the unbalanced evolution of homo sapiens

Double Down News  Professor Stuart Russell,  one of the world’s leading scientists in Artificial Intelligence, has come to consider his own discipline an existential threat to humanity. In this video he talks about that and how we can change course before it's too late.

The Hill  Co-host of the Bad Faith podcast, Briahna Joy Gray, discusses the Force The Vote townhall.  The event is aimed bringing Medicare for all to the floor of the House for a vote. 

acTVism Munich   This video was produced by the World Ethical Data Forum (WEDF) and published on September 20, 2018. acTVism Munich republished it to foster understanding on the issues discussed in this video as well as on the Julian Assange case.   This interview was the first time Julian Assange had been heard from after his communication channels were cut off by the Ecuadorian embassy in March, 2018. The interview proved also to be the very last time he was heard from, as on 11th April 2019, Assange was carried out from the embassy by UK police and taken to Belmarsh Prison on the charge of having breached his bail conditions. He has since spent most of his time in solitary confinement and on January 4, 2021, a British court will decide whether he will be extradited to the United States.

A long and cruel siege, constant Israeli attacks resulting in the killing of countless civilians, destruction of homes and infrastructure, extreme poverty, and trauma remain the daily bread of Palestinians in Gaza.   by Miko Peled    Part 2 - A European delegation comes to visit A delegation of European representatives recently visited Gaza, yet Europeans have not used their influence, political or otherwise, to end Israeli violations of human rights and international law. It would not have taken much for EU representatives to see the devastation, poverty, and severe shortages experienced by the people of Gaza. All one needs to do is drive through the Gaza Strip to see the evidence, and yet no change seems to be forthcoming from the Europeans. In fact, according to the Israeli press, Germany just announced that in order to provide Israel with a European made vaccine for Covid-19, “ Germany used its influence in the EU to bend the rule that a European-produced vaccination would be given

Why do we still pretend crap jobs give our lives meaning?   by Lee Camp    Part 3 - How about no more wage slavery?   For example, daily outside my apartment window, in a parking lot, no fewer than three Leaf Blower People (technical terminology) blow the fuck outta thousands of leaves. The entire neighborhood sounds like the middle of a nonconsensual monster truck rally for three hours every single morning. And as if that’s not inane enough, most days it’s windy out. The leaves return to their original locations 15 seconds after the guy blows them. So – much like a fluffer on a porn set – his work doesn’t last long. Not to mention, why do leaves have to inhabit a particular location anyway? At the risk of sounding like a radical, let the leaves be leaves! Let them do their thing. I’m a strong supporter of leaf self-determination. It’s not like they’re scorpions and allowing them to run free near domiciles is a downright danger to society. No one has ever found a leaf in a parking lot,

by Jonathan Cook   Part 3 - Ringing off the hook   There is nothing unusual about what is happening in Germany. Jewish organisations are stirring up these “shitstorms” – designed to paralyse political and cultural life for anyone who engages in even the mildest criticism of Israel – at the highest levels of government. Don’t believe me? Here is Barack Obama explaining in his recent autobiography his efforts as US president to curb Israel’s expansion of its illegal settlements. Early on, he was warned to back off or face the wrath of the Israel lobby:                               Members of both parties worried about crossing the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Those who criticized Israeli policy too loudly risked being tagged as “anti-Israel” (and possibly anti-Semitic) and confronted with a well-funded opponent in the next election. When Obama went ahead anyway in 2009 and proposed a modest freeze on Israel’s illegal settlements:                              The Whi

While the US and its allies glorify Leopoldo López as a new MLK, the US-backed Venezuelan opposition  collaborates with Colombia’s narco-affiliated, death squad-sponsoring former President Álvaro Uribe.   by Ben Norton   Part 1   According to Western corporate media outlets and human rights groups, Venezuela’s far-right opposition leader Leopoldo López is a hallowed saint.  The New York Times glorified López as the would-be “ savior ” of Venezuela, akin to none other than Martin Luther King Jr., while Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have dubbed him a noble “ prisoner of conscience ” and “ Venezuela’s most prominent political prisoner. ” The real Leopoldo López, however, has repeatedly shown himself to be a violent extremist committed to overthrowing Venezuela’s government no matter the cost. And the right-wing political opposition factions under his control have revealed links to drug trafficking, death squads, and organized crime in neighboring Colombia. This December, L

Rolling Stone   Julian Casablancas sits down with his “ personal hero and greatest intellectual (along with elder chieftain Noam Chomsky), ” journalist and professor Chris Hedges, on the latest episode of his Rolling Stone interview series, S.O.S. — Earth Is a Mess. 

