the unbalanced evolution of homo sapiens

The mega-rich buy up media outlets precisely because a lie is more likely to fly than the truth – including the lie that they are invaluable. by Jonathan Cook  Part 6 - Footsoldiers for the rich   The debate has been polarized yet again into one in which we must pick one of two unappealing sides. Either a Twitter ruled by a shadowy cabal of billionaires limiting our exposure to information by manipulating the algorithms in secret, or one ruled by a single, outsize, fickle ego who promises a bigger information marketplace and a little more transparency – until he doesn’t. Liberals, because they distrust the deplorables, want to stamp out the chaos of populism and ensure that nice, philanthropic billionaires like Gates decide what is best for us. And conservatives, because they distrust liberals, want to let a maverick, more brashly self-aggrandizing billionaire like Musk decide what should be allowed. Team Musk vs. Team Gates. We are now deep in the trenches of an information w...

Biden has reversed Donald Trump’s withdrawal of US forces from Somalia and will redeploy Special Operations Forces. It is just the latest move in a long history of destructive US-UK meddling in the Horn of Africa.    by TJ Coles   Part 2 - The real agenda: “acquire and maintain the capability to respond to any military contingency that could threaten U.S. interests”   Billionaire-backed, self-appointed “fact-checkers” like Snopes, PolitiFact often rate what they call “fake news” as having “missing context,” yet mainstream state-corporate media operate almost entirely on an unspoken doctrine of propaganda-by-omission. Researchers are left to piece together the kind of coherent recent-historical narratives that MSM refuse to provide. Somalia’s “missing context” can be summarized as follows: In 1997, the US Space Command (which is still operational, though its duties are largely second to the Space Force) committed the Pentagon to achieving “ full spectrum dominance ” ...

If George W. Bush is not going to stand trial for war crimes, he should at the very least stop appearing in public to weigh in on unjustified wars, as he did this week when he accidentally referred to the “wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq.”   by Chip Gibbons    Part 2 - Pining for War   The 2003 US invasion of Iraq was murderous. It was a massive assault on an already devastated nation. According to the United Nations, the 1991 bombing of Iraq under President George H. W. Bush was “ near apocalyptic ” and brought the country “ to a pre-industrial age. ” US sanctions, which President Bill Clinton kept in place, not only prevented Iraq from rebuilding but led to mass death of Iraqi children. And by the end of Clinton’s term, the US was bombing Iraq once every three days. One of Bush’s first acts in office (a full two years before the Iraq War) was to dramatically escalate this bombing. From the perspective of Iraqi citizens who had lived under consistent ...

Pfizer is projected to rake in more than $50 billion from its COVID medicines this year. It’s a symbol of the drastic inequality created by a for-profit approach to global health.   by Nick Dearden    Part 4 - Building Something Different   Pfizer has its own special brand of ruthlessness that has led to a string of investigations over the course of the pandemic. The company stands accused of spreading disinformation about the rival Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, including funding a study that claimed vaccines like AstraZeneca’s are risky for vulnerable patients and can cause cancer — something there’s zero evidence for — which was then used to misinform health professionals in Canada. We also know that they made extraordinary demands of countries who wanted to buy their vaccines, demanding complete liability, not just for unexpected side effects, but also negligence, fraud, or malice on the part of the company itself, in some cases demanding governments put up sovereig...

The video, with more than 181,000 views, in which top U.S. officials in 2014 discuss changing the Ukrainian government, had been removed from YouTube after more than 8 years.   Consortium News   A video of a leaked conversation between then Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and the then U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, which had been removed from YouTube, has been restored. In the video, the two discuss changing the Ukrainian government weeks before the democratically-elected President Viktor Yanukovych was violently driven from power. The video, posted on April 29, 2014 had 181,533 views before it was taken down on Wednesday, was among the most viewed versions of the conversation on YouTube. Eight years worth of viewer comments on the video had also been removed. 

failed evolution   On 11 April 2019, the Ecuadorian government of traitor Lenin Moreno, invited the Metropolitan Police into the Ecuadorian embassy in London, and they arrested Julian Assange . Since then, Assange is kept in Belmarsh high security prison in London, without actual charges.   The real reason world's number one political prisoner is still kept in this high security prison, is because he exposed horrendous war crimes carried out by the US imperialists and their allies.   The ruthless Western imperialist regime wants to punish the No1 real journalist in the world and make him an example for any Whistleblower or real journalist who will attempt to expose its big crimes in the future.   That Assange, who is in precarious physical and psychological health and who suffered a stroke during court video proceedings, has been condemned to death should not come as a surprise. The ten years he has been detained, seven in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London an...

Leaked emails reviewed by The Grayzone reveal possibly criminal plot by pro-Leave elites to sabotage Theresa May’s Brexit deal, infiltrate government, spy on campaign groups, and replace May with Boris Johnson. by Kit Klarenberg       Intelligence cabal infiltrated UK civil service thanks to “centrally placed mole”     Ex-MI6 chief Richard Dearlove pitched espionage operations targeting civil service and campaign groups     Fake Democratic Party fronts run by CIA veterans were proposed to infiltrate pro-Remain groups     Cabal sought to spy on and disrupt Prime Minister’s top Brexit negotiator     Shadowy billionaires funded effort in total secret     Dearlove claimed credit for influencing government policy on Huawei     Cabal now seeking to remove Boris Johnson     These efforts could amount to charges of TREASON  Part 2 - “‘A Very English Coup D’Etat’…coul...

