. He is standing at the dais
in Proceeding Hall, the National Assembly building in South Korea. Perhaps it’s
the color saturation level on our old monitor, but on this night Trump looks
like a grotesque figure from a George Grösz painting.
His face is glazed an acidic orange as if slathered in mortician’s makeup. Even
though he is reading from a prepared text written by one of his sycophants and
projected for him on a teleprompter, he speaks in a switchbacking syntax that I’ve come to call Trumponics. He looks and sounds like the dictator of bad
taste.
Of
course, it’s useless to probe Trump’s ramblings for their symbolic content. He
strikes right for the spleen. Still, I continue to hunt for some logic to what
he’s saying, knowing it’s futile. Except, perhaps, for the
logic of the suicide pact. But a pact implies a deal, and most of us
haven’t signed away our consent, except, I suppose, through our passive
acquiescence to his resurrection of the old nuclear demons.
Each
Trump speech should come with a risk assessment of its potential fallout. Yet
none of Trump’s military-grade handlers—McMaster, Mattis
or Kelly—seem up to the calculus. Tillerson may have
some idea, but Rexxon’s been locked out in the cold
for months, as the State Department, though alas not the state, withers away.
The State Department, which, since World War II, at least, has been responsible
for far more deaths than the Pentagon deserves its vacancies.
Trump’s
bombast never seems quite serious. But I fear we must begin to take him so. He
is, after all, a man without humor.
February 2
With
his customary bravado Donald Trump boasted that the TV audience for his first
State of the Union address was the largest in history. This extravagant
assertion was soon swatted down by none other than Fox News, which cited at
least five other SOTUs speeches with bigger ratings since 1992, including
Obama’s final bland monologue in 2016.
Even
so, Trump drew a respectable viewership, many of whom, no doubt, were hoping to
watch a live train wreck in the well of the House. They were a little
premature. The live train wreck would take place the following day in Crozet,
Virginia, when an Amtrak metroliner carrying the
Republican leadership rammed a stalled truck. But don’t change that channel,
the injured politicians will likely get a guest-starring role in next year’s
State of the Union address.
By
most accounts, Trump’s big speech fell flat. There’s nothing more deflating
than tuning in expecting a Trump spectacle and hearing a meandering stream of
florid platitudes that could have been written by Peggy Noonan. Most of the fun
from watching Trump speak comes from his brusque improvisations. Like many a
pitchman, Trump relies punchy one-liners, pungent putdowns and inscrutable
maledictions. Yet, he gets lost reading compound sentences on a teleprompter,
skidding to a halt at commas and running over periods.
It
turns out that much of Trump’s speech was drafted by former investment banker
Gary Cohn, now Director of Trump’s National Economic Council. So, Hillary gave
speeches to Goldman Sachs and Goldman Sachs gave speeches to Trump to read. Plus ça change.
February 5
The
great Nick Von Hoffman, who died last week, was fired by 60 Minutes for
speaking this truth during height of Watergate “Nixon is the dead rat on the kitchen
floor of America, and the only question now is who’s going to pick him up by
his tail and throw him in the garbage.” Von Hoffman was a terrific
journalist. His book on the Freedom Rides, Mississippi
Notebook, is hard to find, but essential reading.
February 9
Even
in the bestiary of Trump’s inner circle, Kelly comes off as a truly odious
figure. It’s Kelly’s pseud0-piety that reeks the most pungently. The general
has positioned himself as a chronicler of American moral decline. Last October
during his nasty press conference defending Trump’s crude
condolence call to Myeshia Johnson,
the wife of Sgt La David Johnson who was killed in a botched operation in
Niger, Kelly bemoaned the decay of the nation’s values, including the place of
women in society. “When I was a kid growing up, a lot of things were sacred in
our country,” Kelly
sermonized. “Women were sacred and looked upon with great honor.
That’s obviously not the case anymore, as we see from recent cases.”
