Featured Post

The white-Left Part 1: The two meanings of white

Tuesday, October 3, 2017

Put a pin in this: The Mandalay Bay shooter was obesessed witn guns

Few facts have so far emerged about the man who killed 59 concert goers before killing himself that give us a clue about his mentality or his motivation. One of those facts seems to be that he owned at least 42 guns and brought 23 to the hotel room for this operation. There could be a lot for reasons why he might own so many guns. He may have been a collector. He was a millionaire, so if he was into guns he could afford it.

The 23 guns he brought to the hotel room is key. It has been reported that only one was a handgun. I'm willing to wager that he committed suicide with that handgun and he brought it explicatively for that purpose. Clearly, at least one of those guns was a fully automatic machine gun, and it has been reported that he had set up two shooting platforms with tripod-mounted guns, if he had a backup gun for each shooting position, together with the handgun, we are up to five guns already. Given that each additional weapon brought up to the hotel room represented an operational risk, how could he have rationally justified the need for 23 guns for this suicidal lone-shooter operation? The only rational for 23 weapons in the room is that Stephen Paddock had a gun fetish and it played a big role in this shooting spree.

UPDATE: Tuesday 3 October 2017

According to USA Today, Marilou Danley, who is reported to be the shooter's girl friend has been out of the country and is no longer considered a "person of interest."

House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) on Tuesday said Congress is focusing on “mental illness reform” to prevent mass shootings in the future

President Trump on Tuesday called Mr. Paddock “a sick man, a demented man,” adding that “we are dealing with a very, very sick individual.”





Syria is the Paris Commune of the 21st Century!

Click here for my posts on the 2016 US Election
Click here for a list of my other blogs on Syria
Click here for a list of my other blogs on Libya

Posted by at No comments:

Saturday, September 30, 2017

Santa Monica Committee for Racial Justice - next meeting Sunday, 8 October

Since CRJ has normally met on the first Sunday of the month and we have reported that, we wanted to get this announcement out before tomorrow in case someone thought the meeting would be taking place tomorrow.


After much discussion among the leadership of CRJ, Bob Gordh produced this excellent history and description
The Committee for Racial Justice

CRJ originated in response to a single disturbing racial incident.

On May 4, 2011, an African American member of the Santa Monica High School wrestling team was held against his will and chained to his locker by two Caucasian teammates while there were chants of “Slave for sale” and a wrestling dummy had a noose around its neck nearby. This racially charged incident and the District’s slow response were the catalyst for the formation of the Committee for Racial Justice (CRJ). Our 11-person
Steering Committee consists of parents of Santa Monica students, community members and clergy. CRJ membership is open to all. We welcome all people of good will to attend our workshops and join our working committees.

CRJ is committed to combating all forms of racial injustice, whether overt or covert, whether individualized or systemic, that may take place in
our community. While we know that racism affects many cultural groups, we are especially drawn to focus on the severe impact it has on the African
American community.

CRJ has been active in 3 main arenas.

Since early in its existence, CRJ has been active in 3 arenas. First, we have produced a series of workshops on various aspects of the subject of race. We do not, of course, view race as a natural category but rather as a social construct imposed by racism. Racism has had an enormously complex and destructive history in our country. Likewise, it persists today in enormously complex and destructive ways. In common with anti-racists everywhere, we see racism as much more than just a conscious attitude. It can also be an unconscious bias. Moreover it is much more than just attitude, whether conscious or unconscious. It is also an insidious pattern
embedded in the systems by which our society is organized. It manifests itself, for instance, in segregated housing patterns, in enormous racial disparities in our distribution of wealth, in the use of predominantly Eurocentric materials in our history classes, in racially discriminatory policing, etc. The study of race and racism is multi-disciplinary, involving the fields of history, sociology, political science, psychology, economics, religion, literature and other arts, and more. There is so much to learn!

Hence, our monthly educational workshops, which typically feature noted guest speakers, as well as time for discussion and dialogue.

And of course, there is so much to do to undo racism. A regular feature of our workshops, therefore, is to inform our attendees of a variety of opportunities for action.

