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For years, the home-oxygen industry has failed in myriad ways the million-plus Americans who struggle to breathe. Lincare, the country’s largest distributor of breathing equipment, has a decadeslong history of bilking Medicare and the elderly, as ProPublica has revealed. Philips Respironics hid serious problems with its sleep apnea machines, with devastating consequences, including reported deaths. Other large respiratory companies have paid multimillion-dollar fraud settlements.

But as the current session of Congress hurtles to a close, advocates for oxygen patients — in a seemingly improbable alliance with the companies that have victimized them — are making a final push for legislation that, among other things, would pay the scandal-scarred industry hundreds of millions of dollars more than it currently receives. The patients, many aged and infirm, have been besieging lawmakers with meetings, calls and emails, pressing them to pass the Supplemental Oxygen Access Reform, or SOAR, Act by the end of the year. The corporate and patient advocates vow that if the legislation fails in the current term, as seems possible, they will push to reintroduce it next year.

The SOAR Act would achieve two long-sought goals for the industry, which receives much of its revenues from Medicare. The bill would protect companies from additional reductions in their billings by removing oxygen from Medicare’s competitive bidding program, which has saved taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars. And it would make it far more difficult for the government to challenge those billings.

The patient groups, in turn, have their own goals: improving the industry’s notoriously poor service and assuring access to costly liquid oxygen for a relatively small group of the sickest patients. That form of oxygen is coveted by patients with advanced lung disease because it provides the high flows they need in easy-to-carry cylinders that last for hours. Emotional accounts of stricken patients, unable to obtain the equipment they need, have been prominent in the lobbying campaign to pass the measure.

“The current situation is pretty horrific,” said Susan Jacobs, pulmonary research nurse manager at Stanford University Medical Center, who has spent more than a decade studying access to oxygen therapy and supports the legislation. “Patients aren’t getting the oxygen devices they need or being educated or trained on use of that device. The SOAR Act addresses multiple issues.”

Jacobs and other advocates acknowledge the history of bad behavior by oxygen companies. “I used to feel like they are the enemy,” Jacobs said. Added Erika Sward, assistant vice president of national advocacy for the American Lung Association, another supporter of the SOAR Act: “Some of the companies were very much acting in bad faith when it came to taxpayer dollars.”

But the patient advocates are now backing the industry’s long-standing complaints that Medicare’s payment cuts have gone too far. “I have become convinced of this over the past five years or so,” Sward said. “They’re not being paid enough under competitive bidding. … I fully believe the suppliers are negotiating from a very good-faith perspective for patients.” She added: “Unless everyone is willing to compromise, nothing is going to change. Obviously they have a financial interest.” (Sward said the American Lung Association receives no funding from oxygen companies or trade groups.)

The SOAR Act, which now has a half dozen sponsors in the Senate and 31 in the House, was first introduced in late February by Louisiana Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy, a physician, and Democratic senators Mark Warner of Virginia and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota. “Respiratory care is lifesaving for so many patients, but too often access to this care is cost-prohibitive or simply not accessible,” said Warner, in a joint press release issued at the time. Cassidy, Warner and Klobuchar did not respond to requests for comment.

Beyond protecting against further Medicare rate cuts for items such as an oxygen concentrator (the bill would essentially freeze them at current levels), the SOAR Act would create a standardized medical form for authorizing suppliers’ claims; pay companies like Lincare to provide respiratory therapist services; and more than double what the companies are paid for liquid oxygen systems.

The bill is projected to cost taxpayers about $654 million over 10 years, according to a private study partly funded by industry (which the SOAR Act’s supporters have declined to share). The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has not yet prepared an estimate. Beneficiaries would also have to pay the companies more as part of their 20% Medicare copay.

Liquid oxygen has long been virtually unavailable even to Medicare beneficiaries who need it most. In 2004, before cuts in the government’s historically lavish payments for oxygen began kicking in, suppliers provided portable liquid oxygen equipment to more than 80,000 Americans.

Fewer than 4,000 Medicare patients received liquid oxygen in 2021, according to Medicare data. That’s a tiny portion of the 1.5 million Americans who now receive some form of supplemental oxygen. The bill’s advocates say there are thousands of Medicare beneficiaries who desperately need liquid oxygen to live more normal lives. “We’re ordering liquid,” Jacobs said. “Our [suppliers] are saying, ‘We don’t have it, and we can’t provide it.’ That’s not acceptable. Patients should be able to have enough oxygen to get out of their house. They’re unable to go to religious services, unable to see family, can’t go to a child’s graduation. These are heart-wrenching stories.”

Under the competitive bidding program that was launched in 2011, oxygen companies were legally required to provide liquid systems to any patient whose doctor prescribed them. But the companies insisted it was too expensive to do it at the rates the companies had agreed to in the bidding process. Providing liquid oxygen, which is stored at freezing temperatures under high pressure in special equipment, requires special trucks, frequent deliveries and hazmat-certified drivers.

Medicare enforcers never cracked down on the companies. Then, in 2019, the federal government “paused” the oxygen bidding program and many of its reimbursement rules — five years later, it can’t say when it may replace or reactivate them — freeing companies from any obligation to provide liquid oxygen.

In a statement, a Medicare spokesperson repeated the program’s long-standing contention, disputed by industry and patient groups alike, that access to liquid oxygen has not been a significant problem: “Although there were some complaints about contract suppliers refusing to furnish liquid oxygen, the suppliers came into compliance and agreed to furnish the liquid oxygen, so no [supplier] contracts were terminated as a result.”

The SOAR Act also includes what advocates call a “patient bill of rights” — and which they view as a major concession by the oxygen companies. Aimed at addressing the dismal service that has predominated, it and other parts of the bill would require suppliers to provide equipment setup assistance and monitoring, patient education and 24/7 coverage for emergencies as a condition for Medicare payment. (Left unresolved is how the federal government, whose enforcement record has historically been less than stellar, would police such rules.)

Lincare has long blamed problems on Medicare’s cuts and what it characterizes as the “flawed” competitive bidding program. The company told the agency in a 2017 letter that low reimbursements and “burdensome documentation requirements” had made it “next to impossible to continue providing quality services to beneficiaries.” Yet Lincare appears to collect substantial profits. It generated about $300 million in profit in 2023, on revenues of $2.4 billion, according to a former company executive. (Lincare declined to comment.) Rotech, another large company in the home respiratory business, was purchased this year for $1.36 billion, after recording $200 million in earnings for fiscal 2023.

Such profits make it possible for the industry to spend lavishly on Capitol Hill. Its lead trade group is the Council for Quality Respiratory Care, made up of six big manufacturers or distributors of oxygen equipment, including Lincare and Philips, and chaired by Lincare’s CEO. Since 2018, each of the six CQRC companies has reached at least one multimillion-dollar settlement with the government alleging it cheated Medicare. The corporations have typically denied wrongdoing.

Lobbying payments by the trade group and its member companies on reimbursement issues have totaled more than $1.4 million since the start of 2023. CQRC’s outside PR firm won an industry “advocacy” award for its 2016 campaign in support of legislation slowing oxygen reimbursement cuts, where it boasted of generating 29,000 emails to members of Congress. Through such efforts, the award commendation read, “an engaged community of concerned citizens was created to help support CQRC’s efforts.”

In a statement responding to ProPublica’s questions, CQRC praised the SOAR Act for providing “long-overdue Medicare reforms” and correcting service woes that patients and their advocates have often blamed on the industry. The trade group blamed “current law” and “chronic underfunding” for leaving patients “often unable to access the medically necessary home respiratory treatments their doctors prescribe,” but it said the bill would establish “clear patient protections and supplier responsibilities” while protecting Medicare beneficiaries from “potential fraud and abuse.”

Meanwhile, a new government-funded academic study is challenging the industry’s claims about the purported harms of competitive bidding for oxygen services. Published in late October in JAMA Internal Medicine, the investigation examined Medicare data to weigh the bidding program’s impact on patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, by far the largest group of Medicare oxygen patients.

Its conclusion: Competitive bidding saved taxpayers and patients hundreds of millions of dollars, without curbing their access to oxygen or hurting their health. Dr. Kevin Duan, an assistant professor of respiratory medicine at the University of British Columbia and the article’s lead author, told ProPublica his team’s review found no evidence of harm: “No drop in claims, no change in clinical outcomes.” Duan said the study has sparked a backlash from the measure’s advocates. “I knew this was directly questioning a part of the SOAR Act,” he told ProPublica. “I feel like I walked into a firestorm.”

“We don’t have a horse in this race,” Duan said. “There’s a lot of blaming the competitive bidding program without much data. Rarely do we have high-quality evidence that can directly inform a piece of legislation. It shouldn’t be ignored.”

Doris Burke contributed research.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Peter Elkind.

On September 28, 2023, Samuel Shahramanyan, the last president of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic, better known to its ethnic Armenian citizens as Artsakh, signed a ceasefire with Azerbaijan in which the latter nation agreed to end its brutal siege of the prior provided that the NKR kindly agreed to cease to exist. On the first day of 2024 this genocidal “peace” deal formally went into effect but not before the last 100,000 citizens of Artsakh abandoned their ancestral homeland to run for their lives.

In many ways, this was the most shockingly successful genocide of the Twenty-First Century with thousands of years of culture and history obliterated with the click of a pen, but the final chapter of this final solution actually began several years earlier like so many others, with an American-sponsored bloodbath. After years of careful planning and hording high-tech weaponry, Recep Erdogan’s revanchist NATO sultanate of Turkey decided to reenact the Armenian Genocide by micromanaging a brutal proxy assault on the contested territory of Artsakh in 2020 using the neighboring Ottoman puppet state of Azerbaijan like a hammer.

Armed to the teeth with both Turkish and Israeli drones along with tens of millions of dollars in American cluster munitions, Azerbaijan’s notoriously ruthless strongman, Ilham Aliyev, laid siege to the supposedly treaty-protected Nagorno-Karabakh Republic, bombarding crowded civilian city centers and shelling the refugees who dared to flee from them. Over 6,000 people were slain in just over one month and another 90,000 were forcibly displaced under the threat of genocide. What population that remained was herded into the last corner of their territory as it was cut in half and totally surrounded by heavily armed Turkic gestapo.

