Thursday, October 31, 2024

Brown University Affirms Support For Genocide

 The "Corporation of Brown University" voted to retain its investments in companies supporting Israeli crimes and Israeli companies.


The University's chancellor and president issued this statement in justification:


University Chancellor Brian T. Moynihan and President Christina H. Paxson said that with a majority vote to accept ACURM’s recommendation, the Corporation — Brown’s highest governing body — stated its clear position opposing divestment, and accordingly, the University will not divest.


“In particular, Corporation members noted ACURM’s finding that Brown’s exposure to the 10 companies identified in the divestment proposal is de minimis, that Brown has no direct investments in any of the companies targeted for divestment and that any indirect exposure for Brown in these companies is so small that it could not be directly responsible for social harm, as defined in ACURM’s charge,” they wrote in an Oct. 9 letter to the Brown campus. “These findings alone are sufficient reason to support ACURM’s recommendation.”


The Brown officials claim the investments are "de minimis," meaning of very slight size and value. Which means the financial sacrifice of selling the shares would be insignificant! But they wouldn't sell nevertheless.


Because they are stubbornly IN SUPPORT of Israeli genocide. They won't even take the MOST MINOR STEP to mollify people suffering the emotional pain of witnessing Israel's genocide, and caring.


Meanwhile numerous other U.S. "institutions of higher learning" are repressing and persecuting students and faculty who try to protest the Israeli-U.S. genocide of the Palestinian people.


What callous scum run U.S. "institutions of higher learning." These assholes need to learn about morality and basic human decency.



Brian T. Moynihan. He plays rugby, he wants you to know!
 
Christina H. Paxson. And she looks so NICE! 
 
[The University statement is at https://www.brown.edu/news/2024-10-09/divestment-decision]

Wednesday, October 30, 2024

You're In Luck: In Most States, Your Vote Against Trump Doesn't Matter

That means you are free to vote for whomever. In CA, NY, NJ, CT, and other non-"battleground" states, there is no contest. Kamala Harris is going to win 100% of the Electoral College vote in those states. Every single Electoral College vote. 


In states that are a lock for Trump, the same logic applies. Trump will win no matter what, so voters there need not feel trapped inside the two-party straitjacket. Especially for people who would vote Democratic, which is futile.


In 2016, Donald Trump got 62,979,879 votes, but Hillary Clinton got 65,844,954 votes, 2.9 million more than Trump. So how did Trump become president? He won in the Electoral College, 306 to 232. Hillary Clinton got more votes than any other losing presidential candidate in US history. 


In 2000, George Bush got 50,456,002 votes, Al Gore got 50,999,897 votes, 543,895 more than Bush. Bush became president, elected by the Electoral College, 271 to 266. (Ralph Nader received 2,882,728 votes nationally, but ZERO Electoral College votes. That's fair, right?)


Except for Nebraska and Maine, every state gives ALL their Electoral College votes to the winner of the "popular" vote in the state. They do NOT divide their Electoral College votes among the candidates in proportion to how the PEOPLE of the state voted. 


So your vote for Harris does NOTHING to defeat Trump. Harris is going to get ALL the Electoral College votes in your state, the votes that actually elect the president.


You don't have to vote for an accomplice to genocide and horrific crimes in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, and Yemen, where Israel is attempting to create another mass starvation by bombing the sole port through which food enters Yemen that is the difference between life and death for the people there.


For as long as I've been alive, the Democratic Party has practiced a politics of extortion. You "have" to vote for them or you get something worse, the Republican. It has worked for decades to force people to vote for them, and then the Democrats most often turn around and betray the promises they made. 


We live in a two-party dictatorship, a cartel controlled by two parties that on the basic fundamentals are in agreement- support corporate oligarchy (each party has its billionaire supporters) and imperialism as foreign policy. Breaking the stranglehold on power this political cartel has is an uphill struggle. But for people in non-"battleground" states, the choice to break free is actually easy. YOU WON'T BE HELPING ELECT TRUMP IF YOU DON'T SUBMIT TO EXTORTION BY A SUPPORTER OF MASS MURDER.


