Friday, April 22, 2022

Johnny Depp

Jonathan Turley offers some thoughts on the ongoing Johnny Depp and Amber Heard trial:

 

The first two days of the trial included gripping and disturbing testimony despite Depp’s tortuously fragmented and rambling accounts. There were the hospital pictures and details of his severed finger tip, which he said was the result of Heard throwing a vodka bottle at him. Heard’s stony demeanor in court played well for Depp as he described someone who seemed to enjoy torturing him with every weakness. It did not help the defense that, at points, Heard looked like she wanted to through a bottle at Depp on the stand.

Conversely, Depp presented himself as a fragile figure tormented by a conniving and greedy spouse.  He used his abusive relationship with his mother to not only explain his own inability to be abusive but to paint Heard as a classic case of a man tragically marrying his mother.

Depp may have succeeded in one notable respect. He did not try to hide that fact that he was an utter train wreck of a human being; someone who burned through millions and past relationships. Yet, he may have connected on the notion that Heard picked through the rubble to take what she could. Being clueless (even comically clueless) is better than being abusive.

Depp detailed how Heard allegedly flew into fits of violence and abuse to the point that his children did not want to be around her. He alleged that she used nail polish to pretend that he broke her nose while repeatedly leaving him with cuts and bruises.  Heard is heard in one tape admitting that she hit Depp and there were photos offered to support his claims that she was physically abusive.

 

I'm Team Johnny by the way.  I know him through C.I.  I remember how upset C.I. was when those two got together.  She said Amber would destroy him.  I believe she even told him that.  He didn't believe her because (a) he was in love and (b) somehow (being young and dreamy and lucky) he'd never encountered a woman as vile as Amber before.  Didn't believe anyone could be that calculating.  C.I. said at the time that Amber had no talent and was realizing that fame was not coming her way so she was determined to try to give her career a boost by latching onto Johnny.

 

For Johnny, it was a middle-aged crisis and had has lost everything due to it. 


Here are some video reports.



 

"Iraq snapshot" (THE COMMON ILLS):

 

Wednesday, April 20, 2022.  Lily Tomlin, climate change, Iraq and more.


Actress and comedian (and animal rights activist and feminist and . . .) Lily Tomlin is in the news lately.  NETFLIX is about to drop the last episodes of GRACE AND FRANKIE, the show she co-stars with Jane Fonda in, and and April 22nd, she's going to be honored by TURNER CLASSIC MOVIES and she has two upcoming film projects.  THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER spoke with her and we'll note this section:


Do you think culture and comedy have evolved in the time since you first started out?

[Lily Tomlin}: People are more conscious about misogynistic jokes or homophobic jokes or racial slurs. Those [jokes] are just expressions of anger and fury and dislike and propaganda to separate groups and individuals. I don’t know how well-founded this is, but as tragic as Ukraine is, you think of it as a white European country. I think of the people in Haiti and in all the countries of color where terrible things happened and not as many people responded, and it was not as widely spread in the press. There was just an embrace of the Ukrainian people and a dismissal of people of color in other countries.


Amen.


At BLACK AGENDA REPORT, Ajamu Baraka offers:

U.S. propagandists had learned from the Vietnam experience that it was much safer to shield the public from the brutality that their troops were dishing out to poor villagers, students, ordinary workers, and anyone who dared to resist the military might of the U.S. military on a daily basis.

But the Ukraine war, at least the portion that began with the Russia “special operation” in February, was one of those instances where exposure to the dehumanized reality of war was welcomed.

Why?

The images of the burnt-out buildings and frightened refugees crossing the frontiers of the nations that border Ukraine served an especially important purpose. It was to generate public support for war. War in support of Ukraine and revulsion against the Russian “invaders!” And it did not hurt that the victims were white!

An important lesson was learned from the U.S. and NATO wars to dismember Yugoslavia in the 1990s and it was that white victims made selling war amazingly easy– especially when framed as a humanitarian mission to rescue people from tyranny.

We know what emerged from this discovery. The ideological weapon of humanitarian intervention and the mantra, “responsibility to protect” became invaluable to justify imperialist war, even when the victims were not white, because an appeal could be made to another powerful force – liberal white saviorism!

