BREAKING NEWS RIGHT NOW
FURTHER SPLITS AMONG THE WORLD’S IMPERIALISTS, IN CUBA
In the context of no news about important topics, at the behest of the same monopoly media organizations that decry the ‘Fake News’ that their outlets are the primary guilty parties in dispensing, and as a result of Daily Linksongoing commitment to bring to readers what is otherwise missing or falsified, a new briefing from TeleSur about the discarding of a two decade European Union set of sanctions against Cuba, penalties that Washington’s vassals over the Atlantic had established under American guidance, in place of which a “new era” of cooperation and respect will supposedly flower, a critically important insight for scrappy scribes and stalwart citizens that concerns a key piece of the planet’s ‘real estate,’ one of the first colonial ventures in the previously ‘undiscovered’ Western Hemisphere by the restless conquerors of Iberia, information that amplifies centrally helpful insights about the world, though it does not utterly eliminate the utility and fascination of more mundane recountings, such as Rolling Stone’s assessment (http://www.rollingstone.com/
This Day in History
This date in Japan commemorates the island nation’s special combination of Chinese characters and Japanese pictograms as Kanji Day, while Kenya marks its independence from England as Jamhuri Day; in the Eastern Mediterranean in Southwest Asia, then as now characterized by ongoing conflict thirteen hundred eighty-nine years ago,Byzantine armies soundly defeated Persian invaders at the Battle of Nineveh; nine hundred eighteen years ahead of today, a different, related expression of Levantine conflict unfolded as members of the First Crusade broke through the defenses at Ma’arrat al – Numan, slaughtering tens of thousands of innocents and then resorting to cannibalism when their food supplies ran low; MORE HERE
A Thought for the Day
Imperious entitlement prevails among the upper crust in similar fashion as big bellies are the fate of beer drinkers, and while those who exercise their noblese oblige may not recognize the fact, the sense of justified imprimatur, of knowing everything and deserving more, is far more toxic than taking in too many liquid carbohydrates and gaining lots of weight, a dynamic that in afflicting many societies before ours, and ours in horrific degree at the present moment, leads either to genocidal assault against the ‘lower orders’, or the deployment by these sorts of people as they gain agency of the necessary blades and towers to decapitate the practitioners of such treatment.
products OR commodities OR devices electronic OR computers OR "high tech" shoddy OR "poorly built" OR "prone to breakage" OR "planned obsolescence" ubiquitous OR commonplace OR widespread "political economy" OR explanation OR explication history OR origins critique OR criticism OR deconstruction radical OR marxist = 104,000 Intersections.
TODAY’S HEART, SOUL, & AWARENESS VIDEO
Nearly Naked Links
From Fridays Files
Working Class Fight Back? – http://portside.org/2016-12-10/donald-trump-bullying-unions-he-picked-wrong-fight
Women’s March Cannot Protest Inauguration – http://www.salon.com/2016/12/09/womens-march-on-washington-barred-from-protesting-donald-trump-inauguration/
Contextualizing the Murder of Walter Scott – https://www.facingsouth.org/2016/12/mistrial-police-killing-walter-scott-part-history-brutality-against-black-veterans-south
A Naked Capitalism look at the work of a fearless and incisive academic with a bracing look at the problems and potential solutions of the current moment, ” I’m Michael Hudson. I’m a professor of economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City and Peking University. My focus is on the distinction between the financial economy and the real economy at large. I treat the financial sector and debt as an economic overhead, so my focus is on how society can deal with the debt and to explain why society cannot recover from the current depression until it writes down the debts to what can be paid.”
A WhoWhatWhy interview with a writer whose pulse on America’s dissent might suggest the possibility of an effective resistance movement in the future: “We seem to be entering a new age of protests and pushback. Some of it is still fuelled by the hangover from the 2008 financial crisis and it is fed daily by economic and technological change. And to the extent that these protests are effective, particularly in this age of instant communications, it could change the fabric of the country.
Nation Institute fellow, progressive journalist and author of Necessary Trouble: American in Revolt, Sarah Jaffe has been observing the cutting edge of all of these movements and in this week’s podcast she talks to WhoWhatWhy’s Jeff Schechtman.”
Crowdfunded Muckraking Case Study
A Poynter article that offers both an example for and hope for those who still hope for ‘the fourth estate’ can find its way out of the darkness of corporate propaganda and woeful underfunding: “Donald Trump was elected president, thwarting pollsters and shaking off seemingly endless fact-checking. News organizations continue to lay off journalists as Facebook and Google gobble up the advertising market. And trust in media sunk to an all-time low, helped along by abuse on the campaign trail.
Despite that, a former whistleblower thinks journalism still has the power to make big changes. And he wants help from people who agree with him.”
A Free Thought Project article that looks at the current skirmish between Federal agencies, a circumstance which points to the splitting crisis affecting those in power today: “The Washington Post reported that anonymous sources claimed, “the CIA concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency, rather than just to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system.”
What the Post, in their shameful piece of yellow journalism, failed to mention is that the FBI did not in any way agree with the assessment by the CIA. In fact, the FBI said the information was “fuzzy and ambiguous” and DID NOT provide clear evidence that Russia had meddled in the U.S. election.”
Warmongering Eternal War, Profitably
A Tom Dispatch piece that examines closely one of the many horrifying conflicts that have raged on for a good many decades thanks to executive branch overreach: “So to return to where we began: why exactly has Washington supported the Saudi war in Yemen so fully and with such clout? The best guess is that it’s a make-up present to Saudi Arabia, a gesture to help heal the rift that opened when the Obama administration concluded its July 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran. Under that agreement’s terms, Iran vowed “that it will under no circumstances ever seek, develop, or acquire any nuclear weapons” in return for the United States lifting years of economic sanctions.”