I recommend you go on youtube and watch interviews of Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Stein and the Green Party represent decent human politics, which neither of the two parties of the establishment's political cartel do. An alternative can only be built slowly, with persistence.


[Five times in U.S. history, so far, the loser got to be president: 1824, 1876, 1888, 2000, 2016. The U.S. is unique in the world. Yet it constantly boasts that it is the World's Best Democracy, indeed stands as the very SYMBOL of democracy.]

Friday, October 25, 2024

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 'ANTI-SEMITISM' WITCHHUNT, 2005

                                                     

Yes, 2005. What we're seeing today in 2024 is nothing new. Israel's American supporters and unregistered agents of influence are constantly working to ban anyone who is not fond of Israel's crimes against humanity from colleges and elsewhere. 


Then as now, the pattern is well-honed and easily recognized. A Jewish student indoctrinated in Zionist ideology and brought up on the story of Jewish persecution for millennia culminating in the Holocaust, thus having a persecution complex, will deliberately sign up for a class by a Palestinian professor or a professor targeted as unfriendly to Israel, and bait the professor with outrageous remarks designed to emotionally upset the professor. Then the student, backed by outside organized Jewish Zionists, brings a complaint to the university administration claiming the professor is anti-Semitic. 


Obviously this is a plot hatched in advance. Students don't naturally sign up for classes they expect to dislike, with professors they are hostile to. The premeditation is obvious.


The way these things unfold is the university administration doesn't defend the targeted professor, but lets him or her twist slowly in the wind. At a minimum, the targeted educator suffers some reputational damage. When you hurl mud at someone, some of it sticks, no matter the untruthfulness of the smears.


I'm reminded of an anecdote about Lyndon Johnson. Johnson wanted to make an outrageous accusation against a political opponent. One of Johnson's minions said he couldn't do that, it wasn't true. "But let the son-of-a-bitch deny it," Johnson evilly replied. In other word, get the smear out there, put the victim on the defensive. Denying a vile accusation is what people expect a guilty person to do, same as an innocent one. As long as some people believe it, or are merely influenced by it subliminally, the tactic can be effective. Richard Nixon is a politician who rose to power by smearing people he ran for Congress against as Communist "fellow travelers" or tainted with socialistic tendencies.

Monday, October 21, 2024

The Biggest Lie Politicians Tell

 That they care about you.


Think about it. How much do YOU care about total strangers? And how much do you care about millions of them? You care primarily about yourself, your family, and your friends, mainly in that order. Then there's acquaintances, work colleagues, and various people you deal with on a regular basis.


That's not to say you never care about other people, in particular strangers. If those strangers are "humanized" for you, if personal stories of their plight are brought to your attention, that evokes a sympathetic response in you. You are capable of empathy. (I'm assuming you are a normal human. There are pathological humanoids who are classified by biologists as the same as us, homo sapiens, that are incapable of empathy.) But you don't have a burning concern for strangers, most of the time.


What makes you think politicians are different from you?

In fact they care LESS about strangers than you do. (Most of them, with a small minority of exceptions, which I will come to.)


What they care about is POWER. What the hell do you think politics is about? It's about POWER. And politicians want to get and keep power.

YOU are an INSTRUMENT, to be used both to GAIN power, and to exercise power OVER.


That's pretty obvious, isn't it?


So how do politicians get away with it?


I guess people don't think, so they don't see the obvious.


But oftentimes people become "cynical," as the politicians like to say as a putdown, that is, too many false promises by the politicians are broken, too many pipe dreams are spun like so much political cotton candy, that people stop believing the bullshit.


All that I said above isn't just about the U.S. It's true in all countries.


Now there are some people who go INTO politics because there is something they care about, something about the world they want to change. If it's something to make the world better for humans, let's call them progressives. They want progress. If it's something to make things worse, call them reactionaries. Like wanting to take away hard-won rights, as the right to abortion.


Don't make the mistake of equating the word progressive with left, or reactionary with right. The terms Left and Right are used in very broad senses to encompass in both cases a variety of people with various agendas, ideologies, and attitudes. Some of the people and movements lumped in them are wholly inappropriate, especially in the case of what is "left." Two examples: environmentalism and abortion. Environmentalism is simply a rational concern with the fitness for human habitation of the world we live in. What's "leftwing" about THAT? As for abortion, that it should be identified as "leftist" is absurd. There are progressive Catholics who are anti-abortion, and Republicans who favor abortion rights, as the recent smashing success of pro-abortion rights referendums in states where GOP legislatures and Governors outlawed abortion proves. Having the right to control one's own body doesn't seem to be a left-right issue.