However, in this short essay I want to address something even more insidious and dangerous than the general propaganda efforts to generate support for the war against Russia, and that is: in the process of building support for war,  the white supremacist, ultranationalist, and neo-Nazi elements in Ukrainian society and in the state were downplayed, if not ignored.

That whitewashing, coupled with the inordinate attention given to the war, with the inevitable sympathy for the white victims of this war – a war motivated by the desire of Ukrainians to join Europe, to “defend Europeanness,” and European “civilization” – revealed a contradiction that has always been present at the heart of the emergence of what became Europe. That contradiction was the hyper-valuation of white lives, of “whiteness,” in relationship to the racialized “others,” a contradiction that I refer to as the “white lives matter more movement.”

This whitewashing of Ukraine is particularly dangerous because it is occurring at a historical moment of deep crisis for the global capitalist order, producing proto-fascist movements across Europe that are becoming more visible and bolder. As I said in previous writings on this subject, U.S. authorities and the U.S. and Western European press understood that Ukraine had an active problem with white supremacist ultranationalists and literal neo-Nazis. Nevertheless, in order to engender support for Ukraine and to set the stage for the performance of a lifetime by Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s actor president, Ukraine had to be recreated, minus the ultranationalist influence and Nazis.

Herein lies the danger for non-Europeans.

The coup in 2014 saw for the first time since the second world-war, literal neo-Nazis serving in the government of a European state. Moreover, even though the ultranationalists and neo-Nazis did not have a commanding electoral base, their non-state presence controlling the streets of major cities and towns across Ukraine was significant. They were notorious for their attacks on LGBTQ populations, anarchists, non-Europeans, and Roma peoples. Their violent opposition to communists and communism and socialism of any sort was officially amplified with repressive legislation that outlawed and repressed most left political tendencies.

Beginning in 2014, white supremacists from throughout the European world traveled to Ukraine, with over four thousand “volunteers” traveling to Ukraine recently to fight in response to Zelensky’s call to help fight the Russians. It did not matter to Zelensky or the European nations supplying weapons and paying the salaries of these “volunteers” that most of them were self-identified white supremacists.

Again, we do not need to make the case of the presence of these forces in Ukraine. That has already been done, here , here, and here . The political issue is that the sanitizing of the right-wing Ukrainian state has strengthened the far-right not only in Ukraine but globally. The whitewashing by liberals and the liberal/left in the U.S. that transformed these elements into “moderate” Nazis is having the effect of legitimizing their proto-fascist racialized politics, a politics that is emerging across the white world. There is a reason Marine LePen has a chance to defeat Emmanuel Macron, even after he moved further to the right after being elected.

Liberals pretend to be opposed to the right, but they do not because they aligned themselves with the neo-liberal right more than two decades ago. The right will never defeat the far-right – the dilemma of the democratic party in the U.S. But in embracing the illusion of being in opposition and conceding ideological terrain in the elusive quest for “bipartisanship” the far-right is further legitimized and emboldened.

The whitewashing of the right in Ukraine in order to support its U.S.-backed government will have domestic political consequences. For example, the liberal and left/liberal argument for opposing Trump was that his supporters were infected with racism and his movement represented a proto-fascist political development in the body politic of the U.S. The political and ideological challenge now is to square this support for white supremacists in Ukraine with their opposition to Trump. How do you condemn Trumpian racism after embracing a government and society infested with white supremacists and literal neo-Nazis?


In a few yers, when everyone looks back at this time period, there's going to be a lot of shame -- and there should be. Shame on the part of the media, shame on 'caring' actors.  They should all be on the receiving end of some version of Jesse Jackson Jr.'s 2008 speech/attack on Hillary Clinton -- where he listed all the things she dind't cry over but felt that she had cried over her poorly run campaign.



A lot of people will have to answer whe the hysteria dies down.


Hysteria?


Most Americans, despite the media whoring, don't care.  They care that people are at war in the abstract.  But, no, this isn't seen by the majority of Americans as a US priority.  


And what they see at home only appalls them.  A member of Congress telling the homeless to go home.  To go home.  And it's not a Republica snarling at them.  No, it's a Democrat.  The once powerful and righteous Maxine Waters.  Sunk by her own corruption.  Mayb it's time the ethics review board over Congress was taken out of the hands of Congress?  Between Nancy Pelosi's profits from the stock market and all the family scandals for members of Congress, something needs to be done.