Now
we learn that as chief of staff, Kelly had been fully apprised of the brutal
behavior of Rob Porter, the wife-beating former White House Staff Secretary,
who resigned this week after both of his former wives
described enduring years of verbal abuse and physical violence. Kelly,
self-proclaimed defender of the sanctity of women, kept Porter in the position,
a kind of gatekeeper for who gets to see the president, despite the fact that
the FBI had refused to grant the staffer a security clearance, as it pursued an
investigation into the allegations, allegations buttressed by a restraining
order and photos of the battered face of his first wife Colbie Holderness. Kelly, who hailed Porter as “a man of
true integrity and honor,” reportedly encouraged Porter, now romantically
linked to glam-staffer Hope Hicks, to stay in his job even after the
incriminating photos of his former wife appeared in the Daily
Mail. Sacred honor, indeed.
Most
members of Congress, both Republican and Democrat, are former prosecutors, who
regularly used Confidential Informants and jail house snitches for warrants.
Biased and purchased testimony is endemic to the prosecutorial state.
February 10
Israeli
lawmaker Oren Hazan, one of Trump’s pals, said this
about Palestinian teenager Ahed Tamimi,
who is now languishing in an Israeli jail with nearly 400 other Palestinian
children: “If I was there, she would finish in the hospital. For sure. Nobody could stop me. I would kick, kick her face,
believe me”.
February 16
Americans
have a remarkable tolerance for child slaughter, especially the mass murders of
the children of others. This emotional indifference manifested itself vividly
after the disclosure of the My Lai Massacre, when dozens of Vietnamese infants
and children were killed by the men of Charlie Company, their tiny, butchered corpses
stacked in ditches. After the trial of Lt. William Calley,
more than 70 percent of Americans believed his sentence was too severe. Most
objected to any trial at all. In the end, Calley
served less than 4 years under house arrest for his role in the execution of
more than 500 Vietnamese villagers.
Twenty-five
years later, American attitudes toward child deaths had coarsened even harder.
When it was revealed that US sanctions on Iraq had caused the deaths of more
than 500,000 Iraqi children, Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State, Madeleine
Albright, icily argued that the deaths were “worth it” to advance US policy in
the Middle East. Few Americans remonstrated against this official savagery done
in their name.
Now
the guns are being turned on America’s own children and the rivers of blood
streaming out of US schools cause barely a ripple in our politics. If the
Columbine shooting (1999) was a tragedy, what word do you use to describe the
436th school shooting since then?
Don’t
look for an answer or even solace from any of our political leaders. All you’ll
get is cant, hollow prayers and banal vituperations of the sort we’ve been
hearing for two decades from the likes of Nancy Pelosi. Pelosi’s most
restrictive gun control proposals wouldn’t have stopped any of the recent
shootings. She plays politics with the blood of children as cynically as the
NRA’s Wayne LaPierre. Both are adept at fundraising
off the bodies of the dead.
February 23
===========
i.
Dispatch
from Palestine: A year in review
https://mondoweiss.net/2018/12/dispatch-palestine-review/
+
Ray McGovern: The Inside Scoop on the Middle East & Israel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnITcUQiK1Y&feature=youtu.be
Ray explains you cannot understand the situation in the Middle East without understanding the relationship between the US and Israel. Once again, background information the public isn't aware of. The Neocons didn't get their war with Iran and they're mad. The truth and facts behind the lies about Syrian chemical weapons. Fascinating account of the behind the scenes struggle in the White House...Clapper, Dempsey, Clinton. Putin-Obama meeting in St. Petersburg..."Kerry is lying and he knows he's lying." Ray relates the hilarious encounter between Ray, Paul Wolfowitz and Joe Lieberman, two arch conservatives in the CNN studios.
