Left, Conservative, and Liberal in World Affairs

https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2025-03-26/idiots-guide-world-affairs/

America Moving to Left ???

 MAGA Red and other right wingnuts are now proclaiming that America has been "moving to the left."

That's funny, because the America I live in has been steadily moving to the right all my life.  This has been analyzed many times: the rightward shifting of The Overton Window of mainstream acceptible politics is described in a large number of books.  Many have observed we still live in The Reagan Era with both parties emulating Reagan with one twist or another, but not really fundamentally changing matters.

In my lifetime, the New Deal era started by FDR gave way to the Neoliberal/Neoconservative era, which is clearly much farther to the right.

President Johnson unveiled the War on Poverty, Nixon unveiled the War on Drugs, and Clinton unveiled the War on the War on Poverty, ending the most fundamental aid program, AFDC, which guaranteed income support for needy mothers, and replacing it with a cheap limited duration and highly contingent substitute.

One key metric of social democracy (now called "leftist" because we've moved so far to the right) is union membership, which has been declining all my life.  Likewise, income inequality has been increasing all my life, to the extent that we now live in a second Gilded Age reflected by our current President who likes gold toilets.

Under Biden, universities were pressured by the US government to lock up students.  Trump took this one step further by threatening the funding of the universities unless they make even more draconian policies.

An apparent disciple of Ayn Rand has been given free reign to hack away at US government programs that he doesn't like.  It's worth noting that Naziism was most fundamentally about the elimination of socialism (European Jews were targeted because socialism was believed to have come from them).

We've moved so far the the right that fascism is now centrist in America.

We can only choose how much and how far, and with Trump Americans are going to see good and deep right now.

Fighting Darkness

The best way to fight darkness is with light.  (Heat isn't quite as much helpful.)

First thing, Fascists strangle expression of opposing views for that reason, and we must not let them.

Sadly, it's hard to light a single candle when faced with the high powered wind blowers of mass media.

AI is the perfect Fascist tool

 One of the first big uses of AI in society was the targeting of Palestinians in Gaza for assassination.  Hundreds of doctors, journalists, and others were targeted, part of the overall effort to make Gaza unlivable for Palestinians going forwards.

Apparently the Trump project to crack down on critics of Israel is also using AI, a fact briefly mentioned in this report by Jonathan Cook.  We can imagine AI has become useful in cracking down on critics of Israel in Germany and UK as well, whose prosecutions point to social media postings.

With AI, robots can scour people's social media accounts, with little fear that the AI itself might change it's mind or learn from the writing of the people it is reading.

So, by just "obeying orders," it's the perfect fascist tool.  If it's unable to make the fine distinctions that a well educated and thoughtful person might be able to do, that's a plus in these applications.

The Tesla Implosion

 Fairly straight up version from a marketing guy.

"Autopsy" from a sustainability guy.

From about 2011-2017 I was sure a Tesla was going to be my next car.  Then the Model 3 (on which I had purchased a "reservation") was very disappointing to me.  No dashboard, back window too high, and too wide for my garage.  By then I was becoming more and more disappointed that Tesla was not ushering in a new era of EV's, like a Henry Ford, but only making increasingly cranky statement pieces for whitewashing the unsustainable lifestyles of the rich people who buy them.

Back in 2009, I was impressed that Musk had done what others had long said was impossible: and EV with a range similar to a gasoline powered car.  It wasn't really that it was impossible, but there weren't enough moneybags to invest in it.  Somehow Elon got that done, so I respected him a lot.

Now I've lost all respect.  Elon Musk is Ayn Rand in drag and Hitler with a chainsaw.  Other people had actually designed the Tesla, all the ideas (and in all his other companies) were nothing new, Musk was simply able to sell them better to the corrupt and stupid capitalists of the western world.

And EV's aren't The Answer anyway, perhaps not even a help if not employed to actually reduce overall environmental destruction.  So what if one's car doesn't produce greenhouse gasses but the new infrastructure to build them toasts the planet?

The key point of being sustainable is to give up everything excessive.  And Teslas are full of excessive.

  

Pivoting to China and World War 3

 A decade ago, Professor John Mearsheimer was calling for greater peace with Russia and preparing for war with China instead.

Going back even further, around 1969 Gore Vidal also called the US fixation on fighting Russia stupid.  He argued for allying with Russia to keep China from taking over.  China was clearly going to have the top position eventually, and other major powers needed to ally ensure they wouldn't dominate.

About three decades ago for a brief moment we had something like peace (and lots of trade) with both Russia and China.  That started disappearing as soon as the Clinton Administration started reneging on the previous administration's promises not to expand NATO...  Then NATO sponsored wars in the former Yugoslavia, Libya, Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Ukraine.  The US sponsored Color Revolutions in many countries--including 2 in Ukraine because the first didn't run as intended--to oust Russian-friendly governments in Russia's backyards and replace them with highly dependent, corrupt, sold-out, and mostly unpopular western client states.  And here we are, at the precipice of WW3. 

