The world reacts to Cuba’s demand: 184 nations against the U.S. blockade!

The UN General Assembly overwhelmingly approves the resolution “Necessity of ending the economic, commercial and financial blockade imposed by the United States of America against Cuba”.

Yisell Rodríguez Milán & Lisset Chavez Bergues 

Granma | June 23, 2021

Image: teleSUR

With a vote as impressive as all those on other historic occasions, the Cuban resolution demanding an end to the blockade was approved this Wednesday in the United Nations General Assembly by 184 votes in favor, 2 against and 3 abstentions.

Colombia, Ukraine and the United Arab Emirates abstained; while the United States and Israel opposed Cuba’s demand.

After the result of the vote was announced, Communist Party of Cuba First Secretary and President of the Republic Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez, tweeted: 184 votes in favor, 2 against and 3 abstentions. This is how the world reacts to Cuba’s demand. It’s now been 28 years of worldwide rejection of the blockade. The blockaders have run out of arguments. Those in solidarity strengthen support. Eliminate the blockade.

How Mobsters Control U.S., UK, & Netherlands

Eric Zuesse

“Mobsters” are whatever the law says they are, but in some countries they are, in fact, simply the nation’s wealthiest people, who can and do pay whomever they have to pay (“consigliere”) in order to get the law to mean what they want it to mean. In other words: sometimes a mobster is anyone who no matter how harmful to society, can become and remain enormously wealthy and never go to prison for it, nor be executed for it. They are above the law, and are therefore the real rulers in the dictatorship where they happen to live. They engage in the most-premeditated of crimes, from which the largest numbers of people become (basically) murdered and injured, but can and do buy impunity, so that prisons contain only the relatively low-level (and usually poor) crooks, and also innocent people who simply couldn’t afford a decent lawyer. This is ‘justice’, in ‘democracies’. It’s not justice in any democracy.

Anthology of cold war propaganda: a down payment toward truth

Blog 207 / khakispecs.com

This blog is nowhere near exhaustive. It is intended to serve no purpose other than a quick one-port call to obtain a more balanced view of the more egregious unlikelihoods promoted by western propaganda agencies in their anxiety to restrict the economic growth of Russia and China. It is envisaged that it will have to be continuously updated as the cold war progresses and the associated lies and mistruths proliferate.

The alliance of western nations clustered around the USA is engaged in a major propaganda campaign. The primary aim of this campaign is to justify the extraction of enormous sums from the pockets of their citizens to be spent on their ‘defence’ at the expense of their wellbeing. These eye-watering wastes go to line the pockets of the multiple interests vested in the military industrial complex.

Debunking A ‘Chinese Defector’ Story

Bernhard, editor of Moon of Alabama

It is sad to see how much Col. Pat Lang’s intelligence judgment has deteriorated.

Here he goes crazy over a story of an alleged Chinese high level defector who allegedly brought all kinds of materials with him:

This man, as Chinese counter-intelligence boss looked around the IC and decided that he was most likely to survive an internal leak if he defected to DIA. That means that in spite of the fact that DIA had an internal Chinese mole (recently arrested at DIA request by the FBI), the rest of the agencies are worse in the level in Chinese intelligence penetration not only of their analytic people but also of their operations staff. How do I know that? Material from the defector (Dong) would not normally be shared with analysts if it had his name in it. His identity would be held in operational channels.

Clearly, this man believes that; CIA. army intelligence, naval intelligence, USAF intelligence and all the rest are heavily penetrated. pl.

Lang

After backing Maidan coup in Ukraine, is Biden ready for peace?

Pushback with Aaron Maté

The Grayzone | June 20, 2021

Hard to believe, but the Putin-Biden summit may have actually opened the road to an improvement in the global situation, at least a recognition by the US that its power is not unlimited, and that endless hostility toward sovereign nations like China or Russia may prove ultimately counterproductive and downright deleterious to American power. As well, if this summit opens a path to peace in the Donbas, everyone will be the winner. Russia’s rapid and highly impressive military mobilisation during the last US-precipitated crisis in Ukraine may have opened the eyes to some Western planners, forcing them to accept the fact Russia is a major world power, capable of global strategic muscle.

