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The day's news roundup + tonight's musical feature: Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson

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Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features saxophonist and singer Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson. Enjoy!

^{Eddie Cleanhead Vinson - Too Many Women Blues}

"A fire broke out backstage in a theatre. The clown came out to warn the public; they thought it was a joke and applauded. He repeated it; the acclaim was even greater. I think that's just how the world will come to an end: to the general applause of wits who believe it's a joke."

-- Soren Kierkegaard

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News and Opinion

Revisiting John Pilger’s 2016 Warnings About US Warmongering Against Russia And China

In March of 2016 the renowned Australian journalist and filmmaker John Pilger published an article titled “A world war has begun. Break the silence.” which urgently warned of the US empire’s aggressive escalations against Russia and China. Re-reading parts of it in 2023 is like watching someone placing flags next to recently planted seeds that would eventually grow into the towering problems our world now faces.

It’s like listening to a time traveler warning people from the past about a grave mistake they were about to make. Pilger points to US provocations in Ukraine, NATO militarism, and the encirclement of China and warns of the surging risk of nuclear war, noting that nuclear warhead spending “rose higher under Obama than under any American president.”

“In the last eighteen months, the greatest build-up of military forces since World War Two — led by the United States — is taking place along Russia’s western frontier,” Pilger wrote. “Not since Hitler invaded the Soviet Union have foreign troops presented such a demonstrable threat to Russia.”

“Ukraine — once part of the Soviet Union — has become a CIA theme park,” wrote Pilger. “Having orchestrated a coup in Kiev, Washington effectively controls a regime that is next door and hostile to Russia: a regime rotten with Nazis, literally. Prominent parliamentary figures in Ukraine are the political descendants of the notorious OUN and UPA fascists. They openly praise Hitler and call for the persecution and expulsion of the Russian speaking minority.”

“In Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia — next door to Russia — the US military is deploying combat troops, tanks, heavy weapons,” Pilger said. “This extreme provocation of the world’s second nuclear power is met with silence in the West.”

“What makes the prospect of nuclear war even more dangerous is a parallel campaign against China,” Pilger continued. “The United States is encircling China with a network of bases, with ballistic missiles, battle groups, nuclear-armed bombers. This lethal arc extends from Australia to the islands of the Pacific, the Marianas and the Marshalls and Guam, to the Philippines, Thailand, Okinawa, Korea and across Eurasia to Afghanistan and India. America has hung a noose around the neck of China. This is not news. Silence by media; war by media.”

Pilger highlighted the way his home country Australia was being roped into Washington’s war preparations against China, a trend which has since grown much worse as the drums of war grow louder.

“In 2015, in high secrecy, the US and Australia staged the biggest single air-sea military exercise in recent history, known as Talisman Sabre,” he wrote. “Its aim was to rehearse an Air-Sea Battle Plan, blocking sea lanes, such as the Straits of Malacca and the Lombok Straits, that cut off China’s access to oil, gas and other vital raw materials from the Middle East and Africa.”

Pilger wrote all this while preparing to release his excellent film “The Coming War on China”, which would come out later that year. In it, he shows how the US has been surrounding China with war machinery in a way that would be considered an act of war if it was happening near American shorelines, and drives home the seriousness of the prospect of nuclear conflict.

Everything Pilger warned about turned out to be everything he said it was. A war in Ukraine has erupted from the spark of the US-backed coup in 2014 and Russia’s fear of an increasingly expansionist and militaristic NATO, while the US military encirclement of China has been rapidly increasing as hostilities between the two superpowers accelerate toward a breaking point, facilitated in no small part by the continent-sized military base known as Australia. What were only background stories in 2016 now dominate the headlines of today.

I bring this up because I think it’s useful to show that we’ve been on this track toward global conflict between major powers for years, and it’s been unfolding in ways that some saw coming from miles away. Much of Pilger’s work could be called prophetic, but Pilger is no prophet — he’s just a journalist with an ear to the ground who’s been critically scrutinizing the behavior of the empire for decades. He was able to accurately mark the trajectory our world has been on earlier than most, and it has continued along that same trajectory with frightening speed ever since.