But we don't have money to care for the homeless, we are told. Yet Joe Biden keeps sending more and money to fight Russia.  


Ma8rgaret Kimberly (BLACK AGENDA REPORT) notes:


The United States, its NATO allies, and their partners in corporate media are engaging in an unprecedented war propaganda effort. Their goal is to get and maintain public support for their actions against Russia which are playing out in Ukraine. The messaging is constant and isn’t at all subtle. One cannot go online for any purpose without seeing exhortations to help Ukrainian children, buy products colored in blue and yellow, or somehow “stand with Ukraine.”

What passes for news about Ukraine is usually little more than anti-Russian screeds, sourced by “anonymous officials” eager to reveal claims that Vladimir Putin has untold billions of dollars stashed away, or that Russians are protesting, refusing to fight, or fleeing their country. In these stories Putin has been fooled by his aides, is purging the intelligence apparatus and is either depressed or in fits of rage, depending on the source of the anti-Putin invective. We are told that the Russian economy is crumbling, every atrocity is committed by Russians only, and that Ukraine’s president Volodomyr Zelensky is a perfect human being. Documented proof that he has a fortune in offshore accounts has been disappeared by the media which once reported on these activities.

Joe Biden and his foreign policy team of incompetent ideologues hope to convince Americans to accept food shortages, rising gas prices, and the risk of a hot war. The steady diet of dangerous nonsense is a necessity for them. The game is up if the people begin to question what they are being told.

Then again, while there may not be mass rejection of the Ukraine narrative there is certainly a mass rejection of Biden himself. The latest opinion poll shows him with a very low 33% approval rating. The average person may not be well versed in the history of U.S. policy towards Russia, but they know when things don’t add up and they know that the president is not a well man. Rambling, incoherent speeches punctuated by shouts of “war criminal” and “genocide” don’t cut it when working people can barely afford to put gas in the tank. We are left with a mass gaslighting effort that has created the desired effect of generating fear and or hatred towards Russia, but that hasn’t increased satisfaction about the country’s direction.

Biden’s actions aren’t very surprising. He was the Ukraine point person after the Barack Obama coup in 2014. He was always one of the most hawkish democrats and came into the presidency with Antony Blinken, Victoria Nuland and the same cast of characters who first violated Ukraine’s sovereignty. He hoped to instigate Russia and kill the NordStreamII pipeline and sanction Russia. He didn’t expect the full incursion that he spent months saying would happen.

Now he is hoisted on his own petard, trying to bully other nations into condemning Russia when it isn’t in their interests to do so, and causing world wide suffering in a futile effort to destroy Russia’s economy. Sanctions against Russia have increased fuel prices all over the world. Disruptions in wheat production will reduce Ukraine’s harvest and decrease supplies in places that had no connection with this ginned up conflict. The anti-Russian propaganda is working but the pro-Biden effort is not, hence the public disapproval.


Nothing is working for Joe.  And he's so feeble and out of touch that he's whispering about running for 2024.  Does he think he'll be able to hide in basements and avoid the campaign trail again?


The 'peop' shots they gavee him befor the debates -- the Democratic Party debates -- did wake him back up once thy started but they also brought out his aggressive nature and he looked really angry.


That won't work in 2024.  Equally true, Joe's been abusing the same 'pep' shots since he got into the White House, he thinks they help him thihnk better. 


Nothing in a needle will ever do that trick, Joe.


Among his many failures?  He'll be remembered for doing damn little to save the planet.  April 22nd, Lily gets honored (rightfully so) but that day is also Earth Day.  


AFP reports:


·1 min read

Iraq was hit Wednesday by its third heavy dust storm in two weeks, temporarily grounding flights at Baghdad and Najaf airports, as the weather phenomenon grows increasingly frequent.

The air in Baghdad was thick with a heavy sheet of grey and orange dust, while the state news agency INA cited the meteorological office as saying the latest storm was expected to lift on Thursday.

Flights were suspended at Baghdad International Airport due to poor visibility.

The airport serving the Shiite holy city of Najaf to the south also released a statement announcing flights were grounded.

Two dust storms struck the country earlier in April, leaving dozens hospitalised with respiratory problems and temporarily grounding flights at a number of airports.

