VIRTUAL UNIVERSITY

ED CURTIN—Maybe a hawk killed the bluejay, but if so, it didn’t gloat over its body.  It would have been operating under the laws of necessity, where as far as we know, compassion has no place. Not true for Che’s killers. Here they are posing for the camera, guns still aimed at the dead man, as if he still posed a great danger to them.  They were right, at least in the long term.

PAUL EDWARDS—Human history, as far back as we can trace it, has been a tale of the tyranny of economic power in various forms, and the struggle of the  people for equity, endlessly waged and endlessly defeated.  Until very recently, power had no need to disguise itself because its mandate was said to be divine.  Only in the last few hundred years has a rising tide of popular discontent forced power to camouflage its cruelty and corruption.  Democracy—the idea of it—has been its very best cover.

BEN NORTON—When internal emails were leaked showing that the massive opposition media platform Basma Syria was funded by the United States and Britain, Albany wrote, “the Basma brand has been compromised following leaks about funding project aims.”

The leaks on social media “have damaged the credibility and trustworthiness of the existing branded platform,” Albany wrote. “Credibility and trust are the key currencies of the activities envisaged and for this reason we consider it essential to refresh the approach if the content to be disseminated is to have effect.” The Basma website was taken down soon after.

MAX PARRY—It is unconvincing precisely because it follows a pattern of improbable events questionably attributed to the Kremlin. As many have noted, the incident strikingly resembles the alleged March 2018 poisoning in Salisbury, England of disgraced former Russian intelligence officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, visiting from Moscow which caused a similar diplomatic row. Skripal, who had been a double agent for MI6 and served ten years imprisonment for high treason, was exiled to the UK after his sentence in a spy-swap between Russia and Britain in 2010. While residing in southern England, Skripal was reportedly in close contact with a security consultant who worked for the author of the salacious but fabricated dossier on U.S. President Donald Trump’s alleged ties to Russia, former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele — and may have even been the source of its unverified contents.

JAY JANSON—The many bloody and thieving wars ordered by President Obama should make people recall how Obama as a candidate for president ran as a peace candidate, and so be cautioned not to be fooled with the present promising of both this years candidates to end America’s forever wars. Recently, President Trump called the Vietnam War “a stupid war. Anyone who went was a sucker.”  With all President Trump’s macabre and bizarre use of US military, including assassination and deadly sanctions, and mainstream media’s consistent wars promoting, the world is prone to forget how candidate Trump was the most dramatic American denouncer of US wars in history.