Second, CRJ works continuously to advocate for Black students in the Santa Monica/Malibu Unified School District. We persistently push for policies and practices that will benefit Black students. We do not espouse “colorblindness.” We believe Black students face specific challenges in this society, which is so pervaded by racism, and we believe, accordingly, that they deserve various kinds of support that are designed especially for them. For example, we believe that they deserve courses that are specifically about Black history and culture, as opposed to mere equal access to predominantly Eurocentric courses. It is worth noting that CRJ avoids a binary approach to thinking about race. We do not, for instance, divide individuals simply into racists and non-racists. Instead we recognize that we are all at some point on a continuum. Similarly we see institutions like the Santa Monica schools as being at some point on a continuum. Our goal is to push them to the highest point possible. We believe that not only Black students but all students will benefit enormously as a result. CRJ has created a document called “A Vision for Schools where Black Lives Matter” to guide us in this work. During the 2017-2018 school year we will be campaigning specifically to establish a support group for the parents, grandparents and guardians of Black students for every school in the district.

Third, CRJ works to oppose many forms of injustice in the nation’s criminal justice system: racial profiling and race-based harassment, excessively harsh sentencing laws, mass incarceration, police shootings of Black citizens, discrimination against individuals exiting incarceration, etc. On the local level CRJ, along with the Santa Monica/Venice chapter of the NAACP, the Westside ACLU and the Peace and Justice Committee of the Santa Monica Unitarian Universalist Church, participates in Coalition for Police Reform. It is the mission of this coalition to eliminate racial profiling, as well as the use of unnecessary force toward Black citizens, by the Santa Monica Police Department.

CRJ faces new challenges, seizes new opportunities.

CRJ’s July, 2017, workshop was visited by 5 members of white supremacist hate groups, 3of them wearing bandanas as masks. Throughout the meeting they interrupted and made racist and anti-Semitic remarks out loud. The August meeting was besieged by at least 30 white supremacist disruptors, who tried to invade the hall but were blocked at the door by stalwart attendees. Our research indicated that over 300 neo-nazis were mobilizing to descend on our next workshop. CRJ spearheaded a de-escalation and public safety program for CRJ and its anti-racist allies. Several hundred CRJ supporters turned out for the September 10 workshop. They were fortified by a plan for resistance, the presence of numerous clergy, and a large police contingent. Only a handful of far-rightists dared to show up, and the meeting proceeded peacefully.

Not only are white supremacists attempting to disrupt our workshops. They are also spreading misinformation about us. We have therefore taken up the additional projects of safeguarding our workshops and of sharing our message more broadly. We shall not be moved. We are committed to growing and expanding our anti-racist work in Santa Monica and invite others to join and participate with us.

Syria is the Paris Commune of the 21st Century!

Click here for my posts on the 2016 US Election
Click here for a list of my other blogs on Syria
Click here for a list of my other blogs on Libya
Posted by at No comments:

Friday, September 29, 2017

#TakeAKnee - Why I won't stand for DotardTrump's use of patriotism to cover racism



According to Politico:
Singing the national anthem before National Football League games has been ongoing for "decades," said NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy.

One aspect of this history that has spawned some confusion in recent days concerns a change made in 2009.

Until that year, players in primetime games would remain inside their locker rooms while the anthem was sung, due to timing concerns for the television networks. After 2009, the players in primetime games have been on the field during the anthem, McCarthy said.
In other words, prior to the election of the first black president, the "respect for our Country, Flag and National Anthem," that the Dotard and the other white supremacists are now getting stark, raving mad about was trumped by the "timing concerns for the television networks," and nobody was complaining then.

What Trump called the mothers of the players who took a knee, that's what I call DISRESPECT.
Syria is the Paris Commune of the 21st Century!

Click here for my posts on the 2016 US Election
Click here for a list of my other blogs on Syria
Click here for a list of my other blogs on Libya
Posted by at No comments:

Thursday, September 28, 2017

@TwitterSupport: Will you tell us who was behind these suspended accounts?