 Brian Berletic argues the Trump Administration is not making the change (a reset with Russia) that it advertised and many of its fans believe (and that Maga Blue Democrats wrongly deplore).  Instead, he shows what the Trump Administration is doing is really just a continuation of previous policies.  They are unloading and outsourcing the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine to Europe, in order to free resources for war (and Berletic emphasizes that the moves make it clear that US has hot war in mind, not just economic war or cold war) with China.

So, yes, WW3.

The West's Moral Authority to Disparage Putin

None whatsoever, according to former UK diplomat Craig Murray.

I agree completely.  Craig states the basic case:

The plain truth is that the Western powers interfere far more in other countries than Russia does, through massive sponsorship of NGOs, journalists and politicians, much of which is open and some of which is covert.

I would have also explicitly mentioned the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria, and the sanctions the US levies and enforces on many countries.  In the last 30 years alone, many millions of people have died as a result of US foreign wars, weapons, and sanctions.  (I've seen one believable estimate of 10 million.)  Nothing Russia or China have done in this epoch has come close, and this pattern holds all the way back to the end of WWII when US fought big wars in Korea, Vietnam and other countries, and funded 80 deadly coups also responsible for the deaths of millions.  US has been #1 in deaths from war, sanctions, and coups for some time now.

Craig also rejects a claim many of my friends nearly always make:

There is simply no evidence of Putin having territorial goals beyond Ukraine and the tiny enclaves of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. It is perfectly fair to characterise Putin’s territorial expansion over two decades as limited to the reincorporation of threatened Russian-speaking minority districts in ex-Soviet states.

That it is worth a world war and unlimited dead over who should be mayor of the ethnic Russian and Russian-speaking city of Lugansk is not entirely plain to me.

The notion that Putin is about to attack Poland or Finland is utter nonsense. The idea that the Russian army, which has struggled to subdue small and corrupt, if Western-backed, Ukraine, has the ability to attack Western Europe itself is plainly impractical.

Then, Craig points to the obvious inconsistency between how Russia is disparaged and Israel is defended:

Strangely, the same “logic” is not applied to Benjamin Netanyahu. It is not argued by neoliberals that his annexations of Gaza, the West Bank and Southern Lebanon mean he must have further territorial ambitions. In fact, they even fail to note Netanyahu’s aggressions at all, or portray them as “defensive” – the same argument advanced much more credibly by Putin in Ukraine, but which neoliberals there outright reject.

Many Zionists including members of current Israeli government have recently made aspirational visions of a Greater Israel which not only includes Gaza and other parts of Palestine, but Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and beyond.  Craig doesn't venture that far in this post.

Then Craig states how the current European chest thumping looks in Russia:

The economies of Western Europe are being realigned onto a war footing, led by the utterly transformed European Union. The enthusiastic proponents of genocide in Gaza who head the EU now are channelling an atavistic hereditary hatred of Russia.

The foreign policy of the EU is propelled by Kaja Kallas and Ursula von der Leyen. The fanatical Russophobia these two are spreading, and their undisguised desire to escalate the war in Ukraine, cannot help but remind Russians that they come from nations which were fanatically Nazi.

To Russians this feels a lot like 1941. With Europe in the grip of full-on anti-Russian propaganda, the background to Trump’s attempt to broker a peace deal is troubled and Russia is understandably wary.

Then he states the basic case where we concur:

But Putin is not Hitler. It is only through the blinkers of patriotism that Putin appears to be a worse person than the Western leaders behind massive invasion and death all around the globe, who now seek to extend war with Russia.

First Amendment Rights

While most legal experts I follow are adamant that the Constitution explicitly (and with many Precedents) applies to all People in the USA--not just Citizens--and that includes the Bill of Rights*, it seems that the Trump Administration is not the first to test this.

 (*I love how Judge Nap's eyes grow very big when he emphasizes this point.)

It was the Biden Administration which argued that Julian Assange did not have First Ammendment rights to free speech.  When UK judges questioned if this wouldn't violate the principle of non-discrimination in international human rights agreements, in 2015, the Biden administration quickly settled the Assange case rather than answer the question.

But many wonder why Khalil was chosen when there were surely much better cases around where protestors had actually been accused or convicted of a crime.  I guessed that it was because Khalil was "one of ours" who was politicized (aka radicalized) by the Genocide in Gaza.  It turns out, I was right.  Khalil worked for the British government in toppling Assad (as shown in Craig Murray's article linked immediately above).  He wasn't a spy but an asset used by British Intelligence because of his local knowledge and connections.  He was likely apolitical and on the track to a much better economic life for himself in the West.  Murray lays out two other possibilities, including that he might have been a double agent all along, but finds the idea that he was politicized by the Gaza Genocide to be the most credible.

Nihilism

 Some might consider me a nihilist.  After all, I consider the grand extinction of humanity to be very likely resulting from the growth economy we have now, and a massive human die-off of more than 50% (and probably more like 90%) inevitable in the next century or so.  We've already seen an age-defining extinction and decimation of non-human species, which will only get worse the longer the human "experiment" continues.  And I don't hold out any hope for the endless stream of techno hyperbole that crosses our screens: "Singularity.  AI.  Quantum Computers.  Crpto Anything.  Mars."  The age of tech actually making things "better" is long over, and even if it did, it would only bring on overinflation and collapse of the growth economy sooner.  Look at the server farms being built for Crypto and AI.  Look at the globally expanding manufacturing and mining of toxic metals.  Now tech is intended to build a more comprehensive overlord, while holding up feel good promises.

