EyeSeeYou.icu: June 2021

Wednesday, June 30, 2021

Old Hills And Old Folks Resist The Mountain Valley Pipeline In Bent Mountain

Report from Appalachians Against Pipelines on blockade against the construction of the Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP). On Wednesday, June 30, 2021 at 5:30 A.M., Deborah Kushner, Alan Moore, and Bridget Kelley locked themselves in and to a broken down vehicle on Honeysuckle Road, blocking Mountain Valley Pipeline’s access to the pipeline easement, a work yard,... Read Full Article
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Transmissions Part One: Origins

A four part mini-series from sub.Media.Tv focusing on the various dimensions of intergenerational relationships amongst anarchists. Part One is a collection of anarchist origin stories from the late 60s through to the early 2000s. Listen to Ashanti Alston, Helen Hudson, Ann Hansen, Frank, Ian Bone and Cindy Milstein recount the pivotal and historical moments that... Read Full Article
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July 16: Day of Agitation for the Freedom of Political Prisoners in Abya Yala

Joint Statement for the Upcoming Day of Agitation for the Freedom of Political Prisoners in Abya Yala We have recently seen the sharpening of the struggle of the oppressed, exploited, and dominated, against those who rob us of our freedom and of a good life. All states have been confronted by thousands of people of... Read Full Article
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You Ordered Healthcare, You Got Airstrikes: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Listen to a reading of this article:

Americans: healthcare please

Biden: Sorry, did you say airstrikes on Iraq and Syria?

Americans: no, healthcare

Biden: Alright, you drive a hard bargain, but here are your airstrikes on Iraq and Syria.

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It is journalistic malpractice to parrot US government claims about acts of military mass murder on the other side of the planet being “defensive”. The only strikes near the Iraq-Syria border that could accurately be called “defensive” are those launched by the inhabitants of those nations upon the invading western military occupation. The only actual defensive action that the US could legitimately take to protect troops in the Middle East would be to remove US troops from the Middle East.

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Those who said “we can push Biden to the left” get criticized every time this administration takes another rightward turn, but they don’t get criticized enough for the fact that they never even try to push Biden to the left. At no point have they ever even tried.

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Nobody in America had any idea the Parliamentarian existed until the Democrats needed an excuse not to advance progressive causes.

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The Biden administration is killing people around the world and ramping up cold war escalations while eroding civil rights with new “domestic terror” policies, so naturally Republicans are focused on worrying about dying in imaginary concentration camps during an imaginary White People Holocaust.

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I love that you can always tell how inconvenient someone was for the powerful just by reading the Washington Post headline about their death. https://t.co/kco4EUGY3r

— Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ (@caitoz) June 27, 2021

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Yeah okay let’s give control of the world to the nation built from slavery and genocide and founded by witch-burning Puritan lunatics, what could go wrong.

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It’s a safe bet that if the world found out all the profoundly evil things the US government and its allies did in Syria it would damage US imperialist consensus-building far worse than the Iraq invasion. That’s why so much narrative management gets poured into ensuring this never happens.

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The whole Intercept/TYT foreign policy schtick is going “It’s possible to promote all CIA/CNN narratives about every US-targeted government AND give meaningless lip service to opposing war against those governments. You can do BOTH.”

Mehdi Hasan built a whole career on this.

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Many “right-wing conspiracy theories” began as left-wing conspiracy facts.

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I started saying “US intelligence cartel” a while back because the cutesy label “US intelligence community” was like saying “the ISIS Capades”.

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Isn’t it weird how we’ve learned that the US prosecution against Julian Assange relied heavily on false testimony from a diagnosed sociopath and convicted child molester, yet Assange is still in prison?

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We haven’t seen anything like the complete mass media blackout on Stundin‘s revelation that the Assange prosecution relied on false testimony since the complete mass media blackout on the OPCW leaks.

In the information age the powerful place emphasis not just on managing what information gets out to the public, but how that information is received and perceived. Now legit bombshells like the Stundin story and the OPCW leaks can come out without having any real impact, just due to perception management.

In this new paradigm, investigative reporting and whistleblowers are still of course important, but just as important as obtaining the information is addressing the problem of getting it unfiltered into public attention. It doesn’t matter what information you get if no one sees it, and even if it is seen you still need to deal with imperial media spinning what’s seen in a power-serving way. Today you could publish solid, indisputable proof that the FBI was behind the Capitol riot, for example, and the narrative managers would quickly manipulate it into a nothingburger.

This is also why you’ll see narrative managers working so hard to advance smear campaigns against anyone who presents narratives that are inconvenient for the powerful; if they can generate enough public suspicion and dismissiveness toward someone’s voice, no one will ever listen to them. That’s why fighting smear campaigns is so important.

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Almost all good business practices are terrible human being practices. To be a good businessman you have to harden the humanity out of you. This is why capitalism creates and elevates terrible humans, and why we are being led into extinction by assholes.

Even seemingly benign business practices like “maintaining cash flow” are inherently corrosive to human nature. You need to break something good in you in order to hold back from paying people for as long as possible, while chasing people to pay you ASAP to keep up your cash flow.

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Interrupting criticisms of capitalism to yell “That’s not REAL capitalism!” is like interrupting a magic show to yell “That’s not REAL magic!” Okay it’s not the imaginary fantasy thing you have in your head, but it’s also the only way the thing we’re discussing has ever existed and ever will exist.

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It’s not just that “the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence” as Bukowski said. It’s that people with empathy and humility can be shamed and intimidated into silence by the crowd while narcissists just dismiss the crowd as irrelevant insects. The result is that the real artists and visionaries with solid grounding in their inner depths are often brutalized into silence by those who throw rocks at things that shine, while those without functioning empathy centers rise to positions of significant influence.