The Democratic National Committee refused to cooperate with investigators and was “ directly involved in the development process ” of the infamous Shadow app ahead of the 2020 Iowa caucuses. That’s the conclusion of the former U.S. attorney leading the investigation into what went wrong during the first-in-the-nation caucuses, as relayed to the Iowa State Democratic Party in a closed-session meeting last week, according to a transcript of the meeting obtained by The Intercept .   “ The DNC was directly involved in the development process, ” Nicholas Klinefeldt, a former federal attorney appointed by President Barack Obama, told the Iowa Democratic Party state steering committee in the December 12 meeting about the findings of an investigation he led alongside former Iowa Attorney General Bonnie Campbell.  Klinefeldt’s revelation about the committee’s involvement counters the DNC’s claim it made immediately after the Iowa caucuses. Back then, the DNC claimed it had “ absolutely no invol

Yanis Varoufakis    

The Grayzone   Max Blumenthal discusses life on the ground in Venezuela under suffocating US sanctions, and debunks media myths about the December National Assembly election, which he observed. Venezuelan journalist Diego Sequera also addresses the economic situation and what a Biden administration policy could look like. 

The Grayzone  Max Blumenthal, reporting from Venezuela, discusses with Aaron Maté and Ben Norton how Western corporate media outlets are full of stenographers for spy agencies, how the CIA and MI6 drive reporting on Russia, how the US and UK governments fund regime-change website Bellingcat and its deceptive articles on Syria and the OPCW, and how the British military censors journalism.

The new sanctions come even as an estimated 100,000 people have been killed by American sanctions in Venezuela alone as vital medical equipment and lifesaving drugs have been blocked from entering the country.   by Alan Macleod  On its way out the door, the Trump administration is ramping up another round of aggressive, punishing sanctions against a host of countries. On Friday, the State Department announced new sanctions against Iran, the People’s Republic of China, and Venezuela. And today, it tightened the grip of the decades-long blockade on Cuba and increased sanctions on Nicaragua. In the case of Iran, the measures were aimed at its oil industry and went so far as to sanction Vietnamese companies helping with the international supply of Iranian hydrocarbons. “ Today, thanks to the success of our sanctions, Iran is looking to come back to the negotiating table to get relief, ” Trump’s Special Representative for Iran and Venezuela, Elliott Abrams, asserted, adding (falsely) that t

A long and cruel siege, constant Israeli attacks resulting in the killing of countless civilians, destruction of homes and infrastructure, extreme poverty, and trauma remain the daily bread of Palestinians in Gaza.   by Miko Peled    Part 1 A report published by the United Nations in 2018 stated that by the year 2020 the Gaza Strip would be uninhabitable. It said specifically that, “ the United Nations has stated that Gaza may well be unlivable by 2020. ” The report emphasized also that “ Michael Lynk, Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories Occupied Since 1967, drew attention to Israel’s persistent non-cooperation with the Special Rapporteur’s mandate. As with his two predecessors, Israel has not granted him entry to visit the country, nor the Occupied Palestinian territory. ” Anyone who thinks that the Gaza Strip was liveable prior to 2020 is out of their mind. The Gaza Strip has been a humanitarian disaster since it was artificially created

Why do we still pretend crap jobs give our lives meaning?   by Lee Camp    Part 2 - Why should we all have to be slaves to the labor market to survive in the first place?   Forgive me a quick aside about the inner workings of systemic racism. As those unemployment numbers make clear, not every problem in America involves racism, but every problem in America also involves racism. Systemic racism deniers refuse to comprehend this. When shit is bad for young people – it’s even worse for black young people. When life sucks for the elderly poor in the United States – it sucks even more for elderly poor Hispanics. If the police are using weapons of war to crack activist heads – they’re cracking black activist heads twice as hard. If there’s a clean water problem in America – the water in Indigenous communities isn’t just unclean, it has chunks of shit in it! (Usually chunks of something Dupont used to produce Teflon™. I mean, what’s a few thousand people with cancer in order to ensure the eg

by Jonathan Cook   Part 2 - Guilt by association   This isn’t even a double standard. I can’t find a word in the dictionary that conveys the scale and degree of hypocrisy and bad faith involved. If the American Jewish scholar Norman Finkelstein wrote a follow-up to his impassioned book The Holocaust Industry – on the cynical use of the Holocaust to enrich and empower a Jewish organisational establishment at the expense of the Holocaust’s actual survivors – he might be tempted to title it The Antisemitism Industry. In the current climate in Europe, one that rejects any critical thinking in relation to broad areas of public life, that observation alone would enough to have one denounced as an antisemite. Which is why the Haaretz article – far braver than anything you will read in a UK or US newspaper – makes no bones about what is happening in Germany. It calls it a “witch-hunt”. That is Haaretz ’s way of saying that antisemitism has been politicised and weaponised – a self-evident conc