Only a no-growth society can make sensible choices.  As long as human society is programmed for growth and not sustainability tech will always be an amplifier of destruction, not a savior.

Given that such horrific outcomes are near inevitable anyway, what's the point in doing anything?

That is where I break in many ways from nihilists.  Firstly, I don't consider anything to be inevitable.  Everything that happens is the result of vast numbers of causual "contribution."  To get right down to it, everthing that happens is influenced by everything within a time-space lightcone.

So what I just did moments ago, contributes to the global reality in some tiny measure within seconds, and perhaps more than that later, etc.

So the future is not some determinate thing, it is something I contribute to, along with everyone I know, and know of--including those whose "contributions" I might well hate.

People like me are contributing less to the political outcomes of the world at this moment than many others.  I'm no Trump, Biden, or Netanyahu.

(But my hope remains, like Hari Seldon, people will be reading my words to form their understanding of this time and since.  And so in some form, my contribution may be much greater in the future.  I am also hoping that future starts while I am still alive and not too far from now.)

And regardless of the likelihood of success, I am fully responsible for my contribution and should am for it being a good one, at least overall. Perhaps the best I can make it, but within balance of my life as a while, not 'sacrificing' myself (for something unlikely anyway, the prevention of human and animal suffering and extinction, etc).

I may have little choice, for example, but continue to do business with corporations that violate my ethical ideals.  But I can try to reverse that effect with other measures including contributions, purchases, donations, protests, organizing, and speaking.

What we need is an ecologically rebuilding communist society to clean up from the collapse of the growth economy.

So, anyway, it was with that in mind that I read this description of Soviet Nihilism, which I'm not sure about.

Update from Greenstein

Long one of my favorite bloggers, Jewish Anti-Zionist Tony Greenstein has written recently about his interviews with Katie Halper and Rania Khalek which went deep into the thickets of history.

Here are my favorite sections:

Orthodox Jews in particular opposed Zionism. Agudat Yisrael was founded as a specifically anti-Zionist organisation. This gives the lie to the claims of Britain’s racist Chief Rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis that Zionism and Judaism have been intertwined for 3,000 years.

I also went into the content of my book in some depth explaining that for the Zionists building a ‘Jewish’ state was the first priority in the holocaust and that Ben-Gurion is notorious for saying that if there was a choice to be made between rescuing and saving Jews and building their bastard state, the latter comes first. 

When Britain offered to take 10,000 Jewish children in the wake of Kristallnacht the Zionists were outraged that they weren’t going to Palestine. In a speech to Mapai’s (Israeli Labor Party) Central Committee Ben-Gurion said:

If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England, and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Yisrael, then I would opt for the second alternative. For we must weigh not only the life of these children, but also the history of the People of Israel.

I also described the Kasztner Affair and the resulting trial in Israel from 1954-8 when the leader of Hungarian Zionism, a senior official and candidate in Mapai (the Israeli Labor Party) for the next elections, Rudolf Kasztner, sued for libel when he was accused of being a Nazi collaborator. He lost when it transpired that he had spent his time post-war at Nuremberg testifying in favour of Nazi war criminals.

Kasztner had concluded a deal with Eichmann that if the Nazis agreed to a train out of Hungary for the select few (Zionists, bourgeois and a few rabbis) he would not inform Hungarian Jews of the Auschwitz Protocols which two escapees from Auschwitz had written detailing where they would go if they boarded a deportation train. Up till then no one knew that Auschwitz was an extermination camp. Kasztner went so far as to misinform those who were deported that they were travelling to a fictious resettlement camp, Kenyermeze.

With Rania I gave an outline of the development of Zionist historiography of the holocaust and how it had been distorted to accord with Zionist myths of Jewish resistance. Zionism has rewritten the letters and memoirs of the Zionist resistance fighters in the Warsaw ghetto eliminating their criticisms of the Zionist movement.  This was in order that their writings should accord with the Zionist narrative that they led the resistance and were heroes rather than sordid collaborators.

The Zionist historians had also erased entirely the role of Jewish anti-Zionists, in particular the Jewish anti-Zionist Bund and its leader, the last Commander of the Resistance, Marek Edelman.

With Rania I first discussed Trump’s ethnic cleansing plans. I was sceptical that they would succeed but I am less so now as all the indications are that Israel is looking for an excuse to resume the genocide.

We discussed the reaction of Israeli Jews to the plan. 80% support it and just 3% think its amoral. Which means that 97% of Israelis are not only amoral bastards but genocidaires too.  The other 17% either can’t make their mind up about it or think it’s not practical.

I imagine some Nazis also thought the extermination of Jews, Poles, Gays, Roma etc. was not practical. This is the morality of Israelis and that’s why I find it hard to explain why in a democratic, secular state  Israeli Jews would have the right to national rights as Jews. It is difficult explaining why Palestinians should be forced to live side by side with genocidal would be murderers.

