Max Blumenthal can be a pain in the ass because he’s so harsh sometimes and he expresses such disgust with things that don’t seem that disgusting, but the man has seen things. So, when he says that a staged a-cappella in a Kiev subway makes him sick to his stomach, it’s because he knows that it’s a staged operation funded by think tanks funded by the CIA, deliberately made and promulgated by the U.S. government to retain support for the war in Ukraine.

How Zelensky Is Leading Ukraine's Massive Privatization Drive by Behind the Headlines (YouTube)

He says at 17:20,

“Every war or color... [More]”

The following video was quite interesting and not just for observing the sartorial style of the San Fransisco author set. They are very thoughtful and passionate revolutionaries for a sane and just society.

'Chokepoint Capitalism' How to take back the arts from Big Tech | Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow by The Real News Network (YouTube)

At 36:20, Rebecca says,

“People’s passion is being weaponized to facilitate their exploitation.” These are the so-called “thankless” jobs where the pay sucks, but it’s morally and/or societally important: health-care, education, old-age care, care for the poor. All of these need to be... [More]

The following video is almost two hours long. I have not summarized it, but address the general tenor of Žižek’s argumentation and presentation.

An Evening with Slavoj Žižek: Why Do We Enjoy Feeling Ashamed? (YouTube)

I continue to be shocked at how terrible Žižek’s take on the Russian attack on Ukraine is. This video is very long and he spends most of the time fighting foolish strongmen, mostly people he calls his “friends”, who all seem to have the absolute worst reasons possible for not supporting Ukraine wholeheartedly.

I heard absolutely nothing about... [More]

Since at least July, I’ve been following the story of the railroad workers in the U.S. Their situation is awful. Their working conditions are extremely strict. They are not commensurate with those of a civilized society. It is only because of the extreme death of labor in the U.S. that there is even a discussion. But there is—because there is no support for labor in the U.S., only support for capital.

The U.S. is far from covering itself in glory, as we’ll learn from a spate of articles,... [More]

I think that one of the main things that sticks in my craw about the war in Ukraine is the absolute speed with which so many people capitulated to the idea of its inevitability. We acted like Liam Neeson in Taken, Sylvester Stallone in Rambo, Arnold Schwarzenegger in Commando, Mel Gibson in Payback, or, most recently, Keanu Reeves in John Wick .

Look, you could still enjoy the movies, but you must be aware of how manipulative the initial scene of massive injustice toward our hero or his family... [More]

…is not that he is Indian. The problem is that he is a neoliberal class-warrior against the poor.

A friend sent me a video of Trevor Noah in a segment on the racism experienced by Rishi Sunak. I could only find the original video on Facebook, of all places. YouTube is chock-full of reaction video to the original video. Trevor Noah plays a call-in show from England that features a racist caller saying that Sunak can’t represent England because he’s not white. That’s just basic maths, right?[1]
... [More]

We’ve definitely heard that Invasions Are Only Bad When Russia Does Them by Ted Rall. Is this true? It seems to be. No-one else gets shit for invasions.

Ted Rall: 14.10.2022

It’s rich when the U.S. leads the charge to talk about how bad it is when one of its official enemies invades a country.

Was there provocation in Russia’s case? Yes, there was. Is that justification for the invasion? No, it is not. There is no justification for any invasion.

Was there provocation in Panama, Grenada, or Cuba? In the case of Cuba, yes,... [More]

…was convincing the world he was God.

To paraphrase the classic phrase a bit, that is what the United States keeps on being able to do with the rest of the western world.

My theory is that it’s because the rest of the world is cynically focused on their own short-term self-interest. Nothing much has changed in that regard. They simply continue to pretend that they’re doing whatever they do for wholly virtuous reasons, but they really have no principles at all.

Look at a country like... [More]

Not only is Cloudflare getting opinionated about what kinds of site it deems worthy of hosting, but now the Internet Archive is also deciding which sites are worth remembering.

That is not either one of your jobs.

You each have one job.

You are not doing it.

Stop censoring knowledge and history and information.

I’ve read that a so-called special master has been appointed to oversee the dissemination of information from the files seized in the raid of Trump’s Mar-el-Lago resort. I’ve also read that this will significantly delay the release of information. I think it’s ok in the sense that I’m interested in justice being served for Trump as well as anyone else. That is, if the information were to be disseminated by an extremely unfriendly press and Twitterati, then it would be very likely that we would... [More]

I’m going to be there soon for the first time in almost four years.