By inviting an Azov fighter to address Greece’s parliament, Zelensky opened the country’s historic wounds and triggered angry demonstrations that have shaken its pro-US government.   by TJ Coles   Part 7 - Zelensky brings Nazis to Greece for “a historic sham”   This March, the Greek Communist Party (KKE) announced that its 15 lawmakers would boycott Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s speech to the 300-seat Bouleterion (parliament). The parliament’s Vice President, Geórgios Lambroúlis, and one of Greece’s elected representatives at the European Union, Sotirios Zarianopoulos, had already been barred from Kiev for backing the Ukrainian Communist Party, which Zelensky has banned and whose Youth Leaders, brothers Mikhail and Alexander Kononovich, are currently imprisoned As The Grayzone reported, Zelensky’s SBU security services have escalated its campaign of terror against political opposition since war with Russia erupted, arresting, torturing and even occasionally as...

It is hard to destroy your own cause and feel righteous while doing so, yet the American left has done it. After more than two centuries at the vanguard of the struggle for freedom, the American left, broadly defined, executed a volte face and embraced anti-working-class policies marketed as purely technical public health measures.   by Christian Parenti   Part 9 - Covid Repression in the Global South   In the Global South the biosecurity justified lockdowns were far more socially crippling than those imposed in Europe or the US. As Amnesty International’s Report 2020/21 explains, “ many governments imposed blanket bans on demonstrations or used unlawful force, particularly in Africa and the Americas. ” The poorest of the poor were hurt the most. “ Lockdowns and curfews led to particularly high numbers of workers in the informal economy losing their incomes without recourse to adequate social protection. ” Women and girls, who are over represented in that sector, “ were d...

TikTok has become an enormously influential medium that reaches over one billion people worldwide. Having control over its algorithm or content moderation means the ability to set the terms of global debate and decide what people see. And what they don’t. by Alan Macleod  Part 5 - Surveillance Valley   This is far from the first time the national security state has pulled this trick, however.    In 2018, Facebook came under enormous pressure from the U.S. government, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg himself being hauled in front of both the House and the Senate to face hours of grilling over the platform’s role in privacy, content moderation and spreading Russian disinformation. Only weeks after this, Facebook announced a new partnership with the Atlantic Council, whereby the group would serve as Facebook’s “eyes and ears,” taking considerable control over its content moderation, supposedly in an effort to weed out fake news and disinformation. The Atlantic Council, however,...

The mega-rich buy up media outlets precisely because a lie is more likely to fly than the truth – including the lie that they are invaluable. by Jonathan Cook  Part 5 - Latest Darth Vader   But significantly, the reason Twitter users spread more trivial forms of misinformation is that, after a lifetime spent in the billionaires’ bubbles of disinformation, we struggle to anchor ourselves to reality. Awash in corporate disinformation, we are credulous in the face of simple, easily digestible stories: ones that require us to cheer either for Team Musk or for Team Gates, Donald Trump or Joe Biden, the Rebel Alliance, or the latest Darth Vader. We cannot make sense of a world so corrupt, so divided, so harsh. Instead, we are drawn to simplistic narratives of good vs. evil, right vs. wrong. And the most simplistic of all these narratives are the ones that undergird the sense of collective virtue of our society and our tribe. If our wars are different from their wars, then the differ...

Biden has reversed Donald Trump’s withdrawal of US forces from Somalia and will redeploy Special Operations Forces. It is just the latest move in a long history of destructive US-UK meddling in the Horn of Africa.    by TJ Coles   Part 1   Almost as soon as the administration of President Joseph Biden announced a redeployment of US Special Operations Forces to Somalia on May 16, the Western media began to spin the intervention. As the BBC framed it, Biden’s deployment would “ support the fight against militant group al-Shabab ” (sic). The intervention coincides with the re-election of former Somalian President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, who governed between 2012 and ‘17. Similarly, the New York Times (NYT) reported that “ Biden has approved a Pentagon request for standing authority to target about a dozen suspected leaders of Al Shabab, the Somali terrorist group that is affiliated with Al Qaeda. ” But are these motives true? Does Washington really want merely to defeat...

If George W. Bush is not going to stand trial for war crimes, he should at the very least stop appearing in public to weigh in on unjustified wars, as he did this week when he accidentally referred to the “wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq.”   by Chip Gibbons    Part 1   On January 20, 2009, the United States completed a changing of the guard. As was customary, the outgoing president attended the new president’s swearing in before flying out of town. On MSNBC, Chris Matthews made an uncharacteristically lucid remark about George W. Bush’s flight from Washington: “ It’s going to be like the Romanovs, too, and I mean that. There’s a sense here that they are fallen from grace, that they’re not popular, that the whole family will now go into retreat. ” Matthews’s remark raised objections from his fellow talking heads. Keith Olbermann (yes, that Keith Olbermann) reminded him that many predicted Richard Nixon and those around him would be similarly exiled, onl...