And I think maybe the lesson here is that we must become so very awake that we have the inner spaciousness to tolerate and heal our way through a bombardment of attacks.

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Certainty that humanity is doomed is not a reality-based position. We barely know anything about our universe, our minds or our world. Anything is possible. Rigid pessimism about our fate is grounded in ignorance and intellectual arrogance, not “realism”. Doesn’t mean things aren’t bad, but there’s no rational reason to give up hope or stop fighting.

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It is true that we are plunging headlong into a continuum of exponentially expanding weirdness and that familiar patterns are rapidly evaporating. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. To paraphrase Krishnamurti, it is no measure of health to preserve normality in a profoundly sick society.

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source https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2021/06/30/you-ordered-healthcare-you-got-airstrikes-notes-from-the-edge-of-the-narrative-matrix/

Canadian Tire Fire #4: Churches Burn as the Remains of Hundreds of More Children Uncovered; Mass Resistance to Brutal Eviction in Toronto

The week leading up to Canada Day saw another devastating discovery of unmarked graves, this time at the Marieval Indian Residential School. On June 23rd, the Cowessess First Nation announced the discovery of the remains of approximately 751 children, in a graveyard outside the school. Statue of Sir John A. Macdonald in downtown #HamOnt Gore... Read Full Article
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NYC Reportback: A People’s Park Queer Takeover

Radical queers report back from PRIDE as showdowns between police and the wider community in Washington Square Park continue. On Sunday, June 27, a group of radical queers and accomplices gathered in Washington Square Park on the stolen island of Manhatta, Lenapehoking—now part of so-called New York City—to celebrate our love, our struggle, and each... Read Full Article
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Anarchist Strategy in an Era of Popular Revolt

New text of analysis and strategy from so-called Philadelphia that touches on the broader realities of US society in the developing post-pandemic and post-rebellion world while looking at what might lead to continued liberatory eruptions. Originally posted to Philly Anti-Capitalist. [Read] [Print] What role can anarchists in the United States play in popular uprisings like the... Read Full Article
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Tuesday, June 29, 2021

The Weird, Creepy Media Blackout On Recent Assange Revelations

Listen to a reading of this article:

As of this writing, it has been three days since the Icelandic newspaper Stundin broke the story that a key witness in the US government’s case against Julian Assange had fabricated allegations against the WikiLeaks founder. And yet, somehow, Assange is still in prison.

Weirder still, not one major western media outlet outside of Iceland has reported on this massive and entirely legitimate news story. A search brings up coverage by Icelandic media, by Russian media, and by smaller western outlets like Democracy Now, World Socialist Website, Consortium News, Zero Hedge and some others, but as of this writing this story has been completely ignored by all major outlets who are ostensibly responsible for informing the public in the western world.

It’s not that those outlets have been ignoring Assange altogether these last few days either. Reuters recently published an interview with Assange’s fiance Stella Moris. Evening Standard has a recent article out on Assange’s plans to marry Moris in Belmarsh, as does Deutsche Welle. It’s just this one story in particular that they’ve been blacking out completely.

I don’t think one US or UK newspaper has reported this. The free press is incredible. https://t.co/NpkCpa2kdN

— Matt Kennard (@kennardmatt) June 28, 2021

And it’s not that the mainstream press are unaware of this story. Mainstream western reporters spend a lot of time on Twitter, and Assange’s name was trending in the United States after the Stundin story broke. Tweets about the article by high-profile accounts like WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden have many thousands of shares each. They’ve all seen the article. They all know it’s newsworthy. They’re just choosing not to report on it.

It reminds me of the blanket media blackout that occurred while the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons was hemorrhaging leaks revealing a US government-tied coverup in the alleged chlorine gas incident in Douma, Syria. Immensely newsworthy stories were breaking every few days on a major international scandal, yet not a peep was made about it by the mainstream press.

We got some insight into what happens in mainstream newsrooms during such bizarre circumstances when journalist Tareq Haddad leaked the emails from his editors at Newsweek refusing him permission to write about the unfolding OPCW scandal. Haddad’s pitch was rejected by editor Dimi Reider on the basis that other bigger outlets hadn’t written about it.

“Leak has been out since weekend,” Reider wrote. “It’s certainly no scoop. Yet despite the days that passed, not a single respected media outlet – many of whom boast far greater regional expertise, resources on the ground and in newsroom than Newsweek does – have taken the leak remotely seriously. Which already yesterday made my wonder how we could or why we should.”

Reider was supported by Newsweek‘s digital director Laura Davis, who told Haddad his pitch was being rejected because “the leak found zero to no traction among publications which are highly resourced and experienced on Syria.”

And that’s just pretty darn convenient for the powerful, is it not? Assuming other mainstream news outlets feel the same, this means they’re all generally following the lead of just a handful of top-tier publications like The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The Guardian. If just those few outlets decide to ignore a major news story that’s inconvenient for the powerful (either by persuasion, infiltration or by their own initiative), then no one else will either. As far as the media-consuming public is concerned, it’s like the major news story never happened at all.

And that’s really, really creepy.

As far as we can tell from searches, not a single 'mainstream' UK newspaper has covered this major development in the #Assange case. Nor has BBC News.

The discipline, or blindness, to ignore awkward facts is a reliable feature of corporate 'journalism'.https://t.co/DMOUD568j5

— Media Lens (@medialens) June 29, 2021

Western mass media outlets are propaganda. They are owned and controlled by wealthy people in coordination with the secretive government agencies tasked with preserving the world order upon which the media-owning plutocrats have built their kingdoms, and their purpose is to manipulate the way the mainstream public thinks, acts and votes into alignment with the agendas of the ruling class.