I just sent this tweet to Twitter. After studying their website for an hour, it was the only way I could find to contact them:
I know that Twitter officials are talking to congressional Russia investigators today about how Russia-linked accounts were used to influence the US 2016 elections. There is a growing body of evidence indicating that the Russian state, under the control of Vladimir Putin, has been massively using computers to create robots with artificial intelligence, to "people" fake social media accounts to push Putin's agenda around the world.

Currently, the focus is on the most recent US presidential election, but we know Russian bots have also been active in recent European elections as well, and are active even today, tweeting on both sides of the #TakeAKnee controversy.

Facebook has gotten the most attention. Especially since they revealed the existence of facebook ads paid for by Russians in rubles, including ads supporting the candidacy of Green Party contender Dr. Jill Stein. There is every reason to believe the Russian influences were even more active on Twitter than on facebook, but so far Twitter has not been forthcoming about the details.

Some sources have cited Russian bots flooding Twitter promoting Putin's views on Ukraine after the July 2014 downing of the Malaysian Air MH17 passenger jet. I think it may go back even further than that. In July 2013, I was mainly blogging about Syria. At the time the Syrian revolutionaries and their supporters were winning the social media war, especially on Twitter. Then, quite aRuptly, there came a flood of pro-Assad, counter-revolutionary tweets. I noticed this trend and wrote the blog post below about it.

With all the talk of possible Russian bots on Twitter, I decided to go back and look at it again this morning. This is what I found in place of the embedded tweets:
Clicking on the links returns this error message from Twitter:


Everyone of the 10 accounts I questioned in this blog four years ago has been suspended, not closed and not just inactive. That means these accounts were closed by Twitter for cause. I believe we are entitled to more information than that.

If you read the blog post, you will see that in 2013, I assumed these fake accounts were of Syrian origin, since I first struggled against them on the Syrian social media battlefield. Now, I think it is probably safe to assume they were Putin inspired and an example of his support for Assad. The only way to know for sure, however, is to see what these accounts tweeted about since they were created in early July 2013. That is actually what I intended to find out when I went back to the tweets and found the accounts suspended. This is not helpful. While I'm glad these accounts have been suspended, it is important that we still have access to their publicly published content.

Like it Never Even Happened! is not a good slogan for a social media company.

As long as the content is not pornographic, it should still be made available with a warning about why the account was suspended. To begin with, these now suspended accounts helped to keep a brutal fascist dictator, Bashar al-Assad, in power. They should not be simply "disappeared" after having done that. Who knows what other damage they did before they were suspended? Twitter knows! They should not keep this info to themselves. They should make a full accounting. When Twitter reveals what it knows about these accounts and why they were suspended. I will report it here. Please Re-tweet this article until they respond.

This is the 10 July 2013 post:

What's up with these Tweets? "Former US Army Vet Who Fought Alongside Al-Qae'a in #Syria Linked to #CIA"

For about a week now my twitter feed filtered for #Syria has seen this same tweet repeated over and over with no link or not a usable one for more info. All of these tweets are worded very closely if not exactly the same, which would seem to indicate some unity between them but they are all from different accounts.

I took a look a some of these accounts and I found an interesting thing. All of these accounts were very new. Most appear to have been started on 2 July 2013, most have only a few dozen tweets and a dozen followers.

Most interesting is that this tweet appears to be the only one from these accounts on #Syria although it may have repeat this tweet a number of time. Most of the other tweets make no sense.

So what is going on here?

Here is a sampling from the last hour that shows what I am talking about:


26 TWEETS | 136 FOLLOWING | 21 FOLLOWERS


3 TWEETS | 41 FOLLOWING | 23 FOLLOWERS


39 TWEETS | 191 FOLLOWING | 28 FOLLOWERS


47 TWEETS | 127 FOLLOWING | 21 FOLLOWERS


11 TWEETS | 66 FOLLOWING | 11 FOLLOWERS

Just to give you an idea how weird this seems, this is the tweet Scott Luke sent out 1 second before the above:

This guy has sent out 11 tweets most seem like nonsense, this is the only tweet about #Syria or the #CIA, the only other interesting tweets are these:


Which is a tweet that also shows up in many of these accounts.