A single road was left open connecting Artsakh to the Armenian mainland. In late 2022 that road was closed, and a crippling ten-month long blockade followed, barring the already impoverished and shellshocked people of the NKR from all food and medicine. In September of last year, Azerbaijan struck again, easily routing the cornered nation’s last remaining military positions within 24 hours and forcing its besieged government to concede to its own erasure. It was a strange and lonesome ending to a long and storied resistance movement. An ending that felt almost unfathomably anticlimactic to anyone actually familiar with Armenian history.

Ethnic Armenian settlements have existed in the region known as Nagorno-Karabakh for over 3,000 years, often at the mercy of the constantly competing Ottoman and Russian empires. Artsakh was just one piece of the ancient Christian region of Armenia which had once stretched across Eastern Turkey and deep into the Caucuses of modern-day Russia and Western Iran. Much of this territory along with 1.5 million Armenians was erased by the Ottomans during the gruesome final days of their vampire empire in one of the darkest chapters of the First World War.

That same damnable war also led to the rise of the Soviet Union which would ultimately include what little remained of Armenia as well as the neighboring Turkish outpost of Azerbaijan. In a typically cruel attempt to divide and conquer, the Bolsheviks arbitrarily incorporated the Armenian region of Artsakh into the Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan in spite of the vehement protests of the Armenian partisans who had helped them dethrone the Czar. Repeated requests for sovereignty nearly broke out into open warfare before the Kremlin finally caved and established the Nagorno-Karabakh Oblast within Soviet Azerbaijan in 1923.

But the movement to return Artsakh to Armenian rule never ceased and when peaceful attempts by the oblast to break away from Azerbaijan failed during the waning days of the Soviet experiment, a brutal ethnic conflict erupted into the First Nagorno-Karabakh War which raged on for 6 long years between 1988 and 1994. The ensuing carnage resulted in tens of thousands of fatalities, hundreds of thousands of refugees, and unspeakable atrocities committed by both sides. An uncomfortable peace was finally brokered by France, Russia and the United States in a coalition known as the Minsk Group but the people of Artsakh didn’t need meddlesome outsiders to tell them who they were.

After all, if Azerbaijan had the right to independence from the Russian Federation, then why shouldn’t Artsakh have the right to their own independence from Azerbaijan? And so, the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic boldly declared its independence with a popular referendum in 1991 without the recognition of a single UN member state, including Armenia, and I believe that it is this silent betrayal, the betrayal of nation states against nation states, that ultimately dammed Artsakh to its tragic fate over thirty years later.

The most disturbing thing about the strange and lonesome final days of Artsakh is that quite literally every single nation state touching that region, friend or foe, found some way to fuck those people over and few states fucked Artsakh harder than the Armenian fatherland. The final ceasefire that proved to be the final nail in Artsakh’s coffin was actually built on the internationally brokered ceasefire that officially ended the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War in 2020 while handing over half of Artsakh to Azerbaijan and affording them the territorial advantage to take the rest of the Republic four years later. This oddly tragic ceasefire was brokered by the original three nations of the Minsk Group along with Azerbaijan and Armenia but conspicuously excluded any representatives from the Republic of Artsakh and also seemed to exclude the consent of the citizens that Armenia supposedly represents, who were nothing short of infuriated to learn of their nation’s act of diplomatic betrayal.

In fact, while this ceasefire may have temporarily silenced the rifles on the frontlines, it also led to months of riots back home in Yerevan, nearly a year of open upheaval that saw crowds of irate citizens seizing parliament buildings and beating their supposed representatives half to death in the streets. Scores of high-ranking Armenian officials resigned in disgust, including the nation’s own Minister of Defense, and an alleged coup launched by members of the Armenian Military was barely thwarted in 2021. That’s because representative democracy only truly represents the will of the highest bidder and in Armenia that bidder has become the United States who have sickeningly played both sides of the trenches in this conflict for the same reasons that they turned Ukraine into a geopolitical boobytrap, to sow discord amongst the ranks of its rivals.

After arming their mortal enemies in Azerbaijan for years with multi-million-dollar military hardware, the United States has taken to simultaneously dangling NATO membership over Armenia’s heads like scraps to a beggar that they put out in the cold themselves. In fact, Armenia spent the two weeks prior to Azerbaijan’s final assault on Artsakh engaged in joint military exercises with the United States intended to prepare them for “evaluation” on NATO eligibility, in spite or perhaps because of the fact that Armenia is already a member of Russia’s own NATO-style military alliance, the Collective Security Treaty Organization aka the CSTO. This game of ballistic Caucasian footsie has been going on for years and it’s likely what inspired Russia to ignore its own security obligations to Armenia when Azerbaijan launched airstrikes within their borders during the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War in 2020. You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to conclude that this is precisely what Washington is after, especially when you remember that they sold Baku the bombs that struck the fatherland.

But sadly, Armenia has become just corrupt and desperate enough to fall for this shell game just like Kiev did. That shiny NATO dream of a Coca-cola in every fridge and an Apache Helicopter on every pad. Thousands of years of pride and resistance down the shitter, all so a few thugs in Yerevan can have a whisper of a chance at joining the same military alliance that arms their old chums in Turkey. Not that Sultan Erdogan gives a flying fuck about any empire but his own. His expressed goal in this whole sorry sorted affair is actually just to pave over Artsakh in order to turn it into an off-ramp for China’s Belt and Road Initiative known as the Middle Corridor. But Israel can live with that just so long as Turkey doesn’t open that corridor through Iran, so they’ve gladly filled in for their Yankee overlords as Azerbaijan’s biggest arms supplier in order to convince them to tear a page from their own playbook and choose genocide over diplomacy.

If your head hurts that’s because this schizophrenic skullduggery is absolutely batshit crazy but it’s also precisely what states do and it’s what states have always done. They rise, they fall, they fuck each other over, and they devour entire nations like Artsakh in the process just to spit them back out again. Contrary to western lore, a nation is not a government built on the fickle materialism of blood and soil. A nation in its truest form is a tribal community bound by a shared history, culture, and vision for the future. The state on the other hand is nothing but a cartel designed to capture a nation behind its borders and destroy any real sense of community that once bound it with a monopoly on the use of force and the shifting territorial ambitions of the elites that such a caste system inevitably creates.

Artsakh was a great nation destroyed by a state and that state wasn’t Turkey or Azerbaijan or even the United States of America, it was Armenia, with its corrupt elites and its globalist neoliberal ambitions. This tragedy is a warning in the shape of a self-inflicted genocide. Artsakh thrived for centuries before the poisoned invention of the Westphalian Nation State redefined its existence as mere geographical collateral. So, did Palestine. Every nation should think twice before they consider any state to be a solution because in an age of collapsing empires any state can easily become a nation’s final solution.

The post The Strange and Lonesome Death of Artsakh is a Warning to Palestine appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Nicky Reid.

The post The Strange Rehabilitation of Elliott Abrams appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Melvin Goodman.

Prigozhin in Bakhmut. Concord Press Services.

                                                                             Love cools,
 friendship falls off, brothers divide; in cities, mutinies;
in countries, discord; in palaces, treason; and
the bond cracked ’twixt son and father. This villain
 of mine comes under the prediction: there’s son
 against father. The King falls from bias of nature:
 there’s father against child. We have seen the best of
 our time.

– King Lear, Act 1, Scene 2

Anyone who presumes to tell you what is going on in Russia now is almost certainly wrong. That includes me. So caveat lector. It is a war that confounds predictions, a war of dizzying turns, blunders and prolonged stagnation, as if from the beginning the conflict had entered not so much a deep fog as a hall of mirrors, where even professional deceivers emerge deceived.

Some of today’s most vociferous hawks (you know who you are) were a mere 18 months ago assuring us Russia would never invade Ukraine, while many of those who predicted a six-day putsch to the fall of Kiev are now bemoaning that the war is lost.

What should have been obvious then, and must be to all but the most obtuse now, is that this war can never be “won”, whatever victory might look like between nations that have merged and splintered numerous times over the last several centuries. Not only can’t the war be “won,” it might not even be possible to be totally “lost.”

By that I mean, even in the unlikely event that NATO and Washington pulls the plug on military support for the Zelensky regime Ukraine is unlikely to “lose”–any more than the Taliban “lost.” After the massacre at Bucca, the missile strikes on civilian targets across Ukraine on apartment buildings, schools, hospitals, power plants and restaurants, the animosity toward Russia is likely to be generational. Instead, the conflict will transform into an underground war of resistance, a campaign of sabotage, assassination and IEDs, as we’ve seen in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan–tactics that the Ukrainian militias have already shown themselves to be quite proficient at. The current war has already gone well beyond disputes over the Minsk Accords and will instead be driven by memories of fresh atrocities. Be careful what you think you’ve won. Military occupations come at a very bloody price.

The real question, the only question it seems to me, is how does such a war (where distant powers assert their own hidden agendas) end in the foreseeable future and who can and will broker the peace? For a brief moment, it seemed as if China might seize the moment. But one hears that Xi didn’t want to risk humiliation by mediating between two parties whose wounds were too fresh and grievances too deep to reach an accord. More cynically, China benefits from a war that weakens both Russia and NATO. Lula gave it a shot, but was rewarded with indifference from Moscow, Kiev, Brussels and DC. The poor African delegation, fronted by another BRICS leader, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, journeyed to Kiev only to be rudely greeted by Russian missile strikes, then had their Moscow meeting hijacked and prematurely terminated by an agitated Putin, whose imperious demeanor is resembling more and more that of an aging princeling of the Romanov clan he idolizes. One wonders whether Putin will now risk a trip to  Johannesburg for the August 22-24 BRICS summit, with an ICC warrant hanging over his head and the bomb blasts still ringing in Ramaphosa’s ears.

The view from South Africa of this unfortunate escapade has been fairly brutal. Here’s Steven Grootes writing in The Daily Maverick:

Ramaphosa is now likely to have to respond to accusations that this shameful series of events shows that he has absolutely no influence on the global stage. Various people are also likely to ask why, if, as Dirco Minister Naledi Pandor put it, Russia is a “friend” to South Africa, did it launch missiles on Kyiv knowing Ramaphosa was there? Pandor herself may well want to ponder the question. Does she still believe Russia is a friend, even after providing a friendly fire backdrop to Rampahosa’s few hours in Kyiv? This argument is likely to be intense. This is almost certainly the first time in the history of South Africa as a nation-state that its leader has been in a city against which missiles have been launched by a “friendly” nation which knew they were there. The criticism will be appropriately crisp: if your friend.