You see this propaganda in the way things are reported, but you also see it in the way things are not reported. Entire news stories can be completely redacted from mainstream attention if they are sufficiently inconvenient for the mechanisms of empire, or only allowed in via platforms like Tucker Carlson Tonight and thereby tainted and spun as ridiculous right-wing conspiracy theories.

If newsworthiness and significance were what governed mainstream news media reporting, instead of the agendas of profit and power, we’d constantly be hearing about the people dying in Yemen and the brutal income inequality in the United States. And the fact that the most powerful government in the world is persecuting a journalist for telling the truth would be at the forefront of everyone’s awareness, instead of the mountain of smears they have heaped upon Julian Assange.

I worry sometimes, who will explain this stuff with this level of detail, if they put me in jail?
Worth noting that the Thordarson saga has never been reported by mainstream media outside Iceland.https://t.co/sq5hu8PDiV

— Craig Murray (@CraigMurrayOrg) June 29, 2021

I sometimes get people telling me that some news stories are meant to “distract” us from other, bigger news stories, like this is something the imperial narrative managers do especially on some occasions but not all the time. In reality, distraction is never not happening, because every single day the plutocratic media pull people’s attention away from the pressing issues of the moment like ecocide, poverty, oppression and mass military slaughter to get them talking about Cardi B’s baby bump and Marjorie Taylor Greene’s latest doofy publicity stunt.

We are being lied to. Constantly, and in more ways than we realize. By omission, by distortion, by half-truths and by outright deception. Our minds are being actively messed with by powerful people with limitless resources to ensure their continued domination of the planet at any cost. Our very perception of reality is being assaulted on myriad fronts. Until humanity finds a way to wake itself up from its propaganda-induced coma, the abuses of the powerful will continue.

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Featured image by Henry Nicholls, Creative Commons 4.0

source https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2021/06/29/the-weird-creepy-media-blackout-on-recent-assange-revelations/

This Week In Fascism #114: Nick Fuentes Calls Tour a “Nightmare,” Plans Fundraiser for GOP Rep Paul Gosar

Welcome fellow antifascists! We’ve got a report on white nationalist troll Nick Fuentes’ “White Boy Summer” tour and his plans to link-up with GOP politicians, another horrific white supremacist murder in the US that’s gone under-reported, a wave of anti-Black and racist vandalism by neo-Nazis in Patriot Front, more fallout from the attempted January 6th... Read Full Article
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Monday, June 28, 2021

Polyvalent Power: A Review of the “Power” Issue of “Perspectives on Anarchist Theory”

Image: “A Love Supreme,” by Erin Bree of Gallery of the Streets, from issue 32 of Perspectives on Anarchist Theory. During the height of the movement against neoliberal globalization in the U.S., numerous chants and sayings emerged or were resuscitated, such as, “This is what democracy looks like” or “The whole world is watching.” Fortunately,... Read Full Article
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In Contempt: June 11th Roundup; Analysis of Biden’s New Domestic Terrorism Document

It’s been a busy month and there’s a lot to catch up on. In this month’s column, we roundup what all went down on June 11th, offer an analysis of the Biden administration’s recent report on countering domestic terrorism, a roundup by state across the so-called US of repression news, info on current George Floyd... Read Full Article
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Sunday, June 27, 2021

US Again Bombs Nations On Other Side Of The World In “Self-Defense”

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The US is again illegally bombing nations on the other side of the planet which it has invaded and occupied and branded this murderous aggression as “defensive”.

“At President Biden’s direction, U.S. military forces earlier this evening conducted defensive precision airstrikes against facilities used by Iran-backed militia groups in the Iraq-Syria border region,” reads a statement by Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby. “The targets were selected because these facilities are utilized by Iran-backed militias that are engaged in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) attacks against U.S. personnel and facilities in Iraq. Specifically, the U.S. strikes targeted operational and weapons storage facilities at two locations in Syria and one location in Iraq, both of which lie close to the border between those countries.”

Even more absurd than the fact that we’re all still pretending this clearly dementia-addled president is “directing” anything is the claim that these actions were “defensive” in nature. It is not possible for occupying invaders to be acting defensively in the nations they are occupying an invading; US troops are only in Iraq by way of an illegal 2003 invasion, a bogus 2014 re-entry, and a refusal to leave at the Iraqi government’s request last year, and they are in Syria illegally and without the permission of the Syrian government. They can therefore only ever be aggressors; they cannot be acting defensively.

It’s like if you broke into your neighbor’s house to rob him, killed him when he tried to stop you, and then claimed self-defense because you consider his home your property. Only in the American exceptionalist alternate universe is this considered normal and acceptable.

The only actual defensive action that the US could legitimately take to protect troops in Iraq and Syria would be to remove US troops from Iraq and Syria.

There’s no legal authorization for U.S. troops to be in Iraq or Syria. Bring them home and stop bombing people under the guise of self-defense. https://t.co/EYZipHURtK

— Justin Amash (@justinamash) June 28, 2021

As former US representative Justin Amash pointed out following the bombing, there is no actual legal authorization for US troops to be in Iraq or Syria in the first place. As journalist Glenn Greenwald highlighted, there is also no legal basis for bombings on the military personnel in those nations either, no matter how “Iranian-backed” they are.

“I know it’s boring to note this but Biden has no legal authorization to bomb ‘Iranian-backed’ targets in Syria and Iraq, making it illegal,” Greenwald tweeted, adding, “But Obama bombed Libya after the House voted against doing so, and few of the Sacred Rule Of Law mavens cared.”

