Saturday, May 20, 2023
Senior U.S. diplomats, journalists, academics and secretaries of defense say: The U.S. provoked Russia in Ukraine   SHARE Our government lied about the wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Latin America and elsewhere   Unsurprisingly, they've been lying big time about the proxy war with Russia in Ukraine.  President Biden, lawmakers and mainstream media repeat the lie that the Russian invasion was unprovoked.  But U.S. senior diplomats, academics, journalists and even two secretaries of Defense say that the U.S. provoked the invasion.  This article also appeared at Code Pink and was tweeted by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

       Saturday, May 20, 2023
Exclusive photos from closed-door hearings of the House Armed Services Committee   SHARE Closed-door hearings of the House Armed Services Committee are held to hide state secrets. But these exclusive photos reveal that there's a lot more going on that the public is aware of. This information will help explain why America gets involved in endless disastrous wars, most of which are unjustified.

       Saturday, December 25, 2021
Right-Wing Fringe Factions Erupt in Anger After Trump Backs Vaccines   SHARE The fringe factions of the right wing erupted in anger after Trump lauded the COVID-19 vaccines. Figures such as Alex Jones and Ali Alexander swiftly rebuked Trump over his pro-vaccine stance. Members of QAnon-linked Telegram channels said they felt betrayed after Trump said to get the shot.

(5 comments)        Friday, December 3, 2021
The Right-Wing Story About Human Nature Is False   SHARE One common view of human beings is that we are “by nature” selfish, violent, cruel, and untrustworthy, and that, to the extent we manage to restrain these base instincts, it is because we are taught to be generous, and punished if we go around hurting others. Dutch historian Rutger Bregman, in Humankind: A Hopeful History (newly issued in paperback), destroys this story utterly. Bregman, perhaps best known for driving Tucker Carlson nuts by daring to criticize Carlson on his own show, claims this is nothing more than a myth or fable about humanity.

       Wednesday, October 13, 2021
Build Back Better Legislation: New Keynesianism or Neoliberal Public Relations Stunt?   SHARE Some provisions of Biden’s “Build Back Better” legislation benefit the masses of Black people, but this legislation is a bare minimum effort to blunt some of the sharpest contradictions of the system while attempting to maintain the neoliberal order. Even the editors at the Wall Street Journal, the flagship paper of the U.S. ruling class,  argued that adjustments to what has been called neoliberalism had to be made, and the editors of the Financial Times, the paper of choice for the international bourgeoisie, made what was a startling claim on April 4, 2020 that the era of neoliberalism was basically over.

(1 comments)        Thursday, October 7, 2021
Ivermectin: How false science created a Covid 'miracle' drug - BBC News   SHARE Thousands worldwide have taken ivermectin to fight Covid. But what's the evidence? Campaigners for the drug point to a number of scientific studies and often claim this evidence is being ignored or covered up. But a review by a group of independent scientists has cast serious doubt on that body of research. The BBC can reveal that more than a third of 26 major trials of the drug for use on Covid have serious errors or signs of potential fraud. None of the rest show convincing evidence of ivermectin's effectiveness. Dr Kyle Sheldrick, one of the group investigating the studies, said they had not found "a single clinical trial" claiming to show that ivermectin prevented Covid deaths that did not contain "either obvious signs of fabrication or errors so critical they invalidate the study".

(6 comments)        Tuesday, October 5, 2021
Brazil's Tragic Ivermectin Frenzy Is a Warning to the US, Experts Say   SHARE In Brazil, ivermectin is a commonly prescribed anti parasitic drug. Early on in the pandemic, Brazilians thought that ivermectin might also help treat and prevent COVID-19. But, as one ICU doctor put it: "We Brazilians had to learn in the hardest way that ivermectin didn't work."

(2 comments)        Friday, September 17, 2021
How to end the American dependence on driving - Vox   SHARE To fight climate change, cities need to be designed with much more walking, biking, and public transit use in mind. Data from the EPA shows that the transportation sector is actually the biggest source of pollution in the US, and that light-duty vehicles (or passenger cars) are responsible for 58 percent of those emissions. Overall, the EPA’s research — and the 2021 study — reinforce the fact that the transportation systems of American cities over-rely on cars in ways that are not sustainable should the US actually want to approach its stated greenhouse gas reduction goal of 50 percent by 2030, a number it has to reach in order to limit global warming by 1.5 degrees Celsius or less.

       Monday, September 13, 2021
The Enemy Within: on the corruption of Joe Manchin   SHARE Andrew Cockburn reports on the deep corruption of Joe Manchin and the sordid history of West Virginia politics.  Joe Manchin may be the poster child for obstruction of the new New Deal, a bulwark against progressive reform. But he also serves as a useful excuse for the Democratic Party, fronting for an establishment that has long recoiled from the progressive politics of the Charlotte Pritts and Kendra Fershees of this world, yearning instead for the bipartisan embrace of a merciless enemy.

       Monday, September 6, 2021
N.E. Jouurnal of Medicine Calsl for Emergency Action to Confront Climate Change   SHARE The greatest threat to global public health is the continued failure of world leaders to keep the global temperature rise below 1.5° C and to restore nature. Urgent, society-wide changes must be made and will lead to a fairer and healthier world. We, as editors of health journals, call for governments and other leaders to act, marking 2021 as the year that the world finally changes course.