"The dust is affecting the whole country but particularly central and southern regions," Amer al-Jabri, an official at Iraq's meteorological office, told AFP.


The dust storms are worse and more frequent due to climate change.  And the world sits by waiting .  Or fretting over nonsense.  

The following sites updated:0




at

Wednesday, April 20, 2022

Still disgusted

Jonathan Turley:

We recently discussed the collapse of the Whitmer kidnapping case after a jury acquitted defendants in Michigan. Now, one of the lead prosecutors is leaving the case, according to a motion filed by Assistant U.S. Attorney Jonathan Roth. That adds questions about how the case will move forward after the earlier loss.

Shortly before the 2020 election, Gov. Whitmer stood before cameras describing her narrow escape from being kidnapped and murdered by “domestic terrorists.” Despite the fact that the Justice Department in the Trump Administration made these arrests, Whitmer blamed former president Donald Trump. President Biden agreed that Trump was fostering a “civil war.”

The media went into a frenzy, declaring that the case proved that “Trump’s rhetoric and policies have unleashed a second pandemic in the form of far-right domestic terrorism.”

The problem is that the case — and the narrative — quickly fell apart after the election. A Michigan jury recently acquitted Daniel Harris and Brandon Caserta and hanged on the verdicts against Adam Fox and Barry Croft Jr. Fox is portrayed as a ringleader of the group and leader of the conspiracy.

While Fox and Croft can be retried, the acquittal raises an additional challenge. Harris and Caserta may feel fewer inhibitions in testifying. With the exception of perjury, they can safely take the stand to discuss their actions — and more importantly, the actions of the government.

The Michigan case stands as one of the most chilling examples of entrapment techniques used by the FBI. While Whitmer declared Trump “complicit” in her planned execution, the FBI increasingly appeared more “complicit” in the creation of a government-inspired, government-funded, and largely government-staffed plot.



People and publications went bat s**t insaneand it wasn;t hust the corporate media.


I lost a ton of respect for WSWS.  What was clearly entrapment was egged on by WSWS because it fit their narrative.  They sunded like lunatics.  Now that it's imploded?  They look like fools.


There was way too much blind faith put into the FBI and the CIA when Trump was in the White Hous.  I am still appalled by Janis Ian -- and I know her.  Haven't spoken to her in years.  Only knew her through C.I. to begin with.  But this is a woman whose family was destroyed by the FBI and there she was cheering them on because they were enemies of Donald Trump.  No.  No.  And no.


People lost their minds and stormed away from their ethics and smart people foolishly supported censorship.


It was appalling and I'm still disgusted by it.  



"Iraq snapshot" (THE COMMON ILLS):

 

Wednesday, April 20, 2022.  Lily Tomlin, climate change, Iraq and more.


Actress and comedian (and animal rights activist and feminist and . . .) Lily Tomlin is in the news lately.  NETFLIX is about to drop the last episodes of GRACE AND FRANKIE, the show she co-stars with Jane Fonda in, and and April 22nd, she's going to be honored by TURNER CLASSIC MOVIES and she has two upcoming film projects.  THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER spoke with her and we'll note this section:


Do you think culture and comedy have evolved in the time since you first started out?

[Lily Tomlin}: People are more conscious about misogynistic jokes or homophobic jokes or racial slurs. Those [jokes] are just expressions of anger and fury and dislike and propaganda to separate groups and individuals. I don’t know how well-founded this is, but as tragic as Ukraine is, you think of it as a white European country. I think of the people in Haiti and in all the countries of color where terrible things happened and not as many people responded, and it was not as widely spread in the press. There was just an embrace of the Ukrainian people and a dismissal of people of color in other countries.


Amen.


At BLACK AGENDA REPORT, Ajamu Baraka offers:

U.S. propagandists had learned from the Vietnam experience that it was much safer to shield the public from the brutality that their troops were dishing out to poor villagers, students, ordinary workers, and anyone who dared to resist the military might of the U.S. military on a daily basis.

But the Ukraine war, at least the portion that began with the Russia “special operation” in February, was one of those instances where exposure to the dehumanized reality of war was welcomed.

Why?

The images of the burnt-out buildings and frightened refugees crossing the frontiers of the nations that border Ukraine served an especially important purpose. It was to generate public support for war. War in support of Ukraine and revulsion against the Russian “invaders!” And it did not hurt that the victims were white!