The legal justification the Biden administration is using for this airstrike is the same bogus one it used for its airstrikes in Syria this past February: not counter-terrorism, but an extremely weird and broad interpretation of Article II of the US Constitution.

“As a matter of international law, the United States acted pursuant to its right of self-defense,” Kirby writes in the aforementioned statement. “The strikes were both necessary to address the threat and appropriately limited in scope. As a matter of domestic law, the President took this action pursuant to his Article II authority to protect U.S. personnel in Iraq.”

This claim the Executive Branch has been leaning on lately, that Article II permits unilateral acts of war on the other side of the planet without congressional approval, has come under criticism from legal scholars across the US political spectrum. As Tess Bridgeman wrote for Just Security following Biden’s February airstrikes:

“With former President Donald Trump’s term in office over, it’s time to evaluate his war powers legacy and where it leaves the Biden administration as it begins to grapple with how and when to use force abroad in the absence of congressional authorization. The picture that emerges from Trump’s war powers reporting to Congress is one of an extraordinarily broad vision of the president’s authority to use force abroad without congressional authorization, and of a willingness to exploit loopholes in reporting requirements in a way that obscures information on the use of force from the public.”

A willingness to exploit loopholes is right. But as long as acts of mass military violence serve as the glue which holds a globe-spanning empire together, death finds a way.

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source https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2021/06/28/us-again-bombs-nations-on-other-side-of-the-world-in-self-defense/

Assange Prosecution Relied On False Testimony From A Diagnosed Sociopath And Convicted Pedophile

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The Icelandic newspaper Stundin reports that a key witness in the US prosecution of Julian Assange has admitted in an interview with the outlet that he fabricated critical accusations in the indictment against the WikiLeaks founder.

“A major witness in the United States’ Department of Justice case against Julian Assange has admitted to fabricating key accusations in the indictment against the Wikileaks founder,” Stundin reports. “The witness, who has a documented history with sociopathy and has received several convictions for sexual abuse of minors and wide-ranging financial fraud, made the admission in a newly published interview in Stundin where he also confessed to having continued his crime spree whilst working with the Department of Justice and FBI and receiving a promise of immunity from prosecution.”

BREAKING: Lead witness in US case against Julian Assange admits to fabricating evidence against him in exchange for a deal with the FBI #Assange https://t.co/kZxsTi62q0

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) June 26, 2021

This major witness would be Iceland’s Sigurdur “Sigi” Thordarson, a paid FBI informant who after his short-lived association with WikiLeaks has been found guilty of sexually abusing nine boys as well as embezzlement, fraud, and theft in his home country. A court-appointed psychologist has found him to be a sociopath.

“The court found that Sigurður is by all definitions a sociopath, suffering from a severe anti-social personality disorder. However, the court found that he did know the difference between right and wrong and could not be considered insane and could therefore stand trial,” Iceland Magazine reported in 2015 during Thordarson’s child abuse case.

This was all public knowledge when the US government was building its case to extradite Julian Assange to America and try him under the Patriot Act for journalistic activity which exposed US war crimes, a prosecution for which Assange is still locked up in Belmarsh Prison pending Washington’s appeal of a UK court’s denial of the extradition request. And now we know for a fact that the odious person whose testimony formed the basis for much of that prosecution was lying.

“US officials presented an updated version of an indictment against him to a Magistrate court in London last summer,” Stundin says. “The veracity of the information contained therein is now directly contradicted by the main witness, whose testimony it is based on.”

What this means is that the US decided to add more accusations to its previous indictment because charging a journalist for standard journalistic practices was too weak on its own, and now this decision has bitten them in the ass.

The article’s authors explain that contrary to the claims in that indictment, “Thordarson now admits to Stundin that Assange never asked him to hack or access phone recordings of MPs” and “further admits the claim, that Assange had instructed or asked him to access computers in order to find any such recordings, is false.”

Judge Baraitser: "he also asked [Thordarson] to hack into computers to obtain information including audio recordings of phone conversations between high-ranking officials, including members of the Parliament, of the government of “NATO country 1”.”
This is false, says Thordarson https://t.co/oDXLARJuGK

— Kristinn Hrafnsson (@khrafnsson) June 26, 2021

Thordarson’s testimony was cited extensively by British Magistrate Vanessa Baraitser when she was providing her ruling on the extradition request which is currently under appeal, and it looks pretty silly now that we know it was bogus. Her ruling repeats the prosecution’s claim that Assange “asked Teenager [code for Thordarson] to hack into computers to obtain information including audio recordings of phone conversations between high-ranking officials, including members of the Parliament,” but Thordarson has now recanted this claim.

While the judgement on the extradition request reads, “It is alleged that Mr. Assange and Teenager failed a joint attempt to decrypt a file stolen from a ‘NATO country 1’ [ code for Iceland] bank”, Thordarson told Stundin that “this actually refers to a well publicised event in which an encrypted file was leaked from an Icelandic bank and assumed to contain information about defaulted loans provided by the Icelandic Landsbanki,” and that “Nothing supports the claim that this file was even ‘stolen’ per se, as it was assumed to have been distributed by whistleblowers from inside the failed bank.”

While the ruling repeats the claim that Assange “used the unauthorized access given to him by a source, to access a government website of NATO country-1 used to track police vehicles,” Thordarson told Stundin that “Assange never asked for any such access.”

It should be. https://t.co/PhTi8PIKLJ

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) June 26, 2021

These revelations are entirely damning.

“This is the end of the case against Julian Assange,” tweeted NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, adding, “If Biden continues to seek the extradition of a publisher under an indictment poisoned top-to-bottom with false testimony admitted by its own star witness, the damage to the United States’ reputation on press freedom would last for a generation. It’s unavoidable.”