I was thinking today what I’m going to say when someone in my family asks me what I think of America.

Maybe something like:

I think that you’re lost control of your country. And I think you need to stop worshiping the people who’ve taken it from you.

I think you’re all fighting over what amount to minor differences relative to the actually major issues on which you mostly agree. You get lost in the weeds on issues like... [More]

Zelenkskyy’s wardrobe of 100% T-Shirts is pretty clearly a power move.

Casual Meeting with Zelenskyy

Everybody else shows up in the classic garb of the European upper-class. Zelenskyy shows that he’s got them by the balls by showing up in a grotty, old, army-olive T-Shirt. He’s at war, you see.

In this next picture, we see him thinking about what he’ll ask for next.

Zelenskyy Thinking Hard

Apparently, it was for them to not only let Ukraine into NATO, to have Sweden and Finland give up their neutrality for Ukraine, but also to fast-track... [More]

I skimmed through a recent article called Pacifism is the wrong response to the war in Ukraine by Slavoj Žižek (The Guardian). I’ve read a lot of Žižek. I’ve heard a lot of interviews with him. This article doesn’t “sound” like him at all.

There are no contrarian positions, there are no mentions of Hegel or Lacan, no mentions of psychiatry. He made absolutely no pop-culture references. He told no jokes. He usually talks of being a realist communist—nothing of the sort here. No mention of Ukraine’s absolute war on... [More]

Earlier this year, seemingly inside of a day, the normally deadlocked U.S. government approved an $800B+ budget for the U.S. military. That’s the base price, not including money for actual wars and not including “black budgets” for spy agencies.

The Congress even threw in more than the Pentagon had asked for, just for shits and giggles.[1]

A few weeks ago, the ruling classes of the United States decided to spend an additional $40B on the Ukraine conflict, over ¾ of it for weapons and military... [More]

The cartoon We Come in Peace by Ted Rall writes,

“After mass shootings, liberal opponents of gun rights love to say that violence is never the answer. But their messaging on war, violence, militarism, even assassinations, sends a completely different message about their hypocrisy.”

This one got me thinking that America’s refusal to pass gun-control/background-check measures to stem the violence is one place where we’re not hypocritical! We are the world’s largest arms merchant, flooding one... [More]

The following is a collection of essays, notes, and ideas I’ve written over the last several weeks, all loosely associated with the war in Ukraine. I’ve tried to edit the notes into some coherence, especially since some have been chronologically superseded, but I’m neither a journalist nor a scholar, so YMMV. I don’t even necessarily stand behind everything here—some of it is or was just food for thought. The lower you go, the older the notes. The title refers to one of the essays, which... [More]

If we can agree that calling Stephen Pinker right-wing is factually if not wildly incorrect, then are we not also intellectually obliged—in some part, at least—to look more carefully into other accusations of right-wing association or white-supremacy made by the same crowd?

That their accusations are wrong in the case with which we are familiar should make us suspicious that their other accusations might also be incorrect or exaggerated—and that they are perhaps motivated to do so for... [More]

YouTube doesn’t actually remove videos from your lists. I suppose that makes them better than truly totalitarian systems, which would make a greater effort to erase knowledge. Instead, when a video is unavailable, YouTube automatically hides it from you, removing its pesky presence from your lists, replacing these videos with a subtle notification at the top of the list.

Unavailable Videos In Watchlist
If you’ve got more than a couple of dozen videos in a list, then you’ve probably scrolled down far enough in the list that... [More]

I just heard that Switzerland is thinking of banning RT.

Europe has done it. Great Britain has done it. The U.S. has de-facto done it (it’s not by government decree, but by the corporations that de-facto run that country’s media).

Viola Amherd of Switzerland said something about following their lead.

So, let me get this straight: Viola’s principles allow her to buy JSF35 jet fighters from the U.S. and have no problems running U.S. state propaganda (CNN everybody; pay attention), but she has... [More]

From the Intervention Plenary 7.2.2022 by Mick Wallace (Twitter),
some backbone and real talk from Mick Wallace of Ireland, in the European Parliament. The video is 62s; transcript is below.

Mick Wallace

“The current crisis in Ukraine has been used by the Irish media class and a handful of politicians to make the case that Ireland should relinquish the neutrality enshrined in our Constitution and even commit to joining NATO.