An important lesson was learned from the U.S. and NATO wars to dismember Yugoslavia in the 1990s and it was that white victims made selling war amazingly easy– especially when framed as a humanitarian mission to rescue people from tyranny.

We know what emerged from this discovery. The ideological weapon of humanitarian intervention and the mantra, “responsibility to protect” became invaluable to justify imperialist war, even when the victims were not white, because an appeal could be made to another powerful force – liberal white saviorism!

However, in this short essay I want to address something even more insidious and dangerous than the general propaganda efforts to generate support for the war against Russia, and that is: in the process of building support for war,  the white supremacist, ultranationalist, and neo-Nazi elements in Ukrainian society and in the state were downplayed, if not ignored.

That whitewashing, coupled with the inordinate attention given to the war, with the inevitable sympathy for the white victims of this war – a war motivated by the desire of Ukrainians to join Europe, to “defend Europeanness,” and European “civilization” – revealed a contradiction that has always been present at the heart of the emergence of what became Europe. That contradiction was the hyper-valuation of white lives, of “whiteness,” in relationship to the racialized “others,” a contradiction that I refer to as the “white lives matter more movement.”

This whitewashing of Ukraine is particularly dangerous because it is occurring at a historical moment of deep crisis for the global capitalist order, producing proto-fascist movements across Europe that are becoming more visible and bolder. As I said in previous writings on this subject, U.S. authorities and the U.S. and Western European press understood that Ukraine had an active problem with white supremacist ultranationalists and literal neo-Nazis. Nevertheless, in order to engender support for Ukraine and to set the stage for the performance of a lifetime by Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s actor president, Ukraine had to be recreated, minus the ultranationalist influence and Nazis.

Herein lies the danger for non-Europeans.

The coup in 2014 saw for the first time since the second world-war, literal neo-Nazis serving in the government of a European state. Moreover, even though the ultranationalists and neo-Nazis did not have a commanding electoral base, their non-state presence controlling the streets of major cities and towns across Ukraine was significant. They were notorious for their attacks on LGBTQ populations, anarchists, non-Europeans, and Roma peoples. Their violent opposition to communists and communism and socialism of any sort was officially amplified with repressive legislation that outlawed and repressed most left political tendencies.

Beginning in 2014, white supremacists from throughout the European world traveled to Ukraine, with over four thousand “volunteers” traveling to Ukraine recently to fight in response to Zelensky’s call to help fight the Russians. It did not matter to Zelensky or the European nations supplying weapons and paying the salaries of these “volunteers” that most of them were self-identified white supremacists.

Again, we do not need to make the case of the presence of these forces in Ukraine. That has already been done, here , here, and here . The political issue is that the sanitizing of the right-wing Ukrainian state has strengthened the far-right not only in Ukraine but globally. The whitewashing by liberals and the liberal/left in the U.S. that transformed these elements into “moderate” Nazis is having the effect of legitimizing their proto-fascist racialized politics, a politics that is emerging across the white world. There is a reason Marine LePen has a chance to defeat Emmanuel Macron, even after he moved further to the right after being elected.

Liberals pretend to be opposed to the right, but they do not because they aligned themselves with the neo-liberal right more than two decades ago. The right will never defeat the far-right – the dilemma of the democratic party in the U.S. But in embracing the illusion of being in opposition and conceding ideological terrain in the elusive quest for “bipartisanship” the far-right is further legitimized and emboldened.

The whitewashing of the right in Ukraine in order to support its U.S.-backed government will have domestic political consequences. For example, the liberal and left/liberal argument for opposing Trump was that his supporters were infected with racism and his movement represented a proto-fascist political development in the body politic of the U.S. The political and ideological challenge now is to square this support for white supremacists in Ukraine with their opposition to Trump. How do you condemn Trumpian racism after embracing a government and society infested with white supremacists and literal neo-Nazis?


In a few yers, when everyone looks back at this time period, there's going to be a lot of shame -- and there should be. Shame on the part of the media, shame on 'caring' actors.  They should all be on the receiving end of some version of Jesse Jackson Jr.'s 2008 speech/attack on Hillary Clinton -- where he listed all the things she dind't cry over but felt that she had cried over her poorly run campaign.



A lot of people will have to answer whe the hysteria dies down.