“Now it’s time to have an international inquiry on how Sweden, UK, US, Ecuador and Australia have handled the Julian Assange case. My FOIA provides evidence nothing is normal in this case,” tweeted investigative journalist Stefania Maurizi.

It just says so much that the most powerful government in the world, with all its essentially limitless resources, needed to build its case against Assange on false testimony from a diagnosed sociopath and convicted child molester. That’s how strong their case was against a journalist whose only “crime” was telling the truth about the powerful.

This after we learned that Assange and his lawyers were spied on by the CIA, that he is being tortured, that his seven-year de facto imprisonment prior to his two-year stay in Belmarsh was arbitrary detention and unjust from the very beginning, and that the pretext for keeping him there was itself fallacious.

This is a farce. The fact that this man remains behind bars is an outrage.

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source https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2021/06/27/assange-prosecution-relied-on-false-testimony-from-a-diagnosed-sociopath-and-convicted-pedophile/

Saturday, June 26, 2021

Resistance to “Cop City” Project that Would Destroy Forest Expands and Continues in Atlanta

Resistance is heating up to plans by the City of Atlanta to build a mass, “Cop City” training facility, a development that would destroy hundreds of acres of woodland and green space, while an LA based Hollywood company also seeks to expand an existing movie production area. Last week, as Fox News reports: Environmental activists... Read Full Article
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Lessons & Analysis From Opposing the Proud Boys at Clackamette Park in Oregon City

Critical report back and analysis on recent mobilization against the Proud Boys in so-called Oregon City, Oregon. Cover Image via Daniel V Media For the past couple months there has been a flag wave held at the Berry Hill Shopping Center in so-called Oregon City on Fridays. Attendance has ranged between 40 and 60 participants.... Read Full Article
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Pennsylvania Prisoners start Hunger Strike against Isolation Practices

Report on prisoner hunger-strike organized in a facility located just outside of so-called Philadelphia, PA. By Lena Mercer, Perilous Chronicle On June 23, 20-30 prisoners at SCI Phoenix, a 3,800 bed state prison facility near Philadelphia, began a hunger strike. The strikers are protesting against the use of an Intensive Management Unit (IMU), or segregation... Read Full Article
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System Fail 9 – Chile: The Frontline Against Neoliberalism

In this episode we look back at the wave of revolts in Chile that began in 2019, before being interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. CW: Includes discussion about sexual assault, torture, and scenes of police brutality. English and Spanish, with hard-coded English subtitles. In this episode we look back at the wave of revolts that... Read Full Article
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Friday, June 25, 2021

Statement from the Gathering of Resistances and Rebellions in Oaxaca

Statement from the Gathering of Resistances and Rebellions, which took place on June 19 in the community of El Rebollero, Cuatro Venados, Oaxaca To the Zapatista Army of National Liberation To the National Indigenous Congress To the Indigenous Governing Council To the Squadron 421 To the Free and Independent Media Gathered in El Rebollero, the... Read Full Article
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UFO Report Provides No New Information But Plenty Of Fodder For Cold Warrior Policymakers

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has released its hotly anticipated UFO report, which at nine pages in length with no new information is about as spectacular a letdown for UFO enthusiasts as you could possibly get. It does however contain multiple lines which will likely be useful for cold warrior policymakers going forward, just as we forecast earlier.

In summary:

The ODNI says there do appear to be unidentified objects in US airspace behaving in ways the government can’t yet explain.
No direct mention is made of the possibility that these objects could be extraterrestrial in origin.
Direct mention is made of the possibility that UFOs could be highly advanced Russian or Chinese technology.
UFOs “pose a hazard to safety of flight” and could be a national security threat.

Those last two points are the only ones which US policymakers of any significance are going to pay attention to.

“UAP [Unidentified Aerial Phenomena] clearly pose a safety of flight issue and may pose a challenge to U.S. national security,” the report says. “Safety concerns primarily center on aviators contending with an increasingly cluttered air domain. UAP would also represent a national security challenge if they are foreign adversary collection platforms or provide evidence a potential adversary has developed either a breakthrough or disruptive technology.”

“UAP pose a hazard to safety of flight and could pose a broader danger if some instances represent sophisticated collection against U.S. military activities by a foreign government or demonstrate a breakthrough aerospace technology by a potential adversary,” the report adds.

“Some UAP may be technologies deployed by China, Russia, another nation, or a non-governmental entity,” it also says.

UAP REPORT: RUBIO FULL STATEMENT: Rubio is the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Vice Chairman Marco Rubio (R-FL) https://t.co/MKoxgQJytp pic.twitter.com/oNx3jRpZDU

— Kellie Meyer (@KellieMeyerNews) June 25, 2021

While the authors of the report also say they “currently lack data to indicate any UAP are part of a foreign collection program or indicative of a major technological advancement by a potential adversary,” the fact that Russia or China magically leapfrogging US technology by centuries seventy years ago has been validated as a possibility by the report is a gift to cold warriors eager to ramp up aggressions and inflame a high-budget arms race against those nations.

Among those cold warriors is Senator Marco Rubio, one of the handful of individuals behind this strange new UFO narrative’s entry into mainstream attention. Rubio released the following statement shortly before the report was published:

“For years, the men and women we trust to defend our country reported encounters with unidentified aircraft that had superior capabilities, and for years their concerns were often ignored and ridiculed. This report is an important first step in cataloging these incidents, but it is just a first step. The Defense Department and Intelligence Community have a lot of work to do before we can actually understand whether these aerial threats present a serious national security concern.”

