Filed under: international solidarity

TODAY, TOMORROW,  WEDNESDAY, 2pm Central [and additionally any other time] tweet:
Stand up for ‪#‎academicfreedom‬: Why is ‪#‎Palestine‬ taboo at @ColumbiaChi?http://chn.ge/MXMtpY

The Power Hour, Joyce Riley, Feb 24, 2014
Bullet Points, Navid Nasr, Voices of the 99 Percent Radio, posted Mar 5, 2014

An Italian Catholic journalist challenges the behavior and example of Pope FrancisEditor's Introduction: The following essay is the clearest clarion alarm we have seen in writing regarding the pontificate of Pope Francis. It is a jeremiad, but the Italian author, Mario Palmaro, makes his points with charity.

 
We are stuck in the Gaza strip – the world’s biggest open air prison, The Egyptian military closed the ” Rafah ” border for almost a month now !! Many Gazan patients, students, and others aren’t able to leave !! While the Israeli\Egyptian border ” Taba ” didn’t close for one single day !!
Today the Egyptians said that they will be opening ” Rafah ” tomorrow only to let people enter Gaza, but no one will be leaving the Gaza strip !!
What kind of treatment is this ?! coming from your Arab neighboring country ?!

RT | March 10, 2014

The British government has “disrespected” Scotland by keeping quiet about a nuclear leak at a Scottish-based reactor for two years, believes nationalist minister, Alex Salmond, all at a time of high tensions ahead of a referendum on independence.

A guest post by Nic Lewis

Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada-Garcia
 
Who What Why
 

Edward Snowden spoke today via video feed to an audience at this year’s South by Southwest. Here is the full discussion:

‘I used to be sick all the time’: Dozens of Americans who claim to be allergic to electromagnetic signals settle in small West Virginia town where WiFi is banned

 
NSA leaker Edward Snowden accused the U.S. surveillance agency of “setting fire to the future of the Internet,” and called Monday for the tech community to be “the firefighters.”
The former NSA contractor received a warm reception while speaking at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival remotely via video from Russia where he’s lived since having been granted temporary asylum.
Snowden appeared in front of a green-screen that showed Article One of the U.S. Constitution.

Five Passengers Didn't Board...
Mystery Iranian businessman...

 
Thesis + Antithesis = Synthesis
by Stephen Lendman
 
US-style diplomacy features bullying, bluster and coercion. Cowing other nations to comply with its diktats is longstanding Washington policy. Outliers face stiff reprisals.
 
Post-9/11, former Bush Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage notorious warned Pakistan, saying: “You will either accept our carpet of gold or we will carpet-bomb you back to the Stone Age.”
 

Post Libya invasion – Most of the cash / gold was forfeited to Goldman Sachs etc  (story here) This is after hustling Libyan Fund Managers for years…

http://youtu.be/XACSmFjieiQ Eric Draitser of StopImperialism.org appears briefly on RT to discuss recent comments from the so called “interim Prime Minister” of Ukraine Yatsenyuk regarding Russia’s military presence in Ukraine.  Draitser explains that his comments are part of the broader attempt to piece together a constructed narrative that justifies the claims of the Western media of Russian aggression in Crimea. 

I wanted to get this up end of last week.....A bit late, but, still important!Syria to miss deadline to destroy 12 sites- so says an unidentified officialYes, that is right an unidentified official is providing us with a narrative. But, it's not just narrative creation it's also prognosticating. The unidentified official (who knows who this really is?) is speaking certainties nine days before the said official could/should be certain.Counting chickens/unhatched eggs. You know?

Over the weekend, Marilou Johanek took apart the Ohio Republicans' elaborate excuses for strangling voters' access to the polls and concluded that it's just plain old voter suppression.

Press TV – March 10, 2014

Former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder says the European Union (EU) is responsible for the situation in Ukraine’s Crimea as its policy toward the Eastern European country was erroneous in the first place.
Schroeder made the comments on Sunday in Hamburg during a press event, in which he said that Brussels made a mistake in the outset when it offered Ukraine an association agreement on “either/or” terms.