Jonathan Cook dissects the investigation by the Equalities and Human Rights Commission into the U.K. Labour Party.  by Jonathan Cook Part 9 - Boris Johnson’s Racism It is instructive to compare the certainty with which the commission treats Bromley’s ambiguous remarks as irrefutable proof of anti-Semitism with its complete disregard for unmistakably anti-Semitic comments from Boris Johnson, the man actually running the country. That lack of concern is shared, of course, by the establishment media and Jewish leadership organisations. The commission has repeatedly rejected parallel demands from Muslim groups for an investigation into the ruling Conservative party for well-documented examples of Islamophobia. But no one seems to be calling for an investigation of Johnson’s party for anti-Semitism. Johnson himself has a long history of making overtly racist remarks, from calling black people “piccanninies” with “watermelon smiles” to labelling Muslim women “letterboxes.” Jews have not avoi

globinfo freexchange   A disturbing revelation came on surface lately by the Greek independent press. And while it has been almost completely ignored by the big media in Greece, it has been extensively circulated and discussed throughout the Greek social media network.   According to an article on Sunday's (20 December) paper edition of the newspaper Documento , current Greek PM, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, has kept secret from the public, the collaboration with a US high-tech giant with dark connections and activity.  The company is Palantir and it is well known for its involvement in huge scandals of interceptions coming from the NSA-Cambridge Analytica-Facebook complex.   With the permission of the Greek PM - who is taking advantage of the COVID-19 pandemic - Palantir is harvesting and analyzing data from Greek citizens. The government is collecting data today that may be proved useful tomorrow, as the scenario of a general election before the normal completion of Mitsotakis' admin

The Grayzone   Syria and its allies prevented regime change, but the US and its allies are continuing to squeeze Syria's population with crippling sanctions on all aspects of civilian life and a US military occupation in Syria's northeast breadbasket. Peter Ford, the former UK Ambassador to Syria, analyzes the state of the Syria proxy war and the ongoing propaganda campaign to whitewash it. 

Going Underground   John Pilger speaks about:    The devastating impact of Coronavirus in the U.K.  Rising poverty and militarism.  The Western logic for the new Cold War with China.  The victory of Joe Biden over Donald Trump and why not much will change with Trump leaving the Presidency.  The Yemen War.  The survival of Venezuela despite crippling international sanctions. Mainstream journalism vs Real journalism.  

RT     Renowned philosopher Slavoj Zizek believes that it’s time to accept that the pandemic has changed the way we exist forever. Now the human race has to embark on the profoundly difficult and painful process of deciding what form the ‘new normality’ is going to take.  

Briahna Joy Gray on why forcing Pelosi into a floor vote is one important part of a broader strategy for building progressive power.   by Briahna Joy Gray  On November 27th, YouTube pundit and comedian Jimmy Dore proposed a provocative plan to advance the Medicare for All movement: refuse to re-elect Rep. Nancy Pelosi D-CA as Speaker of the House until she brings Rep. Pramila Jayapal’s Medicare for All bill H.R. 1384 to a floor vote. Because last month’s elections whittled down the Democratic majority in the House, it would take only a handful of Democrats to hold Pelosi’s speakership hostage. The “Squad,” composed of Reps. Alexandria-Ocasio Cortez (D-NY), Ilhan Omar (D-MN), and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), could theoretically find sufficient support from among the ranks of the nearly 100 members of the Progressive Caucus. And if successful, progressives could force an unprecedented public debate about the merits of an enormously popular policy that, because of the COVID crisis, Americans hav

RT   RT talks to Kristinn Hrafnsson, WikiLeaks’ chief editor, about the new tape that reveals Julian Assange's attempt to warn US officials of leaked classified US State Department cables in 2011 and limit the spread of damaging information.  

