Roaming Charges: Both Ends Burning

Image: Kenneth J. Schubert.

“I was born near Ypres in 1917 on the western front. The first thing I really remember about my father was him waking up screaming in the middle of the night, having one of his recurring nightmares about the war.”

– John Berger

+ The tributes to Madeleine Albright, who died this week at 84, are sickening to read. The lede for her obituary should read very simply: Chief architect of a sanction regime that killed 500,000 Iraqi children, whose deaths she said were “worth it.”

+ In our identity-obsessed political culture, Madeleine Albright finally proved that American woman (the Israelis and Brits had demonstrated this quality decades earlier) are fully capable of supervising mass death without flinching or showing the tiniest twinge of regret or remorse.

+ It is the ultimate moral crime to target for misery, pain and death those least responsible for the offenses of their tyrannical rulers. Yet this is the very policy Madeleine Albright made Standard Operating Procedure for US diplomacy.

+ The “soft power” of economic sanctions don’t prevent war. After Ms. Albright’s sanctions on Iraq killed 1 million civilians, half of them children, the US still invaded Iraq, toppled their government, occupied their country for the next 17 years and continues to bomb it at will.

+ Albright may be dead. But her policy of “hands-off” killing through sanctions continues to function as the most lethal weapon in the US arsenal. Look no further than Afghanistan where upwards of 175 newborns are dying every day as a consequence of crippling sanctions. The moral stench of her policies is made more ghoulish by the fact that Albright justified the deaths of children, women, the old, the infirm and the destitute on humanitarian grounds. Few people in history have overseen the deaths of so many civilians they claimed they were acting to protect.

+ Although the first line in Albright’s obituary should be her shocking lack of conscience about consigning 500,000 Iraqi kids to death, her lifelong obsession was not the Middle East but Russia. She never stopped pushing for NATO expansion right to Russia’s borders, sparking an antagonism that has only intensified ever since.

+ Given the black hole opening in Ukraine, threatening to suck all the major European powers into it, it’s instructive to recall that it was Bill Clinton, NATO Supremo Wesley Clark and Madeleine Albright’s failure to negotiate in good faith with Milošević that led to the Kosovo War–a war all of the above desperately wanted and got–heedless of the still convulsing consequences.

+ Jason Motz: “She’ll be greatly missed…at The Hague.”

+ And by the press…

+ And still Kissinger lives. Would someone check the vintage of the serum vials in Henry’s fridge…A, B or O-Neg?

+ Apparently, even the deepest precincts of Hell have rejected Kissinger.

+ If there weren’t neo-Nazis in Mariupol before, there will be now. If a century of aerial bombardments has taught us anything, it’s that bombing radicalizes the bombed. They may go far left or far right, but they’re not going to forget or forgive and they’ll re-emerge wanting payback.

+ In the first three days of the Iraq War, the US launched 1,700 air sorties and 504 cruise missiles…

+ Many people are wondering why Russia hasn’t conducted saturation bombing of major Ukrainian cities, as the US did in Iraq and Russia did in Syria. But unlike in Syria, where Russia hoped to get reconstruction contracts for what the buildings, streets and infrastructure their bombs and missiles leveled, the point of the invasion of Ukraine is to occupy it. If they succeed, Moscow would be on the hook for rebuilding what they’ve pulverized.

+ When one capitalist country invades another blame…Karl Marx?

+ The Russian invasion of Ukraine has already created a flood of nearly 10 million refugees, 20 percent of the entire Ukrainian population. Sanho Tree: “What makes the crisis in Ukraine so extraordinary is the speed & scale of the catastrophe. More than 3 million have fled the country and nearly 6.5 million are IDPs (internally displaced persons). In comparison, it took Colombia FIVE DECADES of civil war to reach 7 million IDPs.”

+ At least seven wildfires are now burning in the Chernobyl radioactive exclusion zone, near the site of the world’s worst nuclear calamity. The fires, which have been documented by satellite photos, are currently exceed by ten-times the level of Ukraine’s emergency classification standard. Meanwhile, the radiation-monitoring system in the Chernobyl zone has been disabled.

+ The Russian forces are losing general officers at a faster rate in Ukraine than in any war since World War II. Of course, most of the Russian generals killed during (and just before) WW II were offed by Stalin, who had nearly 1000 Russian generals executed during the Red Army purges. The Nazis only succeeded in killing about 600. (See Adam Hochschild’s The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin.)