When news hit last week that China’s defense spending will increase by 12.2 percent this year to $132 billion, pundits and politicians told us to be scared. I’m not:

Via Ian Bremmer in Politico.
Note that this is using a conservative estimate of U.S. military and national security spending. There is much in the black budget that would add to the gap.

Last week, I argued in a piece at Reason that Russia did not decide to intervene militarily in Ukraine because of alleged “weakness” on the part of U.S. foreign policy, despite what hawks would have us believe. The talking point, especially but not exclusively from Republicans, is that Putin saw the Obama administration’s reluctance to use military force in, for example, Syria, and therefore calculated that he could get away with it, without risking a harsh U.S. reaction.

by Judith Curry A changing climate means that weather-related disasters like droughts, wildfires, storms [and] floods are potentially going to be costlier and they’re going to be harsher. – President Obama Justin Gillis of the NYTimes responded to the statements … Continue reading →

By Yossi Gurvitz | Yesh Din | March 9, 2014

By Friends of Al-Aqsa  November 7, 2013

The need to boycott Israel is growing

MEMO | March 10, 2014

Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) has issued an unprecedented attack on a Christian conference taking place in Bethlehem this week, accusing organisers of “using religion for the purpose of incitement”.

United States Marine Corps
March 9, 2014
2nd Marine Regiment
Camp Lejeune, N.C.
Warlords, Norwegians prepare for Cold Response
By Staff Sgt. Steve Cushman | 2nd Battalion
Giskaas, Norway: On March 12, the Warlords of 2nd Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment, 2nd Marine Division will begin the annual multinational and multilateral training exercise, Cold Response 2014.

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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Bertolt Brecht: Selections on war
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Bertolt Brecht
From Threepenny Novel (1934)
Translated by Christopher Isherwood

War-Song
And now they’re off to the war

Virginia food stamp slashers George Allen and Don BeyerWhen Jim Moran announced his retirement in January, first politician out-of-the-box declaring an intention to run was multimillionaire car dealer and ex-Lieutenant Governor Don Beyer. It's almost as though he knew and was prepared. He's certainly the Establishment choice for the progressive D+16 Arlington and Fairfax counties suburban DC district (Obama 68% in 2008 ands 2012).

JERUSALEM (AP) — Israeli guards shot and killed a Jordanian judge on Monday who the Israelis said “tried to grab a rifle from a soldier” (uh huh) at the border crossing between the West Bank and Jordan.
The shooting took place at the Allenby crossing as the man was going from Jordan into the West Bank, the Israeli army said.

Before the BIS (Bank of International Settlements or The Central bank’s bank, and the IMF (and other MFs) tighten their grip on your real wealth, and or use negative austerity measures….. We need to invoke POSITIVE Austerity. P.A. – means cutting elite services like Corporate welfare / subsidies, the police state, the MIC, SIC, Fed interest, and bloated bureaucracy etc… 

1629 – Charles I of England dissolves Parliament, beginning the eleven-year period known as the Personal Rule.
1762 – French Huguenot Jean Calas, who had been wrongly convicted of killing his son, dies after being tortured by authorities; the event inspired Voltaire to begin a campaign for religious tolerance and legal reform.
1804 – Louisiana Purchase: In St. Louis, Missouri, a formal ceremony is conducted to transfer ownership of the Louisiana Territory from France to the United States.

We’ve seen the rollout of the MSM propaganda using over-the-top hyperbole and flat-out lies to try to demonize Russia in the lead up to the “new cold war.” But is this just part of the dialectic, trying to get us to buy into one side or the other in a rigged game? Should we devolve into mere spectators choosing sides in a squabble between #TeamObama and #TeamPutin? Join us this week on The Corbett Report as we explore whether the enemy of our enemy is indeed our friend.
CLICK HERE to download the audio mp3 of this podcast.