+
Labour
and Anti-semitism in 2018: The Truth Behind the Relentless Smear Campaign Against Corbyn
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/50846.htm
by
Jonathan Cook
Bombarded by disinformation campaigns,
many British Jews are being misled into seeing Corbyn
as a threat rather than as the best hope of inoculating Britain against the
resurgence of right-wing anti-semitism menace
End-of-year polls are
always popular as a way to gauge significant social and political trends over
the past year and predict where things are heading in the next. But a recent poll of European Jews – the
largest such survey in the world – is being used to paint a deeply misleading
picture of British society and an apparent problem of a new, left-wing form of
anti-semitism.
An
anti-semitism problem?
The
survey was conducted by the European Union's agency on fundamental rights and
was given great prominence in the liberal-left British daily the
Guardian. The newspaper highlighted one area of life in which Britain
scored worse with Jews than any of the other 12 member states surveyed.
Some
84 per cent of Jews in the UK
believe there is a major problem with anti-semitism
in British politics. As a result, nearly a third say they have considered
emigrating – presumably most of them to Israel, where the Law of Return offers
an open-door policy to all Jews in the world.
Britain
scored only slightly better on indices other than politics. Some 75 per cent
said they thought anti-semitism was generally a
problem in the UK, up from 48 per cent in 2012. The average score in the 12 EU
states with significant Jewish populations was 70 per cent.
Jeremy
Corbyn, head of the UK’s opposition Labour party, has faced a barrage of criticism since he was
elected leader more than three years ago for presiding over a supposedly
endemic anti-semitism problem in his party. The
Guardian has been at the forefront of framing Corbyn
as either indifferent to, or actively assisting in, the supposed rise of anti-semitism in Labour.
Now
the paper has a senior European politician echoing its claims.
'Playing
with fire'
Relating
to the poll, Vera Jourova, the EU’s commissioner for
justice, helpfully clarified what Britain’s terrible results in the political
sphere signified. The paper quoted her on Corbyn:
"I always use the phrase 'Let’s not play with fire', let’s be aware of
what happened in the past. And let’s not make the same mistake of tolerating
it. It is not enough just to be silent … I hope he [Corbyn]
will pay attention to this survey.”
However,
both Jourova’s warnings and an apparent perception
among British Jews of an anti-semitism problem
fuelled by Corbyn fly in the face of real-world
evidence.
Other
surveys show that, when measured by objective criteria, the Labour
party scores relatively well: The percentage of members holding anti-Semitic
views is substantially lower than in the ruling Conservative party and much the
same as in Britain’s third party, the Liberal Democrats.
For
example, twice as many Conservatives as Labour party members believe typically anti-Semitic
stereotypes. Even more significantly, the percentage of Labour party members who hold such prejudices has fallen
dramatically across the board since Corbyn became
leader.
This
fact suggests that the new members who joined after Corbyn
became leader – a massive influx has made his party the largest in Europe – are
less likely to be anti-Semitic than those who joined under previous Labour leaders.
In
other words, the evidence suggests very persuasively that Corbyn
has been a force for eradicating, or at least diluting, existing and rather
marginal anti-Semitic views in the Labour party. More so even than the previous leader, Ed Miliband,
who was himself Jewish.
But
all of this, yet again, went unremarked by the Guardian and other British
media, which have been loudly claiming a specific “anti-semitism
problem” in Labour for three years without a shred of
concrete evidence for it.
Resurgent
white nationalism
There
are good grounds for Jews to feel threatened in much of Europe at the moment,
with the return of ugly ethnic nationalisms that many assumed had been purged
after World War Two. And Brexit
– Britain’s planned exit from the European Union – does indeed appear to have
unleashed or renewed nativist sentiment among a
section of the UK population.
But
such prejudices dominate on the right, not the left. Certainly Corbyn, a lifelong and very prominent anti-racism activist,
has not been stoking nativist attitudes.
The
unexplored assumption by the Guardian and the rest of the corporate media, as
well as by Jourova, is that the rise in British Jews’
concerns about anti-semitism in politics refers
exclusively to Corbyn rather than a very different
problem: Of a resurgent white nationalism on the right.