And

I also explained that Hitler didn’t start out with a plan to genocide the Jews. His plan, like the Zionists was ethnic cleansing.  It was only when that failed that genocide became his only option if he wanted to be rid of the Jews. The same ‘dilemma’ faces the Zionists.  If it can’t be expulsion it must be holocaust.

I went into how the very history of the holocaust had been rewritten by the Zionists to emphasise Jewish resistance, despite it being very low apart from the Warsaw Ghetto and a few others such as at Bialystock which went off at half cock, Lachwa and Minsk.

We discussed the situation of Arab Jews in Israel and how Israel deliberately set out to destabilise their position in 1948. In Iraq it is well documented that they planted bombs in synagogues and other places Jews frequented in order to stimulate flight. Avi Shlaim, an Emeritus Professor at Oxford University in his book Three Worlds has recently come up with further proof of Zionist involvement in the bombings.

When the Zionist underground threw a grenade into the courtyard of the Masudo Shemtov synagogue in Baghdad, killing 2 people, they stimulated a mass emigration of the oldest Jewish community in the world.  Out of 135,000 Jews only 10,000 remained after 1951.

I also told how when they arrived in Israel Iraq’s Jews were treated like animals and were sprayed with DDT. Three Worlds also explains how a rich cultured community were turned into poor labourers in Israel, forced to sleep in tents and how they were deArabised.

I described how Holocaust Worship today leads to the creation of holocaust museums (but not for Black slaves or the Native Indians) such as the United States  Holocaust Museum where history has been rewritten.  When I went there Pastor Niemoller’s saying ‘First they came for ...’ was hanging above the entrance except it had been changed. The first category was ‘First they came for the communists’ but that wouldn’t do in cold war America so it was omitted.

I also showed how two-thirds of the members of the Judenrate, the Nazi Councils that the Nazis established to help implement the Final Solution, were Zionist. It was the Judenrate and not the Nazis who rounded up Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto. Rania observed that the Palestinian Authority was the Palestinian equivalent of the Judenrate!

I quoted Hannah Arendt who said in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem that

Wherever Jews lived, there were recognized Jewish leaders, and this leadership, almost without exception, cooperated in one way or another, for one reason or another, with the Nazis. The whole truth was that if the Jewish people had really been unorganized and leaderless, there would have been chaos and plenty of misery but the total number of victims would hardly have been between four and a half and six million people.[1]

I told how the Warsaw ghetto resistance’s first task was to execute Jewish [[Zionist]] collaborators. They couldn’t have organised a rebellion with the collaborators operating. [[...]]

Whatever happened to the Phoenicians?

 It have wondered for some time why one of the greatest empires in world history, the Phoenician Empire, is nearly scrubbed from western history.  These were also the smart people who also invented the alphabet.  Instead, we learn a lot of made up details about a nearby backwater tribe of no such grand distinctions who made themselves famous for male genital mutilation and recasting religious stories largely invented elsewhere.  That the pseudo-history of this tribe (regarded as God's Truth by many) barely mentions the concurrent activities of the adjacent Phoenician Empire has always made me very suspicious.

The grand conspiracy theorist Miles Mathis has written a grand essay on this.  First he notices that the era of the Phoencians greatest success, 1200-800 BCE, which is called a "Dark Age" in western history, wasn't so dark after all.  Mathis shows that it was deliberately blacked out, to hide the success of the Phoenicians.

In our academic (as opposed to biblical) history, the Phoenicians were first defeated by the Persians.  But Mathis shows that this supposed defeat never happened.  Instead, what seems to have happened is that Phoenicians married into the royal lines of Persia, and eventually took them over.  So Persia and Phoenicia became the same thing.  And then this happened again with Greece, with Alexander (who was probably more Phoenician than Greek).  And through Alexander, the next was Egypt.

And then Mathis shows the Pheoenicians followed that model the world over.  All the royal European lines are basically Phoenicians who wormed their way in.

In Mathis' telling, once the Phoenicians had mastered trade, they decided that wasn't good enough.  They wanted to directly ingest the wealth of their partners with a straight pipe, and this is how they did it.  Largely with marriage, secrets, and clandestine activities.  We are still ruled by Phoenicians today (and we wish they'd do a better job).

Then what about the Jews?  They are of course Phoenicians too.  Both are semitic (despite some attempt by Victorian scholars to recast Phoenicians as Aryan).  Possibly one in the same.  They have a folk history in the Holy Bible to confuse people, conveniently owning all "Abrahamic Religion" sides.

I'm not saying this far out conspiracy theory that Phoenicians still run the world is true.  But after reading Mathis, it's clear that most of what we think we know is lies, lies meant to hide inconvenient truths about our past so we don't fully understand the present.

And it also underlines a point I keep trying to make against racial supremacists: We are all more closely related than you think.

So I can state with very high probability than indeed I am descended from both Cyrus and Darian, and yes Abraham and David (if they even existed) and James the Brother of Jesus (if not Jesus himself, if he existed and has surviving ancestors).  Over 2000 years, the probability of any descent you could think of is over 80% and over 3000 years it's over 90%.

