AMERICAN STUDIES

PAUL EDWARDS—The Euronebishes, the third-string hacks who run the patsy EU nations, clutched their pearls, but it got worse.  Trump sent his spear carriers, Hegseth and Vance, with the new gospel.  They were debagged, and had their wimpy asses paddled in public.

Wailing, tears, gnashing of teeth.  These shameless sycophants and ceremonial ass-kissers have few peers in history.  For decades they had been told what to do, and how to do it, by a smirking, boasting hegemon, until subservience had become second nature, so that, told to jump, they asked how high?

JOHN RACHEL—These are different times. No longer does innocence bloom. Hope is a four-letter word, gutted by abuse, now a contemptuous metaphor for hypocrisy and cunning. Faith, charity and love have been quantified, digitized, commodified, sexualized, turned into more weapons of mass deception and poisoning of the human spirit; just box cutters in the toolbox of a tiny elite, self-anointed as the class of absolute privilege and ultimate prerogative, self-appointed as Masters of the Universe. The sociopaths have won the class war and sit at the top of the sh*tpile they’re fabricating. No, good people, forgiveness is no longer recommended, no longer possible, such graciousness is not the appropriate noble response anymore. We simply cannot forgive those who are doing to our world what we see happening right now.

BRUCE LERRO—One of the stereotypes is that artists’ models must be beautiful. This is not true, in fact, many artists have old me they prefer models who have “character” rather than just a pretty face, or as some say, “skinny little white girls”. As an artist myself I agreed. In fact, at the auditions if you were anything but a skinny white girl you had an advantage. The second stereotype is that artists’ models and artists have sexual relations. This may have been true historically but not likely once artists’ models formed unions or a “guild”.

EDITOR—In his report, contributing editor Jon Elmer looks into the details of the fifth exchange of prisoners last Saturday in Deir al-Balah, in the central Gaza Strip. This is a segment from The Electronic Intifada’s livestream on day 26 of the Gaza ceasefire. Ali Abunimah, Nora Barrows-Friedman, Jon Elmer and Asa Winstanley were joined by Abubaker Abed live from the Gaza Strip. The images are stunning: Palestinian fighters in crisp uniforms, footage of Israeli armour being destroyed, a mass of surviving Palestinians witnessing the ceremonies, all of it confirming that the spirit of Gazans has not been broken despite the depraved 15-month, non-stop attack by Israel and the Western Empire. 

ERIC ZUESSE—The Cold War started on 25 July 1945, when U.S. President Harry Truman made his final decision for the U.S. Government to reverse his immediate predecessor FDR’s plan for the post-WW2 world (FDR had planned for international relations in the post-WW2 world to be dominated by his invention, the U.N., which would replace all empires — he planned this because he knew that both World Wars had been CAUSED by competing empires; so, all empires must be ended). Truman aimed instead for the U.S. Government itself to ultimately conquer — by subterfuges, coups, blockades, military invasions, or whatever means would be needed — the Soviet Union.