the unbalanced evolution of homo sapiens

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 4 - Serious business   Readers who consider TikTok little more than a fun app to watch short videos of people dancing are behind the times. From a modest beginning, it has exploded in popularity, growing exponentially from 85 million global users in early 2018 to 1.2 billion by late 2021 (with a similar monstrous growth in revenue to boot). It is exceptionally popular among the younger generations. The 2021 Reuters Institute Digital News Report found that 9% of people aged between 18 and 24 worldwide had gone to TikTok to get news over the past week, while 31% of that age group used the app in that period (and therefore likely passively consumed news to some extent). Furthermore, it has a very loyal user...

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 4 - Censorship as panacea But, unable to maintain their attention on the structural deformations caused by the rule of the billionaires, left-liberals like Monbiot and Chakrabortty keep deflecting to the cause of censorship. They speak of unspecified “curbs” and approve of blocking “Russian news sources” as though this is the panacea for society’s ills. The point they have obscured is that misinformation spread by Twitter users pales in comparison to the disinformation that constantly batters us from corporate news outlets, like The Guardian newspaper they work for. (Disinformation is misinformation with deception or manipulation as its intent.) Disinformation such as making us believe that the West’s many illegal wars of aggression, like the one against Iraq, were defensive, or mistakes, or to promote democracy. Or th...

Imran Khan joins the long list of deposed prime ministers and underscores the reality that, in Pakistan, whoever the people elect, the U.S.-backed military is always in charge. by Alan Macleod  Part 6 - A dangerous near miss The Pakistani military is thought to possess around 165 nuclear warheads. The country’s nuclear status came into sharp relief just as the campaign to oust Khan was heating up.    While the world was concentrating on Ukraine, a potentially far more deadly incident occurred when India mistakenly fired a BrahMos cruise missile – the sort it uses to deliver its nuclear warheads – into Pakistan. In the course of routine maintenance, the rocket was accidentally launched. India did not immediately inform its neighbor of its mistake. Faced with what seemed to be a nuclear attack, the Khan administration had no more than a few minutes to decide how to respond. One position was to launch Pakistan’s entire nuclear arsenal back at India – an action that could hav...

Brazil’s left-wing leader Lula da Silva says if he wins the 2022 presidential elections, “we are going to create a currency in Latin America,” called the Sur (“South”), to combat “the dependency on the dollar”   by Benjamin Norton  Part 3 - Lula leads polls for Brazil’s 2022 elections, following US-backed judicial coup Brazil’s presidential elections will be held in October 2022. Polls consistently show Lula leading over far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s sitting president. Bolsonaro only came to power in the 2018 elections due to a soft coup d’etat backed by the United States. Lula had been significantly ahead in the polls in the lead-up to the 2018 vote, but Brazil’s judicial system imprisoned him on false charges, handing the victory to Bolsonaro. The US Justice Department helped support this campaign of what Lula calls legal warfare, or lawfare, to prevent him from returning to the presidency. The US government also backed the 2016 political coup against Brazil’s...

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 2 - Pandemic Profits   It’s easy to see where Pfizer’s profits come from. Pfizer claims that the cost price of its vaccine is just under £5 per dose, though experts say doses could be made for as little as 76p. Either way, the UK government paid £18 a shot for its first order, £22 for later purchases. Even taking Pfizer at its word, that would mean the National Health Service (NHS) has paid a markup of at least £2 billion — six times the cost of the pay rise the government agreed to give nurses last year. Even this price seems rather reasonable compared to the amount it has been claimed Pfizer tried to charge the US government: an eye-watering $100 a dose, prompting a former US disease prevention official to accuse the firm of “ war profiteering. ” Pfizer prides it...

Glenn Greenwald    

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...

globinfo freexchange   One of the biggest "wet dreams" of the US imperialists for decades, especially after the Communist victory in 1949, was to break-up China. Xinjiang was among Chinese territories in which the US and the Western imperialism saw an opportunity to grow internal tensions and create serious destabilization against the Asian giant. As The Grayzone revealed in March, 2020, through an extended report :   In recent years, few stories have generated as much outrage in the West as the condition of Uyghur Muslims in China. Reporting on the issue is typically represented through seemingly spontaneous leaks of information and expressions of resistance by Uyghur human rights activists struggling to be heard against a tyrannical Chinese government. True or not, nearly everything that appears in Western media accounts of China’s Uyghur Muslims is the product of a carefully conceived media campaign generated by an apparatus of right-wing, anti-communist Uyghur ...

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 5 - The CIA transforms “an unreliable and troublesome partner” into a dependable ally   An undated US State Department review stated that if the right-wing New Democracy party won the 1981 elections, “ Greece would remain stable and its Western ties would be consolidated. ” If, however, Papandreou’s Panhellenic Socialist Movement won, “ Greece would … become an unreliable and troublesome partner for the US. ” Papandreou won but, to the relief of the US, followed a pro-Washington course. By decades’ end, the CIA could tolerate its former employee, writing that despite the rhetoric, Papandreou “ reached an agreement on continued US basing ” and that his “ promised radical Socialist solution ” ended with “ austerity and fiscal restraint. ” A Congressional Research Service repo...

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 7 - Vaccine efficacy and adverse effects   The organized left still endorses a vaccine centric policy with religious fervor. Some of its members do so still assuming that vaccines prevent Covid transmission and can thus end the pandemic. They thus follow the discredited pronouncements of Anthony Fauci, who explained in the early months of the vaccine roll out, for those vaccinated “ the risk is extremely low of getting infected, of getting sick, or of transmitting it to anybody else, full stop. ” This was about when progressives started purchasing votive candles bearing Fauci’s likeness. In reality, these are very ...