Hysteria?


Most Americans, despite the media whoring, don't care.  They care that people are at war in the abstract.  But, no, this isn't seen by the majority of Americans as a US priority.  


And what they see at home only appalls them.  A member of Congress telling the homeless to go home.  To go home.  And it's not a Republica snarling at them.  No, it's a Democrat.  The once powerful and righteous Maxine Waters.  Sunk by her own corruption.  Mayb it's time the ethics review board over Congress was taken out of the hands of Congress?  Between Nancy Pelosi's profits from the stock market and all the family scandals for members of Congress, something needs to be done.


But we don't have money to care for the homeless, we are told. Yet Joe Biden keeps sending more and money to fight Russia.  


Ma8rgaret Kimberly (BLACK AGENDA REPORT) notes:


The United States, its NATO allies, and their partners in corporate media are engaging in an unprecedented war propaganda effort. Their goal is to get and maintain public support for their actions against Russia which are playing out in Ukraine. The messaging is constant and isn’t at all subtle. One cannot go online for any purpose without seeing exhortations to help Ukrainian children, buy products colored in blue and yellow, or somehow “stand with Ukraine.”

What passes for news about Ukraine is usually little more than anti-Russian screeds, sourced by “anonymous officials” eager to reveal claims that Vladimir Putin has untold billions of dollars stashed away, or that Russians are protesting, refusing to fight, or fleeing their country. In these stories Putin has been fooled by his aides, is purging the intelligence apparatus and is either depressed or in fits of rage, depending on the source of the anti-Putin invective. We are told that the Russian economy is crumbling, every atrocity is committed by Russians only, and that Ukraine’s president Volodomyr Zelensky is a perfect human being. Documented proof that he has a fortune in offshore accounts has been disappeared by the media which once reported on these activities.

Joe Biden and his foreign policy team of incompetent ideologues hope to convince Americans to accept food shortages, rising gas prices, and the risk of a hot war. The steady diet of dangerous nonsense is a necessity for them. The game is up if the people begin to question what they are being told.

Then again, while there may not be mass rejection of the Ukraine narrative there is certainly a mass rejection of Biden himself. The latest opinion poll shows him with a very low 33% approval rating. The average person may not be well versed in the history of U.S. policy towards Russia, but they know when things don’t add up and they know that the president is not a well man. Rambling, incoherent speeches punctuated by shouts of “war criminal” and “genocide” don’t cut it when working people can barely afford to put gas in the tank. We are left with a mass gaslighting effort that has created the desired effect of generating fear and or hatred towards Russia, but that hasn’t increased satisfaction about the country’s direction.

Biden’s actions aren’t very surprising. He was the Ukraine point person after the Barack Obama coup in 2014. He was always one of the most hawkish democrats and came into the presidency with Antony Blinken, Victoria Nuland and the same cast of characters who first violated Ukraine’s sovereignty. He hoped to instigate Russia and kill the NordStreamII pipeline and sanction Russia. He didn’t expect the full incursion that he spent months saying would happen.

Now he is hoisted on his own petard, trying to bully other nations into condemning Russia when it isn’t in their interests to do so, and causing world wide suffering in a futile effort to destroy Russia’s economy. Sanctions against Russia have increased fuel prices all over the world. Disruptions in wheat production will reduce Ukraine’s harvest and decrease supplies in places that had no connection with this ginned up conflict. The anti-Russian propaganda is working but the pro-Biden effort is not, hence the public disapproval.


Nothing is working for Joe.  And he's so feeble and out of touch that he's whispering about running for 2024.  Does he think he'll be able to hide in basements and avoid the campaign trail again?


The 'peop' shots they gavee him befor the debates -- the Democratic Party debates -- did wake him back up once thy started but they also brought out his aggressive nature and he looked really angry.


That won't work in 2024.  Equally true, Joe's been abusing the same 'pep' shots since he got into the White House, he thinks they help him thihnk better. 


Nothing in a needle will ever do that trick, Joe.


Among his many failures?  He'll be remembered for doing damn little to save the planet.  April 22nd, Lily gets honored (rightfully so) but that day is also Earth Day.  


AFP reports:


·1 min read

Iraq was hit Wednesday by its third heavy dust storm in two weeks, temporarily grounding flights at Baghdad and Najaf airports, as the weather phenomenon grows increasingly frequent.