+ Not exactly the speech Kutuzov made the night before the Battle of Borodino…

+ Who am I to dispute Einstein? But it’s looking more and more likely to me that WW4 will be fought with NFTs…

+What tends to happen when Europe goes to war with itself: In France, half the men who were between the ages of 22 and 30 in 1914 were dead by the war’s end in 1918.

+ The first major battle with modern weapons was fought in 1897 at Omdurman where British troops under Lord Kitchener enfiladed Sudanese peasants with Maxim machine guns capable of firing 600 rounds a minute. In a single day, 12,000 Sudanese were killed and 15,000 wounded and maimed for life. The Brits lost a total of 46 men.  Thus was “Chinese” Gordon revenged. The Maxim Gun was designed specifically to suppress and terrorize rebellious colonial populations in Africa, India and Ireland. But less than two decades after Omdurman, Europe’s imperial powers would be turning these new mechanized weapons of mass slaughter on themselves, resulting in carnage beyond the limits of human imagination. More than a century later, the super powers that dictate the world are still perfecting techniques for mass murder, including thermobaric bombs that melt the lungs of all breathing beings. Thus were the Sudanese revenged.

+ There was justifiable concern this week after Russia reiterated that it reserved the right to use nuclear weapons in the Ukraine war if it felt threatened by NATO. Yet this newfound nuclear anxiety is late in coming, since this has been Russia’s policy

+ The long-standing justification for supporting Saudi Arabia’s genocidal war on Yemen, which has remained consistent from Obama to Trump to Biden, is that the Saudis are fighting a defensive war that helps to protect the 70,000 American citizens living in the oil kingdom. But a new analysis from the Quincy Institute demolishes this rationale. Since 2015, the Saudi-led coalition has carried out more than 24,600 air raids, an average of almost 10 each day with each air raid encompassing hundreds of individual airstrikes or bombs. These air raids have killed almost 9,000 civilians and wounded more than 10,000. In contrast, the Houthis have launched a total of 430 missiles and 851 drones at Saudi Arabia since the start of the war in March 2015, killing 59 civilians for an average of one attack every other day.

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+ Detention of immigrants and refugees was once reserved only for those who threatened public safety or posed a flight risk. Now it the US has the largest immigrant detention gulag in world. But only forty years ago, this system did not exist.

+ ICE is shoveling millions to private companies for detention contracts, while many of the companies aren’t spending the money for even the minimum level of sanitary conditions they’ve agreed to provide. The contracts come with little or no oversight.

+ The Gary Gilmore Option: How do you want to go, firing squad or electric chair?

+ Speaking of Gary Gilmore, the state of South Carolina has just legalized the use of firing squads for executions, as measure first proposed by Democratic state Sen. Dick Harpootlian as a “more humane method of execution” than lethal injection or the electric chair.

+ The Biden White House considered giving out gas cards to ease the pain of rising prices at the pump, but rejected the idea as “infeasible.” They have no trouble funneling billions in subsidies to the fossil industry every year ($5.9 trillion a year globally), but can’t find a way to give families gas cards?

+ The brand new Freedom-class littoral combat ships have proven so unseaworthy that the Navy wants to scrap as many as 10 of them in its new budget request. The ships cost $600 million each.

+ Boeing lost $4.2 billion last year and cut nearly 16,000 jobs. It rewarded its CEO, Dave Calhoun, with $21 million. Calhoun replaced Dave Calhoun, who was fired as Boeing’s CEO in 2019 and received a $62.2 million payout in cash, stock and pension funds.

+ Typical Democratic Party strategy: Demonize the guy who is up by 30 points for being “too liberal”!!! A memo circulated by a pro-Conor Lamb super PAC warns “he’s 30 points behind and that Democratic voters don’t yet see [John] Fetterman as the liberal he is.”

+ Georgia GOP senate candidate Herschel Walker questioned in vitro fertilization and other forms of medically-assisted reproductive technology: “The conception of a baby. Let me tell you, science can’t do that. They’re still trying to do it, but they can’t, because there has to be a God.”

+ Walker sounds like he just got back from a school trip to the Creation Museum with his head full of astounding new factoids.

+ According to a recent Gallup poll “the people who seem to be driving the negative feelings toward American schools do not have children attending them.”

+ 23% of Americans who died in the last five years had a net worth of zero or less.

+ Deep Thoughts from Vice-President Kamala Harris: “The significance of the passage of time, right? The significance of the passage of time. So when you think about it, there is great significance to the passage of time…there is such great significance to the passage of time.”