30 TWEETS | 130 FOLLOWING | 12 FOLLOWERS


50 TWEETS | 223 FOLLOWING | 27 FOLLOWERS


19 TWEETS | 119 FOLLOWING | 24 FOLLOWERS

Here is his next tweet, minutes after the one above:




24 TWEETS | 147 FOLLOWING | 9 FOLLOWERS


19 TWEETS | 84 FOLLOWING | 15 FOLLOWERS

I could go on and on, but you get the picture. I have looked at many more of these tweets and the accounts that made them than I have listed here and I have found exactly the same pattern. They go back to 2 July and none of the accounts I have looked at have more that 50 tweets and 30 follower, all have this lone tweet on #Syria, often repeated, but no other tweets about #Syria. Curious.

I strongly suspect that something very nefarious is going on here, like a robot invasion, and given that this one tweet ties them all together, I have to strongly suspect that it is the Assad Regime, or its supporters that are behind this.

In any case, I feel that we need to know what really going on here because it feels like somebody is trying to subvert social media big time.

Syria is the Paris Commune of the 21st Century!

Click here for my posts on the 2016 US Election
Click here for a list of my other blogs on Syria
Click here for a list of my other blogs on Libya
Posted by at No comments:

Sunday, September 24, 2017

The Vietnam War Story Burns & Novick aren't telling

Having now watched the first five episodes of "The Vietnam War" as told by Burns & Novick, I find it a very detailed and sophisticated effort to normalize our collective history of the Vietnam War in such a way that even while we recognize the horror that it was, we feel no collective responsibility for it. Its mission is to prepare the US public to support future US wars wherever in the 3rd world the US may next conduct them. Vietnam need not worry this time; Korea, Iran and Venezuela should be concerned. Its mission is to create a national consciousness about the Vietnam War in which we can look back and see ourselves as "the good guys," flawed perhaps, but still "the good guys." Ken Burns want us to believe that the "better angels of our nature" were still at work in the Vietnam War.

Vietnam:American Holocaust 
To sell this mythology they have to obscure or avoid two important aspects of the Vietnam war story that fly it the face of this good guy image. The first is the sheer meanness and racism of the way the US conducted the war. For 30 years it thought that killing more Vietnamese was the answer. I addressed this aspect in my first blog post on this series and in my film Vietnam: American Holocaust.

The second is aspect I expect this series to continue to avoid is the hint of any larcenous motives for the US war in Vietnam. The motives so far presented are a need to fight communism and a desire to support an independent South Vietnam. These are presented as honestly felt motives even if they latter proved not to be all that. It is nowhere suggested that the US was in it for the money. The image of the United States during Vietnam War is one of an economy that was going well in spite of the burden of the war, when actually it was the other way round; the US economy was doing well precisely because of the war.

The bottom line truth is that US capitalism is addicted to war. The boom times of the '60s required a US war somewhere. It was just Vietnam's turn. Near full employment at home required up to half a million Americans working abroad killing gooks. While an economic and political analysis of why this feature of advanced monopoly capitalism is so well established is beyond the scope of anything I will present here, the temporal relationship is easy enough to illustrate.

To do that I will here present the first thing that comes up in a Google search for "US recession history," which is The History of Recessions in the United States, and add to it my commentary as it relates the corresponding US wars timeline. My comments are in blue type.

US Economy
The History of Recessions in the United States
Causes, Length, GDP, and Unemployment Rates

By Kimberly Amadeo
Updated August 22, 2017

The history of recessions in the United States since the Great Depression show they are a natural, though painful, part of the business cycle. 

Excuse me! They most certainly aren't "natural." Capitalist crises are caused by the economic inequalities of that system, but that is not the only way to do business.

The National Bureau of Economic Research defines when a recession starts. The Bureau of Economic Analysis measures recessions using gross domestic product.

1945 Recession

This recession lasted only eight months (February to October 1945). It seemed to last longer.That's because GDP continued to fall until it reached -10.6 percent in 1946. This was a natural result of the demobilization from World War II. That happened when the huge demand for military weapons fell off. Government spending dropped, although business spending was robust. Source: “Business Cycle Expansions and Contractions,” National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA, NBER.).