But
let’s assume that they are correct that the poll solely registers Jewish
worries about Corbyn. A separate finding in the
EU survey underscored how Jewish opinion on anti-semitism
and Corbyn may be far less straightforward than Jourova’s presentation suggests – and how precisely the
wrong conclusions are likely to be drawn from the results.
Buried
in the Guardian report was a starkly anomalous finding – from Hungary.
The
Hungary anomaly
Hungary
is a country in which Jews and other minorities undoubtedly face a very
pressing threat to their safety. Its ultra-nationalist Prime Minister, Viktor Orban, used the general election last April to whip up a
frenzy of anti-Jewish sentiment.
He
placed the Hungarian-born Jewish billionaire George Soros at the centre of his
anti-immigration campaign, suggesting that the philanthropist was secretly
pulling the strings of the opposition party to flood the country with
“foreigners”. In the run-up to the election, his government erected giant posters and billboards all over the
country showing a chuckling George Soros next to the words: “Don’t let Soros
have the last laugh.”
Raiding
the larder of virtually every historic anti-Semitic trope, Orban
declared in an election speech: “We
are fighting an enemy that is different from us. Not open, but hiding; not
straightforward but crafty; not honest but base; not national but
international; does not believe in working but speculates with money; does not
have its own homeland but feels it owns the world.”
All
of this should be seen in the context of Orban’s recent praise for
Miklos Horthy, a former Hungarian leader who was an
ally of Hitler’s. Orban has called him an
“exceptional statesman”. So did Hungarian Jews express to EU pollsters
heightened fears for their community’s safety? Strangely, they did not. In
fact, the percentage who regarded anti-semitism as a
problem in Hungary was only slightly above the EU average and far below the
concerns expressed by French Jews.
Not
only that, but the proportion of Hungarian Jews fearful of
anti-semitism has actually dropped over the
past six years. Some 77 per cent see anti-semitism as
a problem today, compared to 89 per cent in 2012, when the poll was last
conducted.
So,
the survey’s results are more than a little confounding. On the one hand,
at least according to the British media and the EU, British Jews are in a
heightened state of fear about the UK Labour party,
where the evidence suggests an already marginal problem of anti-semitism is actually in decline.
And
on the other, Hungarian Jews’ fears of anti-semitism
are waning, even though the evidence suggests anti-semitism
is on the rise and government-sanctioned there.
Understanding
the paradox
There
is, however, a way to explain this paradox – and it has nothing to do with
anti-semitism.
Corbyn’s socialist-lite
agenda faces a devastating array of opponents that include British business;
the entire spectrum of the UK corporate media, including its supposedly liberal
components; and, significantly in this case, the ultra-nationalist government
of Israel, headed by Benjamin Netanyahu.
The
British establishment fears Corbyn poses a challenge
to the further entrenchment of neoliberal orthodoxy they benefit
from. Meanwhile, Israeli politicians loathe Corbyn
because he has made support for the Palestinian people a key part of his
platform, becoming the first European leader to prioritise
a Palestinian right to justice over Israel’s right to maintain its 51-year
belligerent occupation.
Hungary’s
Viktor Orban, by contrast, is beloved of big
business, as well as the country’s mainstream media, and, again significantly,
the Israeli government. Rather than distancing himself from Orban and his Jew-baiting electioneering in Hungary,
Netanyahu has actually sanctioned it. He has called Orban
a “true friend of Israel”, thanked him for "defending Israel", and
joined the Hungarian leader in denouncing Soros.
Netanyahu,
like Orban, intensely dislikes Soros’s liberalism and
his support for open borders. Netanyahu shares Orban’s
fears that a flood of refugees will disrupt his efforts to make his state as
ethnically pure as possible.
Earlier
this year, for example, Netanyahu claimed that Soros had funded human
rights organisations to help African asylum seekers
in Israel avoid a government programme to expel
them. Netanyahu has many practical and ideological
reasons to support not only Orban but the new breed
of ultra-nationalist leaders emerging in states like Poland, Italy, France and
elsewhere.