(3 comments)        Thursday, August 26, 2021
Why Some White Evangelical Republicans Are So Opposed To The COVID-19 Vaccine   SHARE In fact, nearly two-thirds of white evangelical Republicans (64 percent) from our March survey agreed that the chaos in the country today meant the “end times” were near. Faced, then, with the belief that death and the end of the world are a fulfillment of God’s will, it becomes difficult to convince these believers that vaccines are necessary. Sixty-nine percent of white evangelical Republicans who said they refused to get vaccinated agreed that the end times were near.

(1 comments)        Thursday, August 19, 2021
If you're so smart, why aren't you rich? Turns out it's just chance.   SHARE The most successful people are not the most talented, just the luckiest, a new computer model of wealth creation confirms. Taking that into account can maximize return on many kinds of investment. The distribution of wealth follows a well-known pattern sometimes called an 80:20 rule: 80 percent of the wealth is owned by 20 percent of the people. Indeed, a report last year concluded that just eight men had a total wealth equivalent to that of the world’s poorest 3.8 billion people. This seems to occur in all societies at all scales. It is a well-studied pattern called a power law that crops up in a wide range of social phenomena. But the distribution of wealth is among the most controversial because of the issues it raises about fairness and merit. Why should so few people have so much wealth?

       Wednesday, August 18, 2021
It's Not Exactly The CIA, But Close Enough   SHARE Creative Associates International: It’s Not Exactly The CIA, But Close Enough.  C.I.A. poses as humanitarian aid organization, but many of its activities involve fomenting revolt and government overthrows in nations including Cuba, El Salvador, and Venezuela. It also made hundreds of millions of dollars in Afghanistan. Because it's semi-private, its activities can be largely kept private.

(4 comments)        Wednesday, August 18, 2021
Trump goes off script to attack Bush in Hannity interview   SHARE Donald Trump on Wednesday, Aug 18, 2021, lambasted the George W Bush-led administration for the ongoing conflict in Afghanistan and termed the US administration’s decision “to go into the Middle East” as the “worst decision in history.” In a televised interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity, Mr Trump said: “Think of it, we took this horrible place, it was the worst decision to go into the Middle East, I know the Bush family will not be happy but I believe it was the worst decision in the history of our country when we decided to go into the Middle East.”

       Saturday, August 14, 2021
Facebook's Attack on Research is Everyone's Problem   SHARE Facebook recently banned the accounts of several New York University (NYU) researchers who run Ad Observer, an accountability project that tracks paid disinformation, from its platform. This has major implications: not just for transparency, but for user autonomy and the fight for interoperable...

       Wednesday, August 4, 2021
More than half of women in Army report facing some form of sexual harassment: study   SHARE Women soldiers say they are facing repeated attempts at unwanted sexual relations, being “ignored,” “mistreated” and “insulted “due to their gender and hearing they are not as good as men, according to a Rand Corporation study about sexual harassment and gender discrimination faced by soldiers.

(3 comments)        Friday, December 18, 2020
BUSTED? Why the numbers behind Mitch McConnell's re-election don't add up   SHARE Even as Republicans across the country still insist that the election was rife with fraudulent Democratic votes, no one’s asking how McConnell managed one of the most lopsided landslides of the Nov. 3 election. They should. An investigation of Kentucky voting results by DCReport raises significant questions about the vote tallies in McConnell’s state. McConnell racked up huge vote leads in traditionally Democratic strongholds, including counties that he had never before carried. There were wide, unexplained discrepancies between the vote counts for presidential candidates and down-ballot candidates. Significant anomalies exist in the state’s voter records. Forty percent of the state’s counties carry more voters on their rolls than voting-age citizens.

(1 comments)        Saturday, November 7, 2020
Sen. Ron Johnson says half of country won't accept a Joe Biden win   SHARE Republican U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson, of Wisconsin, said Friday that half the country will not accept the outcome of the presidential election if Democrat Joe Biden wins. Johnson, a staunch supporter of President Donald Trump, also refused to say if he thought the election was legitimate, while admitting he had no proof of any illegal activity. “It’s very unfortunate that no matter who wins, the other half of America is not going to view this as a particularly legitimate election,” Johnson said on WTMJ-AM. “That’s a real problem. I’m not saying it’s legitimate or not. I’m saying this process has been set up where people are not going to view it as legitimate. And that’s a real problem.”

       Tuesday, September 29, 2020
Trump order may affect Pentagon's efforts to diversify ranks   SHARE The military’s top leaders said Thursday they remain committed to addressing racism and discrimination in the ranks, just two days after President Trump signed an executive order banning what he called “divisive” diversity training. The new executive order executive order prohibits every federal agency and contractors that do business with the federal government from carrying out workplace training that suggests a person may consciously or unconsciously carry racial or sexist biases based on their own race or background.

       Sunday, September 27, 2020
Robocops police battle protesters in Seattle - Washington Liberals   SHARE Robocops police battle protesters in Seattle While covering protests in Seattle I got gassed again and hit with probably pepper spray because I couldn’t see, my eyes were burning and my respiratory system was in distress as I coughed and stumbled off to get away from the chemical agents used on the crowd by police. Protesters built barricade of burning dumpsters at the original site of #CHOP (Capitol Hill Occupied Protest) at 11th and Pine – one block from the East Precinct station. Police attacked with blast ball grenades/pepper spray, etc