So, basically, we are all Phoenicians now.  (They REALLY got around, too.)

Though it's possible there's an inner Phoenician elite most of us are not part of.  Well, that may be at least partly the elite we know.  Not many who could choose would choose to live in ordinary circumstances (or worse) as disguise.

I don't know what to say

 I don't know what to say when people, quoting "respectable" sources such as The Atlantic magazine and the BBC, claim that Russia is losing the war in Ukraine badly.

I suppose I could point them to articles such as this one where my favored journalist debunks the claims in The Atlantic.

Not that it would do any good, because they would surely say that MoA is Russian Disinformation.

Tim Cook, writing at Antiwar.com, has similar feelings except he DOES know what to say and says it.

I happened to notice that Antiwar.com is an operation of the Bourne Institute, and I looked up Bourne.  He was a lefty writer who opposed WW1 and argued against another self-described liberal, Dewey, who endorsed it.  Bourne also argued against the idea of a 'Melting Pot' in favor of multiculturalism.  Sadly Bourne died of "Spanish Flu" (which actually started in Kansas) in 1918.

Here's the 10 minute Aron Mate description of the origins of the war in Ukraine.

Though this is often called Russian Disinformation, US officials repeatedly promised that NATO would not extend eastward.

A Great Moment

Aaron Mate gives a pretty good primer.

https://www.aaronmate.net/p/zelenskys-hostility-to-peace-triggers

Simplicius has a particularly good 10 minute section of the 50 minute encounter, which gives a somewhat different view from US centrist MSM which of course castigates Trump.  Simplicius and many other recommend viewing the entire 50 minutes (I have not yet done that).

https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/bloodbath-in-the-oval-office

Historian Doctorow calls this "historic"

https://gilbertdoctorow.com/2025/03/01/the-trump-zelensky-fracas-in-the-white-house/

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2025/03/the-oval-office-shouting-match-wrap-up.html

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/trump-ukraine-zelensky/

https://consortiumnews.com/2025/03/01/trump-vance-school-zelensky-on-reality-of-his-war/

Duran (on youtube link below) emphasizes that the Minerals Deal was originally Zelensky's idea, and all sides seemed set to accept a no-explicit-security-guarantees version Trump had offered him until Zelensky started trying to renegotiate that with Trump on camera...making this NOT a set-up but a real live dramatic and pivotal (though probably predictable by all involved) "negotiation" that ended in failure for Zelensky because he was demanding too much...something Trump had already ruled out...and what Zelensky was (and has been) demanding is basically a nuclear WW3 NATO response to defend Ukraine, because otherwise NATO is running out of conventional stuff and Ukraine is running out of conscriptables to keep this war going.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mG2dTDIGjaM

Mearsheimer was one of the first to respond.

I have never voted for Trump, I have never donated to Trump, I have always supported leading Trump opposition candidates, and I haven't supported anything else President Trump has done.  In fact

for those other things he has been and might do I have great anger and fear for our constitutional republic, let alone our economy and the health and safety of our citizens.

But on these two things--restoring relations with Russia and ending support for the War in Ukraine--he has exceeded my most rosy expectations so far.  (If in fact the world is saved from nuclear annihilation by his avoiding WW3, they may be the two most important things.)

I've learned from long concert attendance, that it's best to give the

standing ovation to the work that truly inspires you, rather than wait

until the end by which time your enthusiasm may have dimmed or even been canceled.  So I immediately wrote a letter to Trump, thanking him. 

Other than reinforcing an already existing precedent that Presidents can even withdraw from treaties when those treaties themselves forbid that option, I'd even be fine with Trump pulling out of NATO. NATO has long proven to be imperial overreach in many places, most obviously Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Serbia, where it has indeed operated as an offensive alliance.  (My own interpretation of the war in Ukraine is that too: It's NATO's offensive war on Russia by proxy.)

It would be better if NATO were officially discarded by the treaty-required Senate vote.  But NATO is really just a cover for US imperialism anyway.  It's driven by the US geopolitical agenda, and powered by the military prowess and economic power of the US.  It actually doesn't commit anyone to anything.  If the US simply ignores NATO, nothing is likely to happen.  Britain's 60 operational tanks aren't going to make much difference, nor the 12,000 or so "peacekeeping" troops it might scare up

Despite much ranting and raving in NATO-owned European governments and "centrist" Atlantacist media and parties throughout the West, they are not going to do anything except said ranting and raving.

The entire "need" for NATO from the beginning was (#1) US Imperial ambition, #2 Russia/Commie phobia, and (#3) Western misrepresentations of events surrounding the end of WW2.

When the Soviet Union fell, even many former anti-Soviet hardliners were calling for bringing NATO to an end.  (Instead, that's when NATO's most aggressive and least "defensive" phase began.)

But amidst all the anti-Russian hysteria what is never noticed is how most of the aggressive wars of the last 80 years, and in particular the last 25, have been driven by US and not Russian imperialism.