+
U.S. and Israel Exit U.N. Cultural Agency at Stroke of
Midnight
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/u-s-and-israel-exit-u-n-cultural-agency-at-stroke-of-midnight/
by Thomas Adamson
‘Boycott Israel, we’ll boycott you’: How US Senators & state lawmakers put foreign power first
===========
j.
5G Is Coming This Year & Here’s What You Need to
Know
The
transition to new fifth-generation cellular networks, known as 5G, will affect
how you use smartphones and many other devices. Let’s
talk about the essentials . . . .
+
Parents For Safe Technology
http://www.parentsforsafetechnology.org/
20,000 Satellites for 5G to be Launched Sending Focused Beams of Intense Microwave Radiation Over Entire Earth
===========
j.
Government
Shutdown or Not, the Police State
Will
Continue to Flourish
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/50849.htm
by John W. Whitehead
“There is
no more dangerous menace to civilization than a government of incompetent,
corrupt, or vile men.”- Ludwig von Mises
The government has shut
down again.
At
least, parts
of the government have temporarily shut down
over President Trump’s demand for a $5 billion border wall.
Yet
while these political games dominate news headlines, send the stock market into
a nosedive, and put more than 800,000 federal employees at risk of having to
work without pay, nothing about this government shutdown will diminish the
immediate and very real dangers of the American Police State with its roadside
strip searches, government surveillance, biometric databases, citizens being
treated like terrorists, imprisonments for criticizing the government, national
ID cards, SWAT team raids, censorship, forcible blood draws and DNA
extractions, private prisons, weaponized drones, red
light cameras, tasers, active shooter drills, police
misconduct and government corruption.
Shutdown
or not, war will continue. Drone killings will continue. Surveillance will
continue. Censorship and persecution of anyone who criticizes the government
will continue. The government’s efforts to label dissidents as extremists and
terrorists will continue.
Police
shootings will continue. Highway robbery meted out by government officials will
continue. Corrupt government will continue. Profit-driven prisons will
continue. And the militarization of the police will continue.
|
Indeed,
take a look at the programs and policies that are not affected by a
government shutdown, and you’ll get a clearer sense of the government’s
priorities, which have little to do with serving taxpayers and everything to
do with amassing money, power and control. |
Not
even NORAD, the
North American Aerospace Defense Command that tracks Santa Claus’ route across
the globe, will have its surveillance efforts curtailed one iota.
Surveillance
will continue unabated.
On any given day, whether you’re walking through a store, driving your car,
checking email, or talking to friends and family on the phone, you can be sure
that some government agency, whether the NSA or some other entity, is listening
in and tracking your behavior. Police have been outfitted with a litany of
surveillance gear, from license plate readers and cell phone tracking devices
to biometric data recorders. Technology now makes it possible for the police to
scan passersby in order to detect the contents of their pockets, purses,
briefcases, etc. Full-body scanners, which perform virtual strip-searches of
Americans traveling by plane, have gone mobile, with roving police vans that
peer into vehicles and buildings alike—including homes. Coupled with the
nation’s growing network of real-time surveillance cameras and facial
recognition software, soon there really will be nowhere to run and nowhere to
hide.
Government
spying will continue unabated.
Government shutdown or not, the National Security Agency (NSA), with its $10.8
billion black ops annual budget, will continue to spy on every
person in the United States who uses a computer or phone using programs such as
PRISM and XKEYSCORE. By cracking the security of all major smartphones,
including iPhone, Android, and Blackberry devices,
NSA agents harvest such information as contacts, text messages, and location
data. And then there are the NSA agents who will continue to use and abuse
their surveillance powers for personal means, to spy on girlfriends, lovers and
first dates.
===========
k.
US Corporations Are Micromanaging Curricula to Miseducate Students
https://truthout.org/articles/us-corporations-are-micromanaging-curricula-to-miseducate-students/
by Eve Ottenberg,
Whether
designing biased educational videos, constricting course content or promoting
curricula that smear movements like Occupy, US corporations help miseducate students.