Pfizer is projected to rake in more than $50 billion from its COVID medicines this year. It’s a symbol of the drastic inequality created by a for-profit approach to global health.   by Nick Dearden    Part 3 - The Art of Intellectual Property   The monopolies that Pfizer enjoys are hardwired into the rules of the global economy. In the 1980s a handful of corporations, led by a former Pfizer chief executive, recognized that their most important assets were not their factories, their workforces, or even their research base. Rather it was the intellectual property that they sat on — the patents, the know-how, the trademarks. They set about persuading the US government to ensure this intellectual property was as well protected as possible, and in the mid-1990s US-style patents laws were embedded in the newly formed World Trade Organization as a global minimum, undermining the sort of sharing, copying, and imitation of technology that had allowed countries like South Kore...

For every new billionaire created during the pandemic — one every 30 hours — nearly a million people could be pushed into extreme poverty in 2022 at nearly the same rate, reveals a new Oxfam brief today.    Profiting from Pain is published as the World Economic Forum — the exclusive get-together of the global elite in Davos — takes place for the first time face-to-face since COVID-19, a period during which billionaires have enjoyed a huge boost to their fortunes. “ Billionaires are arriving in Davos to celebrate an incredible surge in their fortunes. The pandemic and now the steep increases in food and energy prices have, simply put, been a bonanza for them. Meanwhile, decades of progress on extreme poverty are now in reverse and millions of people are facing impossible rises in the cost of simply staying alive, ” said Gabriela Bucher, Executive Director of Oxfam International. The brief shows that 573 people became new billionaires during the pandemic, at the rate of one eve...

failed evolution   On 11 April 2019, the Ecuadorian government of traitor Lenin Moreno, invited the Metropolitan Police into the Ecuadorian embassy in London, and they arrested Julian Assange . Since then, Assange is kept in Belmarsh high security prison in London, without actual charges.   The real reason world's number one political prisoner is still kept in this high security prison, is because he exposed horrendous war crimes carried out by the US imperialists and their allies.   The ruthless Western imperialist regime wants to punish the No1 real journalist in the world and make him an example for any Whistleblower or real journalist who will attempt to expose its big crimes in the future.   That Assange, who is in precarious physical and psychological health and who suffered a stroke during court video proceedings, has been condemned to death should not come as a surprise. The ten years he has been detained, seven in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London an...

Leaked emails reviewed by The Grayzone reveal possibly criminal plot by pro-Leave elites to sabotage Theresa May’s Brexit deal, infiltrate government, spy on campaign groups, and replace May with Boris Johnson. by Kit Klarenberg       Intelligence cabal infiltrated UK civil service thanks to “centrally placed mole”     Ex-MI6 chief Richard Dearlove pitched espionage operations targeting civil service and campaign groups     Fake Democratic Party fronts run by CIA veterans were proposed to infiltrate pro-Remain groups     Cabal sought to spy on and disrupt Prime Minister’s top Brexit negotiator     Shadowy billionaires funded effort in total secret     Dearlove claimed credit for influencing government policy on Huawei     Cabal now seeking to remove Boris Johnson     These efforts could amount to charges of TREASON  Part 1 Leaked emails and documents reviewed...

By inviting an Azov fighter to address Greece’s parliament, Zelensky opened the country’s historic wounds and triggered angry demonstrations that have shaken its pro-US government.   by TJ Coles   Part 6 - “The culmination of efforts” by the US military to turn Greece into a hub of anti-Russian operations   After backing a coup in Ukraine in 2014, the US initiated Operation Atlantic Resolve: an EU-wide rotation of 7,000 personnel and weapons, including Apache, Blackhawk, and Chinook helicopters, Abrams, Bradley, and Paladin tanks, and a host of logistical equipment. Five years later, the US Army and Navy began dredging the Greek seaport in Alexandroupoli, in the east, in preparation for Atlantic Resolve. In 2021, Greece and other nations joined the US Special Operations Command’s International Division. That year, the port in Alexandroupoli enabled “ the movement of hundreds of U.S. Army equipment items for [Atlantic Resolve]. ” According to Pentagon’s Europe Command (EUC...

It is hard to destroy your own cause and feel righteous while doing so, yet the American left has done it. After more than two centuries at the vanguard of the struggle for freedom, the American left, broadly defined, executed a volte face and embraced anti-working-class policies marketed as purely technical public health measures.   by Christian Parenti   Part 8 - The Liberty Issue   The left has turned its back on liberty. Worse yet, the left now campaigns against freedom. ACLU luminaries editorialize for de facto forced vaccination and vaccine passports. This has devastating social, political, and economic consequences; and the left’s failure to acknowledge and understand this will haunt it for years after the pandemic. The left invokes “the greater good” to justify support for vaccine mandates, vaccine passports, lockdowns, and censorship; in so doing the left supports undemocratic rule by unaccountable bureaucrats. During the Covid crisis, there have been no lockdown...