The Grayzone   Col. Lawrence Wilkerson assesses President-elect Joe Biden's "national security" picks, including Gen. Lloyd Austin for Secretary of Defense and Anthony Blinken for Secretary of State. " I don't see a different kind of administration being formed, " Wilkerson says. " And it disturbs me because it just means more of the same -- a little more calmness, a little more serenity, which lulls everyone into thinking that things are better, when in fact they're not. " 

Why do we still pretend crap jobs give our lives meaning?   by Lee Camp    Part 1 - Unemployment is raging out of control   Leaf blowers are everything wrong with capitalism. . . . I’ll explain that in a minute.   We all know times are irredeemably grim, and they’re only getting worse. The unemployment level in America seems to be setting the record books aflame, and for some bizarre reason those numbers correlate nicely with the number of Americans under 40 living with their parents again.   Understandably, the entire country is a little on edge. If I spend more than 30 minutes around my parents, one eye starts twitching, a dull ringing settles into my inner ear canal, and I start to think Rachel Maddow (which they leave on 24/7 as if she’s Christmas music at Macy’s) makes some logical sense. Point being, in terms of discomfort, I would imagine living with your parents in your late thirties ranks somewhere between erectile dysfunction and having a brain-eating parasite. Anyway, back

by Jonathan Cook   Part 1   The Israeli newspaper Haaretz has run a fascinating long report this week offering a disturbing snapshot of the political climate rapidly emerging across Europe on the issue of antisemitism. The article documents a kind of cultural, political and intellectual reign of terror in Germany since the parliament passed a resolution last year equating support for non-violent boycotts of Israel – in solidarity with Palestinians oppressed by Israel – with antisemitism.   The article concerns Germany but anyone reading it will see very strong parallels with what is happening in other European countries, especially the UK and France.   The same European leaders who a few years ago marched in Paris shouting “Je suis Charlie” – upholding the inalienable free speech rights of white Europeans to offend Muslims by insulting and ridiculing their Prophet – are now queuing up to outlaw free speech when it is directed against Israel, a state that refuses to end its belligerent

Jonathan Cook dissects the investigation by the Equalities and Human Rights Commission into the U.K. Labour Party.  by Jonathan Cook Part 8 - Internecine Feud Here is the second comment by Bromley highlighted by the commission. It was posted in late 2019, shortly after Labour had lost the general election:                          My major criticism of him [Corbyn] – his failure to repel the fake accusations of anti-Semitism in the LP [Labour Party] – may not be repeated as the accusations may probably now magically disappear, now capitalism has got what it wanted. Again, it seems clear that Bromley is referring to the party’s long-standing internecine feud, which would become public knowledge a few months later with the leaking of the internal report. In this case, Bromley was suggesting that the media and anti-Corbyn wing of the party would ease up on the anti-Semitism allegations — as they indeed largely have done — because the threat of Corbyn’s socialist project had been ended by

The Grayzone   Max Blumenthal interviews former Ecuador President Rafael Correa, who was in Venezuela to observe its legislative elections and show support to a government under sustained economic and political attack by the US.   Correa addresses issues ranging from the repression in his country under the watch of its outgoing neoliberal president, Lenin Moreno, to the persecution of Julian Assange and the role of a CIA contractor in targeting him and the Wikileaks founder.    Blumenthal and Correa also discuss the prospect of a left-wing victory in Ecuador's upcoming national elections, and what the US-backed government is doing to stop it.  Concerning the upcoming general election in Ecuador, Correa points out:   Polls put us as winners, even in the first round. But with all the experience they had in Bolivia where they were demolished, they are willing to do everything possible to prevent our victory.   So we are optimistic, but never triumphalist, and we expect anything could

The Grayzone  Max Blumenthal interviews former Ecuador President Rafael Correa, who was in Venezuela to observe its legislative elections and show support to a government under sustained economic and political attack by the US. Correa addresses issues ranging from the repression in his country under the watch of its outgoing neoliberal president, Lenin Moreno, to the persecution of Julian Assange and the role of a CIA contractor in targeting him and the Wikileaks founder. Blumenthal and Correa also discuss the prospect of a left-wing victory in Ecuador's upcoming national elections, and what the US-backed government is doing to stop it. Concerning Julian Assange's case, Correa points out: The institution of asylum was disrespected. Ecuador disrespected its own constitution. Article 41 of the constitution explicitly prohibits turning over a refugee. Moreno did it. For the first time in history, a country, a sovereign government allowed an armed force to enter its embassy. It’s h