the unbalanced evolution of homo sapiens

failed evolution   World's number one political prisoner, Julian Assange, still in high security prison for exposing horrendous war crimes carried out by the US imperialists and their allies.     

Newly leaked documents show that US officials in 1958 cavalierly planned a nuclear strike on China over a handful of disputed islands. As Washington once more stokes tensions with China, it’s a reminder of the callous recklessness at the heart of US foreign policy.   by Branko Marcetic  Part 1 Since nuclear bombs were first dropped on civilians seventy-six years ago, the world has come close to nuclear war nearly a dozen times that we know of. At various times, sometimes at the height of tension, sometimes at entirely innocuous moments, mistakes, malfunctions, and misunderstandings have nearly brought us past the brink, were it not for last-minute realizations or a few courageous, clear-thinking individuals who refused to sign on to the unthinkable. In many ways, things right now are more perilous than they were even during the Cold War. A series of nuclear arms control agreements have been shredded, and the United States and Russia are both adding new, more dangerous weapons ...

Through his hallowed foundation, the world’s de facto public health czar has been a stalwart defender of monopoly medicine.  by Alexander Zaitchik Part 4 - Bill Gates’s position on intellectual property was consistent with a lifelong ideological commitment to knowledge monopolies Gates can hardly disguise his contempt for the growing interest in intellectual property barriers. In recent months, as the debate has shifted from the WHO to the WTO, reporters have drawn testy responses from Gates that harken back to his prickly performances before congressional antitrust hearings a quarter-century ago. When a Fast Company reporter raised the issue in February, she described Gates “ raising his voice slightly and laughing in frustration, ” before snapping, “ It’s irritating that this issue comes up here. This isn’t about IP. ”  In interview after interview, Gates has dismissed his critics on the issue—who represent the poor majority of the global population—as spoiled children deman...

Under cover of the pandemic, Greece’s right-wing government has passed a slew of new measures to benefit the wealthy at the expense of workers, while massively expanding police powers. On the back of a decade of austerity, the latest laws are set to transform the country into a client state and playground for foreign tourists.   by Matthaios Tsimitakis/Mihalis Panayiotakis    Part 4 - The COVID-19 Doctrine Politically, the response to this crisis has been a mix of nationalism, authoritarian rule, and neoliberal economic reforms — ingredients embedded in New Democracy’s clientelist politics and multilayered graft, and sold at every level by the mainstream media. The result is a potent hybrid of social conservatism and right-wing economic liberalism. As the lockdowns have confined people to their homes, the government has been granted the perfect cover for a shock therapy that aims to reengineer Greece in an even more inegalitarian manner. A slew of new legislation passed d...

People are dying at record rates from opioid overdoses, and harm reduction advocates are asking the Biden administration to overhaul how it deals with the crisis.   by Michelle ChenTwitt  Part 1 When North Carolina was besieged by Covid-19, Louise Vincent nearly died—but it wasn’t the virus that got almost her. She spent months shuffling in and out of clinics, struggling to get appropriate medical treatment, and eventually was poisoned when she attempted to medicate herself in desperation. The medicine she needed was methadone, which is used to help people manage opioid use disorder. She should have been able to access it easily; Vincent helps run the North Carolina Urban Survivors Union, a drug users’ advocacy and harm reduction group.  But Vincent ran into trouble with her usual methadone clinic, in part because she had missed appointments because of traveling for work. “ They wouldn’t let me come back and said I had failed at their program, ” she told me. She tried to ...

Belarusian regime-change activist Roman Protasevich, whose arrest on a grounded plane caused a global scandal, joined Ukraine’s neo-Nazi Azov Battalion and was cultivated by the US government’s media apparatus.   by Ben Norton  Part 1 A high-profile Belarusian regime-change activist whose detention on a forcibly grounded airplane caused an international scandal has extensive links to neo-fascist groups, which his political sponsors in Western capitals have conveniently overlooked. Right-wing activist Roman Protasevich was traveling on the Irish airliner Ryanair on May 23 when the plane crossed into Belarusian airspace and was ordered to land by state authorities. Protasevich was subsequently taken off the aircraft and arrested. The incident triggered a wave of denunciations by Western governments, and a new round of aggressive sanctions on Belarus. Many anti-interventionist critics pointed out the hypocrisy of the US government’s condemnations, recalling how, in 2013, it forci...

failed evolution   World's number one political prisoner, Julian Assange, still in high security prison for exposing horrendous war crimes carried out by the US imperialists and their allies.     