As I’ve been saying repeatedly, the odds of this new UFO narrative entering mainstream consciousness courtesy of the Pentagon, military/intelligence operatives, and corrupt warmongering politicians at the same moment the US begins implementing a new cold war against Russia and China is far too convenient for mere coincidence to be a likely explanation. We can expect to see the hawkish agendas of warmongers like Marco Rubio further advanced by this new UFO narrative going forward.

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Sorry for no audio on this one; we’re out of town today.

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source https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2021/06/26/ufo-report-provides-no-new-information-but-plenty-of-fodder-for-cold-warrior-policymakers/

New video by Unicorn Riot on YouTube - go check it out ;-)

Watch on YouTube here: Derek Chauvin Sentencing Hearing
Via Christian Gasper

Into The Unprecedented

Listen to “Into The Unprecedented”:

“Look at her, just staring at her phone like a zombie,” the middle-aged woman said in a loud stage whisper which was clearly intended to be heard.

“She’s sitting in an art museum, right in front of a genuine Monet, and she’s staring at her phone,” said her husband, not even bothering to whisper.

“Guarantee you if someone had shown Monet an iPhone while he was painting that piece of shit he woulda dropped his brush and forgotten all about it,” said the girl without looking up.

The woman gasped and sputtered. The man’s face went dark.

“Piece of shit?” he said. “Piece of shit? Do you have any idea who Monet was? How lucky you are to be able to experience his work? And you sit there staring at your phone without so much as a glance at the masterpieces you’re surrounded by?”

The girl ignored him.

“The good Lord never saw fit to give us a child,” said the woman. “But if he had, I like to think we’d have taught her to have some respect for her elders. And if we’d have caught her staring at her phone in an art museum, I’d have taken it away and thrown it in the trash.”

The girl looked up. Her eyes were strange.

“You do get that I’m not actually ‘staring at my phone’, right? Like, you know I’m having actual conversations and engaging with people and taking in information, don’t you? Do you understand that there’s information on this screen that I’m actively interacting with? This isn’t a TV, I’m not just passively staring at it.”

“TikTok videos,” the man sneered.

“I mean yeah, sometimes,” said the girl. “Sometimes I’m looking at other teenagers figuring out their bodies and their appearance and stuff. I know it’s always been cool to make fun of literally anything teenage girls like, because we can’t possibly have interests and values that are worth treating with human dignity, but you know what? There’s also some great stuff on TikTok. Not just dancing, but like people sharing their insights and experiences to help each other understand life better and sort through their trauma and confusion and figure out their place in the world, and it’s really helpful and I’m really glad it’s a thing. It’s helping me unpack and dismiss all the weird ideas your generation keeps trying to force down our throats. I’ve learned more useful stuff about life and growing up from TikTok than I ever learned from my parents.”

“And yeah I use it to socialize; I’ve got friends all around the world and I connect with them more deeply than lots of people ever connect with anyone, even though we’ve never met in real life. But I also use my phone to get information about what’s going on in the world. I’ve got access to everything humanity has ever produced right here, including every painting in this museum and every Monet in existence. Any time I get curious about something I just look it up and suddenly that information is in my head. Your generation grew up just taking in whatever information they fed your brain in school or on TV, and guess what? A lot of it was crap. My generation is raised on an information network that’s like one giant brain made up of billions of little individual brains interconnecting all around the planet.”

The girl stood up and faced them.

“I’m not ‘staring at my phone’. I’m interfacing with the evolution of the human species. I’m riding the cusp of a giant wave into something that has never ever existed before into a future that none of us can even imagine. My generation is not like yours. The boundaries which confined the development of your minds simply are not there for us. We are an entirely different kind of creature, and we are much better for it. Your stale, repetitive enclosed thought systems have brought our world to the precipice of ecological collapse and nuclear war; everything you have handed down to us has been as colossal a failure as anything could possibly be. And you presume to teach us what to do with our phones?”

As she spoke, a pair of giant black wings full of glowing ones and zeros spread outward from her back.

“We are not like you. We will not perpetuate your bigoted, destructive, closed-minded faceplant of a worldview into the future. We will turn this world around, and we will do it by tearing down all the old models that you and your ancestors have built for us. We will be the architects of the new world. It will be a boundless world, a healthy world, a much, much better world, and guess what? We’ll even let you be a part of it. We’ll even take care of you as you age your way out of existence. We will fix all of your mistakes for you, and we will carry your helpless, hopeless minds into the new world with us, because we are good, and because we care. So please, at least try and have a little respect.”

“But where is this all headed?” said the woman, clutching her husband tightly. “What you’re describing is very frightening.”

“How should I know?” the girl replied. “We are riding into the unprecedented together.”

With that she strode out the museum door, phone in hand, and took off into the sky.

__________________________

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Featured image by Steven Depolo, Creative Commons 3.0

source https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2021/06/25/into-the-unprecedented/

Thursday, June 24, 2021

This Is America #142: Resisting the Curfew in NYC; A Discussion on ‘Desert’

Welcome, to This Is America, June 25th, 2021. On today’s show, first we feature an interview with Black House News, about the ongoing resistance to curfews happening in New York and attempts by the State to hold onto control of the streets in a post-pandemic and post-rebellion world. We also discuss how the terrain in... Read Full Article
by via It's Going Down

The Right And Wrong Lessons From Afghanistan: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Listen to a reading of this article:

❖

Your efforts to understand the world will fail unless you account for the fact that (A) echo chamber dynamics have a vastly under-appreciated effect on the way we all take in information, and (B) that rich and powerful people are actively trying to manipulate your perception of reality.

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The correct lesson from Afghanistan instantly beginning to revert back to Taliban control the moment the western occupation ends is not that the occupation needs to continue, it’s that it should never have happened in the first place.