If you can see the trajectory that an object is on, you can determine where you need to stand in order to obstruct its path. The fact that we’ve been on a linear trajectory toward global conflict between nuclear-armed states all these years shows that opposing that trajectory is of existential importance for every living organism on this planet. And yet the media still want us focused on celebrity gossip and party politics and Donald Trump.

World war is still closing in on us. We still need to break the silence and oppose it. Our rulers have been steering us in this direction for a long time now, and they’re not going to turn away until we make them.

Rus Enters Sinkovka; Blinken to Kiev as Offensive Stalls, US Rejects Negotiations, Cut Kiev Loose

Nato pledges ‘strong solidarity’ with Romania over likely Russian drone debris

Nato has said it stands in “strong solidarity” with Romania, which has reported that parts of a probable Russian drone fell on its territory during a Russian attack on neighbouring Ukraine. “We continue to monitor the situation closely, and we remain in close contact with our ally Romania,” Nato said in a statement on Wednesday night.

Romania, a Nato member, had initially repeatedly rejected claims by Ukraine that Iranian-made Russian drones fell and detonated on Romanian territory during a strike on the Ukrainian port of Izmail on Sunday night. But on Wednesday Romania’s defence ministry said in a press release: “Investigators discovered elements resembling drone debris in the evening of 5 September.” ...

Romania’s defence minister, Angel Tilvar, said there was no direct threat and told Agerpres, Romania’s national news agency, that it was possible the drone did not explode on impact but rather simply fell, or pieces landed on Romanian territory. “[That] does not make us happy, … but I don’t think that we can talk about an attack and, as I said before, I think we need to know how to distinguish between an act of aggression and an incident,” Agerpres quoted him as saying.

Nato should respond more aggressively to Russia, says Polish general

Vladimir Putin’s “gangster”-like nuclear threats require Nato to adopt a much more aggressive response, including flying more aircraft with nuclear weapons, the chief of the general staff of the Polish armed forces urged on Tuesday.

Gen Rajmund Andrzejczak also said he did not think North Korea would be preparing to sell weapons to Russia without the agreement of China. “I don’t believe North Korea is strong enough or so free to make such an offer, so maybe it is testing our determination, attention and political will, but what is even more important is what China says about this than the North Korean leadership.”

Washington briefed this week that it believed Putin was preparing to buy weapons from Pyongyang.

Andrzejczak also predicted that Russia would try to create a crisis in next month’s Polish election but gave no details in public. He warned that Russia was on a permanent war footing and was “very much active in Poland, looking for some gaps in the system, trying to interfere in the media”.

Andrzejczak also warned that if Ukraine lost the war and Belarus went further into Russia’s orbit, Poland would find that limiting defence spending to 5% of its gross domestic product and a standing army of 300,000-strong would not be enough. “If we lose credibility as Nato, as a civilisation, China is watching, so this is a big game,” he said. He was speaking at the Karpacz Economic Forum in Poland, during which he urged his audience to think of the long-term economic cost of Ukraine’s military defeat.

Eastern European NATO Countries Fear Peace Talks Between Ukraine and Russia

NATO members that border Russia and Belarus are afraid that growing opposition to the proxy war in Ukraine inside the United States will put pressure on the Ukrainians to pursue peace talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin, The Hill reported on Tuesday. ...

Former President Trump, the Republican frontrunner for the 2024 election, has claimed he would end the war in Ukraine within “24 hours.” The Biden administration is looking to sign a long-term security deal with Ukraine to tie the hands of a future administration on the issue, but the political climate has some NATO members nervous that peace might be pursued.

The report said that for Poland and the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, talking with Putin is a “red line.” The four nations want the US and the rest of Ukraine’s Western backers to prepare for a future where the Russian leader is completely isolated.

The narrative from the countries on NATO’s “eastern flank” is that peace talks would reward Putin and put Russia in a better position to exert its influence. “All of this then increases the threat on NATO’s borders. Putin would be able to sell negotiations as a victory, and [it] would help him exert even greater political influence globally — we already see it in Africa, in Niger and South Africa. It’s not only a military threat but a diplomatic one, too,” an unnamed Baltic official told The Hill.