The reason environmentalism and abortion rights are associated with leftism is because reactionary propagandists (which includes the corporate power establishment media, the so-called "mainstream media," have made them shibboleths tied to leftism, and decades of indoctrination has branded leftism as bad, evil, socialist, communist.


So to recap: The Biggest Lie politicians tell is that they care about you.

"Smiling faces, smiling faces, tell lies." [The Undisputed Truth - "Smiling Faces Sometimes" (1971)]

Sunday, October 20, 2024

Why Indonesia Should Declare War On Israel Now

 

 The Israeli army has been attacking the UN peacekeeping force stationed as a buffer in southern Lebanon for several weeks now. The so-called "Israeli Defense Force," IDF, the official name of "the most moral army in the world," as Binyamin Netanyahu insists, is gunning down soldiers serving under the UN flag.


In Israel's first act of war against Indonesia, two Indonesian soldiers as part of that UN contingent have been shot by Israeli soldiers. That is an act of war against Indonesia, as well as a violation of international law.  More have been shot since.


Israel has been firing on UN watchtowers. Its army invaded a UN camp and rampaged inside it.


As always when Israel commits some violent outrage, its propaganda machine, starting with the mouth of Binyamin "Mad Dog" Netanyahu, the long time prime minister of that demented nation, spouts the lines that the UN force are "human shields" for Hezbollah. When Israel calls someone a "human shield," as they do with Palestinian and Lebanese civilians that is a prelude to murder. Israel's other whine is that the UNIFIL [1] troops aren't fighting Hezbollah! And as usual, the Israeli puppet government of the U.S. goes along with this.


This latest crime by Israel is backed by Israel's guarantor of utter impunity, the U.S. In particular, U.S. government, politicians, and the awful propaganda system ("the media"). It is the U.S. that makes Israel's rampages and crimes possible, thus it is the U.S. that bears ultimate responsibility.


Unless other nations start forcefully opposing the mad dog state of Israel, there will be no limit to its ravages against civilization.

1] UNIFIL stands for United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon.


Thursday, October 10, 2024

Will Netanyahu Bomb Iran's Oil Facilities To Help His Ally Trump Retake The U.S. Presidency?

 He may well. He's ruthless enough. This is a man who exterminates babies. How would that help Trump? It would cause a sharp (temporary) rise in oil prices, which in turn raises gasoline prices. And Americans hate nothing more than paying more for gasoline. They would hold the Biden-Harris regime responsible. Trump would loudly scapegoat the Democratic regime for his own benefit in the presidential election less than a month away.

Americans are stupid people who think the president of the U.S. controls the economy and controls the prices of products. And Trump has harped on blaming the Biden regime for inflation. The Democrats have been lame in reaction. Instead of refuting that nonsense, they squirm under the barrage of false accusations and point to this or that they did to lower the price of this or that (such as the handful of medical drugs that Medicare is now allowed to negotiate the prices they pay for).

Kamala Harris made it worse by promising to lower grocery prices- something the president has no power to do. The U.S. isn't a socialist nation. The Government cannot dictate the prices that eggs or milk sell for at retail, for example. By doing this, Harris tacitly agreed with Trump that presidents have such power, and by implication the Biden regime is responsible for inflation.

Inflation has various causes, and inflation of particular products can be effected by all kinds of events- a shortfall in crop yield, a disease that wipes out chickens, and so on. These are not under the control of the White House. Maybe sometime a politician might want to tutor the moronic American public about this- if the totalitarian corporate media will let them, that is.