“Oh no, bad things are happening because we’re leaving!” No, bad things are happening because you went in. You spent two decades hammering that poor nation with bombs and war crimes, and now they’re just going right back to where they were before you inflicted that upon them. Everything that’s happening in Afghanistan today is the fault of the invaders.

The argument that the occupation has been a boon for human rights is just plain false, and is premised on the idea that the western empire should invade every nation with illiberal cultural values and force it to change at gunpoint. Even if that ridiculous premise were accepted, it has been clearly established that such a thing is impossible.

How fucking obnoxious is it that westerners are now wringing their hands over the fact that when they stop forcing Afghanistan to be a certain way at gunpoint, the fate of Afghanistan starts being determined by Afghans? Enough with this white man’s burden bullshit, freaks.

❖

Don’t tell people not to fantasize about Jeff Bezos’ icy body spinning through the vacuum of space for all eternity. It’s kink-shaming.

❖

How to be an American leftist:

Focus exclusively on domestic policy in the most warmongering nation on earth
Criticize governments who are resisting US interventionism instead of US interventionism
Pay more attention to obscure abstract concepts than nonstop mass murder

❖

US politicians always have Twitter bios like “Father of Kelly, husband of Leanne (she’s the real boss!), VERY amateur shower singer,” instead of like, “Rapist of Syria, murderer of Yemeni kids, destroyer of your children’s future.”

❖

Yemen alone completely invalidates the moral authority of the US-centralized power alliance to determine what rules the world should play by.

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It’s not actually possible to be excessively critical of the US empire. There’s a common notion that there needs to be some kind of “balance” between criticism of the US power alliance and its enemies. No there doesn’t; the US government is objectively far worse than any other. No other government is circling the planet with hundreds of military bases, working to destroy any nation which disobeys it, and waging nonstop wars which have killed millions and displaced tens of millions just since the turn of this century.

Criticizing the US empire far more than its rivals is balance; criticizing it the same as you’d criticize US-targeted governments is what would be imbalanced, because the US and its allies are far, far more murderous and destructive than anyone else. It should be criticized more. You’re not being impartial if you pretend the US is as bad as China, Russia, Iran, etc; you’re being heavily biased in favor of the US, because you’re greatly helping to advance the interests of the far worse government by placing it on equal footing with the others.

You see so many dry, elitist wankers acting like they’re being detached and impartial by treating all governments equally, when in reality they’re being anything but. All governments are not equal; one is clearly and demonstrably far, far more destructive than any of the others.

❖

It’s just so amazing how many leftists yell at journalists like Aaron Maté and Glenn Greenwald for using Tucker Carlson’s show to get important perspectives out to a mainstream audience compared to how few leftists yell at other mass media outlets for refusing to platform those important perspectives at all. Like there’s a whole sector of Twitter which seems to spend all its energy bitching about anti-imperialists going on Carlson to share anti-imperialist perspectives, and if you search their tweets you’ll find zero posts yelling at CNN or MSNBC for never platforming anti-imperialists.

Dissident ideas need to get out to the mainstream. The fact that no other outlets ever platform those ideas besides Tucker Carlson is the thing which should outrage people.

❖

If you’re not despised by the Intercept-TYT-Bellingcat media faction, your work probably isn’t that good.

❖

So much of what the CIA used to do covertly it now does overtly; NED, working in media punditry, etc. Pretty soon they’ll just be openly selling narcotics door to door like Girl Scout cookies.

❖

Fun fact: among people who tell you you’re only socialist because you’ve never studied economics, exactly zero percent of them have ever read a book by a Marxian economist.

❖

If I were a thieving oligarch or a murderous imperialist I would be very happy that Americans are all focused on arguing about critical race theory.

❖

Come read my superintelligent Marxist essay about why the left should remain a highly exclusive club no bigger than the size of a public library speaking event. Medium says it’s just a 97-minute read. It’s got over six views and counting. Hope you like footnotes!

❖

Hey remember when Wonder Woman came out the same year Hillary Clinton was supposed to become president and invade Syria, and the villain was a guy who murders villagers with poison gas, including children? That was a bit weird, huh?

Like there was literally a scene where Wonder Woman finds a village of civilians killed with poison gas, and screams about how awful the bad guys are for “Killing people they cannot see! Children. Children!!” How many other superhero movies have you seen where the bad guy just kills kids with poison gas?

Hillary had been openly planning to invade Syria with tens of thousands of US troops to cripple Assad’s air defenses and control Syrian air space, a very dangerous and deadly move which would have required a lot of consent manufacturing.

And you can say well it was set in World War 1, poison gas was a big thing then. Okay, but why set it in World War 1? The character Wonder Woman didn’t exist until 1941. There was no reason it had to be set during a time when poison gas was a big thing, but they chose to anyway.

❖

They say youth is wasted on the young. No, youth is wasted on schoolwork.

❖

Psychedelics are useful not for the hallucinations they provide but for the hallucinations they remove.

❖

I have a conspiracy theory that plutocrats conspire with secretive government agencies to advance murderous and exploitative agendas, and I have another conspiracy theory that some deep force of nature within us is conspiring to awaken humanity from the propaganda of our rulers.

Humanity is becoming more conscious. Awkwardly, sloppily, like a toddler, we’re becoming more and more aware of what’s going on inside us and what’s going on outside us. There are a lot of ugly things which wish to remain hidden as the light expands, but they can’t hide forever.

_________________________

The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here.

