Grab Bag Of News Your Government Does Not Want You To Know About

A reminder that resistance to Israel's war on Gaza did not start on October 7, 2023.

As I prepared to share documented resistance to Israel's genocide in Gaza I paused for Glenn Greenwald's explanation of why banning TikTok is suddenly a burning issue for Congress and the Biden administration. He notes corporate media reporting that October 7 was a game-changer:

The proposal gained momentum partly as a consequence of disquiet over the app’s handling of misinformation[sic] and antisemitic[sic] content following Hamas’s attack on Israel in October (UK capitalism rag The Economist on March 24).

On the other side of the pond, U.S. capitalism rag The Wall Street Journal said an analysis of TikTok data revealed:

far more views for videos with pro-Palestinian hashtags than those with pro-Israel hashtags..at times [the ratio of pro-Palestine to pro-Israel views] ran 69 to 1 (March 12)

 Greenwald humorously added: "Remember when Nikki Haley said..that for every 18 minutes—or whatever it was—that you spend on TikTok, you become 32% more anti-Semitic?"

I did not remember that, but I would love to think that for every 18 minutes you spend reading this blog you become 32% more aware of resistance actions that corporate media has conspired to make invisible. Who knows, maybe you will even become 90% more likely to engage in resistance yourself!

https://twitter.com/OnlinePalEng/status/1768967756060229948

This is the kind of success hard blockers dream of: materially disrupting the operations of a factory where they make the bombs dropped on Gaza. You have to get up early to do this sort of thing. Which makes for beautiful pictures once the sun comes up.

"Nine young supporters of Palestine chain themselves together and block I-95 in Richmond." Photo and caption by Phil Wilayto, Virginia Defender

Above is a close look at a different lockdown in progress, this one to shut down Interstate-95 in Virginia. Ten people were arrested and released after experiencing violence from Virginia State Police. NPR, local t.v. news and a local newspaper covered the action. 

Why block I-95 for Gaza? I wanted to answer this common question by showing you the many war profiteers in Virginia using the interactive map created by Christian Sorensen for The Business of War, but guess what:

Sorenson notes: "There is nothing dangerous or illegal about taking public, official information (from military contracting announcements, corporate press releases, and corporate job postings) and transferring it to a map."

Don't feel up to locking down? Soft blocks using just our bodies probably can't shut down a weapons factory until our numbers are in the thousands, but they can force those ignoring their country's role in funding genocide to pay attention.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/travel/news/protesters-calling-for-gaza-ceasefire-demonstrate-at-san-francisco-airport/ar-BB1jPQDv

Organizer Joshua Caldwell said about 300 protesters gathered at [San Francisco] airport's International Terminal at 8 a.m. They blocked traffic outside and security lanes inside and held up banners and signs calling for an end to the bombing campaign that the United Nations says has claimed more than 30,000 lives.. nobody was arrested 

Wait, did I read that right -- zero arrests? This is becoming a common tactic for suppressing information about resistance actions. (Throttling social media is another.) This action got a fair amount of mainstream media coverage anyway because SFO is a big international airport. Other protests that involve blocking streets? Not so much.

Even soft blocks take physical stamina and solidarity planning. What if you're just a kid? Or elderly and infirm or can't afford time off or to lose your job? Do what you can, where you can, inspired by these Girl Scouts! From Mondoweiss:

A Girl Scout Troop in Missouri recently broke away from the organization after it made legal threats against the group.

For the Girl Scouts’ “Agents of Change” capstone project, a St. Louis county troop decided to make and sell bracelets to raise money for children in Gaza. The Girl Scouts of Eastern Missouri said the move was “political” and instructed them to shut down the fundraiser..

Despite breaking away from the Girl Scouts of Eastern Missouri, the group is staying together, and their bracelet campaign has continued.

It would take me the rest of the day to share all the resistance actions I'm aware of, and I don't even go on TikTok. Here's one from my inbox, spotted in tiny Blue Hill, Maine this weekend:

Want to protest at an intersection where thousands will see you? Join us in Rockland, Maine next weekend!

And if any of this inspires you to join in, let me hear from you!