OPERATION BARBAROSSA: MYTHS AND REALITY

Jacques R. Pauwels

War against the Soviet Union was what Hitler had wanted from the beginning. He had already made this very clear in the pages of Mein Kampf, written in the mid-1920s. As a German historian, Rolf-Dieter Müller, has convincingly demonstrated in a well-documented study, it was a war against the Soviet Union, and not against Poland, France, or Britain, that Hitler was planning to unleash in 1939. On August 11 of that year, Hitler explained to Carl J. Burckhardt, an official of the League of Nations, that “everything he undertook was directed against Russia”, and that “if the West [i.e., the French and the British] is too stupid and too blind to comprehend this, he would be forced to reach an understanding with the Russians, turn and defeat the West, and then turn back with all his strength to strike a blow against the Soviet Union”. This is in fact what happened. The West did turn out to be “too stupid and blind”, as Hitler saw it, to give him “a free hand” in the east, so he did make a deal with Moscow — the infamous “Hitler-Stalin Pact” — and then unleashed war against Poland, France, and Britain. But his ultimate objective remained the same: to attack and destroy the Soviet Union as soon as possible.

School Children, Fracking Fumes, Immigrant Parent’s Daughter, Climate Crisis and Billions of Dollar

Countercurrents | June 21, 2021

Media reports from the U.S. tell about environmental incidents and hardship of the common people in the society.

Fracking and Children

A Fort Worth Star-Telegram report (Thousands of Arlington’s schoolchildren are exposed to fracking fumes, report warns, Thu, June 17, 2021) said:

More than half of Arlington’s public school children attend classes within half a mile of a natural gas drilling site, prompting concerns about the effects of fracking on their health, according to a new report published Tuesday.

A year-long investigation by the Center for Investigative Reporting — which produces the popular news podcast Reveal — found that more than 30,000 Arlington kids go to school near a drilling site. Up to 7,600 infants and toddlers are dropped off at private daycares within the same half-mile radius of drilling, according to the center’s analysis.

Book Review: Rosa Luxemburg by Dana Mills

Reviewed by William Smaldone

Marx and Philosophy Review of Books | June 07, 2021

Dana Mills
Rosa Luxemburg

Reaktion Books, London, 2020. 208 pp., $16.99 pb
ISBN 9781789143270

More than 100 years after her murder by counterrevolutionary soldiers during the German Revolution of 1918-1919, Rosa Luxemburg continues to demand attention. As one of socialism’s most prominent Marxist theorists and one of its most courageous revolutionary activists, Luxemburg remains inspiring to radicals today. Not surprisingly there is a large literature on most aspects of her life and work, including relatively recent major biographies such as those by Annlies Laschitza (1996) and Ernst Piper (2018), which, unfortunately, have not been translated into English. J. P. Nettl’s massive study, originally published in 1966, remains the standard scholarly work in English, while a more accessible volume by Luxemburg’s comrade, Paul Fröhlich, is now over 80 years old. Likewise, Stephen Eric Bronner’s brief 1981 biography, which examined the applicability of Luxemburg’s thought to the conditions of the late twentieth century, is also dated. Meanwhile, Kate Evans’s recent graphic biography provides an innovative presentation of Luxemburg’s life, but lacks the depth that a more text-oriented biography can provide.

What are the greatest health challenges facing people who are incarcerated? We need to ask them

Justin Berk, Josiah D Rich & Lauren Brinkley-Rubinstein

The Lancet | June 08, 2021

In The Lancet Public Health, Paul Simpson and colleagues report their use of a citizens’ jury research method to identify health research priorities directly from people who are incarcerated.¹ This type of community-engaged research helps mitigate the disenfranchisement of a systematically marginalised group of individuals to better address their needs. Indeed, as Simpson and colleagues state, “if endeavours in research priority setting are to consider health equity goals, the views of our most health affected citizens need to be included.”

Although people in prison are considered a vulnerable group, rarely are their voices heard in guiding future research. The majority of health-care trials and data have not included incarcerated populations.² Recent literature has called for their greater participation in research, particularly in the time of COVID-19.³ The USA, in particular, should heed this call and employ similar attempts to understand the primary needs of people in prison from their perspective.

How ancient people fell in love with bread, beer and other carbs

Andrew Curry

Nature | June 22, 2021

Grains were on the menu at feasts that took place more than 11,000 years ago at Göbekli Tepe in Turkey — one of the world’s oldest temples. Credit: Vincent J. Musi

On a clear day, the view from the ruins of Göbekli Tepe stretches across southern Turkey all the way to the Syrian border some 50 kilometres away. At 11,600 years old, this mountaintop archaeological site has been described as the world’s oldest temple — so ancient, in fact, that its T-shaped pillars and circular enclosures pre-date pottery in the Middle East.

The people who built these monumental structures were living just before a major transition in human history: the Neolithic revolution, when humans began farming and domesticating crops and animals. But there are no signs of domesticated grain at Göbekli Tepe, suggesting that its residents hadn’t yet made the leap to farming. The ample animal bones found in the ruins prove that the people living there were accomplished hunters, and there are signs of massive feasts. Archaeologists have suggested that mobile bands of hunter-gatherers from all across the region came together at times for huge barbecues, and that these meaty feasts led them to build the impressive stone structures.