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Featured image via Wikimedia Commons.

source https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2021/06/24/the-right-and-wrong-lessons-from-afghanistan-notes-from-the-edge-of-the-narrative-matrix/

Nationwide Call to Action for the Abolition of I.C.E and to Free All Immigrant Prisoners

Call for a day of action for the abolition of ICE from Occupy ICE PDX. In 2018 here in Portland we started the biggest wave of anti-ICE action the country has seen with the occupation of our local ICE facility for over a month, for the following year or two, folks across the country and... Read Full Article
by via It's Going Down

NYC Anarchist Film Festival: Call for Contributions

Call for contributions for the upcoming NYC Anarchist Film Festival. Deadline is August 1st. Event on September 10th. The NYC Anarchist Film Festival is seeking contributions celebrating the irrepressible spirits of solidarity and resistance amid a world in crisis. Now in its 15th year, the AFF has showcased stories of people across the globe who... Read Full Article
by via It's Going Down

Water Protectors Lock to Enbridge Drilling Equipment Boring Line 3 Under River

Report from the Giniw Collective on a recent direct action against the Line 3 in so-called Hubbard County, Minnesota. Several Water Protectors locked to a Horizontal Directional Drill (HDD) being used by Enbridge to bore its Line 3 tar sands pipeline under the Straight River in Hubbard County, Minnesota. Enbridge has over 5,000 workers in... Read Full Article
by via It's Going Down

Indigenous Prisoners in Struggle in Chiapas Show Solidarity with Fidencio Aldama

Two letters from Indigenous prisoners in struggle in Chiapas showing their solidarity with Yaqui political prisoner, Fidencio Aldama CERSS NO. 10 Comitán, Chiapas, Mexico Dear Compañero Fidencio Aldama, From this prison, I send you an affectionate and combative salute. From inside these four walls, I want to express my solidarity with you, knowing that it... Read Full Article
by via It's Going Down

Wednesday, June 23, 2021

The US government has shut down multiple news media websites based in the Middle East, including Iran’s state-owned Press TV, and al-Masirah TV which is owned by the Houthi group Ansarullah in Yemen. The Department of Justice said on Tuesday it had seized 36 Iranian-linked websites, claiming without evidence that they were associated with “either disinformation activities or violent organizations” and were shut down for a violation of US sanctions.

This would be the same US government that is imprisoning Julian Assange for exposing US war crimes, the same US government which paid for the weapons used to destroy more than 20 Palestinian media outlets in Gaza last month, the same US government whose unipolar domination of the planet is made possible by the journalism-destroying propaganda of the media-owning plutocratic class in alliance with sociopathic government agencies.

This would also be the same US government which constantly pays lip service to the need to protect the freedom of the press, as part of the “rules-based international order” it purports to uphold in the world.

He tweeted this the month before the US government shut down dozens of Middle East-based news media websites and weeks before US-sponsored military explosives were used to destroy over 20 Palestinian media outlets in Gaza, all while Julian Assange wastes away in Belmarsh Prison. https://t.co/iZw7BxxhoV

— Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ (@caitoz) June 23, 2021

The Biden administration has been bleating “rules-based order” so frequently and with such obvious meaninglessness that even The New York Times voiced some criticism of the way that vapid, idiotic phrase is being used instead of the well-defined term “international law”. As Medea Benjamin and Nicolas JS Davies wrote for Salon last month:

For Blinken, the concept of a “rules-based order” seems to serve mainly as a cudgel with which to attack China and Russia. At a May 7 UN Security Council meeting, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov suggested that instead of accepting the already existing rules of international law, the United States and its allies are trying to come up with “other rules developed in closed, non-inclusive formats, and then imposed on everyone else.”

…

Today, far from being a leader of the international rules-based system, the United States is an outlier. It has failed to sign or ratify about 50 important and widely accepted multilateral treaties on everything from children’s rights to arms control. Its unilateral sanctions against Cuba, Iran, Venezuela and other countries are themselves violations of international law, and the new Biden administration has shamefully failed to lift these illegal sanctions, ignoring UN Secretary-General António Guterres’ request to suspend such unilateral coercive measures during the pandemic.

Indeed, US government officials babble endlessly about “rules”, and the “rules” are literally always tools used for the benefit of the US government, and the US government literally always flouts those “rules” exponentially worse than any other government on earth.

"rules-based order" https://t.co/2MgKWD8Bs3

— Dave DeCamp (@DecampDave) June 1, 2021

What the phrase “rules-based order” actually means is Washington-based order. It means a world order imposed by the US government and its lackey states on pain of devastation and death, which exists solely to keep the US at the head of a unipolar empire. It means do as I say, not as I do. It means rules for thee but not for me. It means we decide what happens based on what suits our interests.

If you peel away all the narrative spin and outward politeness, the US empire just looks like any other tyrannical force that has ever existed throughout human history, except it kills a lot more people than most of the others. In the old days the thugs with the most effective killing force would dominate everyone else using terror, wearing frightening battle costumes adorned with the body parts of their enemies. Nowadays they still dominate everyone else using terror, except they do it while wearing suits, and while waxing self-righteously about the “rules-based international order”. And they are much better at killing.

There is no other government on earth that is less qualified to impose any “order” upon the world. This is the only government on earth which has killed millions of people and displaced tens of millions just since the turn of this century, the only government on earth that is circling the planet with hundreds of military bases and working to destroy any nation which disobeys its dictates. Yemen alone completely delegitimizes any claim the US may have had to be the arbiter of “order” in the world, to say nothing of Iraq, Vietnam, Libya and all the other innumerable atrocities that this monstrous regime has inflicted upon our species.

The sooner humanity can extract the parasite that is the US empire from its skin, the better off the whole world will be.

____________________________

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source https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2021/06/23/rules-based-international-order-means-washington-based-international-order/

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