+ Aside from the blatant conflict of interest in having her husband cast a vote to keep her text messages with Mark Meadows on overturning the 2020 elections secret, the texts themselves reveal that Ginni Thomas believes some really weird shit…

In the Nov. 5 message to Meadows, Thomas went on to quote a passage that had circulated on right-wing websites: “Biden crime family & ballot fraud co-conspirators (elected officials, bureaucrats, social media censorship mongers, fake stream media reporters, etc) are being arrested & detained for ballot fraud right now & over coming days, & will be living in barges off GITMO to face military tribunals for sedition.”

+ Speaking of Ginni Thomas, remember that time when she left a message on Anita Hill’s answering machine?

+ I was delighted to learn that my old pal Saul Landau’s documentary films have found a new home on Youtube, where Saul’s very talented son Greg has started the Saul Landau channel. Stream them soon before they run afoul of the censors…

+++

+ The histrionics of the GOP senators on display at Jackson’s confirmation hearings are refreshing in at least one respect: no one can believe the court is a collection of legal scholars who dispassionately interpret the Constitution. The court is an instrument of political power, ruthless, partisan & often quite violent. The bipartisan charade of the years when Biden ruled the Judiciary Committee and went easy on mad dog jurists like Clarence Thomas so as not to alienate his senate pals like Strom Thurmond are long gone. Lives are at stake. Fight like it.

+ Texas Sen. John Cornyn asserted that Judge Jackson had called George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld “war criminals”. If only she had! While she was a public defender, Jackson filed a habeas corpus petition on behalf of a GTMO detainee alleging that he had been tortured in violation of international law; Bush and Rumsfeld were respondents. As the case dragged on into 2009, the respondents in the case were changed to Barack Obama and Robert Gates.

+ Ted Cruz to Jackson: “I’m an Hispanic man. Could I decide I was an Asian man?”

+ “Teenage dating habits:” How Ted Cruz described the sexual assault allegations against Brett Kavanaugh.

+ Another question from the most ridiculous person in a city packed with ridiculous people: “Do you agree that babies are racist?”

+ Matthew Dowd: “I will say this again having worked with Ted Cruz in 2000 campaign: when people asked me why do folks take such an instant dislike to Cruz, my answer was it saves time.”

+ REPORTER: “You would be okay with the Supreme Court leaving the issue of interracial marriage to the states?”

SEN. MIKE BRAUN (R-IN): “Yes. If you are not wanting the Supreme Court to weigh in on issues like that, you are not going to be able to have your cake and eat it too.”

+ I’m sure the senator from Indiana meant to say, “cupcakes.”

+ After taking political heat for these comments, even back home in Indiana, Braun reversed (or perhaps backed over) himself a day later, saying: “I wasn’t paying close enough attention to it. Once I got into it, I didn’t want to litigate anything other than Roe vs Wade.”

+ Marsha Blackburn: “Can you provide a definition for the word, woman?

Jackson: “Can I provide a definition? No, I can’t.”

Blackburn: “You can’t?”

Jackson: “Not in this context – I’m not a biologist. In my work as a judge what I do is I address disputes.”

+ Once Blackburn thought “glitter” was the future…

+ Blackburn to Jackson: “Do you believe child predators are misunderstood?”

+ Blackburn, and about half of her colleagues in the Senate, would fail the test to become a US citizen.

+ Senator Thom Tillis prefacing an inane question on the rights of abortion protestors: “I’m not an attorney, I watch ‘Law & Order’ from time to time…” 

+ For a clearer understanding of Jackson’s views on “sex crimes”, child porn and pedophilia, I highly recommend JoAnn Wypijewski’s recent essay on Jackson  in The Nation.

+ Even so, the American Bar Association confirmed my own assessment of Jackson: she’s shown no particular leniency in her sentencing and has shown a deference to cops. If Jackson was “soft on crime,” as Hawley, Cruz and Graham allege, why did most of the police unions, including the Fraternal Order of Police, support her–which for me was an initial red flag (along with her ruling for Trump’s border wall) against her?

+ Lindsay Graham, during the Jackson hearings: “If you’re listening to my voice right now on a computer and looking at images of child porn…” Complete this sentence with…

A. Why didn’t you answer the Lady G ads?
B. How do you do that?
C. How do I sound?

+ For those of you at home who were scoring the hearings by using the Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASPD) assessment test, how did Graham rank?