Blinken delivers hard message to Kiev

Ukraine’s ‘biggest arms supplier’ orchestrated 2014 Maidan massacre, witnesses say

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Years before emerging as Kiev’s top private weapons trafficker, ex-legislator Serhiy Pashinsky played a key role in the 2014 US-backed coup which toppled Ukraine’s democratically-elected president and set the stage for a devastating civil war. Though the notoriously corrupt former Ukrainian parliamentarian was condemned by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as a “criminal” as recently as 2019, a lengthy exposé by the New York Times has now identified Pashinsky as the Ukrainian government’s “biggest private arms supplier.”
Perhaps predictably, the report makes no mention of evidence implicating Pashinsky in the 2014 massacre of 70 anti-government protesters in Kiev’s Maidan Square, an incident which pro-Western forces used to consummate their coup d’etat against then-President Viktor Yanukovych.

In an August 12 report on Ukraine’s new weapons-sourcing strategy, the New York Times alleged that “out of desperation,” Kiev had no option but to adopt increasingly amoral tactics. The shift, they say, has driven up prices of lethal imports at an exponential rate, “and added layer upon layer of profit-making” for the benefit of unscrupulous speculators like Pashinsky. According to the Times, the strategy is simple: Pashinksy “buys and sells grenades, artillery shells and rockets through a trans-European network of middlemen,” then “sells them, then buys them again and sells them once more”:

“With each transaction, prices rise – as do the profits of Mr. Pashinsky’s associates – until the final buyer, Ukraine’s military, pays the most,” the Times explained, adding that while using multiple brokers may technically be legal, “it is a time-tested way to inflate profits.” As the seemingly endless supply of cash from Western taxpayers provides a bonanza for arms manufacturers such as Raytheon and Northrop Grumman, it similarly benefits war profiteers like Pashinsky. His company, Ukrainian Armored Technology, “reported its best year ever last year, with sales totaling more than $350 million” — a whopping 12,500% increase from its $2.8 million in sales the year before the war. ...

However, even the seemingly critical Times report overlooks a key aspect of Pashinsky’s unsavory biography. Conspicuously absent from the coverage was any explanation of his role in carrying out the infamous massacre of anti-government activists and police officers in Kiev’s Maidan Square in late February 2014. ...

[See article at link for details. - js]

Gabon coup: Military leaders declares Ali Bongo has freedom of movement

Protests mount against Macron’s refusal to withdraw French troops from Niger

After tens of thousands of workers and youth protested this weekend in Niger’s capital, Niamey, thousands have encircled the NATO military base in Niamey. The base hosts some 1,500 French troops alongside US and Italian troops, fighter jets, killer drones and attack helicopters. Protesters are demanding that French troops, who have intervened across France’s former colonial empire in the Sahel during the 2013-2022 French war in neighboring Mali, leave immediately. ...

Paris is pursuing a blatantly neocolonial policy, however. President Emmanuel Macron and the military brass still refuse to withdraw their troops or replace France’s unpopular ambassador to Niger, Sylvain Itté. Anonymous French officers are issuing threats in the press to crack down on protests in Niamey and pledging that any withdrawal they carry out will aim to strengthen French combat effectiveness across the entire Sahel. France Info cited “the army general staff” as warning that “French forces are ready to retaliate against any threat to [France’s] military and diplomatic positions in Niger.”

Yesterday, French officials confirmed that they have opened talks with Niger’s military regime on a partial withdrawal of French troops from Niamey. However, the purpose of these talks is to give French troops the option to redeploy out of the most contested areas in Niger, so they could continue combat duties elsewhere in the region.

Israel imposing apartheid on Palestinians, says former Mossad chief

A former head of the Mossad intelligence agency has said Israel is imposing a form of apartheid on the Palestinians, joining a growing number of prominent Israelis to compare the occupation of the West Bank to South Africa’s defunct system of racial oppression. But Tamir Pardo’s views will have added impact because of the high regard for Mossad in Israel and because they come at a time when far-right members of Israel’s government are moving to kill off any prospect of an independent Palestinian state.