Russia has struggled to secure the very oblasts that Putin claimed the war was meant to liberate. Putin’s “special military operation” launched to thwart NATO’s eastward ambitions, backfired spectacularly, expanding the Alliance and bringing some of its most sophisticated weapons to Russia’s doorstep. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s military and civilian casualties have been horrendous, large cities like Bakhmut, Mariupol, Kherson and Kharkov have been effectively destroyed–habitable now only for the dogs of war. The Russian spring offensive and the Ukrainian summer counter-offensive were duds. The only ground gained was by the Wagner Group, on a strange two-day mutiny against its own patrons that saw the mercenaries shoot down Russian planes and seize control of Rostov-on-Don, then suddenly evaporate, with Wagner’s trollish leader Yevgeny Prigozhin scuttling off to neighboring Belarus, where the bombastic strongman Aleksandr Lukashenko eclipsed his putative boss Vladimir Putin as the man who saved the day.

This turn of events certainly wasn’t in the Kremlin’s script, if there was much of a war plan, which is looking less and less likely. Patrick Cockburn has called the Russian invasion “shambolic” and up to this point, at least, it certainly has been a shambles, against a weaker, under-armed and poorly trained opponent. But wars of invasion rarely turn out well even for the most disciplined and well-equipped invading forces in the long run, something the Russians should understand better than almost anyone. And Putin, as Prigozhin himself repeatedly complained, has been fighting the Ukraine war on the cheap. So far Putin’s invasion has largely been run on the model Russia used in Syria–by some of the same commanders–with a heavy reliance on airstrikes, cruise missiles, Iranian drones and by flinging two mercenary armies to the front: Prigozhin’s Wagner Group and the Chechen paramilitaries under the control of Ramzon Kadyrov, who has repeatedly urged the use of tactical nuclear weapons against Ukraine. (I would note that the Syrian war is still ongoing, 12 years later. Proof that wars are “won” by controlling territory not by destroying cities from above and afar.)

Of course, Putin had good reasons for being frugal with his war budget. Even under Western sanctions and the cut off of pipeline oil and gas sales to EU nations ($6.6 billion in annual sales Russia has yet to find a new market for), the Russian economy has remained remarkably resilient, at the national level. (The economy for Russian oligarchs may be a different and more problematic story.) The cost of an all-out war and occupation of Ukraine–as Putin is being pressed to mount from his right–may be too much for the Russia economy and, given the fact he’d probably have to double or triple the rate of conscription–and a war-weary society to bear.

+ I have no idea how, or if, the Ukraine war will end, but a military insurrection is certainly one possibility, especially in a war fought by conscripts and convicts. I’ve always believed that fragging of officers by US troops did more to end the US’s rampages in Vietnam than the peace movement back home.

+ The idea that the MAGA-right must be humiliated by what’s going on in Russia is silly. The potential eruption of civil war in one of the world’s richest and most industrialized nations–a country with the world’s largest nuclear stockpile–must whet their dreams of fomenting civil war here.

+ One of the very first Civil Wars we have a detailed account of–the so-called Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta–was a direct fallout from the Greco-Persian War a decade earlier. Wars rarely if ever solve conflicts or the issues that drive them, but create new contentions.

+ The Afghan Wars led to a civil wars. The Iraq War led to a Civil War. The Syrian intervention led to a civil war. The disposition of Qaddafi led to a civil war. The civil wars following the interventions have almost always been bloodier than the interventions themselves..

+ If Alexei Navalny ends up doing more time than Prigozhin for ‘promoting extremist actions that threaten the State”, we’ll know that either this escapade was some kind of a ruse or the Russian military is even weaker than we thought or Putin really really hates Navalny.

+ The UN Human Rights Monitoring Office has “documented the summary execution of 77 civilians while they were arbitrarily detained by” Russian forces, which also “engaged in widespread torture and ill-treatment of civilian detainees,” including instances of  sexual violence. 

+ On Monday, Biden issued a pious statement noting that it is the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture: “Torture is prohibited everywhere and at all times.  It is illegal, immoral, and a stain on our collective conscience…” That same day, the War Court was in session at at Guantanamo Bay for hearings in the USS Cole bombing case where prosecutors disclosed they’d suddenly found at least  17 videotapes of CIA interrogations from 2007 that had been deemed “so sensitive” that even the judge couldn’t have copies.

+ In a damning report for the UN, Fionnuala Ni Aolain, a law professor in Minnesota serving as special rapporteur on counterterrorism and human rights, asserted that the remaining 30 detainees in the Guantanamo prison are being held by the United States under conditions that constitute “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment under international law.” Aolain concluded that the treatment of the prisoners “may meet the legal threshold for torture.” Aolain’s inspection of Gitmo was the first known visit to the prison by an independent observer since the military ended journalists access to the detention center in April 2019. According to Aoalin’s report, the Bush administration’s use of torture has become “the single most significant barrier to” bringing to justice the alleged ringleaders of the September 11, 2001. She reminded the Biden administration that: “There is no statute for limitations on [Bush’s] torture. Those who perpetrated it, engaged in it, concealed it…remain liable for the entirety of their lives.”

+ According to Southcom, 900 troops and civilians work at Guantanamo prison, which now holds only 30 detainees. That’s 30 Pentagon workers for each prisoner.

+ In a flagrant breach of international law, the Israeli government has approved a plan to build 5,700 new homes in the occupied West Bank. So much for those stern warnings from Foggy Bottom. In the first six months of the new Netanyahu regime, Israel has “advanced or approved” permits for more than 13,000 new housing units in West Bank settlements, the most  since 2012.

+ Yuli Novak, the new executive director of Israel’s leading human rights organization, B’Tselem, said she took the position so that she “wouldn’t have to raise her daughter in a country that imposes apartheid on millions of Palestinians.”

+ At least 89 Kenyans, most of whom were domestic workers, lost their lives in Saudi Arabia between 2020 and 2021.

+ Yes, your daughter could be like Madeleine Albright, who Starved 10s of thousands of Iraqi children to death, let thousands of others go untreated for cancer, allowed none of these deaths to weigh on her conscience and proclaimed that you can’t be a feminist if you didn’t vote for HRC.

+++

+ Continuing a demented tradition set by Antonin Scalia, the Supreme Court has ruled that a finding of “innocence” is not enough to overturn a conviction. In a 6-3 ruling last week, the Court denied the appeal of Marcus Jones who in 2000 was sentenced to 27 years in prison on federal firearms charges. Jones’ conviction should have been invalidated, according to a later Supreme Court ruling in Rehaif v. US. But by the time of the Rehaif decision in 2010, Jones had already appealed his conviction and been denied and according to the Roberts Court you only get one bite at the appeal. The majority opinion came from the pen of Clarence Thomas, who wrote that: “A federal prisoner may not, therefore, file a second or successive §2255 motion based solely on a more favorable interpretation of statutory law adopted after his conviction became final and his initial §2255 motion was resolved.” Thomas based his decision on the odious 1996 crime bill authored by Clinton and Biden.  In a scorching dissent, Justice Sotomayor wrote: “A prisoner who is actually innocent, imprisoned for conduct that Congress did not criminalize, is forever barred by 28 U. S. C. §2255(h) from raising that claim, merely because he previously sought postconviction relief. It does not matter that an intervening decision of this Court confirms his innocence. By challenging his conviction once before, he forfeited his freedom.”

+ Kwame Ture: “We are saying that there is a system that allows for one or two Black people to get out and that’s the rationale for keeping other Black people down.” Consider Clarence Thomas…

+ The Supreme Court struck down affirmative action based on race. It left intact affirmation action for the privileged and the connected, for legacy admissions, the children of rich donors, staff, politicians and athletes. (A 2019 study found that 75% of those white students who entered Harvard on legacy admissions would have been rejected on the merits.)

+ From Justice Jackson’s dissent in the affirmative action case: “With let-them-eat-cake obliviousness, today, the majority pulls the ripcord and announces ‘colorblindness for all’ by legal fiat. But deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life.”

+ Here’s Sotomayor: “Despite the court’s unjustified exercise of power, the opinion today will only serve to highlight the court’s own impotence in the face of an America whose cries for equality resound.”

+ Revealing that Chief  Justice Roberts’ majority opinion explicitly exempts military academies on using race as a consideration for admissions “in light of the potentially distinct interests [they] may present.”

+ Recall that RBG was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2009 (10 years after being diagnosed with colon cancer), when she was 76, and the Democrats controlled the Senate. (Of course, at a personal level at least, Ruth Bader Ginsburg didn’t seem to be an enthusiastic supporter of affirmative action. In her entire tenure on the federal bench, Ginsburg hired only one black law clerk.

+ Federal Judge Carlton Reeves on why he felt compelled by the Supreme Court’s recent swath of “originalist” opinions to rule that the 2nd Amendment prohibits laws restricting the sale of firearms to convicted felons: “Judges are not historians. We were not trained as historians. We practiced law, not history. And we do not have historians on staff. Yet the standard articulated in Bruen expects us ‘to play historian in the name of constitutional adjudication.'” Reeves had asked both the Justice Department and the defendant whether he should appoint a historian to assess the constitutionality of felon-in-possession laws. Both said no, so he didn’t. The entire 77-page opinion (US vs. Bullock)  is compelling–if dispiriting–reading.

+ It took years to destroy the misplaced trust in the Court. Why work to restore it now?

+ Stop-and-Frisk policing seems to have returned with a vengeance in NYC. In the Brooklyn neighborhood of Brownsville, tickets for low-level crimes are up 2,000%. In a recent case, Manuel Morales threw a Mike and Ike candy box at a trash can and missed. Nearby cops jumped out of their car, grabbed Morales shoved his face into the sidewalk, arrested the bloodied man, and jailed him for 7 hours.

+ John Askins and Chris Drake were friends in Oklahoma City. They were both Christians and addicted to fentanyl, living hard lives, often on the streets. One morning Askins, going through withdrawals, showed up at Drake’s grandmother’s house and said he was in pain. Drake suggested they buy some fentanyl to take off the edge. Drake bought three-tenths of a gram from a street dealer for $30, took the first hit and collapsed, his lips turning blue. Askins tried to revive his friend by performing CPR and called 911. When the cops showed up, they arrested Askins and, under merciless new “death by delivery” drug laws, prosecutors charged Askins with Murder One.