Over
the past year, the Trump administration’s science, technology, engineering and
math (STEM) educational program garnered $300
million in pledges from big tech companies. Implicit in this push is
the commonly accepted though questionable notion that millions of cutting-edge
STEM jobs await US workers but go unfilled because public schools have failed
to prepare students for them. The STEM bandwagon rolls on at the expense of
social studies, art, history and literature — all deemed “irrelevant” to career
success and to education as a commodity — while promoting often biased and inaccurate
corporate curricula.
Open
inquiry scarcely figures in corporate-funded curricula, according to Gerald Coles’s recently published book, Miseducating for the Global Economy. Coles points to materials
developed by the Bill of
Rights Institute (an organization created by the billionaire Koch
brothers) as an example of the ideological distortions present in
corporate-funded educational materials. For example, the curriculum developed
by the institute teaches students that “the Occupy movement violated the rights
of others.”
Though
Occupy protested abuses of the richest 1 percent, the Bill of Rights Institute
curriculum is not concerned with this. Instead, according to Coles, it asks
whether the police crackdown on Occupy was justified — and answers “yes,”
because the New York Occupy demonstrators had purportedly damaged both the park
and adjacent neighborhood. Somehow this was construed as a First Amendment
violation and “consequently the government had a right to inflict pain (with
pepper spray, for example) on the Bill of Rights abusers.” Occupy protesters in
Tulsa, Oklahoma, engaged in similar malfeasance, according to the lessons.
+
Our
Universities: Micromanagement
http://walterwendler.com/2013/03/our-universities-micromanagement/
Real
leadership liberates, never limits: it unleashes people to work with passion.
Effective universities recognize that strength in academic programs exists on
the ground, with engaged faculty, staff, and students working towards common
university goals.
Good managers empower their employees to do well by
giving opportunities to excel; bad managers disempower
their employees by hoarding those opportunities…Micromanagement restricts the
ability of micromanaged people to develop and grow, and it also limits what the
micromanager’s team can achieve, because everything has to go through him or
her.
===========
l.
Dr. Cornel West on the Global Shift Right
https://therealnews.com/stories/dr-cornel-west-on-the-global-shift-right
From
Trump in the U.S. to Bolsonaro in Brazil, ordinary
people in large democracies are discontented and shifting right, what can
progressives do about it? Cornel West in conversation with Sharmini Peries
+
Political
Polemics.
Jordan Peterson: The fatal flaw lurking in American
leftist politics
https://bigthink.com/videos/top-10-jordan-peterson-leftist-liberal-politics
The
countdown continues! This is the #2 most popular video of 2018. Can the left
wing grow from this critique?
&
"Jordan
Peterson Addresses Socialist Intellectuals"
===========
m.
US committed to 'protection of Israel' despite Syria
withdrawal,
Pompeo assures
Netanyahu
https://www.rt.com/usa/447892-pomeo-netanyahu-syria-israel-withdrawal/
+
Gaza : Looking Into The Eyes Of Barbarism
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/50865.htm
+
Judge Richard Goldstone suffered for turning
his back on Gaza – but not as much as the Palestinians he betrayed
by Robert Fisk
+
Facebook's Secret Censorship Manual Exposed as Platform
Takes
Down Video About Israel Terrorizing Palestinians
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/50851.htm
by Jessica Corbett
Journalist Rania
Khalek, whose video was restored after public outcry,
says the ability of social media giants "to disappear content as they
please" is "creepy and alarming and should be loudly opposed."
After the New York
Times on Thursday published an exposé
of Facebook's global censorship rulebook, journalist Rania Khalek called out the social media giant for
taking down a video
in which she explains how, "on top of being occupied, colonized territory,
Palestine is Israel's personal laboratory for testing, refining, and showcasing
methods and weapons of domination and control."