Pardo told the Associated Press that Israel’s mechanisms for controlling the Palestinians, from restrictions on movement to placing them under military law while Jewish settlers in the occupied territories are governed by civilian courts, matched the old South Africa. “There is an apartheid state here,” he said. “In a territory where two people are judged under two legal systems, that is an apartheid state.”

Pardo, 70, was appointed to head Mossad in 2011 by Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister then and now. Netanyahu’s Likud party said Pardo “should be ashamed” of his comments. “Instead of defending Israel and the Israeli military, Pardo slanders Israel,” it said.

Successive Israeli governments have fought back against accusations of apartheid by characterising them as antisemitic out of concern the charge will fuel a boycott movement or open the way to prosecutions under international laws against apartheid.

Mexico supreme court decriminalizes abortion across country

Mexico’s supreme court has unanimously ruled that state laws prohibiting abortion are unconstitutional and violate women’s rights, in the latest in a series of victories for reproductive rights activists across Latin America. ...

The court’s decision marked a major victory for the GIRE, a reproductive rights organization based in Mexico City, which brought the test case against the Mexican state as part of a years-long campaign for reform. ...

But the ruling will not automatically make decriminalization the law of the land. Mexico’s two congressional chambers will now need to come together to pass an accompanying law, eliminating abortion from the country’s penal code.

This process could be fast, or it could take years, as happened with the court’s ruling to decriminalize marijuana in 2018, which was not officially ratified by congress until 2021, leaving the possession and recreational consumption of the herb in a legal grey area for three years.

However, Wednesday’s ruling will protect both women seeking abortions and healthcare workers involved in providing abortion care from criminal charges. Anyone with a uterus should also now be able to access abortions in federal health facilities across the country.

Texas ordered to remove buoys meant to block migrants from Rio Grande River

A US judge ordered Texas to move a line of floating buoys that were placed in the middle of the Rio Grande to block migrants from crossing the US-Mexico border. The ruling is a tentative win for the Biden administration after the Department of Justice (DoJ) sued the state.

The federal judge David Ezra on Wednesday issued a preliminary injunction in the state capital of Austin that requires Texas to relocate the controversial buoys, currently near the city of Eagle Pass, to an embankment on the Texas side of the river.

The Biden administration argued in a legal challenge that the barrier illegally disrupts navigation and was installed without necessary permission from the US army corps of engineers.

The ruling is a setback for the hard-right Republican Texas governor, Greg Abbott. He contends that the Democratic president, Joe Biden, has been too lenient with border security as record numbers of migrants have been apprehended after crossing the border in recent years. Some are trying to evade the authorities, many want to report themselves to the authorities and exercise their right to request asylum in the US and be processed, all of which Abbott characterizes as an “invasion”. ...

“Governor Abbott announced that he was not ‘asking for permission’ for Operation Lone Star, the anti-immigration program under which Texas constructed the floating barrier,” Ezra wrote in a 42-page order. “Unfortunately for Texas, permission is exactly what federal law requires before installing obstructions in the nation’s navigable waters.”

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Watchdog Sues to Keep Trump Off Ballot in Colorado, Citing 14th Amendment

A government watchdog and lawyers for six Republican and unaffiliated Colorado voters on Wednesday filed a lawsuit to ban former President Donald Trump as a candidate on the state's 2024 GOP presidential primary election ballot and any future ballot, based on the January 6, 2021 insurrection and the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

As advocacy groups and legal scholars across the political spectrum have highlighted since the embattled ex-president and GOP front-runner confirmed his candidacy last year, Section 3 of the 14th Amendment bars anyone who has taken an oath to the Constitution and then "engaged in insurrection or rebellion" from holding any civil or military office.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) and firms representing the voters—Tierney Lawrence Stiles LLC, KBN Law LLC, and Olson Grimsley Kawanabe Hinchcliff & Murray LLC—argue that "Trump is constitutionally ineligible to assume the office of the president" because he "knowingly and voluntarily aided and incited the insurrection" before and on January 6. ...

Democratic Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold—named as the defendant in the lawsuit because of her position—said in a statement that "I look forward to the Colorado Court's substantive resolution of the issues, and am hopeful that this case will provide guidance to election officials on Trump's eligibility as a candidate for office."