There's an irony here, in that Biden has been 100% behind Israel's genocide in Gaza, pogrom in the West Bank, and terrorism campaign against Lebanon. But he supposedly fulminates against Netanyahu in private, to his own staff. That's enough to make Netanyahu favor Trump. And when he was president, Trump couldn't have been more Zionist. The fact that Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner is a fanatical Zionist, and Trump's daughter Ivanka converted to Orthodox Judaism to be allowed to marry Jared, can't hurt. Oh by the way, when Jared was a boy, Netanyahu used to stay at the Jared family home in New Jersey! So with those kind of tight personal connections, it would be surprising if Binyamin Netanyahu DIDN'T favor Trump!

And by the way, Israel has a long and complex record of interfering in U.S. politics and U.S. elections. The details take a book to describe. Just trust me on this, and do your own research if you want to learn more. 


Tough Guy!

Tuesday, October 01, 2024

Israel Invades Lebanon Yet Again

  U.S. Sending Thousands MORE Troops To Middle East To Support Israel's Invasion of Lebanon

The U.S. has now joined Israel in bombing undefended people in Syria and Yemen.

The U.S. has been increasing in stages its military forces for aggression for the purpose of further intimidating Iran to sit on its hands. And if the U.S. joins the Israeli invasion on the ground, it won't be the first time the U.S. has invaded Lebanon. Eisenhower invaded Lebanon in the 1950s. Reagan invaded Lebanon in the 1980s. And the way U.S. elites "remember" THAT invasion is through the twisted prism of the U.S. was the "victim" of a "terrorist attack." Namely, a truck bomb was driven into a U.S. Marine base, killing several hundred Marines. This prompted Reagan to pull the troops out, and punish the Lebanese by having a U.S. battleship lob 16" diameter cannon shells on Lebanese villages. (Reagan had taken World War II battleships out of mothballs for such purposes. Battleships have no role in naval warfare today, as they are easily sunk by aircraft, missiles, and torpedoes. Their only purpose after World War II is to murder defenseless people in the "Third World," that is, the NON-"WHITE" areas of earth.)

The resistance strike on the Marines' is considered a terrorist outrage, the same as the Nazis considered resistance attacks on their occupying armies "terrorism." They also responded with revenge murders of random civilians as well as any resistance fighters they could find. 

The recent assassination by Israel of a Lebanese commander blamed for the Marines' deaths was noted with satisfaction by the U.S. media.

Meanwhile the Lebanese are the victims of actual terrorism. There is the mass terror attack when Israel detonated 3000 booby-trapped pagers and radios, killing at least 37 and blowing off the fingers of victims and blinding many. Some of the victims were medical personnel. Lebanon's medical system is already crippled by years of economic depression. Lebanon's "government" is simply a collection of different factions and cliques of thieves. Israel and the U.S. over the years have succeeded in making Lebanon a dysfunctional state. (The vile Syrian regime of the Assad crime family also played a malign role)

Lebanon is being subjected to an aerial blitz by Israel, targeting apartment buildings and other civilian targets. Much worse than the Blitz London suffered in World War II, because BRITAIN HAD AN AIR FORCE THAT SUCCESSFULLY FOUGHT BACK. LEBANON HAS NO AIR FORCE, NO ANTI-AIRCRAFT WEAPONS, NO "SHIELD" LIKE ISRAEL HAS TO SHOOT DOWN THE INEFFECTIVE ROCKETS HEZBOLLAH FIRES AT ISRAEL, WHICH HAVE KILLED NO ONE.

Yet U.S. media and politicians keep wringing their hands about the danger ISRAEL is exposed to! What if Hezbollah escalates!

Escalates how?

When Hezbollah fired a single rocket in the direction of Tel Aviv, WHICH ISRAEL SHOT DOWN, this was presented as equivalent to the ongoing bombardment of Lebanon by Israel, and the non-stop assassination of Hezbollah "commanders," which just included the long time head of Hezbollah, Hasan Nasrallah. (Reminiscent of the murder of Yasir Arafat on the orders of Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, by radioactive polonium poisoning.)

A big reason Israel is always murdering the leadership of its opponents is to completely eliminate the "danger" of negotiations. Negotiations are poison to Israel. They wish only to conquer by force. 

Which is to say, Israel is an imperialist state, back by the world's most powerful empire, the most powerful empire in history, the U.S. Whose political class, media, and government Israel has colonized, like a brain worm.



The Grinning Gargoyles of U.S. Imperialism