CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—In a recent interview with US Department of Defense newspaper Stars and Stripes, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden said it’s important to keep troops in the Middle East to fight terrorism, and that it’s likely that America’s bloated military budget will not only remain at its current size but may actually increase under his presidency due to the need to focus on “near peer” threats like China and Russia. This is not a deviation in messaging from Biden and his crack team of beltway string-pullers, but a continuation of already established patterns.
CAPITALIST SICKNESS
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Arctic Heating Races Ahead of Worst Case Estimates • Temperatures climb to 38C in COLDEST city on Earth in Siberia
19 minutes readTIM 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.
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Declaring Elections Illegitimate – by Refusing To Send Observers
20 minutes readMoA—International election observer missions are supposed to watch that the individual legal voting rules of a country are followed. They are expected to report any irregularities they detect. Unfortunately there are now attempts to pervert their purpose. The active withholding of observer missions is now used to delegitimize elections even when those are fair and follow all the relevant rules. Recent examples are the presidential election in Belarus and the upcoming congressional election in Venezuela. Back in June we detected a planned color revolution in Belarus by connecting various media reports that hyped the weak opposition forces. One additional indication that the election in Belarus would be used for nefarious purposes was the willful absence of OSCE election monitors.
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The Teflon Hoax strikes again: Zero evidence does not stop the disseminators of Russophobia campaigns. (Definitive debunking)
40 minutes readMoA—While it is relatively easy to have sock-puppets swamp the comment threads of such sites as this blog (which is why comments are strictly controlled), it is more difficult to have a real effect on social networks. These depend on multiplier effects. To gain many real “likes”, “re-tweets” or “followers” an online persona needs a certain history and reputation. Real people need to feel attached to it. It takes some time and effort to build such a multiplier personality, be it real or virtual.The U.S. election provided an excellent environment to build reputable online persona with large followings of people with discriminable mindsets. The political affinity was not important. The personalities only had to be very engaged and stick to their issue – be it left or right or whatever. The sole point was to gain as many followers as possible who could be segmented along social-political lines and marketed to the companies customers.
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France: ‘Yellow Vests’ Resume Protests Against Pension Reforms
10 minutes readThe ‘Yellow Vests’ Saturday took to the streets after a summer break to continue protesting against Emmanuel Macron’s pension reform plans. Almost two years after their first mobilizations, the Yellow Vests marched through Paris, Marseille, Toulouse, Lyon, Lille, Nantes, Nice, Bordeaux, and Strasbourg.