Stoking Civil War To Stave Off The Revolution We Need

Detail from "America This Week: On Homeland Security's New Snitching Game"

Two men in my family gave the moms carte blanche to do whatever we wanted to do this morning. So, here goes!

I was tempted to construct this blog post as a series of screenshots from articles recently remembered by the web browser on my phone. It would look something like this:

Mother's Day in the U.S. has me thinking of the mothers and grandmothers of the children in Gaza targeted by Israeli bombing last week. The kids had to die because their elders are Palestinian resistance leaders, according to Israel.

This hilarious block of Matt Taibbi's article on censorship -- allegedly on the grounds that the article was "hate speech" -- has since been lifted following an outcry by Taibbi's readers.

Mary Beth Sullivan's excellent letter to the editor is behind a paywall at the Portland Press Herald so here's a photo from the paper copy:

I write this blog to keep my head from exploding as I consider the news of the day. 

The item below has my head continuously exploding as I try to process the marriage of artificial "intelligence" to East German Stasi-style culture where every person is an informer. This coupling is sure to produce multiple Frankenstein's monsters, but this particular example of our corporate overlords stoking civil war to stave off the revolution we so badly need is chilling to say the least. 

As Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn discuss, the Department of Homeland Security created in the wake of 9/11 now turns its attention to so-called domestic terrorists. In other words, your tax dollars are being used to fund a program that will train your neighbors and their kids to inform on you lest you become a threat to domestic tranquility. Or what's left of tranquility in a land where there is a mass shooting on average every two weeks, where more people of color are incarcerated than anywhere else on the planet, and where industrial and military  pollution render human life tenuous.

Here's a link to the full article on Racket News.

After they discuss the so-called Resilience Project and the "DHS OTVTP Choose Your Own Adventure Online" for inter-American spying, Taibbi and Kirn go on to have a literary discussion about a short story. Because they suspect that very soon we will be constrained in discussing political realities and current events, and we'll have to do so mainly via metaphor.

If this reminds you of what you were taught about life in Soviet Russia, it should. If this doesn't remind you of what you're discovering about tech platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and reddit colluding with the U.S. government to surveil and censor users, it should.

A final thought. Am I the only one who thinks the name "substack" for the self-publishing platform I've been reading and just began publishing on is reminiscent of the Soviet-era term samizdat?

Who Profits From Narrative Management & Eliminating Dissent?

Original collage by James Fangboner (left image), modified by me (see "Hating On ____ Is What Gives Life Meaning")

When the Pentagon summons the heads of eight weapons manufacturing corporations to a classified meeting about "aid" to Ukraine, you can be sure that a whole lot more Ukranians will be dying in their civil war on steroids.

This type of aid is in reality U.S. taxpayer-funded corporate welfare for the likes of Lockheed and Raytheon, whose former board member is our current Secretary of "Defense." The aid has been flowing so thick and fast since Russia intervened in the CIA-sponsored war on its doorstep that it's hard to add it all up quickly enough. One tally this week put the total at $1.7 billion!

Also, why limit these already wealthy corporate entities to feeding from just the U.S. trough? Zero Hedge reports: "Besides replenishing stockpiles sent to Ukraine, the companies stand to gain from European countries increasing military spending in the wake of Russia’s invasion."

I believe this cash bonanza explains the barrage of propaganda that liberals have fallen for hook, line, and sinker.

You would think that those who value free speech would be alarmed by the burgeoning online censorship that many independent journalists have noted. 

Consider the case of Michael J. Brenner, "Professor Emeritus of International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh and a Fellow of the Center for Transatlantic Relations at SAIS/Johns Hopkins, as well as former Director of the International Relations & Global Studies Program at the University of Texas" according to an interview in scheerpost:

From the vantage point of decades of experience and studies, the intellectual regularly shared his thoughts on topics of interest through a mailing list sent to thousands of readers—that is until the response to his Ukraine analysis made him question why he bothered in the first place. 