“Naturally, these jingoistic sentiments are from those too old to enlist, their children and... [More]”

Some backbone and real talk from Clare Daley of Ireland, in the European Parliament. The video is 87s; transcript is below.

Afghanistan crisis by Clare Daley (YouTube)

“There’s no doubt about it. We’re living in times of catastrophic crisis, where the lives of innocent civilians are sacrificed in the wars of their masters. Yes, in Ukraine, but not only.

“Since the last plenary, tens of thousands of Afghani citizens have been forced to flee in search of food and safety. Five million children face famine—an agonizing and painful... [More]”

“That’s a nice little town you have here. It’d be shame if something were to happen to it.”

Imagine we live in a small town. We’ve got a neighbor who’s a bit of an asshole. It’s complicated. This neighbor tells everyone how great he is, and he’s done some good things for the town in the past—quite a while ago—but he’s really been a pain in the ass lately. Like the last 50 years or so. He’s pretty rich and he owns a lot of the local stores—or buys from them—so it’s kind of hard to... [More]

I took a look at the Full Transcript of Biden’s State of the Union Address by Joe Biden (New York Times) and took some notes. As these things go, it wasn’t the stupidest State of the Union I’ve heard, but it was pretty stupid.

“Throughout our history we’ve learned this lesson: When dictators do not pay a price for their aggression, they cause more chaos.”

This is 100% true. It was also delivered without irony or shame.

“Putin’s latest attack on Ukraine was premeditated and totally unprovoked.

“He rejected repeated,... [More]”

The following comes from a self-indulgently expansive footnote in the preceding article Superpowers are hypocrites.

After publication, I read Socialists Fight for a Future Without War by Ronan Burtenshaw (Jacobin), which seems to hit many of the same points I made above, while being simultaneously more eloquent and informative.

“We hear very little today about Britain’s role in the NATO-led war in Libya in 2011, which demolished that state, left its people in the hands of warlords, and pushed thousands to flee and drown... [More]”

Let’s think a bit about the stories that we’re told about the world.

These stories show up individually, without context.

Mostly we don’t get context for the story itself, but we almost certainly don’t get context about the story relative to other, similar stories.

When the U.S. and NATO[1] cried “that’s enough” and bombed the former Yugoslavia[2] nearly flat, for humanitarian reasons—because of a “genocide”[3]—and then created and quickly internationally recognized the country of Kosovo, that... [More]

I got a message from a friend yesterday morning (one with whom I occasionally discuss politics). It read,

“I guess the Guardian et al were right…..”

They were referring, of course, to the Russian escalation this morning in the Donbass.

I wrote back:

Sure they were. I’m not going to be so quick to believe everything I’m hearing right now the way they’d like me to hear it. Fool me once, shame on you, etc. Deep breath and wait to see how it shakes out.

If they do get their war, then they did... [More]

I can well imagine that the article following Fed Up With Google, Conspiracy Theorists Turn to DuckDuckGo by Stuart A. Thompson (NY Times) will be “DuckDuckGo is a right-wing web site”.

C’mon New York Times. Do better.

I was at the NY Times this morning to look up a referenced editorial and landed on the home page instead. This is what greeted me, above the fold and prominently placed at the top and center of the site.

NY Times Front Page on 26.01.2022

I don’t usually see the NY Times home page. It’s possible that it always looks like this. I honestly hope not, but can’t rule it out. This is war propaganda, pure and simple. Their formulation has nothing to do with reporting and everything to do with pushing an agenda.

The first headline... [More]

I watched a video called “Do Lockdowns Work?” in late December and wrote down a bunch of notes and thoughts as I did so. The title is ostensibly interesting, but they didn’t really talk about that topic all that much in the 80 minutes of the video.

First off, I don’t want my picking on Jimmy Dore and Max Blumenthal to be read as support of the policies or ideas of whomever they happen to oppose. I listened to their rather long, 80-minute video because I’ve learned from them in the past and... [More]

It’s January 6th, so half of the U.S. media has its panties in a bunch again about the B&E that happened a year ago at the Capitol Building in Washington D.C. It’s not just the usual suspects either—everyone is getting in on the hyperbole. For example, the article What Do You Call a Failed Insurrection? PRACTICE by Greg Palast is by a great investigative journalist. He’s done great work. He’s still rehashing and republishing details that were disavowed nearly a year ago.

“Forget the whack-jobs who invaded... [More]”