RT   Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters on the latest developments in the violent conflict between Israel and Palestine.  

globinfo freexchange   Sepúlveda Allende, a grandson of Chile’s legendary socialist President Salvador Allende, spoke with Ben Norton about the historic May 15/16 elections in which left-wing and independent candidates won two-thirds of the seats for a convention to rewrite the constitution, which dates back to the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.   Allende described the political situation in Chile after the fall of Pinochet's brutal regime. This is an interesting period because it  proves that what happened in the entire West, happened in Chile too.  As he pointed out: When the dictatorship ended, there was a kind of alliance made between the parties that historically had represented certain parts of the old left, like the Socialist Party of Allende. Another that was newly formed in that moment, which had not existed before the coup, called the Party for Democracy, which had (ex-President) Ricardo Lagos, and had a lot of power in that moment. There...

Going Underground   Prof. Aviva Chomsky, author of Central America’s Forgotten History: Revolution, Violence and the Roots of Migration and the daughter of Noam Chomsky, discusses the US’ support for right wing governments in Latin America which followed Washington imposed neoliberalism and the foreign investment model of economic extractivism. How Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela provided a different path for Latin American nations to avoid neoliberalism imposed by the US, IMF and World Bank. The US demand that Latin American policies must be favourable for US corporations which in turn hurts the working classes of Latin America. The US government’s to destroy left wing politics within trade unions in the United States, Latin America and around the world. The US-backed overthrow of Manuel Zelaya in Honduras in 2009. Why Biden’s foreign policy to Latin America will be unlikely to diverge from past US Presidents.

Double Down News   From death in Gaza to racism in the West, Lowkey exposes a very dark side of Israel.  

failed evolution   World's number one political prisoner, Julian Assange, still in high security prison for exposing horrendous war crimes carried out by the US imperialists and their allies.     

Through his hallowed foundation, the world’s de facto public health czar has been a stalwart defender of monopoly medicine.  by Alexander Zaitchik Part 3 - The extent and ways intellectual property posed barriers to ramping up production Technically housed within the WHO, the ACT-Accelerator is a Gates operation, top to bottom. It is designed, managed, and staffed largely by Gates organization employees. It embodies Gates’s philanthropic approach to widely anticipated problems posed by intellectual property–hoarding companies able to constrain global production by prioritizing rich countries and inhibiting licensing. Companies partnering with COVAX are allowed to set their own tiered prices. They are subject to almost no transparency requirements and to toothless contractual nods to “equitable access” that have never been enforced. Crucially, the companies retain exclusive rights to their intellectual property. If they stray from the Gates Foundation line on exclusive rights, they ...

Under cover of the pandemic, Greece’s right-wing government has passed a slew of new measures to benefit the wealthy at the expense of workers, while massively expanding police powers. On the back of a decade of austerity, the latest laws are set to transform the country into a client state and playground for foreign tourists.   by Matthaios Tsimitakis/Mihalis Panayiotakis    Part 3 - Losing Control For more than six months now, practically all of Greece has been under strict lockdown and under curfew. Despite this, a deadly second wave mostly affecting the country’s north hit in the winter, and a third wave is now ravaging Athens, home to almost half the Greek population. Vaccination numbers remain relatively low due to the disastrous handling of vaccine procurement deals by the EU. Even now, the pandemic’s intensity shows no signs of abating. But even with the lockdowns — which offer diminishing returns and feed economic and psychological anguish — the health system rem...

Corruption and supposed efforts to reduce it have become a neoconservative weapon of choice with which to operate the controls on the funding sluice gates to acolytes of the U.S.-led international neoconservative empire.   by Oliver Boyd-Barrett   Part 5 - Poroshenko and Zelensky   Ukraine’s two presidents since the 2014 coup, Petro Poroshenko (2014 to 2019) and Volodymyr Zelensky (2019 to the present), each started with strong support that quickly waned. The country has scarcely improved. Gross National Product peaked in December 2013; unemployment has increased from 7% to over 10%; Ukraine remains the second poorest country in Europe per capita. Corruption, the supposed key force behind popular support for the elections of both Poroshenko and Zelensky, continues to be rampant. Kiev’s policies of stand-off with Russia have been dramatically counter-productive and have deprived Ukraine of Crimea and control of major industrial areas of the Donbass. Some 14,000 lives ...

