the unbalanced evolution of homo sapiens

The scariest thing about Don’t Look Up is that as absurd as it is, it barely exaggerates. Much of our political elite are just as greedy and foolish, our media just as vapid, and our response to impending disaster exactly as mind-bogglingly irrational as in the movie.  by Branko Marcetic Part 1 The times we live in are both shot through with menace and impossibly stupid. This is one of the defining features of this political era, and yet I can’t think of many movies in the post-2016 years that capture this dynamic, or even bother to try, like Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up . The marquee productions about capital “P” politics in the Donald Trump years had plenty of the former. Vehicles like The Post and The Comey Rule filtered the news we all sat around watching and reading after the 2016 election through the lens of a 1970s-style political thriller, and were celebrated for flattering establishment biases. The heroes were institutions like the press and the FBI, nobly defending norms and

It was almost 10 p.m. on a Thursday night, and Ali Watkins was walking around the capital following instructions texted by a stranger. One message instructed her to walk through an abandoned parking lot near Washington, D.C.’s Dupont Circle, and then wait at a laundromat. Then came a final cryptic instruction: She was to enter an unmarked door on Connecticut Avenue leading to a hidden bar. The Sheppard, an upscale speakeasy, was so dimly lit it was sometimes hard to see the menu, let alone a stranger at the bar. But amid the red velvet upholstery, Watkins, then a reporter at Politico , almost immediately spotted the man she was supposed to meet: He was wearing a corduroy blazer and jeans and had a distinctive gap between his teeth.  “ I won’t tell you my name, but I work for the U.S. government, ” he said, according to her account later provided to government investigators. It was June 1, 2017, and Watkins was a rising star in the world of national security journalism, breaking big sto

RT America   Chris Hedges discusses the torture of Julian Assange with his father, John Shipton. Julian Assange committed empire’s greatest sin. He exposed it as a criminal enterprise. He documented its lies, callous disregard for human life, rampant corruption and innumerable war crimes. Republican or Democrat. Conservative or Labour. Trump or Biden. It does not matter. The goons who oversee the empire sing from the same Satanic songbook. Empires always kill those who inflict deep and serious wounds. That Assange, who is in precarious physical and psychological health and who suffered a stroke during court video proceedings on October 27, 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 and nearly three in the high security Belmarsh prison, were accompanied with a lack of sunlight and exercise and unrelenting threats, pressure, anxiety and stress.  “His eyes were out of sync, his right eyelid would

globinfo freexchange   It was the 12th of August, 2020. Nine o'clock in the morning, in London, the news came out that the national income of Britain (GDP) had fallen by more than 20% . That had never happened before in the history of capitalism - British GDP falling by 21% or so in one year. It was not anticipated. The markets were expecting a fall of 8,9,10%. No one was expecting a 21% fall. Fifteen or sixteen minutes later, the London stock exchange went up by 3% . There can be no explanation of that along the lines of capitalism.     This is how the Greek economist, Yanis Varoufakis, described essentially the official death of capitalism and its replacement by something even worse. The thing he calls "technofeudalism". While Varoufakis in various discussions struggles to explain why capitalism is already dead, it's rather funny that people still willing to debate on something that's already dead (capitalism) against something that's far from being practi

Second Thought   The easiest way to inject a propaganda idea into most people’s minds is to let it go through the medium of an entertainment picture when they do not realize that they are being propagandized.                                                                                                     - Elmer Davis

Moderate Rebels   A CIA agent is openly calling for starting a new world war with China in order to keep Taiwan as a US imperial protectorate and maintain Washington's military control over South Korea and Japan. 

Moderate Rebels   The New York Times published a propaganda piece whitewashing the US prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, occupied Cuban territory, promoting its McDonald's. 

Moderate Rebels   The Pentagon admitted to waging a state-sponsored terrorist campaign and unconventional war against the people of Iran. 

Marketed as life-saving public health measures, lockdowns triggered death and economic devastation on a global scale while doing little to slow the spread of Covid-19. Now, they’re back with a vengeance.   by Stavroula Pabst and Max Blumenthal   Part 4 - Lockdowns drive debt, dependency and death across the Global South   The legacy of colonialism and imperialism has split the world economy into a “core” of wealthy economies and a periphery of poor economies that are largely dependent on exporting cheap raw materials and low-value added manufactured goods. When the wealthy core economies locked down in 2020, international trade contracted, triggering a violent economic whiplash in developing countries as their earnings from exports and tourism suddenly collapsed. As a result, developing country debt has risen from an average of about 40 percent of overall GDP to over 60 percent. Throughout 2020, developing economies were forced to pay out 194 billion to their creditors, even as their e

By covertly recruiting popular YouTube influencer Abigail Thorn to counter growing opposition to UK gov’t Covid restrictions, psy-ops pros are bringing home the tactics they honed in the Syrian dirty war   by Kit Klarenberg and Max Blumenthal   Part 1   Leaked documents have revealed a state-sponsored influence operation designed to undermine critics of the British government’s coronavirus policies by astroturfing a prominent founder of the BreadTube clique of “anti-fascist” YouTube influencers. The project aims to conduct psychological profiling on British citizens dissenting against policies such as mandatory vaccination and lockdowns, then leverage the data to establish a YouTube channel that portrays these critics as dangerous “superspreaders” of “disinformation.”  Designed “ to curb the influence of pseudoscience material online, with specific emphasis on Coronavirus-related ‘anti-vaxxing’ sentiment, ” the operation is run by the UK’s Royal Institution, and dubbed “Challenging Pse