+ A Florida couple hired a man to clean their pool. When they heard someone outside their porch, they hid behind their couch and fired 30 rounds from an AR-15 at the man who showed up to clean the pool as requested. The shooter wasn’t charged because the Pinellas County sheriff concluded that his was protected by the state’s “stand your ground” law.

+ The National Association of Medical Examiners now says “excited delirium” should not be cited as a cause of death for people who die in police custody.

+ Inmates in Alabama’s prisons are around three times as likely as other residents in the state to have HIV. While HIV rates have been dropping in the US over recent decades, the new data shows that inmates continue to be a high-risk population.

+ According to CDC data, Florida (37.5 per 100,000) has more fatal drug overdoses per capita than California (26.6 per 100,000)–though you’d assume the reverse was true after listening to Ron DeSantis: “Don’t tell me it doesn’t affect people’s lives. I was just in San Francisco. In 20 minutes on the ground, I saw people defecating on the sidewalk. I saw people using Fentanyl.”

+ DeSantis’ immigration plan could have been written by Stephen Miller: It includes ending birthright citizenship, mass detention of people, possible military action against Mexico and a change in the rules of engagement to allow for deadly force to be used against illegal immigrants cutting through the border wall: “If you drop a couple of these cartel operatives, they’ll stop coming.” Will they be wearing “cartel operative” fatigues? Or will Border Patrol be able to fire on any 12-year-old girl scaling the border wall?

+ As Texas swelters under a record heat wave with the heat index approaching 127°F,  70% of the prison units within the Texas Department of Criminal Justice do not have full air conditioning, creating stifling conditions for the state’s large prison population. This is policy not negligence…

+ Anthony Sanchez is a prisoner on death row in Oklahoma, convicted of a murder his father confessed to committing. Last week, Sanchez rejected a chance to plea for his life before the state’s clemency board, saying: “I’ve sat in my cell and I’ve watched inmate after inmate after inmate get [recommended for] clemency and get denied clemency…. They went out there and poured their hearts out, man. Why would I want to be a part of anything like that?”

+ A federal appeals court in Louisiana ruled that a cop can sue a protest organizer for injuries caused by another person during a demonstration, ratifying a novel legal theory that threatens to further suppress protests and 1st Amendment rights more broadly…

+ A recent Washington Post-Ipsos poll found that 51% of Black Americans expect racism together worse within their lifetimes and 70% said that it’s more dangerous to be a Black teen now than when they were younger.

+++

+ According to an upcoming book by Miles Taylor, a former Trump Homeland Security official, Stephen Miller advocated using U.S. drones in 2018 to blow up migrant boats full of unarmed civilians, And Miller’s HS classmates said Creepy Stevie would never amount to anything…

+ At least 10% of every dollar coming in to Trump’s PAC is being diverted to pay his legal bills–though one wonders if the lawyers will still get paid.

+ Trump’s indictments have been a boon to him financially and politically. He is now far outpacing all of his rivals and is within striking distance of the hapless Biden.

NBC News poll – 2024 GOP Presidential Primary

Trump 51%
DeSantis 22%
Pence 7%
Christie 5%
Haley 4%
Ramaswamy 3%
Scott 3%
Hutchinson 2%

General Election

Biden 49%
Trump 45%

Biden 47%
DeSantis 47%

+ After the crushing of the Jackson and Sanders campaigns, we all know that the Democratic Party primaries are rigged to ensure the triumph of a centrist candidate. (HRC and Obama were largely indistinguishable at a policy level.) So what is the function of RFK, Jr’s doomed campaign? One result seems certain: his movement seems destined to kill off the one lasting legacy of Sanders’ campaigns: single payer. RFK’s relentless attacks on public health as a totalitarian plot are fatal to the prospects for a government run national health care system, at the very moment it is most needed.

+ Apparently, RFK, Jr. took a medical junket to Japan last year for surgery to try to fix his voice, which I rather crudely once described as having the tones of Elvis’ last words, as he died, according to the coroner’s report, “straining at stool.” Jr said:  “I’ve got these doctors that have given me a formula. They’re not even doctors, actually, these guys.” No real surprise, they aren’t “doctors, actually.”

+ Now he’s out torturing rattlesnakes as a campaign stunt?

+ Apparently Kennedy’s views on rattlesnakes are in synch with his views on immigrants and Palestinians, round ’em up, move them somewhere else…

+ RFK Jr.: “I’m proud that President Trump likes me.”

+ The air seems to have gone out of the Eric Adams balloon. The New York mayor’s popularity is in freefall, especially among the city’s black residents, where he’s favorability rating has plunged from 56% last May to 29 percent this June, according to a new poll by Sienna.

+ Wrong, again, Scott. Abolition would have come much earlier, if the colonies had remained part of the British Empire. Britain ended slavery in its colonies in 1834 and in Lower Canada in 1793. The Declaration of Independence itself, which Hawley credits as the ignition point for the slo-motion abolition of slavery in the US, actually cites as a reason for separating from the Empire, Britain’s instigation of slave revolts.

+ Will there be Commie Inspection Stations at the border, like the fruit fly inspections in California? Will Florida State troopers rummage through your trunk looking for copies of the 18th Brumaire and Pedagogy of the Oppressed?

I’m warning socialists and communists not to travel to Florida. They are not welcome in the Sunshine State.pic.twitter.com/ZB4RVz6XdK

— Rick Scott (@ScottforFlorida) June 27, 2023

+ Without the socialist Medicare programs, Rick Scott wouldn’t have had anything to rip-off…

+ 35% of Florida’s state budget comes from the federal government.

+ I wonder which, uhm, Disney movies groomed Haley’s views of this prelapsarian America?

+ Give Nikki credit. Perhaps she’s talking about those easier, simpler days–only a year ago–when 10-year-old girls weren’t forced to give birth to their uncle’s child and 12 year-old boys weren’t sent to work on the midnight shift sharpening cutting blades at the slaughterhouse.

+ Drug overdose deaths soared 533% from 2018 to 2022, mainly from fentanyl. Thirty-three people overdosed on fentanyl in ’18. Fentanyl deaths climbed to 209 in 2022. 

+ Take from the, as Bruce Cockburn would say, “IMF, dirty MF”: Rising corporate profits were the largest contributor to Europe’s inflation over the past two years as companies increased prices by more than the spiking costs of imported energy.”

+ CEO-to-worker pay ratio at:

Amazon: 6,474:1
Expedia: 2,897:1
McDonalds: 2,251:1
Coca Cola: 1,791:1
Bath & Body Works: 1,662:1
Apple: 1,447:1
Chipotle: 1,131:1
Norwegian Cruise Line: 1,018:1
Walmart: 1,013:1

(H/t Public Citizen)

+ New data from the World Inequality Lab shows that the USA, Russia and India are all more unequal today than they were 200 years ago.

+ According to Bloomberg, homebuyers in the US would need an annual salary of $125,000 to qualify for a loan to purchase more than half of the houses now on the market.

+ A study in Science magazine documented an estimated 1,179,024 excess deaths in the US during the first two years of the pandemic (634,830 in 2020 and 544,194 in 2021). The report found that “despite the initial concentration of mortality in large metropolitan Northeastern counties, nonmetropolitan Southern counties had the highest cumulative relative excess mortality by July 2021.”

+ From 2020 through April of this year, at least 5614 people were suspected to have caught COVID while in public hospitals in the Australian state of Victoria for other conditions. More than as one-in-ten of these patients (659) later died of COVID.

+ Merck, one of the Big Pharma companies now suing the federal government to stop Medicare from being able to negotiate lower drug prices, had a net income of $14.5 billion in 2022, up 18% over the previous year.

+ Amy Klobuchar on abortion: “I support allowing for limitations in the third trimester that do not interfere with the life or health of the women.” So Sen. Klobocop’s against something that never happens, but by being against a red herring she weakens the fundamental right to control over one’s body…

+ Nearly half of Americans said they’d be willing to spend up to $100 a month for new weight-loss medicines such as Ozempic, according to a Harris-STAT News Poll, and more than a third say they would indefinitely pay whatever they can afford to get the drugs, according The informative clerk at the local Tractor Supply, Inc. said Ivermectin works just as well…

+ A study published in the British Medical Journal concludes that people who commute by bicycle have:

+ a 52% lower risk of death from heart disease
+ a 46% lower risk of developing heart disease
+ a 40% lower risk of death from cancer
+ a 45% lower risk of developing cancer

+ Three years after Egypt’s population topped 100 million, it has now become the world’s largest importer of wheat.

+ Joe Donnell, a member of South Dakota’s House of Representatives, believes that Mount Rushmore is a demonic portal. He should support giving it back to the Lakota, who’d be happy to close the portal the way the Taliban did those Buddhas.

This is Joe Donnell. He is an elected official serving in South Dakota's House of Representatives. He believes that Mount Rushmore is a demonic portal through which communism is being spread across the nation. https://t.co/Un4LjwKZjy pic.twitter.com/85p3rJsWoh

— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) June 26, 2023

+++

+ According the latest report by the World Meteorological Organization, Europe is heating up faster than any other continent. Last year, Europe was 2.3 degrees C warmer than in the preindustrial era.

+ The city of Del Rio, Texas Del Rio has already experience 20 record highs this year, including 8 in a row.

+ More than a fifth of ecosystems worldwide, including the Amazon rainforest, are at risk of a catastrophic breakdown within a human lifetime, according to a research paper published in Nature Sustainability.

+ At least  half of the native plants in the UK and Ireland are in decline, according a 20-year study published in Plant Atlas.

+ Last summer, the Thames River had become so hot and saturated with sewage that it had to be pumped with tonnes of oxygen for 11 days to keep fish and aquatic plants from perishing.

+ Tropical forest loss increased by 10 percent last year with the planet losing more than 10.2 million acres of primary rainforest. Brazil alone is now losing forest canopy the size of Belgium every year.

+ In 2022, global deforestation caused the release of carbon dioxide equivalent to the annual fossil fuel emissions of India.

+ At least, 257 fires are still burning out of control across Canada, having already burned a record 20 million acres, an area about the size of Maine.

+ Why is Canada burning? Climate change and drought, obviously. But less obviously: plantations. Research has shown that logged areas of the boreal forest in Canada are more susceptible to fires in the decade after they’ve been clearcut than native forests.

+ Gas stoves pollute homes with benzene, emitting more of the known carcinogen than present in secondhand smoke, according to a new study by researchers at Stanford published in Environmental Science and Technology.