Griswold is among election officials in several key states who have recently received letters from Free Speech for People and Mi Familia Vota Education Fund urging them to keep Trump off the ballot because of the 14th Amendment.

Liberals SCHEME to Keep Trump OFF The Ballot; The Donald Says He Would TESTIFY At Trial

First hearing held in Georgia for 2020 election interference case

A Fulton county judge said that he hoped to decide on trial schedules in the Georgia election interference case next week, a case for which a joint trial will take approximately four months, according to state prosecutors. On Wednesday, the judge Scott McAfee held the first hearing in the Georgia election interference case involving 19 co-defendants including ex-president Donald Trump, who have been charged with interfering in the 2020 presidential elections.

During the hearing, a prosecutor from the Fulton county district attorney’s office said that a joint trial involving all 19 defendants will take approximately four months. The prosecutor Nathan Wade also said that the trial will involve approximately 150 witnesses and that the timeline does not account for jury selection. ...

McAfee disagreed with requests from Chesebro and Powell – both attorneys who worked alongside the Trump campaign in 2020 – who wanted their cases to be handled separately from other defendants. Both Chesebro and Powell have also filed motions for a speedy trial. ...

McAfee, who decided to adhere to Chesebro and Powell’s request for a speedy trial, has yet to issue a final ruling on whether the remaining 17 co-defendants will also be tried in October.

Hunter Biden INDICTMENT Imminent

Federal prosecutors seek new indictment against Hunter Biden

Federal prosecutors are seeking to bring a new indictment against Joe Biden’s son Hunter by the end of September, according to court documents filed on Wednesday.

The exact charges the president’s son would face were not immediately clear, but he has been under investigation in Delaware on gun and tax charges.

The US attorney for Delaware, David Weiss, newly named a special counsel in the case, referred to the new indictment in a status report required by Judge Maryellen Noreika.

“The Speedy Trial Act requires that the government obtain the return of an indictment by a grand jury by Friday, September 29, 2023, at the earliest. The Government intends to seek the return of an indictment in this case before that date,” the special counsel’s office said in a court filing.

Working Class HISTORIC REJECTION Of Biden

Democrats worried over Biden chances are ‘bedwetters’, ex-Obama adviser says

Democrats worried about Joe Biden’s re-election prospects are “fucking bedwetters” and should not worry so much, the former Obama campaign manager Jim Messina said.

“Historically, we’re fucking bedwetters,” Messina told Politico. “We grew up in the 80s and 90s when Republicans won elections all the time. Democrats had their hearts deeply broken when Hillary [Clinton] lost [to Donald Trump in 2016] and people didn’t see that coming. And so, you know, we continually believe every bad thing people say.”

Polling shows Trump is the clear leader in the Republican race to face Biden next year. Polling also shows Trump and Biden in a close race, and many more Americans are concerned about Biden, 80, being too old to be president, than about Trump, who is 77.

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Utah officials sued over failure to save Great Salt Lake: ‘Trying to avert disaster’

Environmental and community groups have sued Utah officials over failures to save its iconic Great Salt Lake from irreversible collapse. The largest saltwater lake in the western hemisphere has been steadily shrinking, as more and more water has been diverted away from the lake to irrigate farmland, feed industry and water lawns. A megadrought across the US south-west, accelerated by global heating, has hastened the lake’s demise.

Unless dire action is taken, the lake could decline beyond recognition within five years, a report published early this year warned, exposing a dusty lakebed laced with arsenic, mercury, lead and other toxic substances.The resulting toxic dustbowl would be “one of the worst environmental disasters in modern US history”, the ecologist Ben Abbott of Brigham Young University told the Guardian earlier this year.

Despite such warnings, officials have failed to take serious action, local groups said in their lawsuit, which was filed on Wednesday. “We are trying to avert disaster. We are trying to force the hand of state government to take serious action,” said Brian Moench of the Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment, one of the groups suing state agencies.