Russia has played a more conservative role surrounding it's old but still ethnic Russian populated border areas, and the US has tried to push them into war by inflaming eliminationist movement like the re-emergent and neo- Nazis in Ukraine whose fervor is based on pushing Russians out.  Meanwhile, I see few if any Russian errors here, deviations only follow US precedents except with better justifications, whereas the US errors are immense.

If only Johnson had treated Diem like this, the Vietnam war could have been avoided.

Now if only the Zelensky treatment could be dished out to Netanyahu, rather than his usual being waited on hand and foot.  Then we could really and earnestly think about the end of US Imperialism.  It must end soon, if the world is to survive.

And if only Trump could drop the rest of the US Imperialist agena upon the Global South, in particular Venezuela and Cuba, Trump could capitalize on his success in dumping Zelensky by winning back the hearts and minds of the Global South which Biden and his predecessors trashed.

Letter to Trump

I think it is very good that you are re-establishing diplomatic relations with Russia.  This is the path leading us away from global annihilation in nuclear war.  Russia is an important country, and Putin is a great leader.

I was pleased to see you and VP Vance stand up to Ukrainian dictator Zelensky in public.

I will be happy to see all US military aid to Ukraine ended.  You are correct that we should never have backed war in Ukraine in the first place, and the war would not have happened otherwise.

AI is an enormously expensive bubble

This article may be a bit one sided and shrill.  And its very long and sometimes seems repetitious.

But I think it's also an excellent introduction to who is behind what is available in AI, and a look behind multiple curtains.  As I've always thought, it doesn't look good.  A good nutshell of the article is as follows:

These are also — and I do not believe there are any use cases that justify this — not a counterbalance for the ruinous financial and environmental costs of generative AI. It is the leaded gasoline of tech, where the boost to engine performance didn’t outweigh the horrific health impacts it inflicted.

 The spending on AI datacenters has been gargantuan, it will surpass $500 billion before long, boosted by venture capital and the decenter businesses themselves (including Google and Amazon).

Lack of profitability means we end up all paying the bill.

Here's Ziltron diving deeper into AI promises and nonsense.

Here's Ziltron describing the Digital Rot Economy we live in because of Venture Capital.

Free Speech except for Thee

Another "free speech" warrior who won't let me even like their posts.

*****

A post from Matt Stoller disappeared on X less than 9 minutes after it was posted.  He said, "The media has had an anti-Federal government spending bias since the 1970's.  There's nothing new with DOGE, it's just rehashed Heritage Foundation nonsense.  (This post appeared in my timeline and but I couldn't like it because it had already been deleted.)

Much as I try to migrate from X to Bluesky, Bluesky still feels like a luncheon with Maga Blue democrats.  There's no critique of longstanding US foreign policy (which tries to dominate the world), and one of the baddest things about Trump according to nearly all I follow on Bluesky is that he appears to be making peace with Russia and ending US support for the War in Ukraine (which is only possible because of US support).  Hardly any of the Antiwar and Anti-Imperialist voices I follow on X are on Bluesky.  It doesn't seem this is because of Bluesky banning people, but because of the power (or lack of power) of people gathered there.  So I'm sticking with my plan of reading X on odd days.  I occasionally try to cast some light (with as little heat as I can manage) on Bluesky...this may get me banned or at least blocked by some I'm currently following (which wouldn't make me too sad).

Even Twitter Off Days

Using algorithms instead of human censors, and (mostly) shadowbanning--nothing new--but to a more pervasive level than ever before, the social media formerly known as Twitter has become an alt-right brainwashing system.

Despite that, due to it's long history as the first truly argumentative Social Media, that service continues to host a number of anti-establishment voices of some merit which are not available elsewhere.

(However, many are moving to the competitive service Bluesky, which is getting better and better as a result.)

So while Maga Blue immediately left Twitter the moment the new owner began reversing some of the earlier bans (the wrong reason but perhaps the right move), the service formerly known as Twitter still has some unique value.

THUS I propose a partial boycott.  I propose making the Even days of the month (2,4,6,8, ...) into Twitter Off Days.

On those even days, I will use email (still my biggest thing), Bluesky, favorite blogs and Substacks, Patreon, Youtube, etc.  Everything except the service that used to be known as Twitter.

I suggest people apply the same principle to all of the services operated by the nazi oligarch, or others.

USAID

 I am utterly opposed to DOGE hacking government institutions, and shutting down US agencies created by Congress.  Not only is this Unconstitutional, it doesn't deal with the lives of the current employees and other people affected for no good reason.

USAID was created by an act of Congress in 1961, and that act specifically says there should be an agency to perform this work (not a few handpicked friends of the Secretary of State).

If President Trump is allowed to get away with this, where it will all end?  We know one thing for sure, from the moment he does get away with it, we no longer have a Republic, we have a naked Dictatorship.

If one wants to change the direction of the US government, and I concede I do, one must change the mission first, in Congress, then everything else follows.  If we don't change the mission, the work will go on somewhere else and with even less transparency.  It should well be noted that the kinds of work USAID (and it's sister public NGO, the NED) does was previously done by CIA on the black budget, and it could resume being done by CIA on the black budget.