+ More gas is now being delivered by LNG tankers than through inter-regional pipelines, according to the latest report from the Statistical Review of World Energy.

+ According the Financial Times, this year global spending on solar energy production will outpace spending on oil production for the first time in history: $380 billion on solar compared with $370 billion on oil.

+ The big winner here is China, which has now eclipsed both the EU nations and the US in renewable energy production: “China now generates 650 terawatt-hours of wind electricity, almost twice as much as America. It provides a third of the world’s solar power, 330 terawatt-hours, more than twice as much as the US.“

+ Still according to the Energy Institute’s Statistical Review of World Energy, global energy-related CO2 emissions continued to grow by 0.8%  in the “post-pandemic” (so-called) period and the overall dominance of fossil fuels is largely unchanged at almost 82% of total consumption, despite the impressive growth in renewables.

+ The exception is Europe, where fossil fuel generation is expected to fall by 20% in 2023.

+ In 2011, the average range of electric cars was a mere 73 miles. The average is now 247 miles with some models getting as much as 500 miles per charge.

+ On the other hand, the now ubiquitous doubled-sided digital advertising screens use as much electricity per day as three households.

+ A federal judge has given Enbridge three years to shut down parts of an oil pipeline that illegally crosses reservation land in northern Wisconsin and ordered the energy company to pay the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa tribe more than $5 million for trespassing.

+ Democrats in Action: Sen. Tammy Baldwin and Sen. Amy Klobuchar have introduced a bill that would force the removal of Great Lakes gray wolves from the Endangered Species Act without scientific or public support.

It now seems apparent that feathered creatures preceded dinosaurs and that, in fact, the ancestor of all dinosaurs had feathers.

+ Last year, South Korea’s fertility rate dropped to a record low of 0.78 – less than half the 2.1 needed for a stable population and far below that of Japan at 1.3.

+++

+ With David Ignatius’ The Tao of Deception, the Washington Post is publishing fiction on their homepage. The only thing new about this is the fact they’re labeling it as such.

+ Mike Drucker: “If Lance Armstrong actually believed people are pretending to be trans to cheat at sports, he would have tried it already.”

+ Over the last 30 years, red wine sales in France have fallen by half, the gap in consumption largely filled by an increase in rosé.

+ Before Herbie Hancock played “Footprints” at a gig last week, he introduced the Wayne Shorter composition by saying Shorter’s last words were: “It’s time to go get a new body and come back to continue the mission, before chanting ‘Namu Myōhō Renge Kyō’ over & over.”

+ Phil Spector: “Lenny Bruce died of an overdose of police.”

+ How Mao’s worst idea was adopted by the MAGA-right…

+ I rewatched Best of Enemies last night, the documentary on the 1968 debates between William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal. The film is weighted down by excessive commentary, especially by the likes of Todd Gitlin and Eric Alterman. The presence of the Christopher Hitchens is grating, more so given the fact that he later savaged his former friend in print, just as he had done to Edward Said. There’s a play by the same title by the British playwright James Graham, which, unimpeded by these dull and rather uninformative interruptions, probably gets you closer to the raw thrills of watching the verbal combat live. The jibe that causes Buckley to lose his mind is when Vidal calls him a “crypto-Nazi,” which was true, of course. But Buckley couldn’t tolerate being exposed. The smug mask of Buckley’s face dissolves, revealing the seething hatred beneath, as Buckley lunges toward Vidal and spews from his rictus-like mouth:  “Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi, or I’ll sock you in the goddamn face, and you’ll stay plastered.” Vidal doesn’t flinch. He merely grins in return, knowing Buckley had come undone. “Oh, Bill,” he says softly. “You’re too extraordinary.” But how times have changed. The GOP no longer runs away from such labels. They embrace them. But if there was one person Vidal hated more than Buckley, it was probably RFK, who he goes out of his way to disparage, even as the blood on the floor Ambassador Hotel was still drying. Vidal, who in 1964 joined with James Baldwin and Carey McWilliams to try to undermine Bobby’s campaign become a US senator from New York,  viewed RFK as “disturbingly authoritarian.” RFK, who was friends with Buckley (they both liked to sail), felt pretty much the same way about Vidal. At one point, Buckley unfolds a personal letter from Bobby, shakes it in Gore’s face and quotes RFK as writing: “Let’s give Gore Vidal to the Viet Cong.” Vidal grabs the letter, inspects the handwriting, smiles, points out the upward slanting script and declares: “this is the sure sign of a manic-depressive.” And thus laid waste to two of his most loathed targets in one blow.

+ As Harvey Pleshaw reminded me: “Both RFK and Buckley were raging homophobes, which, politics aside, likely contributed to their hatred of Vidal. This was one reactionary attitude RFK never abandoned. In fact, his top aide Adam Walinsky later became a prominent supporter of Anita Bryant’s anti-gay crusade.”

Why is He Acting So Strange?

Booked Up
What I’m reading this week…

Blue Machine: How the Ocean Shapes Our World
Helen Czerski
(Torva)

Working Girl: Selling Art and Selling Sex
Sophia Giovannitti
(Verso)

In Praise of Polytheism
Maurizio Bettini
Trans. Douglas Grant Heise
(California)

Sound Grammar
What I’m listening to this week…

Changes: the Complete 1970s Atlantic Studio Recordings
Charles Mingus
(Rhino Atlantic)

Western Cum
Cory Hanson
(Drag City)

This Moment
Shakti
(Abstract Logix)

Flee Into the Past

“Someday, with the right man in the White House, there will be a Department of Jesus, yes and a Secretary of Jesus. Then again, that’s the whole Reagan program, isn’t it?–Dismantle the New Deal, reverse the effects of World War II, restore fascism at home and around the world, flee into the past, can’t you feel it, all the dangerous childish stupidity—“I don’t like the way it came out, I want it to be my way.” (Vineland, Thomas Pynchon)

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Jeffrey St. Clair.

  Blood on the leaves and blood at the root

  Black bodies swingin’ in the Southern breeze

  Strange fruit hangin’ from the poplar trees”

Before he entered the world

his umbilical cord clutched his neck tightly

constricting blocking the air that

had yet to flow through his body

He was born breathless

I wear a scar across my belly

to commemorate the day

I saved my son from himself

Did he find out that little brown babies

are not celebrated here

They are not held to the sun for the world to see

They are born and protected

held firmly in between bosoms

forced to shrink and silence themselves

and tiptoe to not disrupt

The breath of a brown baby boy

is large and loud like a

broken glass in a silent room

a gunshot in a large crowd

His inhale is thievery

and his exhale is a disturbance

I grip him tightly

his breath rumbles the ground

and raise hairs on necks

I try to cover his mouth

with survival lessons of

Do what you are told

  Don’t be too loud

    Don’t wear that hood

         Don’t go to that neighborhood

             Keep your hands where they can be seen

Comply always

He is forced from my grip

and suffocated until he is merely

just flesh on concrete

I hear him say momma

  in between each faded breath

I am not strong enough to save him

  
  “Here is the fruit for the crows to pluck,

  for the rain to gather for the wind to suck,

  for the sun to rot, for the trees to drop,

  here is a strange and bitter crop.”

It was worse than I thought, was my initial feeling after watching the killing of George Floyd play on the news. I debated whether to watch it that day in fear of the trigger that it might cause. Working in fields that address inequities and racial injustices for years, my experience as a black woman raising black children has made me sensitive to the triggers that these videos cause. With all the buzz that increased after the footage was released, I had to watch it.

It took me back to the coverage of the Rodney King beating in 1991. I was 9 years old at the time. I didn’t quite understand the magnitude of what I was watching. Although I had already experienced racist encounters by that time, I grappled with how the brown that coats my skin could evoke that level of rage and the assertion of power and control. My parents, angry but not shocked, tried to explain what transpired to my siblings and me.

I became my parents the day I watched the footage of Floyd being pressed into the ground and eventually robbed of every last breath he had. He screamed for his mother. That moment remained etched in my mind. I have had the privilege of birthing 5 children, 3 of whom are boys. I felt both joy and fear the day my oldest son was born. He was born by cesarean section with his umbilical cord wrapped around his neck. The thought of him not being able to breath once bothered me because there was nothing I could do at that moment. All of the healthy food, prenatal pills, and exercise meant nothing.

One of my worst fears is not being able to protect my children from the hands of other people—people who will never see the beauty of my children or value them enough to treat them with care. Care was not a factor when Floyd screamed in desperation that he couldn’t breathe. Raising children is already challenging, but to raise black children who you may not be able to protect is immense pressure and emotional strain.

As we come to the anniversary of the murder of George Floyd, I want to remember the life and the breath he had in him. I did not know him personally, but when I look at my black babies I think of him and all the other black and brown people whose lives were taken. Like my children, they were deserving of all that life had to offer them. To honor those lives and the lives of our children, we have to continue the work of calling out hate and white supremacy, so they won’t be diminished to just another black body on the ground.

The excerpts at the beginning and end of Cassie Williams’ poem is from “Strange Fruit” by Abel Meeropoland, sung by Billie Holiday and Nina Simone.

This article first appeared in Workday Magazine.

This content originally appeared on In These Times and was authored by Cassie Williams.

The post Octavia Butler’s “God-shaping:” A Fiction Less Strange appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kim C. Domenico.

The post Letter from London: Strange Meeting appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Peter Bach.

The post The Strange Case of the Anti-Earth Day GOP appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by George Ochenski.

anomie
or an·o·my [ an-uh-mee ]
noun Sociology.

a state or condition of individuals or society characterized by a breakdown or absence of social norms and values, as in the case of uprooted people.

dictionary.com

‘I fell in to a burning ring of fire..’

– Johnny Cash

Measuring a Weaponized Infrastructure (Telecommunications)

Apropos the above quotation by Johnny Cash this small article based on a diagram as below of a ‘burning ring of fires’ as an apposite metaphor concerning the devil in the psycho political detail of the dimensions of the new normal of ‘scorched earth ’ via infrastructures being weaponized.

– For to ‘be’ as to fall into such a strange technocratic ring of hellfire surrounding is indeed to experience social norms being deliberately burnt down and reconstructed under a build back better rationale as pathological; it is to be be uprooted phenomenologically as to experience the culture shock of being rendered a ‘stranger in a strange land ‘ – which proving increasingly difficult to relate to or understand or navigate , such the austerity of anomie as assuming a syndrome or mass formation ?