“Plaintiffs pray that this Court declare that the State of Utah has breached its trust duty to ensure water flows into the Great Salt Lake sufficient to maintain the Lake,” reads the lawsuit, which was brought by coalition that includes Earthjustice, the Utah Rivers Council, the Center for Biological Diversity and the Sierra Club, among others.

Despite growing political momentum on the issue, scientists say the proposed measures are not nearly enough to save the lake, which has lost about 40bn gallons of water annually since 2020.

Biden to cancel oil and gas leases in Alaska issued by Trump administration

The US interior department has canceled seven oil and gas leases in Alaska’s Arctic national wildlife refuge that were part of a sale held in the waning days of the Trump administration, arguing the sale was legally flawed.

The interior secretary, Deb Haaland, said with her decision to cancel the remaining leases “no one will have rights to drill for oil in one of the most sensitive landscapes on earth”. However, a 2017 law mandates another lease sale by late 2024. Administration officials said they intend to comply with the law. ...

Alaska political leaders have long pushed to allow oil and gas drilling on the refuge’s 1.5m-acre coastal plain, an area seen as sacred to the Indigenous Gwich’in because it is where caribou they rely on migrate and come to give birth. The state’s congressional delegation in 2017 succeeded in getting language added to a federal tax law that called for the US government to hold two lease sales in the region by late 2024.

Joe Biden, after taking office, issued an executive order calling for a temporary moratorium on activities related to the leasing program and for the interior secretary to review the program. Haaland later in 2021 ordered a new environmental review after concluding there were “multiple legal deficiencies” underlying the Trump-era leasing program. Haaland halted activities related to the leasing program pending the new analysis.

11AM AST Sep 6: #Lee is forecast to become a major hurricane by early Saturday. Swells are likely to cause life-threatening surf and rip currents across portions of the Lesser Antilles late this week. Stay up to date with the latest at https://t.co/tW4KeGdBFb pic.twitter.com/2CVr855fan

— National Hurricane Center (@NHC_Atlantic) September 6, 2023

World meteorologists point to ‘vicious cycle’ of heatwaves and air pollution

The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has said extreme temperatures are not the only hazard from heatwaves but that they also cause pollution-related health problems. In their annual air quality and climate bulletin, the meteorologists have highlighted a “vicious cycle” of climate breakdown and air pollution. They have shown that heatwaves sparked wildfires in the north-western US and heatwaves accompanied by desert dust intrusions across Europe, which both caused dangerous air quality in 2022.

The hot temperatures in Europe, which in 2022 were record-breaking, led to higher levels of particulate matter in the air, the bulletin says. During the second half of August 2022, there was also an unusually high intrusion of desert dust over the Mediterranean and Europe.

“Heatwaves worsen air quality, with knock-on effects on human health, ecosystems, agriculture and indeed our daily lives,” said the WMO secretary general, Prof Petteri Taalas. “Climate change and air quality cannot be treated separately. They go hand-in-hand and must be tackled together to break this vicious cycle.”

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Also of Interest

Here are some articles of interest, some which defied fair-use abstraction.

G20: Last Waltz in a World Torn Apart

Media Say ... Gloom And Doom In China

Blinken Announces $1 Billion More for Ukraine, Including Depleted Uranium

Contamination fears after Ukraine loses British tank

Iraqi Official Says US ‘Offensive Weapons’ Violate Terms of Agreement

Georgia RICO Filing Against 61 Stop Cop City Activists Criminalizes Protest

Banks Face COLLAPSE From Real Estate 'Doom Loop'

OLIGARCHY RULE? How Warren Buffet's Son TOOK OVER Illinois City By Buying Influence

NOAA Finds Carbon Concentrations Highest in 800,000 Years as Sea Level Rise Hits Record

‘We were lazy!’ The Rolling Stones unveil new original album Hackney Diamonds after 18-year wait

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A Little Night Music

Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson - Kidney Stew

Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson - Pass Out

Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson - I’m The Midnight Creeper

Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson - When My Baby Left Me

Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson - Cleanhead's Back in Town

Cootie Williams (Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson, vocal) - Cherry Red Blues

Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson - Back Door Blues

Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson - Juice Head Baby

Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson - Wee Baby Blues

Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson & Jay McShann - Red Top

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