The air in Baghdad was thick with a heavy sheet of grey and orange dust, while the state news agency INA cited the meteorological office as saying the latest storm was expected to lift on Thursday.

Flights were suspended at Baghdad International Airport due to poor visibility.

The airport serving the Shiite holy city of Najaf to the south also released a statement announcing flights were grounded.

Two dust storms struck the country earlier in April, leaving dozens hospitalised with respiratory problems and temporarily grounding flights at a number of airports.

"The dust is affecting the whole country but particularly central and southern regions," Amer al-Jabri, an official at Iraq's meteorological office, told AFP.


The dust storms are worse and more frequent due to climate change.  And the world sits by waiting .  Or fretting over nonsense.  

The following sites updated:0




at

Once again free speech gets trampled over

Jonathan Turley:


Last week, Twitter’s Chief Executive Officer Parag Agrawal sounded more like Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in rallying his troops to defy the existential threat of Elon Musk while pledging that they will not be “held hostage.” The threat, however, was not a private buyout but the threat that Twitter might be forced to respect free speech on the site. The problem for the Board members is that they could find themselves in court if their anti-free speech stance continues to stand in the way of shareholder profits.  Such a lawsuit could be a bellwether for shareholder opposition to boards pursuing Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) policies over profits.

The Board responded to the Musk offer with what sounded like a suicide pact to swallow a “poison pill” to sell new shares to drive down share values. While a standard tactic to fend off hostile takeovers, Twitter made it clear that it would not be forced into free speech after making the company synonymous with censorship.

They were joined by liberal commentators who declared that it was not just Twitter but democracy itself that could fall if free speech were allowed to breakout.  The Washington Post’s Max Boot declared that “for democracy to survive, we need more content moderation, not less.”

Former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich went full Orwellian in explaining why freedom is tyranny. Reich insisted that “every dictator, strongman, demagogue and modern-day robber baron” pushed free speech to oppress people and that, while good for Musk, “for the  rest of us, it would be a brave new nightmare.”


I don't know what's worse, the harm TWITTER did to its stock holders or the harm people like Robert Reich are doing to democracy?

"Iraq snapshot" (THE COMMON ILLS):

Tuesday, April 19, 2022.  Press whores are so overwhelmed with their whoring duties that they can't even save their former precious while the political stalemate continues in Iraq.


In November, the US mid-term elections will be held.  Traditionally, the hose controlling the White House loses seats in Congress during the midterms.


 


Joe Biden's polls8ter says,  "The worst political environment for Democrats in my lifetime.""


AOC and the Fraud Squad can't rally because they've been exposed as worthless.


They tried to bring in Bar8ack Obama this month to help Joe.  Even if the catty behavior between Joe and Barack hadn't taken place at that event, Barack couldn't have helped.


The press whoring just isn't working.  

He was still in the White House when I pointed out that The Cult of St. Barack wouldn't be able to keep him afloat after he was out of the White House.  No, people would begin to notice how he did nothing for him and how various 'media' outlets were really just Democratic Party organ who covered for Barrack and Barack's many failures inste8ad of holding him accountable.


He wa8s never held accountable.  He was going to end veterans homelessness, remember?  He didn't8.  He was going to close the gulag at Guantanamo.  He didn't  He was going to pull all US troops out of Iraq -- he never did and he started sending more back in in the fall of 2012 -- as THE NEW YORK TIMES finally reported in September of that month, buried in a story on Syria.  He then began sending more in in8 the second half of 2014 and they remain in Iraq today.  "We want to end the War! And we want to end it now!"  Remember him thundering that in his 2008 rallies?  Remember his alleged superior judgment and how he used the Iraq War to bash Hillary Clinton?


He was really good a words, they just didn't mean anything.


We constantly, while Barack was in the White House would use Joni Mitchell's "The Last Time I Saw Richard" to describe Barack and his cult back when he was president.


The last time I saw Richard was Detroit in '68
And he told me all romantics meet the same fate someday
Cynical and drunk and boring someone in some dark café
You laugh he said you think you're immune
Go look at your eyes they're full of moon
You like roses and kisses and pretty men to tell you
All those pretty lies pretty lies
When you gonna realize they're only pretty lies
Only pretty lies just pretty lies


Pretty lies, when you gonna realize they're just pretty lies?