+++

+ With the BA2 variant looming, many states are closing down COVID testing sites. What you don’t know can’t hurt you (though it may kill your grandmother)…

+ Federal coverage for COVID treatment and testing for the uninsured ended this week. Coverage for vaccine administration for the uninsured ends in 2 weeks. Some might take this as a sign the government thinks nuclear war imminent. But there’s also the high probability that they just don’t give a shit…

+ The same thing is happening in the workplace, where workers are being forced back into offices and business locations with little regard for personal safety. According to a Gallup survey, fewer than one-in-four U.S. employees feel strongly that their organization cares about their wellbeing — the lowest percentage in nearly a decade. No wonder people are quitting in droves or demanding union representation.

Source: Gallup.

+ A Google worker in California claims the tech giant tried to relocate her to Brazil after she criticized the company’s contract with Israel

+ Zhang Jun, China’s permanent representative to the United Nations, at the UN Security Council session on the situation in the Middle East, including the Palestinian question: “We call on Israel to halt the expansion of settlements, stop the eviction of Palestinians, stop the demolition of Palestinian homes, and create conditions for the development of Palestinian communities in the West Bank, as called for in council resolution 2334.”

+ Don’t expect Zhang to apply a similar logic to China’s occupation of Tibet. Maximum hypocrisy:  the privilege of all nuclear powers.

+ Russia, if you’re listening: after the “de-Nazification” of the Azov battalion, perhaps you could turn your attention to the LA Sheriff’s Department, where the Department’s own Inspector General has identified at least 41 employees who belong to “gang-like” groups, one of which is called The Executioners, who tattoo symbol is a skull wearing a military-style helmet?

+ Up in the PNW, Jordan Green reports for Raw Story on another homegrown neo-Nazi cell that formed at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, moved as a group to Idaho, plotted terror attacks on the power grid, compiled a hit list of Black Lives Matter organizers, and featured a cop from Lafayette, Indiana among its ranks…

+ The five states with the highest murder rates (MS, LA, KY, AL, MO)  had rates at least 240 percent higher than New York’s. All five were states that voted for Donald Trump.

+ Average Wall Street bonus:
1985: $13,970
2021: $257,500

Federal minimum wage:
1985: $3.35
2021: $7.25

+ How fast are housing prices rising across the country? There are now ten real estate markets that are poised to become even more unaffordable to live in than San Francisco, including Salt Lake City, San Diego, Raleigh, North Carolina and…Merced, which has all the charm of Fresno, but is a few miles closer to Yosemite traffic jams.

+++

+ William Gibson: “The future is already here—it is just not very evenly distributed.”

Forest fire in the Columbia Gorge National Scenic Area, March 6, 2022. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

+ Both Ends of the Earth are Burning: Last week the Arctic was 50 degrees warmer than average  and Antarctica 70 degrees warmer than average–50 degrees warmer than average in March in Portland, Oregon would be 106F, while 70 degrees warmer than average in Sydney, Australia in March would be 147F.

+ The Antarctic heat wave was quickly followed by the collapse of the entire Conger Ice Shelf, an area about the size of Los Angeles.

+ This week more than 175 wildfires erupted across Texas,  burning more than 100,000 acres, incinerating hundreds of structures, including homes, barns and businesses, and much of the town of Carbon.

+ In order to keep the 1.5C warming threshold alive, carbon emissions need to be cut in half by the end of this decade. Instead, CO2 emissions are set to rise by 14%.

+ Last week Biden’s Energy Department announced two long-term orders giving a pair of Cheniere Energy projects in Louisiana and Texas “additional flexibility to export the equivalent of 0.72 billion cubic feet per day” of liquefied natural gas (LNG) “to any country with which the U.S. does not have a free trade agreement, including all of Europe.”

+ 8,800 cubic meters: the amount of Arctic land ice loss averaged per second between 2020 and 2021

+ Over the past year, volunteers have documented nearly 400 natural gas leaks in all eight of Washington, D.C.’s wards.

+ Micro-plastic particles, from clothing, tires, and cosmetics have been found across the entire planet, from the summit of Mount Everest to the depths of the Pacific Ocean.