Worse still as an extension of such anomie: the feeling that one is a persona non gratis – an unwelcome stranger in a now strange land which one used to think of as ‘home’?

This feeling such the alas is not a localized phenomenon in sense of geopolitics: it is a globalitarian (sic) phenomenon of technocratic deliberation and social engineering which reflects an unprecedented level of the concentration of wealth translated into political power as a raging inferno of social norms being burnt down to the ground – to point of a new normal of even further resource transfer arising Phoenix like as ‘supranational’ from the ashes?

This technocracy as a 21^st C. phenomenon is proving to be a global hijack of evolutionary trajectory as of a hitherto unprecedented proportionality and dimensions?

Small figure below explicates but some of the burning psycho political dimensions of how we of the 21^st C. are being continually uprooted as under phenomenological assault by way of an ordo ab chao as aspectual of the destruction and reconstruction of Nature under a paradigm such the propagated mass formation of lies and illusions – and as reveals a ponerology of the abuse of trust as has been obtained or derived thru the abuse of Empiricism and its fruit technology – to point of infrastructures being weaponized and resources further polarized under resource transfer as a raging inferno of greed as technocracy burns?

A greed which demands a population reduction program (PRP)?

Much as the 20^th C. abomination of the destruction of Dresden in World War 2 by fire bombing had to await the development of aerial born incendiary devices and suitable military aeronautical means of delivery, so too had the burning 21^st C. technocratic ring of fires as Figure 1 illustrates below have to await relevant technologies and infrastructures capable of being weaponized being placed in situ under polarization to purpose of effecting such a mass formation of rootlessness as a frith of an Earth scorched as narrowed?

The determinism enshrined in Empiricism thru technology contains a ponerological bias in favor of ‘evil’ it would appear…

Viz:

Fig. 1. The Burning Ring of Fires of Norms Inverted.

Other than for such necessity than technologically determined the above diagrammed ‘technocratic ring of fires of norms inverted ‘ would still be smoldering – as opposed to now raging ubiquitous as purposively as schematically as institutionally placed beyond the control or understanding of the Demos under layers of illusion or misinformation as propaganda?

As Glenn Frey sings ‘The Heat is on’?

That the ‘real fires raging’ are denied; ‘the don’t look thereI focus’ is on manufactured hobgoblins as Mencken put it?

The statement attributed to Karl Rove that:

‘People like you are still living in what we call the reality-based community. You believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality. That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you are studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors, and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’

The burning down as inversion of social norms is an example of the creation of ‘new realities’ by those whom have arrogated to themselves the role of being ‘history’s actors’; and such a truly dark art practiced entails a psycho political assault which has the abusive as massive objective of producing as forming ‘strangers in a strange land’ as uprooted – and as such rendered more open to absurdity and atrocious abuse such the totalitarian rationale of shock and awe ?

Anomie is a weakening of mind thru a new reality of norms inverted: it is become such the ‘Lo! ‘ sense of Thoreau the weaponization of infrastructures on which life depends – and is contingent upon neoliberalism as an ascendance of private interests by way of economic polarization translated into polarized political power?

Part of the anomie of 21^st C. mass formation is a commensurate subjective sense of economic , political and existential impotence; of a powerlessness to exert any proximation of control or mitigation- as the paradigm of what is ‘normal’ is continually being shifted under a hegemony of resource transfer as reflects a deadly panopticonic inferno of ‘mind over mind’?

– Just when we think we can see the new goal posts they are shifted under a new reality as a technocratic/Svengali fuckover?

Remainder of this small article is structured around ten raging metaphorical fires of the ring diagrammatically explicated construed psycho political – and as are expressive a ‘new technocratic normal ‘ -which to lead to a ‘build back better’ – as we are to believe – and as we are as to be further as so cynically fucked over or alienated as marginalized via mind over mind to point of an increasing rootlessness precipitated which has clear implications for control and manipulation – as much as an ecocide demanded exists but to be rationalized under the pathological warp which ‘R2P the Planet ‘ enshrines?

‘Anomie’ is a ‘narrowing of the frith’; the imposition of rootlesssness a form of divide et impera?

For the fires all set to merge or ‘flashover’ under an inferno of enantiodromia are an expression of technocracy sucking as suffocating Democracy and Nature ; vortex like?

(In Dresden those who sought refuge in underground shelters died of suffocation such the vortex.)

To ironic paraphrase of Herman Goering :

‘It works the same in any country’

The objective here is to detail the psychopolitical ramifications of this infernal technocratically engineered mass formation or collective psychoses which is now burning polymorphous at a supranational level in the 2 1^st C.

Kudos to Zamyatin concerning cognizance taken of ‘infantilism’ which Huxley elected to focus upon in his particular contemplation of dystopia.

(The burning down as inversion of norms has the psychological effect of reducing mind to a regressive as infantile state which is more conducive to control and manipulation? Confusion as much as crisis serves totalitarianism.)

A good crisis as of anomie should not be let to go to waste – such the ‘ordo ab chao’?

Small quarters remain such the 21^st C. milieu of inferno and the burning down of norms thru weaponized infrastructure raging apperceived a pretentious dissident as would rather refuse orthodoxy than subsist as anomic in an infernal circle as a prison of fires strategically set – whereby there no alternative currency permitted be controlled as issued in a tragic as austere panopticonic colony of globalitarianism as an uproot.

‘Fuck that for a game of soldiers!’ indeed – as much as ‘shut the fuck up!’ denied.

Purpose in writing is to attempt to hold by way of intransigence onto mine ‘roots phenomenological‘ as have spread in the course of at least six decades: it is to piss on the fires raging as much as to seek to extinguish same as to prevent an inferno of conflagration.

Such may well be an exercise in futility, but shall keep trying!

– If but one person as fellow peer ‘well met’ grasps the gist then it is a case of ‘mission accomplished’.

And so to the ‘coda psychopolitical’ of that burning ring of fires…

National to Supranational

‘Private/public partnerships’ as created expressive of a resource transfer furthered are now burning

hegemonic supranational as never before, such the scorched earth of ‘Ein reich, ein volke, ein fuhrer’ resounding as the flames grow higher as more incorporative such the Fourth Reich/ Industrial Revolution as amounting indeed to a baptism of fire – which few of us of the 21st C. are to survive under the eugenical calculations of ‘history’s actors’ as lying stateless satanic bastards of satanism?

The detail in the course of the last one hundred years that most of such private/public partnerships arose under the sponsorship of philanthropists of great wealth is highly significant?

Strike thar; we are not talking of philanthropy but rather philanthropy as another hellish inversion?

Psycho political concomitant: we no longer feel an ability to relate to what we previously referred to as ‘our Country’. We no longer have any role as apperceived as sensed to contribute towards change in a Land we have been rendered estranged as uprooted from?

– The tendency is towards a feeling of ‘going through the motions’ whilst increasingly there an anxiety as undermines what were hitherto enjoyable experiences?

Such destruction of erotic joys under Thanatos is a consequence of rootlessness and is expressive of a shock and awe metastasizing under technocratic atrocity?

Bottom up to top down

What Anthropocene history demonstrates is the progressive reduction of the Demos to being politically anomicised; never have so few had so much such the ‘top’, and so many had so little at the ‘bottom’.

That money is a technology which has facilitated such polarization/ resource transfer is to be remembered such the ‘fuhgeddabout it’ denied under one state of gangsterism as a geopolitikal unipolarity?

Psycho political concomitant: we no longer feel an ability to be autonomous or to effect change; we accept thereby en passant a divide et impera which is of profound significance concerning our being uprooted thru alienation and marginalization? We feel ruled over by an irresistible alienating force and unable to trust any more in institutions of authority as present themselves as Democratic or truthful under hegemony? We experience a distrust as to that which would be caste under hegemonic narrative as authoritative – and yet a continual pressure is experienced to adapt to the new norms they urge as atrocity follows upon absurdity? ‘Adapt ‘being a euphemism for conform?

Human to Transhuman

The ‘burning’ down’ of DNA by an experimental gene therapy of global proportionality is ‘well’ underway as a fire raging infernal; this despite the fact that the consequences of same are unknown.

Much as we do not know the contents of experimental gene therapy ‘vaccines’, so we do not know what the implications of emergency authorization are to be, such the trust abused? Similarly, the implications of experimental gene therapy are currently unknown concerning fertility and life expectancy; this as much as concerns the psycho political implications of modified DNA as an anomie precipitated remain unexplicit concerning said fertility and life expectancy; this as much indeed as the exact psycho political implications of modified DNA remain unknown.

Are the genetically modified as transhuman more susceptible as amenable to psychotronic manipulation; are they more absorbent of non ionizing microwave radiation at certain frequencies per chance ? Does experimental gene therapy entail the death of natural immunity as natural DNA once conferred on the herd?

Who knows? (Possibly DARPA?)

Psycho political concomitant: we buy in under the desperation of shock and awe to a trust in cultural hegemony as a coping or survival strategy; we deny the right to question as embrace an absurd narrative leading to atrocity; we become a product as but a fucking slave to be traded/patented as homogenized – and resign our’sellves’ thereby to being but a ‘fire sale product’ as to be owned in a world of norms shifted neoliberal as to be schizoid?

We feel devalued as much as we can so be brought to devalue our own God given unique genetic identity?

In a transhuman world as a scorched earth there is only anomie bi furcative; being of exploitations and arrogations expressed by ‘man gods/history’s actors ’ thru a new reality burning all around?

Two sexes to many Genders.

The funding under philanthropathy concerning ‘woke consciousness’ as a phenomenological inversion of sanity is not without deliberation concerning the eugenic hellfire of the imperative to reduce surplus population. Every child chemically castrated or transgendered as medically mutilated remains a contribution to population reduction; every child persuaded towards gender dysphoria is expressive of a cultivation of ‘Thanatos’; every child as can be subjected to experimental gene therapy is aspectual of a eugenic program of a depopulation under an ‘R2P the planet’ as an absurdity leading to atrocity as per Voltaire’s perspicacity? Heterosexuality is biologically functional by way of sexual reproduction; the diverse and manifold deviations from same are biologically dysfunctional or deadly in context of population reduction effected. ‘People in a strange land ‘ experience many difficulties concerning sexual reproduction, particularly when they are transhumanized? The fear of saying something politically incorrect as deemed by the ‘new normal’ hegemony increasingly preys on the minds of ‘we strangers in a strange land ‘ such the insidious nature of inversion?