The Grayzone   In the feature-length documentary film "Killing Gaza," journalists Dan Cohen and Max Blumenthal documented Israel’s 2014 war on Gaza.  Yet this film is much more than a documentary about Palestinian resilience and suffering. It is a chilling visual document of war crimes committed by the Israeli military, featuring direct testimony and evidence from the survivors.  

failed evolution   World's number one political prisoner, Julian Assange, still in high security prison for exposing horrendous war crimes carried out by the US imperialists and their allies.     

RT America   Pro-Palestine protests are erupting across the US amid escalating violence in Israel and Palestine. 

Moderate Rebels   Ben Norton was invited to give this talk about the fake left and imperialism. He discusses how the CIA's "woke" recruitment ad is not new; it is rooted in an "intersectional imperialist" history going back to the first cold war, in which the CIA poured money into cultivating anti-communist, pro-imperialist progressive groups, using fronts like the Congress for Cultural Freedom and billionaire-funded foundations like Ford and Rockefeller.   Ben goes through the book The Cultural Cold War , and talks about supposed "leftist" CIA assets like feminist leader Gloria Steinem and Trotskyite civil rights activist Bayard Rustin, then analyzes examples of astroturfed, Nonprofit Industrial Complex-backed pseudo-left campaigns in the US, Western Europe, and Latin America.

Moderate Rebels   Following his talk on the cultural cold war and the fake left, Ben Norton takes questions and discusses the "woke" CIA ads, the Biden administration's "intersectional imperialist" foreign policy, the Kurdish YPG/SDF and US military occupation of Syria, and new cold war myths about China.  

globinfo freexchange   Η μονοδιάστατη κάλυψη των εγκλημάτων του Ισραήλ κατά των Παλαιστινίων στη Λωρίδα της Γάζας αλλά και στη Δυτική Όχθη από την εγχώρια μιντιακή χούντα, είναι εκκωφαντική.  Τα "Πετσωμένα" και μπουκωμένα με κυβερνητικό χρήμα συστημικά κανάλια και ιστοσελίδες, εκτός από τις επιχειρήσεις φιλοκυβερνητικής προπαγάνδας, ακολουθούν καταπόδας την φιλο-Ισραηλινή προπαγάνδα των Δυτικών ΜΜΕ.   Ο δημοσιογράφος Άρης Χατζηστεφάνου, σε πρόσφατο άρθρο του, αποκαλύπτει από πρώτο χέρι μερικά κομβικά στοιχεία της συγκεκριμένης προπαγάνδας:   Τι έχει μάθει τις τελευταίες ημέρες για τις εξελίξεις στη Μέση Ανατολή ένας ανυποψίαστος πολίτης, ο οποίος παρακολουθεί μόνο τα κυρίαρχα μέσα ενημέρωσης στην Ελλάδα και το εξωτερικό; Ότι ομάδες «Παλαιστίνιων τρομοκρατών» επιτέθηκαν με ρουκέτες εναντίον κατοικημένων περιοχών του Ισραήλ αναγκάζοντας τις ένοπλες δυνάμεις της χώρας να αμυνθούν χτυπώντας τις δυνάμεις των «τρομοκρατών» στη Λωρίδα της Γάζας. Το γεγονός ότι όλα ξε...

Once again, the media are trying to depict the fighting between Israelis and Palestinians as a round of meaningless violence from “both sides” of an equally matched contest — the reality on the ground be damned.  by Branko Marcetic There are two ways you could report on the bloody conflict unfolding right now in Israel and Palestine. One would be to put every new headline and story, whether that’s about Hamas’s rocket attacks or Israel’s wildly disproportionate airstrikes, in context. That would mean explaining that the rockets came in the wake of a series of outrageous and criminal Israeli provocations in occupied East Jerusalem: a series of violent police raids on the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, the third holiest site in Islam during its holiest month, that have damaged the sacred structure and injured hundreds, including worshippers; that Israeli forces were attacking Palestinians who were occupying Aqsa both to pray and to protect it from bands of far-right Israeli extremists who ...