+ Thirty-three years ago this week the Exxon Valdez clipped Bligh Reef in Prince William Sound. The resulting oil spill killed an estimated 250,000 seabirds, 2,800 sea otters, 300 harbor seals, 250 bald eagles, as many as 22 killer whales, and billions of salmon and herring eggs. The wreck of the Exxon Valdez should never be forgotten. But as Cockburn and I wrote on the 10th Anniversary, more oil is routinely spilled at Prudhoe Bay and along the Alaska Pipeline every five years, day after day, year after year, than entered Prince William that fateful day. The problem wasn’t transporting oil by ship or a drunken captain or the lack of a double-hull, but the nature of the industry itself, from the North Slope of Alaska to the Niger River Delta: oil will leak, spill and kill.

+ Oxfam is predicting that average or below-average rains March-May will force nearly 20 million people into severe food insecurity in Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia, while nearly eight million more are expected to go hungry in South Sudan, which is now facing a fifth consecutive year of severe flooding: “Trauma is real and people are suffering in silence.”

+ Humans have been steadily hunting, killing and eating most other animals to death. A new paper from ScienceDirect shows the series of extinctions of megafauna over 1.5 million years did not result from climatic changes. Instead, it was caused by humans hunting their way down the food chain, as each larger species was depleted or extirpated.

+ Michael Grunwald: “Imagine we decarbonized every aspect of human civilization…except our global food system. From a climate perspective, we’d be way less screwed! But as crazy as it might sound, we’d still be pretty screwed.”

+ We’ve known for a long time that big trees and old forests store more carbon and are more resistant to catastrophic fire than younger forests and plantations. But this new study found another benefit: old forests boost water supplies by preserving winter snowpacks.

+ Four years of drought, the worst in decades, along with deforestation caused by people burning or cutting down trees to make charcoal or to open up land for farming, have transformed vast portions of the once lush island of Madagascar into a dust bowl: “If there’s no rain,” says Felix Fitiavantsoa, a 22-year-old slash-and-burn farmer. “I don’t know what we’ll do. We’ll pray to God.”

+ Market failure? Gasoline price swings (measured on a 3 month moving average basis) have not dramatically impacted total vehicle miles traveled in the US from Jan 2009-Jun 2019…

+ The cost of fueling an average car for 100 miles of travel in the US:

Gasoline:    $14.
Electricity:   $5.

+ In the Arctic, spring vegetation is sprouting up to two weeks earlier than normal, meaning caribou calves are born too late to eat it, decimating populations of the endangered species. But they’ll still blame caribou population declines on wolves…

+ Even Canada is now facing a range of water security issues, largely as a consequence of climate change. According to a new study by Global Water Futures: “Since 2000 Canada has had the most expensive and severe floods and droughts in its history, lake water quality has declined, groundwater has become increasingly contaminated”

+ Yuri Gagarin: “Looking at the earth from afar you realize it is too small for conflict and just big enough for co-operation.”

+ Nearly 80 percent of the carbon credits issued by Australia’s Clean Energy Regulator are flawed, according to Andrew Macintosh, the former chair of Australia’s market oversight integrity committee. It’s left buyers of the credits holding “sham assets” that have failed to reduce the nation’s carbon burden.

+ All carbon “offsets” are a scam, the environmental equivalent of Papal indulgences to continue committing mortal sins. There’s no fixing the system.

+ The Biden White House is now touting nuclear fusion–the Fools Gold, or I suppose, Fool’s Lithium (where the tritium comes from) of the Climate Crisis…

+ The new study out of Japan’s Kyushu University estimates that 25.3 million metric tons of plastic waste has entered the Earth’s oceans and nearly two-thirds of that cannot be monitored. More ominously, another 540 million metric tons of plastic waste—nearly 10% of all plastic produced so far—remains trapped on land, much of which will eventually find its way into the seas.

+ Now micro plastics have been discovered inside the human bloodstream for the first time, giving new meaning to Polythene Pam…

+ Shocking! “The first major evaluation of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s controversial efforts to expand capital-intensive, high-input agriculture in Africa found that the 15-year-effort has failed to achieve its goals of improving food security.”

+ It’s a rare day when the USFWS lists a species on its own volition and not dragging its feet after a court order. So the situation for the Northern Long-Eared Bat is probably even more dire than they claim…

+ The USDA’s Wildlife Services is a mercenary force for the livestock, ag, and timber industries. Last year the Agency killed more than 1.75 million animals (a rate of 200 every hour) in the US, including 324 gray wolves, 64,131 coyotes, 433 black bears, 200 mountain lions, 605 bobcats, 3,014 foxes, 24,687 beavers and 714 river otters.

+ What happens to the EVs and their charging stations after the first electromagnetic pulse event? Of course, nearly all cars have electronic components that will be similarly fried. Except those in Cuba and Alexander Cockburn’s old barn, which will still be running the day after Doomsday.