Direct to Intermediated.

In many ways this is the biggest raging fire of anomie: for in the 21 st C., our senses have become largely contingent upon technological intermediation as have been estranged from esse es percipi thru computer mediated communications as an expression of neoliberal corporatist raw power hegemonic? We are being dragged under such atrocious assault /crime against Humanity as a to be strangers to truth in a strange land of lies and illusions as profits so few among us to propagate as ‘further.’ The growing economic role of capital intensive AI concerning intermediation of our senses is but another expression of the transfer of economic power to political power; the introduction of ‘new AI strangers’ as are welcome in the new land/new normal of technocratic globalitarianism is purposive to an anomie furthered by way of said intermediation, and the gradual deprecation of life as proceeds algorithmic under the arson of what amounts to a scorched earth policy? AI is the new stranger of simulacra as was the prototypical ‘transhuman’ of technocratic glee; it works 24/7 and does not asks questions; it is capable of assuming the form of a lethal autonomous weapon system unhindered by moral qualms of subjective origination -this such the tragedy as ‘become simulcraic!’ resounds under the anomie of transhumanism?

Psycho political concomitant -the fear of being further displaced, of being rendered economically surplus as unwelcome under the march of AI and Robotics. The growing disparity between intermediated ‘information’ and the reality based on our ‘immediate’ apperceptions fosters an anxiety which renders us more amenable to psycho political abuse by way of orthodoxy; sense of Orwell?

Increasingly the ‘Capos’ of the Globalitarian concentration camp scheme are being outsourced to AI working with Robotics under capital intensity?

– Increasingly we anomically subsist as to question the value and meaning of Life estranged within a paradigm determined by technological progress – as defined by an elite of technocrats via a kakistocracy epitomizes austerity?

Diverse to homogeneous

Richard von Coudenhove- Kalergi is a name one would not hear under the Public Relations narrative of ‘Anomie Inc’ ; let alone that ‘his’ ideology be subjected to examination. Or ‘his’ source and application of funding not be ‘memory holed’ such the demand of anomie?

Miscegenation, or the separation of an individual from his or her cultural roots and norms, is a form of anomie?

Psycho political concomitant – the feeling one is under threat; that ones beliefs are arbitrary as much as represent a race supremacy as ironic. That one should feel guilt as compels atonement by way of conformity to new norms demanded is expressive of the power of mind over mind?

Under such panopticonic pressure there is a need to conform experienced.

Consciousness to product

The burning ring of fires really hurts with this one. The reduction of consciousness to but a manufactured product reflects the power of technology to support propaganda. The means of delivery of said propaganda have recently reached the level of development whereby ‘psychotronics’ as bypasses the senses and directly targets the central nervous system(CNS) are feasible; such technology is also known as ‘voice of god’.

The deployment of 5G as a psychotronic platform for the destruction of human consciousness is potentially the ultimate Svengali device as capable of reducing man to a zombie of orthodoxy; dispossessed of any independent or autonomous ability to reason, to form volition as under free will, or to hold to idiosyncratic or alternative norms?It is indeed a synonymization of transhuman with zombie?

In short the above technologies as a weaponization of telecommunications infrastructure represent the ultimate transhumanism?

Psycho political concomitant – it is far from a joke to caution ‘wait till you start eating the bugs or lab grown meat’ let alone ‘wait till you start hearing the voices’ arising from such totalitarian abuse of human environmental ambience by way of psychotronics?

The technology of mind control and the reduction of consciousness to a product is being rolled out; it is a fire now as burning as a weapon in the ever growing arsonal (sic) of Technocracy concerning weaponized infrastructure?

The psychotronics as not so much as of a jingle or ear worm but of a jangle of neurosynaptic modulation resonating involuntary is plausibly deniable?

Education to indoctrination

The ideal of a liberal academia has been inverted under Corporatism to become neoliberal academia. The function of Education has become not to teach how to think but rather how to conform; how to eliminate any free thought from ever seeing the light of day as by self imposed censorship? Education as an infrastructure weaponized is a form of dumbing down; of stifling the ability to reason or to question; of constraining ideological diversity and the ability to conjecture among the Demos?

Psycho political concomitant: the most educated among us often experience a dread of having been lied to; a sense of doubt as to whether the curricula of neoliberal academia fed as approved and contributed toward was based on a trust abused so much – and that the ‘laurels’ of said academia are a reward for self censorship and the suppression of the norms of Democracy apperceived?

Thoreau’s proposition concerning ‘tooldom’ is an apposite reflection?

Empiricism to Religion

This is how the enantodromiatic inversion works as anomie precipitate of a rootlessness; this is how we rendered ‘transhuman’ under Empiricism as ‘objective’? This is the absurdity as much as atrocity of the Age of ‘End Times’?

Psychopolitical concomitant: we find oursellves (sic) as a la Beckett’s contention worshiping filth as proclaiming them our saviors; we know something is wrong but are unable such the anomie/shock and awe to pinpoint as much as to rectify same. Whilst we have a lingering as painful suspicion concerning a false paradigm of one dimensionality we yet have a fear as stultifies – and it is into such engineered gap that technocratic man gods march? People have already been arrested for the crime of prayer as a refusal to accept the one dimensionality of Empiricism as a religion.

Infrastructure to weapon.

Day by day in the 2 1^st C. the polarization of economic power translated into political power is furthering its grip on ‘norms’ as morphed , and infrastructures as were previously life supporting are being weaponized under a technocratic globalitarianism as of a death cult in which we and ours have little to no role other than by way of being written off as ‘surplus population’? That we have been brought to such point, or rather dragged into an infernal circle of fires pursuant, is a tragedy of inversion.? Intermediation of infrastructures as weaponized is the key to ‘understanding’ hellfire as the burning down of norms – and the utilitarian nature of inversion?

That such perspicacity be ‘Verboten!’ is the psychopolitcal concomitant this instance; ‘dumbed down’ as uprooted from reason being the quintessence of ‘mind over mind’?

All in all ‘Eschatology’ strikes the nail on the head such the ‘Paradise Lost’ by way of subsisting in a burning ring of fires?

God help us for history’s actors sure as hell won’t?

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Stephen Martin.

There are a lot of things I write that I know where they came from and when I play the song I feel like I can go there. For example, “Boomer” is about two different places physically in my life. The first part of the song is representative of Brooklyn, when I was experiencing this new freedom of living in a Black community and feeling very supported as a Black person. And I felt really safe. Oh my god, I could be wherever I wanted to be! And the back half of “Boomer,” sonically, is referencing how I grew up. It’s a very rootsy, country, down home comfortable feeling, where you can be comfortable in your house, not outside. So that song is two places put into one song.

Do you feel like you have to be in a specific place mentally or physically to create?

No. I think that’s a gift of moving around a lot. You can go home in your mind. And I feel like, for me, I’m very good at that. Wherever I’m at, I can always find a place in my mind where I can be comfortable.

Growing up in Oklahoma, you were one of the only Black families there, and then moving to Brooklyn you found a community. You’ve described your song “Hennessy” as trying to go against the stereotypes that have been put upon you. You wrote it 20 years ago, so is there anything you wish you had told yourself when you were younger?

Yes. The thing I would say to myself is, “You’re not strange. You’re a pretty normal person.” I just thought I was weird because I was the only one that looked like me, that liked as many things as I liked. I liked everything the white kids liked, but I liked a lot of other stuff too. There just wasn’t a lot of people for me to relate to, so I always felt like I stood out. But in reality, when I moved to the East Coast, I realized I didn’t really stick out, and that was a really cool thing. In the same breath though, because of my experience growing up in Oklahoma, I had something that the people on the East Coast didn’t have, so I had another experience to pull from. So I would just tell my younger self, “You’re not weird, dude. You’re fine. Just hang in there.”

Did figuring out that you weren’t as strange as you thought you were alter your creativity in any way?

When I met other Black people that were creative and driven and had vision for their art and were doing it, it made me want to do it more. Realizing that I was a part of a crew or a movement of people empowered me. But because I was in Brooklyn, I knew I wasn’t going to stand out. I didn’t have the money or the time, and I always feel like you need one or the other. If you have both, incredible, but I needed to move somewhere where I had time. That’s why I moved back to DC because there were a lot of punk bands sliding out of NYU and they had a lot of money and a lot of facilities. I was working a full-time job, my rent was $2,450 plus utilities, plus the train, the credit card. I couldn’t financially or mentally do it there. I needed to move somewhere where I could zone in. I realized I had to stop spreading myself so thin.

You work with so many people and you also played football in college. Did that experience help you to figure out who would be a good collaborator?

I’ve always been a team-oriented person. I think in the beginning because I didn’t really believe in myself, I always thought I couldn’t possibly have the answers and I needed smarter people around. I also really enjoy learning from other people, and I don’t really like being the front person. I’m most comfortable being a utility player and adding value. I used to work in the political space and one thing I did learn from working and leading campaigns was how to build a winning team but also when to recognize weaknesses in yourself and the team you’ve built. The shitty thing about being part of the democratic process in a band is that you need other people’s buy-in to make a decision, but I didn’t want that. I wanted to be able to make the decision when the time came and once I figured that out, I knew I could build a team that will help me to have a career in music.

All of those experiences seem to have poured into the way you work today.

I’m really grateful for them because it has allowed me to be nimble. And I’ve hired, and I’ve fired, and I’ve won, and I’ve lost many, many times. I know what I work with and what I don’t. Now, I think I know what it takes to win. There’s something that we talk about in organizing a lot where it’s like, “If you win, who’s at the table? Now work backwards.” It’s thinking about who’s there when you win. Start there, one at a time.

You’re such a prolific writer and I feel like you’re always working on something new. There doesn’t seem to be a moment when you’re just chilling. How do you know when an idea is worth exploring or when it’s time to stop working on something?

I chill by working on these things. It’s how I release, and it’s relaxing to me, and that’s how I’ve always been. I know something is worth exploring when it makes me curious or excited, or if I’m calling Graham (Richman) and I’m like, “Listen to this, isn’t this cool?” That’s when I know, and that doesn’t mean I need to finish it, but it does mean I should keep poking the bear. Some of my songs come together really quick, but a lot is just me poking the bear over a long period of time.

