AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM

DAVID MATTSON—All of this traces back—at least in a small way—to Mountain Creek, the cow farmer I was observing, and the deeper history of how European colonists despoiled the mountain West. The specifics matter here because this mini-drama set in the magnificent mountains of Montana comes as close as any to being an exemplar of a contemporary malaise featuring the romanticized West, the mythologized cowboy, and our national infatuation with both.

ANDRE VLTCHEK—The Economist (a pretentious rag with a hefty circulation in the US) is extremely biased; it is pre-historically conservative, anti-Russian, anti-Chinese, and laughably cold-war-style – anti-Communist. But it has some breaks and limits, which the liberal mainstream media already lost many years ago. And it does not forgive what it considers ‘bad manners’ and ‘bad taste.’ Recently, an on-going saga which involves a notorious right-wing ‘couple’ – Guo Wengui and Steve Bannon – received unusually harsh but frank analyses from The Economist, while all big British liberal newspapers have been busy trashing, fanatically, everything Chinese and Russian.

A Minneapolis judge is moving forward with jury selection in the 2nd degree murder trial of the cop that killed George Floyd. Ai the height of protests, Minneapolis city council members vowed to disband the local police force. However, “there’s nothing being disbanded, dismantled or defunded, unfortunately, at this time,” said Sam Martinez, of the Twin Cities Coalition for Justice for Jamar Clark, a young Black man killed by cops five years ago. “We let the community know that what happened to George Floyd wasn’t going to stop unless the community has control of the police,” said Martinez.

GLEN FORD—Nobody but Americans celebrates Thanksgiving. It is reserved by history and the intent of “the founders” as the supremely white American holiday, the most ghoulish event on the national calendar. No Halloween of the imagination can rival the exterminationist reality that was the genesis, and remains the legacy, of the American Thanksgiving. It is the most loathsome, humanity-insulting day of the year – a pure glorification of racist barbarity.

TIM RADFORD—An international team of scientists brings bad news about Arctic heating: the polar ocean is warming not only faster than anybody predicted, it is getting hotter at a rate faster than even the worst case climate scenario predictions have so far foreseen.

Such dramatic rises in Arctic temperatures have been recorded before, but only during the last Ice Age. Evidence from the Greenland ice cores suggests that temperatures rose by 10°C or even 12°C, over a period of between 40 years and a century, between 120,000 years and 11,000 years ago.