23 April 2021 — DESMOGUK
Crashing waves, sun-bathed wind turbines, bright green algae farms. Also: women running up a steep hill, a newborn’s feet, a smiling scientist, a child in their father’s arms.
Emotive imagery of nature and family life are central to adverts made by some of the world’s biggest greenhouse gas emitters, all complete with softly spoken voice-overs about the net zero transition.
23 April 2021 — Good Law Project
Explosive emails revealed in a hearing on our legal challenge over direct awards of PPE contracts show civil servants raising the alarm that they were “drowning in VIP requests” from political connections that do not have “the correct certification or pass due diligence”.
22 April 2021 — Black Agenda Report
Margaret Kimberley, BAR senior columnist
If the state reserves the right to commit mass murder no one should be surprised that the people follow suit.
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22 April 2021 — Moon of Alabama
Some two month ago we discussed how the U.S. focus on narratives will let it collide with reality. It is certainly not only the U.S. government that creates narratives, comes to believe in them, and then fails when it is confronted with reality. Carried by think tanks and media the narrative mold has grown throughout the wider ‘western’ world.
22 April 2021 — Institute of Race Relations
Whilst the report by the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities (CRED) has been derided by many individuals, academics, historians, trade unions, health professionals, MPs and most recently UN human rights experts, what has been muted in discussions is the wider historical context in which the report exists. This week on IRR News, Jenny Bourne provides a much-needed reflective piece, Sewell: a report for neoliberal times, which places the CRED report in context of other key reports from the last fifty years, revealing how it’s not the first time that an ‘independent’ report has reflected the ideology of a government.
22 April 2021 — Monthly Review Press
22 April 2021 — Indian Punchline
US to withdraw troops from Afghanistan by Sept 11, 2021The United States and NATO are yet to begin the withdrawal of their forces from Afghanistan but the eyes are cast over the horizon at what lies after the ‘forever war’ formally ends. The US exit strategy in Afghanistan assumes the look of that random arbitrariness of a lottery that was the case with its Iraq war ending inconclusively in 2011.
22 April 2021 — Tricontinental
Mohsen Taasha Wahidi (Afghanistan), Rebirth of the Red, 2017.
Dear friends,
Greetings from the desk of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.
After twenty years, the United States government – and the forces of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) – will depart from Afghanistan. They said that they came to do two things: to destroy al-Qaeda, which had launched an attack on the United States on 11 September 2001, and to destroy the Taliban, which had given al-Qaeda a base. After great loss of life and the further destruction of Afghan society, the US departs – as it did from Vietnam in 1975 – in defeat: al-Qaeda has regrouped in different parts of the world, and the Taliban is set to return to the capital, Kabul.
21 April 2021 — Internationalist 360°
Part I: When Did the “Cold War” End?
I have said on other occasions that our humanity, and not exclusively its youngest members, tends to live not only in the world of images, but also in the world of the immediate, and that its inclination to read is increasingly reduced. The current world power, its deceitful media, its websites and its networks are also determined, through confusion and the trivialization of everything, to ensure that the information we seek therein leaves us with little, everything muddled, and that our already disorganized memory becomes increasingly reduced, volatile and insecure. Therefore, as we continue the critical review of the Cold War begun in the previous article, it would not be superfluous to provide, not a useless summary, but a simple enunciation of its main facts, which today are confused or forgotten.
22 April 2021 — CJ Hopkins
Back in October of 2020, I wrote an essay called The Covidian Cult, in which I described the so-called “New Normal” as a global totalitarian ideological movement. Developments over the last six months have borne out the accuracy of that analogy.
22 April 2021 — Michael Roberts Blog
The collapse of the attempt to form a ‘super league’ of top European soccer teams by the billionaire owners of the big clubs is only an interrupted chapter in the story of the commodification of sport into profitable capitalist enterprises, owned and controlled by capital. It is no accident that JP Morgan was the fund manager for the Super League plan – as the bank epitomises the role of global capital in controlling modern sport. And it is no accident that the main drivers for the new league were the owners of Real Madrid, a football club controlled in the past by the corrupt Spanish monarchy and Francoism, the fascist wing of Spanish capital.
21 April 2021 — Mercola
Makers of COVID-19 vaccines are now destroying long-term safety studies by unblinding their trials and giving the control groups the active vaccine, claiming it is “unethical” to withhold an effective vaccine.21 April 2021 — Moon of Alabama
“Nice sidekick, Shere Khan. A hyena who laughs at his own bad jokes.”
― Bagheera to Shere Khan about Tabaqui
Today Russia’s President Vladimir Putin made his annual Address to the Federal Assembly (English transcript).
Most of his talk was about domestic and economic issues. At the end he made some remarks towards international developments and other governments.
20 April 2021 — Off Guardian
As much of the world rushes to receive a lightly-tested pharmaceutical product, we thought it was high time to look again at the (very) big business of medicine. Leemon McHenry, PhD, guides us to the fraudulent core of ghostwritten studies, captured legislators, revolving-door regulatory agencies, pay-to-play medical journals, and the “key opinion leaders” who lend their academic credentials to giant corporations…for a price.
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20 April 2021 — Black Agenda Report
Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley and Glen Ford
Blacks and the US: a History of Resistance / Maroons Sought Freedom on Ocean Currents / Criminal Neglect of Mumia’s Health
20 April 2021 — Good Law Project
We already knew that Boris Johnson had misled Parliament when he insisted in February 2021 that all COVID contracts were now “on the record”. Now we’ve uncovered a new contract that makes further nonsense of that claim.
20 April 2021 — Moon of Alabama
Thanks to a monoculture of anti-Russia hawks in U.S. policy institutions relations between the U.S. and Russia are likely to further decline. But some hope might be seen at the horizon.
Scott Ritter predicts the end of a generation of anti-Russian influencers in Washington DC who depict Russia and is policies as being run by just one man:
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20 April, 2021 — Swiss Policy Research
From a strategic perspective, ‘vaccine passports’ are the most important aspect of the entire pandemic; in fact, they are more important than the pandemic itself, at least in the long term. This is because vaccine passport advocates, such as the ID2020 consortium founded by Bill Gates and the Rockefeller Foundation, openly state that ‘vaccine passports’ may be used as a platform for a global biometric ID, allowing unprecedented population control and monitoring, modeled after China.
20 April 2021 — Origin: Media Lens
Long before ‘the propaganda model’ flew off Edward Herman’s keyboard and into ‘Manufacturing Consent’, the book he co-authored with Noam Chomsky, Leo Tolstoy had captured the essence of non-conspiratorial conformity:
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The New Dark Age 