Does your process differ when you’re writing for yourself versus when you’re writing or producing for someone else?

It’s very different. I’m a little more loose and a lot more forgiving with other people. I’m way harder on myself. I try more things with other people and I’m a little less risky alone. I feel like other artists’ visions have been really fun tapestries for me to just put something into and see how it plays with the rest of what they do, and it always gives me another idea for my own stuff. So production work is a big part of my personal process of making music big time.

How do you edit your work when there’s so much of it being made?

Rarely do I feel like I have everything I need to finish. If I did something alone, I’m skeptical if no one else has touched it. I’m already like, “Am I good enough to do what I just did? I like it, but maybe I’m wrong.” I’ll take it to the people in my creative world and ask them what they think of it. At that point, one of two things will happen. I’ll be like, “Fuck y’all, you don’t know what you’re talking about,” and that’s when I know it’s done.

Well, maybe it’s just a case of needing someone to say something like that in order to be more cemented in your own opinion. If you feel like you have to defend it, then it’s done, and it’s good.

Yes, I need to test it. That’s actually something I use with Graham (Richman) and Chris (Connors) all the time because I’m like, “I’ve written this song, but I want to strength test it. Let’s keep writing. I think it’s done, but let’s throw more at it.” I write pretty quickly, and I always have a lot of things recorded and ready, so I feel like I always have time. I’m never up against the clock. There’s never a label that’s like, “Where’s the record?” I’m always really early, so I’ve got time to play.

Were you always early even when you had a day job?

Yes. I grew up a classic Black kid. You’ve got to be 10 times smarter, 10 times faster, always ready, always prepared, excellent always. That’s not good or healthy, and it’s no way to grow up, but it’s definitely a reality of my existence now. I don’t know if that’s the driving force behind why I create as much as I do, but I feel safe in it. I definitely feel very prepared when I go into those meetings, and I’m like, “Oh, I’ve got 85 songs. I’m not like these other people you work with,” and that’s something I’m proud of.

You’ve previously said that as a military brat, you molded yourself to whoever you found yourself around in order to fit in. That’s definitely not the case now but how do you steer away from doing that in an industry that tries to put everyone in a neat little box?

It’s so fucking hard. Still, I think my instinct is to fit in, but I stop myself because I hate what I make when I do that. But I still feel so much pressure because I still feel like I’m the only one; I’m in a world of musicians where they can all work together, and then there’s me. I’m not like them. I was talking to someone about this the other day where I realized that my journey is just going to be different than others because I’m not writing sad love songs, and I’m not a part of that thing. I would like to make hopeful, exciting, dynamic music that’s honest to my life and what I’ve experienced. I’m not going to sound like Phoebe or Lucy or Courtney or any of those people. Don’t get me wrong, I love their music, but even after being around them and touring with them and seeing their fans, I realized I’m not like them. My journey will be different. I didn’t do all that work to get here and become the thing I see on TV, which is literally what “Wretched” is all about.

What does your curiosity look like?

I’m naturally curious. I’m very interested in people to the point where I can become consumed by individuals and want to know everything about them. I can become very attached to people and I feel like because I was in the military, I developed a way of being where I could meet people and get so much from them. When I was younger, I was fascinated with adulthood and how to be an adult, how to be a gay adult, how to be a straight adult, how to be an adult that’s a swinger, how to be one that travels for their living, how to be an engineer. I was just like, “Whoa. You can live in so many ways. All of them seem fine. All at once even.” I’m curious about every aspect of life and how people lead their lives. I think I was looking for an excuse to choose a life that was different from the one that I felt like I needed to choose. I realized a lot of people weren’t my parents which was what I wanted. I love my parents, but I knew I didn’t want to live my life like my parents. Then as I got older, I think that kind of changed in a way, but I still feel like I meet people that I fall in love with and I want to know everything about them.

Do you have any habits that you have to fight against in order to get work done and how do you do that?

Honesty is a crooked bone. It is something that you can write without, but you’re not writing unless you are using it. You can do a lot without being honest, but at a certain point, you have to be honest. Especially when you think about singing a song every night for years. You’re going to want to mean it. I know how to write music, I can write without being honest and it’s so easy to lean on that and just make a record that way. So, I think it’s an easy habit. It’s like not wanting to have a therapist. It’s easy to not want to have a therapist or to not want to improve. It’s easy to just live life and make excuses for how things are. You know, not everybody’s making changes, so why should you? There’s enough evidence to support that. But deep down, we all know we want to be better, and that’s the honesty I’m talking about with music. I write music to inspire people and to make people feel like they belong, and you can’t do that if you’re not being honest in the writing.

What has creating music taught you about yourself?

That I can do anything. I used to put all these limits on myself about what I was capable of and who I should be and what success looked like. But if the last 15 years of being a musician in a focused manner has taught me anything, it’s that I can do anything. I never thought I would get to do what I’m doing now, but it was because of all the little things I did over the last 15 years that it’s possible.

Has the meaning of success changed for you since becoming “successful”?

I remember going to the Bowery Ballroom, and looking at the band playing and just being like, “If I could even play here….” I’ve done it. But now the bar just keeps jumping itself because you learn more. My goal is still the same. I want to be a sustainable business. I want to be an artist that isn’t jaded, that’s healthy and makes work that they believe in and brings their friends in and collaborates. I want to be a real songwriter that stands the test of time. I want to be the 60-year-old that puts a record out and my fans like it and none of the young people do.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Sammy Maine.

The post Israel’s Strange Ambivalence on Ukraine appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by John Feffer.

“Arrests at the southern border will set new records this year,” Joe Walsh reports at Forbes. “Border Patrol apprehended 1.998 million people at the U.S.-Mexico border from October to August, already blowing past the 1.659 million arrested in all of fiscal year 2021, which was the agency’s busiest year on record.”

Republicans have noticed, but their response is, well, a bit odd.

US Senator John Thune (R-SD) blames Joe Biden’s “de facto open border policies.”

US Senator Rick Scott (R-FL) blames Biden’s “amnesty agenda and open border policies” not only for “record-breaking illegal [sic] immigration” but for a supposed “fentanyl crisis.”

In what universe does “more arrests than ever before” translate to “open border policies?” And how does the seizure of “9,962 thousand pounds” (I don’t know if that’s a typo or if Scott really means 9.9 million pounds) of fentanyl translate to an “unchecked deluge of drugs pouring into the United States?”

Our mutual friend Bob doesn’t drink, and I can prove it — see that trash can full of empty bourbon bottles on his back porch? Airtight case! High-quality deductive sleuthing on my part. You’re welcome.

Look, I get it: Republicans are miffed that after trying to out-Democrat the Democrats on immigration authoritarianism for 20 years,  finally nominating life-long Democrat Donald Trump as a “Republican” for president in 2016 to get the job done, they STILL lag Barack Obama and Joe Biden on pretty much every “immigration enforcement” metric.

But the immigration and fentanyl “crises” aren’t due to insufficiently vigorous enforcement.  People are going to travel, and use drugs, no matter how much effort the state puts into trying to  stop them and no matter how many are arrested.

The notional “fentanyl crisis” comes down to fentanyl being more powerful than other opioids and therefore easier to smuggle — because smaller quantities are needed — past US drug enforcers.

Scott’s solution isn’t to endorse ending the disastrous war on drugs. Instead, he’s introduced no fewer than three bills to step up the very “drug enforcement” that makes fentanyl an attractive alternative to traditional, less dangerous, opioids.

Our choice isn’t between “secure borders” and a “drug-free America” on one hand, or “open borders” and a “fentanyl crisis” on the other.

Our choice is between open borders and legal drug use on one hand, or open borders and illegal drug use, plus an expensive and overbearing police state on the other.

Politicians — Republican and Democrat alike — clearly prefer the latter.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Thomas Knapp.

Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont blasted the warped priorities of the U.S. Senate on Wednesday as the Democratic-controlled chamber moved to advance legislation that he warned would provide a $53 billion "blank check" to the profitable microchip industry under the guise of promoting innovation, domestic manufacturing, and job creation.

"We have strange priorities here in the Senate," Sanders, the chair of the Senate Budget Committee, said in floor remarks. "We can't extend the child tax credit to combat child poverty. We can't deal with the crisis in child care. We can't provide dental care to seniors on Medicare. We can't deal with climate change."

"But somehow," the senator added, "we can provide a massive amount of corporate welfare to a handful of corporations."

Sanders' comments came as the Senate began holding votes on dozens of motions related to the COMPETES Act, which is currently in conference committee as the House and Senate reconcile their differences on the legislation before final passage. The motions are aimed at instructing the conferees' work on the bill.

In recent weeks, Sanders has vocally warned on the Senate floor and in the pages of major newspapers that the measure in its current form would do nothing to prevent taxpayer funding from going to large corporations that bust unions, outsource U.S. jobs, and buy back their own stock.

The Vermont senator has specifically targeted a provision that would authorize an additional $10 billion in NASA funding for moon landers, money that could wind up benefiting billionaire Jeff Bezos' space flight company Blue Origin.

"Clearly, Mr. Bezos desperately needs this federal assistance," the Vermont senator said sarcastically. "He is only worth $150 billion."

On Wednesday, Sanders introduced motions that would attach a number of safeguards to the legislation's funding and cut the $10 billion NASA provision.

"At a time when 70 million are uninsured, when 600,000 people are homeless in this country, while we are seeing a growing gap between the very rich and everybody else," Sanders said, "it does not make a lot of sense to give $10 billion to the second-wealthiest person in this country."

By overwhelming margins—6-87 and 17-78—the Senate voted down both of Sanders' proposals while approving several Republican-led motions unrelated to the bill's core objectives, including one that would instruct conferees to prohibit President Joe Biden from lifting the terrorism designation on Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

The Senate's votes came days after the leak of a draft opinion signaling that the Supreme Court's right-wing majority is set to overturn Roe v. Wade, imperiling abortion rights and more across the country.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) has vowed to hold another vote on the Women's Health Protection Act, House-passed legislation that would codify the right to abortion care into federal law. But the bill will fail again as long as Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) continues to oppose it and the 60-vote filibuster remains intact—thanks in large part to Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.).

"Congress must pass legislation that codifies Roe v. Wade as the law of the land in this country NOW," Sanders tweeted late Monday. "And if there aren't 60 votes in the Senate to do it, and there are not, we must end the filibuster to pass it with 50 votes."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jake Johnson.