In an email with the subject line “Quittin’ Time,” Brenner recently declared that, aside from having already said his piece on Ukraine, one of the main reasons he sees for giving up on expressing his opinions on the subject is that “it is manifestly obvious that 

our society is not capable of conducting an honest, logical, reasonably informed discourse on matters of consequence. Instead, we experience fantasy, fabrication, fatuousness and fulmination.” He goes on to decry President Joe Biden’s alarming comments in Poland when he all but revealed that the U.S. is—and perhaps has always been—interested in a Russian regime change [emphasis mine]. 

Or how about Scott Ritter, a former UN weapons inspector who sifts through the foggy "facts" of war to discern some truth, who had his Twitter account suspended twice in one week. Based on what he knows about the grisly details of bodies left to rot in the street, he doubted that Russian soldiers could have committed the crimes before their exit from Bucha and speculated that Ukranian militias were the only ones in the area at the time of the massacre.

Cue liberals insisting that Twitter is not the government and therefore can censor anything it likes without violating the 1st amendment. Do they not know that Twitter, Facebook/Meta, Google/YouTube, and other platforms work hand in glove with the federal government to manage the narrative or, when that fails, to eliminate dissenting views? 

Are they fooled by mainstream media like the Washington Post, now owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos, ironically sporting the tagline "Democracy Dies in Darkness"? 

Or do they know and not care because they're more interested in the former president and other right-wingers being denied platforms for their views than they are interested in actual free speech?

From media watcher Caitlin Johnstone:

what exactly is the argument for censoring wrongthink about the Ukraine war? Even if we pretend that everything they're saying is 100% false and completely immoral, so what? What harm is being done? Does a Ukrainian drop dead every time someone says they don't believe Russia committed war crimes in Bucha or Mariupol? Does Putin get magic murder powers if enough social media users say they support his war? Do liberal faces melt off their skulls if they accidentally see an RT headline?

Political action and the players behind it -- at every level -- becomes more murky by the day. Forgive this boomer for saying, back in the day we thought a free press was foundational to reign in the excesses of the wealthy and powerful, by shining a light into their dark doings. 

But late stage capitalism demands fealty to profits above all else. Even, or maybe especially, when the leader of the "free world" is busy shooting himself and his cronies in the foot.

Not A Villa In The Jungle -- You're The Jungle In OUR Villa, Say Young Palestinians

Yaser Murtaja, a 30 year old photojournalist in Gaza. “He was killed doing his job: recording his people’s right to protest for their human rights,” commented Karl Schembri of the Norwegian Refugee Council, which hired Murtaja to record video footage of the protests.
Photo: Reuters/Ibraheem Abu Mustafa

Perhaps you are contemplating the mowing down of unarmed civilians, including journalists, at the Gaza border last week. Or, perhaps the corporate media blackout of information on those war crimes has kept it out of mind.

The "Great Return March" of the Palestinians confined in Gaza angered Israel mightily by calling international attention to their right as refugees to return. 

Here's how Google is helping to manage the flow of information about one of the victims, Yaser Murtaja, who was gunned down in his flak jacket with the word PRESS on it in big white letters. 

Perhaps you'd like to watch the video banned by YouTube in 28 countries -- mostly in Europe -- due to Israeli pressure on those governments. On this segment of teleSUR's Empire Files, Abby Martin interviews author Max Blumenthal about facts on the ground in the occupied West Bank. His characterization of unrest sometimes called the third intifada (uprising) is that a younger generation coming of age are expressing their rejection of the occupation that began when their grandparents were children. 



Blumenthal makes reference to Israel's steady annexation of lands and destruction of West Bank Palestinian infrastructure to establish what former PM Ehud Barak called "a villa in the jungle." Blumenthal notes that Palestinians coming of age now have grown up in a reality of "separation, exclusion" and "see little opportunity or hope... 

They watched a 51 day assault on the Gaza strip and felt helpless...

Two year old victim of Israeli bomb in Gaza with a fractured skull.

When young Palestinians enter the villa with knives, with rocks, with whatever they have, they are reminding Israelis, You know you're not a villa in the jungle, you're the jungle in our villa...You can't just put up a wall and pretend we're not here."

Corporate media puts up a wall so we can pretend Palestinians aren't there. It's up to us to scale the wall and look over at what they don't want us to see on the other side.

Then, get busy in the struggle for justice. #BDS