Tweeting out the Times report—and noting that while,
according to the newspaper, "moderators were told to hunt down and remove
rumors wrongly accusing an Israeli soldier of killing a Palestinian
medic," Israeli soldiers did fatally shoot an
unarmed 21-year-old female paramedic earlier this year—she announced
Friday morning that Facebook had "just
removed" her video.
===========
n.
Trump vs. Mattis: Beware
When Men of War Come to the Rescue
https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/12/28/trump-vs-mattis-beware-when-men-of-war-come-to-the-rescue/
by Robert Fisk
When
a general popularly known as James “Mad Dog” Mattis abandons a
really mad American president, you know something has fallen off the edge
in Washington.
Since the Roman empire, formerly loyal military chiefs
have fled crackpot leaders, and Mattis’s retreat from
the White House might have the smell of de Gaulle and Petain about it.
De
Gaulle was confronted by an immensely powerful hero of the people – the Lion of
Verdun – who was, in his dotage, about to shrug off the sacred
alliance with Britain for Nazi collaboration (for which, I suppose, read
Putin’s Russia). The decision was made to have nothing to do with
Petain, or what Mattis now refers to as “malign
actors”. De Gaulle would lead Free France instead.
Mattis has no such ambitions – not yet,
at any rate – although there are plenty of Lavals
and Weygands waiting to see if Trump chooses one of them
for his next Secretary of Defense. Besides, history should not grant Trump and Mattis such an epic panorama.
After
all, no Trump tweet could compare with Petain’s 1916 “We’ll get them!” (“on les aura”) slogan, and the
dignified, cold and fastidious de Gaulle would never have lent himself to the
rant Mattis embarked upon in San Diego in 2005: “You go into Afghanistan, you
got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn’t wear a veil.
You know, guys like that ain’t got no manhood left anyway. So it’s a hell of a
lot of fun to shoot them. Actually, it’s a lot of fun to fight. You know, it’s
a hell of a hoot. It’s fun to shoot some people. I’ll be right upfront with
you, I like brawling.”
And
Mattis was happy to “brawl” with the Iranians politically, though equally
content to let the Saudis do the fighting for him – in Yemen, at least. In
2017, he chose Saudi Arabia to announce that “everywhere you look if there is
trouble in the region, you find Iran.” He even thought that “Iran is not an
enemy of Isis”, a statement that demonstrated either ignorance or falsehood. No
wonder he later became enamoured of Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman.
But
now he has entered a new pantheon. Suddenly the man of war, the US marine
general who found it “a hell of a lot of fun” to shoot Afghan misogynists and
liked “brawling”, has become a peacemaker. He was the restraining hand tugging
at the sleeve of the insane Trump, the one man who could stop Nero burning
Rome. He was “the sanest of Trump’s national security team”, according to Paul Waldman in The Washington Post. He was “an
island of security”, announced Amos Harel in Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
+
“Shock
and Awe”: the Initial Bombing of Baghdad Revisited
===========
o.
How
Worried Should We Be About Declining Insect Populations?
https://truthout.org/articles/how-worried-should-we-be-about-declining-insect-populations/
Increasingly,
reports are trickling in of unsettling changes in populations of not only
butterflies and bees, but of far less charismatic bugs
and
beetles as well.
+
Sierra
Club v. Morton/Dissent by Justice William O. Douglas
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Sierra_Club_v._Morton/Dissent_Douglas
Sierra
Club v. Morton, 405
U.S. 727 (1972), is a Supreme Court of the United States case on the issue of
standing under the Administrative Procedure Act. The Court rejected a lawsuit
by the Sierra Club seeking to block the development of a ski resort at Mineral
King valley in the Sierra Nevada Mountains because the club had not alleged any
injury.
The
case prompted a famous dissent by JusticeWilliam O. Douglas arguing that trees should be granted legal personhood.
+
The
Simplest Explanation Of Global Warming Ever
https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2019/01/02/the-simplest-explanation-of-global-warming-ever/
===========
p.