The press whored for him constantly.  See Ava and my "TV: The Myths" for some of his many broken promises.  And I was right.  The media whores couldn't devote all the attention they did to covering for him and lying for him when he was out of the White House.  No.  


They ahve othere politicians to whore for today.  They still will rally around Barack and they did for that awful documentary.  That's the reality.  It was awful.  NETFLIX knew they had a dog on their hand, i8t was a NETFLIX exec that provided us with the documentary ahead of time and told us that NETFLIX knew they'd wasted money.  It debuted last week and never made it higher than number 3.  It's dropped.  QUEEN OF THE SOUTH, a USA network series, had its final season show up on NETFLIX and it performed better.  WHITE HOT THE RISE & FALL OF ABERCROMBIE & FITCH just started streaming on NETFLIX and already it's creating more excitement.


Barack never helped anyone but himself.  By the time Michelle Obama's book came out, the bloom was off that rose.  It did not meet the publisher's expectations despite a huge promotional push.  


Barack's only accomplishment was overseeing the greatest transfer of wealth from the bottom to the top.  He was the hero of the 1%.  8And this was made clear as he worked to destroy a Chicago neighborhood by mposing his official library there, by yachting with David Geffen and limp noodle Bruce Springsteen.  By getting millions from NETFLIX despite him never having produced a film  or TV show.


His documentary was an embarrassment.  But the press whores worked the p.r. material they were handed and went around, as the p.r. material did, comparing Barack to a man who has spent his lifetime -- and he's nearly 100 now -- covering environmental issues in films and TV shows.  That was so insulting and outrageous and, no surprise, beyond the whores 8that lie never got traction.


He c9984an't save them.  Bill can't save them -- he has to run from reporters these days to avoid facing the questions regarding Juanita and Monica.  Hillary can't do press?  She's seeing campaign aid after campaign aid pulled into an investigation on how the Russia myth was created by her campaign and paid for by her campaign and how aid how one person with her campaign after another lied to the US government.


In the Iraq that the US destroyed, the political stalemate continues.  No president named since the October 10th elections, no prime minister-designate named.   Six months and counting.  QANTARA offers:

Iraq’s fragility and compounding problems are nothing new. The country has witnessed three devastating wars within three long decades, in addition to international sanctions, sectarian war and foreign influence. By the time Saddam Hussein’s statues were toppled, Iraq found itself in a devastating situation, in which bets were being made that Iraq would splinter into several countries based on sectarian and ethnic lines. Although Iraq defied these expectations, it remains a fragile state edging towards failure. 

Muqtada al-Sadr, a Shia cleric who won 73 out of 325 seats in the recent election, is however promising major change. The young cleric wants to break away from the political tradition of forming a national unity government after each election where all parties representing Iraq’s sects, ethnicities, and religions share the spoils. This type of political arrangement is one of the main causes of corruption and social division.

Instead, al-Sadr wants to form a majority government that can begin implementing desperately needed reforms – beginning with controlling the unruly militias and fighting corruption. He also aims to curb foreign influence from countries like Iran and make sure Iraq remains neutral regarding divisive regional issues. But will he succeed? 

Al-Sadr will face many challenges in his efforts to brighten Iraq’s future. Even if he can form a majority government, further change will be an uphill battle because reform in Iraq is a formidable task that requires tremendous effort. Furthermore, some aspects of reform might take decades.



The western press, doing the US State Dept's bidding, whored for Moqtada and declared him a kingmaker and other things.  He's a cult leader who is responsible for the deaths of many Ir8aiqs as w8ell as many US troops.  But in August8, he took the bribe from the US State Dept -- that was made with US tax dollars -- a8nd they began promoting him lilke crazy.


Well he had t8hree tries.  Three times, he called for a vote in Parliament to elect his nominee for president.


Three times he failed.


He's now in the midst of a 40-day, self-imposed exile  


His oppontents are stupid.  There was some initial excitement that the coordinating framework would be able to put together a government.


Then they learned that their answer was to pimp the same person for prime minister and the same person for president. Moqtada had already installed the same person for another term as Speaker of Parliament.  So if the three top positions in government weren't going to change, what was the point8 of those October elections?


It's a question the already disenchanted are asking even louder these days.




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