Global
Donald Trump is no accident.
He is our Imperial Vulture come home to roost. Our Exceptional Karma. The ultimate incineration of a City on a Hill defined by arrogance, brutality, and greed.
Trump’s willful negligence has killed more Americans in three months than did the Vietnam War in ten years.
He’s saturated our lives with dictatorship, disease, dementia, depression.
But we have no claim to self-pity.
Pinochet (Chile), Mobutu (Congo/Zaire), the Greek Junta, the Shah (Iran), Somoza (Nicaragua), Diem/Thieu/Ky (Vietnam), Yeltsin/Putin (Russia), Pol Pot (Cambodia), Lord Jeffrey Amherst (Indigenous America), Salazar (Portugal), Marcos (the Philippines), Alvarado (Honduras), the Duvaliers (Haiti) … murderers, thieves, despots, liars, bigots, buffoons, puppets, thugs, butchers, hypocrites, clowns, torturers, mobsters, devils incarnate … all installed to serve American corporate interests.
They are Trump and he is them.
I’m adding Christian Sorensen’s new book, Understanding the War Industry, to the list of books I think will convince you to help abolish war and militaries. See the list below.
Wars are driven by many factors. They do not include protection, defense, benevolence, or public service. They do include inertia, political calculation, lust for power, and sadism — facilitated by xenophobia and racism. But the top driving force behind wars is the war industry, the all-consuming greed for the all-mighty dollar. It drives government budgets, war rehearsals, arms races, weapons shows, and fly-overs by military jets supposedly honoring people who are working to preserve life. If it could maximize profits without any actual wars, the war industry wouldn’t care. But it can’t. You can only have so many war plans and war trainings without an actual war. The preparations make actual wars very hard to avoid. The weapons make accidental nuclear war increasingly likely.
The cleverly named On the Record threatens to dethrone the so-called “King of Hip-Hop.” The 97-minute documentary may be to music mogul Russell Simmons what the #MeToo movement and Ronan Farrow’s reportage have been to that other entertainment industry icon, Harvey Weinstein. But unlike the exposes of the disgraced movie producer, Record delves into matters of race, as well as of sex and gender.
Record’s protagonist is Drew Dixon, daughter of a 1990’s Washington, D.C. mayor, Sharon Pratt Dixon, and her father Arrington Dixon was a D.C. City Councilman. Growing up in the milieu of African American politics, Dixon saw Hip-Hop as a musical genre that expressed the voices, issues and concerns of Black people through an art form and decided to pursue a career in the music business. With an ear for talent Dixon rose in industry ranks, and she became an executive at Def Jam, the Hip Hop label co-founded by entrepreneur Simmons, who is also African American.
This is so much bigger than personal accountability.
Yes, the four police officers present at the Memorial Day killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis were fired the next day. The case is being investigated by the FBI. And the mayor of Minneapolis and lots of other politicians are talking about “values.”
Dan Kovalik’s new book, No More War: How the West Violates International Law by Using “Humanitarian” Intervention to Advance Economic and Strategic Interests — which I am adding to my list of books you should read on why war should be abolished (see below) — makes a powerful case that humanitarian war no more exists than philanthropic child abuse or benevolent torture. I’m not sure the actual motivations of wars are limited to economic and strategic interests — which seems to forget the insane, power-mad, and sadistic motivations — but I am sure that no humanitarian war has ever benefitted humanity.
Kovalik’s book does not take the approach so widely recommended of watering down the truth so that the reader is only gently nudged in the right direction from where he or she is starting. There’s no getting 90% reassuringly wrong in order to make the 10% palatable here. This is a book for either people who have some general notion of what war is or people who aren’t traumatized by jumping into an unfamiliar perspective and thinking about it.
BANGKOK, Thailand -- An uncontrolled virus killed at least 543 horses
and many are being buried in mass graves, amid suspicion that imported
zebras brought the disease which is ravaging Thailand's international
multi-million-dollar racing and horse show industry.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture's Animals and Plant Health
Inspection Service declared on March 30 a 60-day quarantine on all
horses imported from Thailand to stop the insect-borne African Horse
Sickness (AHS) virus spreading to America.
The only quarantine facility in the U.S. for horses suspected of
carrying AHS is located at the New York Animal Import Center, in Rock
Tavern, New York. The U.S. also prohibited imports of horse semen and
embryos from Thailand.
The World Organization for Animal Health, based in Paris, cancelled
Thailand's status as an "AHS-Free Country" on March 27 after the first
42 horses died.
The outbreak, which does not make humans ill, began on February 24 and
rapidly spread among horse breeding, riding, training, and rental
businesses in two central provinces.
Vote by Mail will decide the 2020 election. Trump and 50,000 of his armed backers will try to say otherwise.
But VBM could turn us forever from hackable touch screens to paper ballots. To make that happen, election protection activists must overcome Vote by Mail’s many vulnerabilities to make mail-in paper ballots an instrument of real democracy.
The odds are long, but the chances are real.
To follow an ongoing compendium of stories on this election as they unfold, go to the Election Protection portal at the Free Press website. You can also join our national COVID-19 Emergency Zoom call on election protection this Tuesday 5:00-6:30 p.m. Eastern Time (2:00-3:30 Pacific Time) by writing to me for the link.
In the Big Picture, Trump loudly hates VBM. But his followers LOVE it in states they control.
We are being utterly transformed. And the world is being utterly transformed around us.
Ostensibly, this is to tackle a simple virus. In reality, it is to achieve an elite design at staggering cost to humanity and to life generally.
If you have not been carefully following what is taking place, let me highlight some recent developments and what we can do about them.
On 26 March 2020, the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) granted Microsoft a world patent. Titled ‘1. WO2020060606 – Cryptocurrency System Using Body Activity Data’, this patent gives Microsoft (that is, Bill Gates) extraordinary power over our lives.
As Professor Vandana Shiva evocatively explains in her latest article, ‘My Earth Journey in defence of Biodiversity, Life and Freedom over 5 decades’, this development is ‘robbing us of our deep humanity’:
The patent is dramatically changing the meaning of being human.
John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man and this TED Talk, has a new book called Touching the Jaguar. You can pre-order it here and get an online workshop and other bonus materials that I haven’t seen but recommend purely on the basis of having read the book. Perkins also is doing an online workshop in July that you can sign up for here. An interview he’s given about his new book is here. And I’ll soon be interviewing him on Talk Nation Radio.