This recession timeline begins after World War II so it doesn't cover the period of the worldwide Great Depression of 1929-1939 or the fact that in spite of all the various government stimulus and social aid programs, it was ultimately the mobilization the for the war that brought prosperity to American capitalism. Amadeo's history of US recessions begins in 1945 with the recession the US economy immediately fell into as soon as war was not the answer to that central question of monopoly capitalism: How do we forestall economic collapse?

1949 Recession

This 11-month recession began in November 1948. It lasted until October 1949, when unemployment reached a peak of 7.9 percent. It was a mild adjustment as the economy continued adjusting to peacetime production.

There was a lot of pented up consumer demand right after the war, but that only carried the economy so far. In less than four years without serious war spending it found itself back in recession again. It's no accident that 1948-1949 saw the rise of the Cold War and its attended arms race. According to www.us governmentspending.com, the US defense budget, which had been as high as 41% of GDP during WWII, had dropped down to 7.2% of GDP by 1948, and the country started going into recession. Cold War and Korean War spending pushed the defense budget to nearly 15% of GDP, and it starved off recession again until that war ended.

Recession of 1953 

This recession lasted ten months (July 1953 - May 1954). It resulted from the demobilization after the Korean War. Unemployment didn't reach its peak of 6.1 percent until September 1954, four months after the recession ended.

GDP contracted 2.2 percent in Q3, 5.9 percent in Q4, and 1.8 percent in Q1 1954.

As soon as the Korean War ended, US capitalism began to falter again.

Recession of 1957 

It lasted eight months (August 1957-April 1958). GDP fell 4.0 percent in Q4 1957. It immediately plummeted 10.0 percent in Q1 1958. Unemployment didn't reach its peak of 7.1 percent until September 1958

The Fed's contractionary monetary policy caused it.

Actually, the lack of war caused it, although there was never a total lack of war. In this period the US was already paying for about 80% of the French war in Vietnam, and there were always other military expenditures. They just weren't enough to keep the economy humming along. The contractionary monetary policy was a vain effort fix an inherently broken system with monetary patches. Since the end of the Korean War the economy had been troubled, it would take the Vietnam War to deliver the next decade of prosperity. It would be a prosperity paid for by blood, 98% Vietnamese, 2% American.

1960 Recession

Starting in April 1960, the recession lasted 10 months, until February 1961. GDP was -1.5 percent in Q2, rose 1.0 percent in Q3, but was -4.8 percent in Q4. Unemployment reached a peak of 7.1 percent in May 1961. President Kennedy ended the recession with stimulus spending. His opponent, Richard Nixon, said the recession cost him the election. That's because he had been Vice-President so voters blamed the Republicans for causing it.

This economic survey doesn't delve into what Kennedy's stimulus spending was for. Much of it involved the startup costs for America's direct involvement in Vietnam. It would prove to be just a small down payment for the billions in "stimulus spending" that would use the Vietnam War as its justification and keep the US economy humming along for the next decade.

1970 Recession

This recession was relatively mild, lasting 11 months (December 1969 - November 1970.) GDP was -0.7 percent in Q1, then rose 0.7 percent in Q2, 3.6 percent in Q3, and fell 4.0 percent in Q4. Unemployment peaked at 6.1 percent in December 1970.

The war was wining down and already the effects were being felt.

1973-1975 Recession

This recession lasted 16 months (November 1973-March 1975). The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries is blamed for quadrupling oil prices, but the OPEC oil embargo alone didn't cause such a deep recession. Several factors contributed.....

Certainly, Arabs asking a fair price for their oil makes for an easy target, but without a doubt the biggest "contributing factor" to this two year recession following the end of US direct involvement in the Vietnam War was the lack of war to "stimulate" United States capitalism. It would stay in the doldrums until Reagan brought it back with a fresh round of military spending. Now, Trump, who ran as a non-interventionist candidate, has ramped up existing wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, and is looking to start a big new one somewhere soon, while he brags that the anticipatory stock market is at an all time high.

This is the ugly. ignoble truth about US wars, both now and then. Let's see if Burns & Novick even touch on it in week two.


Posted by at No comments:
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)