So if the goal is to make the US stop trying to control the world, which mine is, that has to be taken head on, and not skirted around the edges by even "abolishing" individual agencies like USAID.  Such actions are reckless, unfair, and ultimately pointless.

Even if your goal were just saving money, this would not be the way to do it.

And, it's laughable that Elon Musk and his friend Mike Benz have described USAID as a "Marxist" operation.  If only it were, I'd be deeply supportive of it.  Such incredible spin and dishonesty mainly reveals these people cannot be trusted at all.  They're kooks as well as crooks, just like their boss President Trump.  Boy do we have a wild ride ahead.

*****

But all the same it irks me when USAID is described as a Humanitarian Agency, as if the US had a charity because of its bleeding heart.  Nearly the entire US media (including online) has gone to bat almost immediately to defend USAID in those sorts of terms, about how much "aid" it delivers (while not mentioning anything else).  Once again this makes the "conspiracy theory" of CIA controlling US media look all too real.

Let's get something straight here.

USAID is US SOFT POWER.

Wikipedia says:

 The goal of this agency was to counter Soviet Union influence during the Cold War and to advance US soft power through socioeconomic development.[13][14]

[14]  

Matanock, Aila M. (July 25, 2017). Electing Peace: From Civil Conflict to Political Participation. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-108-10140-0. The mission of USAID had initially been to counter communism through development.

Soft power is generally a more cost effective means of opening up new regions to US financial exploitation (called Freedom and Democracy, of course) than hard power.  If you want to win hearts and minds, nothing works as well as food and medical assistance.

Cuba does it probably far more relative to the size of its economy as the US (and generally where the US doesn't do it at all).

US SOFT POWER pales in comparison to US HARD POWER

US waves a lot more Hot Power in the world than soft power.  Merely look at the military weapons sent to Ukraine since President Trump first authorized it.  I'm seeing a number of $65 Billion but that does not sound complete to me (I think it's about double that).

And Israel, which had generally been the Camp David Accords authorized $3.5B per year, but more recently it's been $21 Billion.

And even that probably pales in comparison with what the US spends on military operations.  The US has spent Trillions of Dollars on foreign military operations since 9/11/2001.  And it's continuing.

IS USAID GOOD OR BAD ?

I think it's fine a good that the US government spends money providing food and medicine to people in other countries, regardless of the political motivations of the US in doing so.  Whatever it spends in these ways pales in comparison to Hot Power, when it should probably be the other way around.  So I look at is as a drop in the bucket given back to the world, at least the food and medicine part.  I'm sure it primarily goes to people we want to curry favor with, for geopolitical power reasons, and others we less want to curry favor are damned, but at least we're doing something positive somewhere, and that's better than nothing.

(Um, but is is "medicine" or "research" the US is conduction.  Research may be fine, certain kinds perhaps not, but let's not consider it aid at all.)

I don't feel so sanguine about the media and other influence USAID provides.  It's clear that USAID has run many influence operations, funded media organizations around the world and especially in US conflict zones.  But I have yet to see the total numbers, no searches I've done have located the total numbers, and most often just debunking Musk on particular points.

The individual numbers can be pretty impressive though.  According to the Council on Foreign Relations, who would in no way enlarge the numbers (more likely find any way to minimize it--which is what they are doing here I believe, claiming these to be exceptional cases when in fact they are typical examples if not on the smaller side):

https://foreignpolicy.com/2014/04/03/cuban-twitter-and-other-times-usaid-pretended-to-be-an-intelligence-agency/

According to a US government website, USAID has given $3 Billion to Ukraine since 1992 to "support efforts to strengthen democracy and good governance, improve health care systems, and mitigate the effects of the conflict in the east.

When I read a line like "strengthen democracy and good government" I know what that means.

It's the same old Freedom and Democracy propaganda that enables US investors to buy up the world, which is called Neo-colonialism.

$3B to Ukraine of influence ops is still a drop in the bucket of USAID over that period.  (Victoria Nuland is shown on a video from a conference from around 2014 saying the US had given more than $5 Billion to Ukraine.)

It turned out, that was only a tiny down payment.

But let us remember that USAID isn't the only US soft power organization.  There is also NED, the National Endowment for Democracy, whose entire mission is the promotion of US style bankster imperialist "Freedom and Democracy."

Here's a relevant QUORA discussion on USAID and NED.  The original post (from someone who does a lot of work for USAID) gives a link (broken) to the "Foreign Aid Explorer" which would tell us where the USAID money goes.  Then. it has a link which supposedly tells us were NED funding goes, but it's just a FAQ for applying to NED which gives no such information.  This discussion appears to be from five years to a few months ago, and I wonder if defenders of Freedom and Democracy are following the standard disinfo playbook of providing links (or references etc) which they don't expect anyone to check out, or have things just changed (and when and why?)

Poster Lance Chambers (an elder with PhD, MA, 6500 Quora followers) thinks like me when he writes:

I remember when I lived in Tanzania that a host of US NGO’s would set up charities and schools to educate the young children. One of the big things they did in the schools was to teach English - understandable as it would help them to read which is an important attribute but why English - it was because they also offered a host of books written in English.