Four
Days in Occupied Western Sahara
A
Rare Look Inside Africa’s Last Colony
https://www.democracynow.org/2019/1/1/four_days_in_occupied_western_sahara
+
Gaza:
The Palestinians who died during the Great March of Return
A
young boy carries a Palestinian flag during a Great March of Return
demonstration in Gaza on 14 May (AFP)
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/how-many-killed-great-march-of-return-palestinian-death-toll-gaza-israel-1113421181
Scores
of protesting Palestinians were killed by Israeli soldiers during 2018. These
are some of their stories
===========
q.
F***
You, Dying American Empire:
Reflections
of an Aging Anti-Imperialist
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/50845.htm
by
Jonah Raskin
Last
year at Jamia Millia Islamia Central University in New Delhi, India I met
students and teachers who thought that it was cool that I’d written an
anti-imperialist book and that it was still in print nearly fifty years after
it was first published. It was easy to be an anti-imperialist at Jamia Millia.
After all, the students and the teachers were anti-imperialists and all
worked-up about U.S. drones, U.S. air strikes and about the Syrians on the
ground who had been battered and bombed.
It
was also relatively easy to be an anti-imperialist in the late 1960s and early
1970s when anti-imperialism was a red badge of courage in SDS, the Venceremos
Brigade, in anti-war circles and even among the Yippies, who were far more
internationalist in their outlook than many on the Left assumed. Once upon a
time, Jerry Rubin went to Cuba to check out the revolution, and later to Chile
with singer and songwriter, Phil Ochs, to see what Salvador Allende was doing.
But
here in the U.S. in 2018, is it still possible to be an authentic anti-imperialist,
an anti-imperialist in more than name? I thought about that question recently
when a former comrade explained that he
was still an anti-imperialist and wondered if I was one, too.
It
wasn’t the first time that my politics were questioned. In 1980, soon after
Reagan was elected president, Professor Edward Said asked me if I was still on
the Left and hadn’t drifted to the right like that former radical, David
Horowitz, whom Alexander Cockburn dismissed as a “whiner.” A plain “Yes,” or a
“No” answer wouldn’t do, nor a “Maybe.”
+
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https://iak.salsalabs.org/blogdigest01032018?wvpId=9623ec16-0340-11e6-ab9d-12c35146c141
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===========
r.
Netflix
Removed Clip That Criticized Saudi Arabia's
Human
Rights Record
Minhaj”
addressed the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. (YouTube screen grab)
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/netflix-removed-clip-that-criticized-saudi-arabias-human-rights-record/
by
Naomi LaChance
Netflix removed an episode of the comedy show “Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj” that criticized Saudi Arabia’s human rights record after a request from the Saudi government to do so, according to a report by the Financial Times.
In
the November clip, Minhaj explained why the killing of Washington Post
columnist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, is only
one instance in a long list of violations. He took issue with the detainment
of women’s rights activists and Saudi Arabia’s direct role in the humanitarian
crisis in Yemen.
Minhaj
addressed the reputation of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman directly:
“It blows my mind that it took the killing of a Washington Post journalist for
everyone to go, ‘Oh, I guess he’s really not a reformer.’ Meanwhile, every
Muslim person you know was like, ‘Yeah, no shit. He’s the crown prince of Saudi
Arabia.’ Now would be a good time to reassess our relationship with Saudi
Arabia. And I mean that as a Muslim and as an American,” he said.
===========
s.
From:
"March 30th No2NATO2019 Mobilization via
ActionNetwork.org" <info@sg.actionnetwork.org>
Sent: Thursday, 3 January, 2019
Subject: A Call for National
Mobilization to Oppose NATO, War, and Racism
|
===========
t.
From:
Mark
Crispin Miller
Sent:
Friday,
4 January, 2019
Subject: [MCM]
Last month, three Palestinians were shot and killed for trying to run down
Israeli soldiers—which, in fact, they hadn't done
________________
|