+ MAGA iconography finally recognizes the threat of rising sea levels…

+++

+ Going back to Ovid, some of the best writing has emerged under conditions of extreme censorship. Soviet Russia alone produced: Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Serge, Grossman, Bulgakov. Yet the writing of the Cancel(ed) Culture claque, which is, ironically, everywhere these days, is undigestible dreck–the prose so tedious, aggrieved and self-infatuated, actually getting canceled by an editor would be doing the writers (not to mention the readers) a favor.

+ Wait until Kurt’s ghost hears what Spotify is paying Joe Rogan…

+ The most frequently mentioned Roman Emperors in heavy metal songs:

1) Nero (139 songs)
2) Caligula (110)
3) Constantine (45)
4) Augustus (25)
5) Tiberius (15)

+ Five blocks of a street in Plainfield, New Jersey has now been named Parliament/Funkadelic Way. I sure hope Philly does the same for Sun Ra, so that we can all travel the Space Way.

Photo: Barnyard Orbit, Twitter.

+ Sun Ra: “To save the planet, I had to move to the worst spot on Earth. And that was Philadelphia, which is death’s headquarters.’” (H/T to David Larsson.)

+ The current leader of the Arkestra is Marshall Allen, 97-years old and still touring with the band. Allen recounted to the Chicago Tribune this week, what it was like to perform in Sun Ra’s revolutionary band: “I’d come out of conservatory, I was up on my reading, my eyes were good, my tone was good — I was a polished musician. Then, I get with Sun Ra, and he turns everything around. Suddenly, I don’t know nothing — and I didn’t! I had to break all those years of training to do something different. It’s like life: You might know, but it don’t always work.”

+ Thelonious Monk: “Where’s jazz going? I don’t know. Maybe it’s going to hell. You can’t make anything go anywhere. It just happens.”

+ Apparently many Vanderbilt alumni are perplexed by the university’s new logo. Not to worry, Herbert Stencil, Benny Profane and Seaman Bodine are on the case!

+ My Oscar picks (restricted to the narrow confines of the official nominations)…

Best Picture: Drive My Car
Best Animated Feature: Flee
Best International Feature: The Hand of God
Best Documentary: Attica, Stanley Nelson & Traci Curry
Best Director: Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Drive My Car
Best Cinematography: Ari Wegner, Power of the Dog
Best Editing: Peter Sciberras, Power of the Dog
Best Original Screenplay: Don’t Look Up, Adam McKay & David Sirota
Best Adapted Screenplay: The Lost Daughter, Maggie Gyllenhaal
Best Actor: Benedict Cumberbatch, Power of the Dog
Best Supporting Actor: Ciarán Hinds, Belfast
Best Supporting Actress: Jessie Buckley, The Lost Daughter
Best Actress: Penelope Cruz, Parallel Mothers
Best Score: Alberto Iglesias, Parallel Mothers
Best Song: Beyonce, Be Alive (Dixon)

+ Tell Me What is There to Save Tonight?

Booked Up
What I’m reading this week…

Anticolonial Eruptions: Racial Hubris and the Cunning of Resistance
Geo Maher
(University of California)

Dissidents Among Dissidents: Ideology, Politics and the Left in Post-Soviet Russia
Ilya Budraitskis
Translated by Giuliano Vivaldi
(Verso)

The Prince: Andrew Cuomo, Coronavirus and the Fall of New York
Ross Markan
(O/R Books)

Sound Grammar
What I’m reading this week…

New Gospel Revisited
Marquis Hill
(Edition)

In Cinerama
April March
(Omnivore)

Forever On My Mind
Son House
(Easy Eye Sound)

The Very Heart of Whiteness

“It is such a supreme folly to believe that nuclear weapons are deadly only if they’re used. The fact that they exist at all, their presence in our lives, will wreak more havoc than we can begin to fathom. Nuclear weapons pervade our thinking. Control our behavior. Administer our societies. Inform our dreams. They bury themselves like meat hooks deep in the base of our brains. They are purveyors of madness. They are the ultimate colonizer. Whiter than any white man that ever lived. The very heart of whiteness.”

Arundhati Roy, The Cost of Living

Jeffrey St. Clair is editor of CounterPunch. His most recent book is An Orgy of Thieves: Neoliberalism and Its Discontents (with Alexander Cockburn). He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net or on Twitter @JeffreyStClair3