The problem wasn’t that they were helping them read but that the books in English were all in English. No books in Swahili so they could write in their native language which would have been very useful but also that many of the books were about how wonderful the US was, how rich they were, how much they should be honoured and respected for all the largess they were offering, how America was so wonderful, so supportive, so kind, so generous - I’m sure you have an idea of what these bodies were doing?

To me they were humiliating the Tanzanians so as to convince them that America would be their saviours and to convince them that America could do no wrong and that the people and government of Tanzania should follow the US in all things.

I admit that this was close to 60 years ago but I still see the US acting in the same way far too often to make me feel comfortable of Americas suggestions of proffered largess when it all ends up being little that is of use if anything at all.

As if to respond to my questions, a video from Grayzone appeared about 8 hours after I first posted it.

 

CIA favors lab leak theory

I've often heard the lab leak theory of COVID origins to be "crackpot" or "right wing."

But it has always seemed all too plausible to me, and possibly the best theory as well according to many articles I've read.  I've read the papers on the other side too and not found them convincing and I worry about conflicts of interest among relevant scientists (notably virologists) who may be driven to defend their kind of work with or without even realizing it.  I've written some posts and emails on this.

Now the CIA joins the DOE and the FBI in endorsing the Lab Leak theory as the most likely.  Insiders say this has been in the works for some time, it was not driven by having a new President.

But the backstory keeps getting elided.  US officially banned Gain of Function research into contagious viruses.  US officials, including Fauci, got a waiver on that ban to continue GOF research at Wuhan into coronaviruses.  Later the Trump administration relaxed oversight on Wuhan.  The perfect storm.  For a long time now we have known that BSL 2 labs were being used to conduct research at Wuhan that was banned for BSL 4 labs in USA.

This was not a "Chinese Military Project" to create bioweapons as some Senators allege.  It was several kinds of negligence, mostly driven by the US, coming together in the same time and place, just like a novel by Michael Crichton. 

At minimum, this catastrophe should be very cautionary.  Even if it were not a Lab Leak, all the ingredients were there--it very well could have been.

To put it simply: Certain kinds of research should not be done.

Yascha on California

 Journalist Yascha Levine has written some great essays (and he has a movie too, Pistachio Wars) about oligarchs in California.

This one starts with legendary California land baron Henry Miller.

This one exposes how unnatural Southern California is.

This one shows how the Resnick's built their pistachio business on the sanctioning of Iran (the previous major producer of pistachios) and therefore has a shared interest with Israel.

Why we feel poorer

In my first 4 years of life, my mother moved 4 times.  She had traveled to Southern California, and with a high school diploma and no particular experience (other than an attempt at Opera singing) she got secretarial jobs that paid the rent in some pretty cool apartments in places like Manhattan Beach.

No one could do that now.

My father retired from Sears Roebuck in Minneapolis, where he had been a buyer (a mid level management job), at 62 and bought a new home in Woodland Hills and sent his two kids to college on his Sears pension.

No one could do that now.

Now even back in those glorious (hah) days, I might point out that (1) we were the last on the block to have any kind of TV, and then, (2) we were the last on the block to have a color TV, and then (3) we were the last on the block to have a TV with remote control, etc.

What's happened in the last 60 years is that the "essentials" of life like rent and education and health care have gone up in price dramatically, and finding new jobs has become orders of magnitude more difficult.  The precariat has been created.

On the other hand, "discretionary" items like TV and computers have become dramatically cheaper for the amount of capabilities they have.

This all gets boiled down into official "inflation" numbers which disguise how much poorer many people are, if you look at how many hours they have, after paying for essentials, to pay for discretionary items.

Because these "inflation" numbers themselves are averages, even (given their way of downplaying essentials) they also paint a very incomplete picture.  Back in the 1960's-1980's there were huge price differentials in things like rents.  If you couldn't afford the rent in a pricey area, and were willing to drive a way (using cheap gas), there were much cheaper rents elsewhere.  Now, the rent is high everywhere.  There are no "cheap" options.  Just like there are no jobs that are easy for an inexperienced person lacking higher education to get, etc.

One other way that official inflation numbers (which are based on hedonic calculus...which of these two options would you prefer, etc) hide the way things have changed is that the definition of what is "acceptable" has changed.

Cars, homes, and many other things are generally much nicer right now than they were in the mid 20th century.  Cars are more powerful, comfortable, safer, etc., and last longer.  Houses are much bigger, have better insulation, and more efficient appliances.  (OTOH, the quality of wood seems to be going down.)

This means you "get" more so of course you have to "pay" more.  But generally speaking, you don't have a choice.  All homes are bigger, so the part of the market with small cheap homes doesn't give you very many choices.  The only small cheap homes are in poor neighborhoods with poor schools.  Etc.

There's simply no way to go back to nice middle class neighborhoods of 1,100 sq ft homes, $1000 new cars, etc.  They don't make 'em like that anymore.

It seems that everything has been rigged to keep ordinary people nailed to their grindstones in fear.  No one can just take off on a lark, like my mother, and establish a new home elsewhere on a dime.

Here's an essay on this topic by someone else.