By Patrick Cockburn 

The defense industry dreams of genies. That’s because it is really hard to get the genie back into bottle after you let it loose. Really, the only option after releasing a genie is to invent new, expensive ways to combat it. And that’s been the story of America’s persistent gift to posterity – the “nuclear […]

When instability is stirred up in the streets by a minority group too small to change a government in the polls but big enough to look like a massive social democratic movement in the street, it can lead to one of at least three kinds of coups. In the first type, the domestic military intervenes […]

Officially, US debt stands at more than $17 trillion. In reality, it is many times more. The cost of the US invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq may be more than six trillion dollars. President Obama’s illegal invasion of Libya cost at least a billion dollars and left that country devastated. The costs of US regime […]

Editorial note: The following is the text of a talk given at the National Summit to Reassess the US-Israel "Special Relationship" held in Washington, D.C., on March 7. As is the case in so many other ways, the conservative movement’s position on the state of Israel isn’t what it used to be. Just as what […]

(Editors Note) Congratulations to Australian Friends of Palestine Association (AFOPA). Your action will inspire continued growth of the BDS movement during 2014. The boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement has again shown that it represents an increasingly effective form of solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for freedom, justice and equality
 

With Climate Change, energy policy and environmental protection shaping up as one of the most important cache of issues facing America's political elites, I've been trying to figure out why DCCC chairman Steve Israel would recruit so many awful candidates with views on the environment identical to Republicans.

TweetThe Libyan patriots continue to take their country back from the puppet government forced upon them by NATO and the US. The port of E Sidar in the East of Libya received the oil tanker "Morning Glory" said to be flying the North Korean Flag but there is no exact knowledge that it is a ship from North Korea.

From the Vietnam War to the Iraq War, facile and wildly inaccurate comparisons between foreign adversaries and Adolf Hitler have served the interests of politicians hell-bent on propelling the United States into war. Often, those politicians succeeded. The carnage and the endless suffering have been vast.
Now, Hillary Clinton is ratcheting up her own Hitler analogies. She knows as well as anyone the power they can generate for demonizing a targeted leader.

The extent to which 21st Century American culture is imbued by anti-Arab racism

Perhaps more worrying than the interference itself are its potential implications. As Russia’s every move is now being scrutinized for a possible military response to the ongoing crisis, the specter of a larger military operation now hangs over Eastern Europe. Part of the decade-long encirclement of Russia by NATO and deliberate provocations on Russia’s doorstep, this process of brinksmanship now threatens to plunge the region into a war the consequences of which cannot be foreseen, let alone contained.

It is the Unlimited Imperialists along the lines of Alexander, Rome, Napoleon and Hitler who are now in charge of conducting American foreign policy. The factual circumstances surrounding the outbreaks of both the First World War and the Second World War currently hover like twin Swords of Damocles over the heads of all humanity.
The post American Unlimited Imperialism: Now Ukraine appeared first on BSNEWS.

The United States strives for world domination, hegemony wherever possible, their main occupation for over a century, it’s what they do for a living. The United States, NATO and the European Union form The Holy Triumvirate. The Holy Triumvirate has subsidiaries, chiefly The International Monetary Fund, World Bank, World Trade Organization, International Criminal Court … all help to keep in line those governments lacking the Holy Triumvirate Seal Of Approval

Polish Press Agency
March 7, 2014
12 US F-16s in Poland from next week

U.S. F-16s
Poland’s defence minister has said that 12 US F-16 aircraft should begin arriving in Poland on Monday and Tuesday, for “training exercises” following the Russian incursion into Crimea.

Attacks left 97 dead and 237 wounded across Iraq today. The
worst attack occurred south of Baghdad. Local officials blamed the attack on
the situation in neighboring Anbar province. Militants still control sections
of two major cities there and have staged attacks in nearby provinces.

What James Thurber called "The War Between Men and Women" seems to rage on without any signs of a truce.by KenI'm going to go out on a limb here and venture that in terms of ongoing hostilities Thurber's "war between men and women" makes the recent unpleasantness in Afghanistan look like a brief skirmish.

I am just back from the National Summit to Re-Assess the U.S.-Israel Special Relationship and will file reports of compelling remarks from speakers in days to come.
But I want to convey the importance of the conference here. The crowds were impressive. There were close to 300 people inside the National Press Club to hear a wide range of speakers denounce the role of the Israel lobby in our politics.

"♫Makin' a soundtrack for another planet to hear♫ on Episode101 - Ready To Go which features brand new sounds from Black Lips, Katie Herzig, Bombay Bicycle Club,