“Since its 2023 invasion of Gaza, the Israeli Defence Forces report fewer than 800 troops killed, while in turn killing tens — maybe hundreds — of thousands of mostly civilian Palestinian Arabs (and 250 or more inconvenient journalists). Since the beginning, they’ve established their ability to attack any point in Gaza at will, driving a displaced, hungry population back and forth over piles of bodies, while seizing more land in the West Bank and Syria, liquidating Hezbollah’s Lebanese strongholds, trading missile strikes with Yemen’s Houthis, and even emerging relatively unscathed, if not particularly successful, in an intermittent war with Iran. Top Israeli regime officials confidently assert that the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and annexation of the West Bank are inevitable. Yes, that sounds rather like multiple ‘victories,’ accomplished and pending. But those victories didn’t come from nowhere.” (09/02/25)
“Scholars, pundits, and politicians make bad predictions all the time, and some of the mistakes are real doozies. For what it’s worth, my nominee for the worst geopolitical forecast of the past 50 years was the post-Cold War belief that the world was being inexorably swept toward a peaceful and increasingly prosperous liberal future. … If one looks back at the past quarter century, it’s clear that these optimistic forecasts were almost entirely wrong. China became more authoritarian, and Russia reverted to autocracy after a brief experiment with genuine electoral democracy. Indeed, democracy has been in steady decline around the world for nearly two decades, including in the United States itself. China, Russia, and the United States are converging, but it is the United States that is becoming more like these corrupt autocracies rather than the reverse.” (09/02/25)
“From the concept of the therapeutic state, we can derive the iatrogenic state. That means just as the former approach encourages clients, patients, or citizens to seek healing in the identification of external forces of trauma, their condition worsens. In other words, iatrogenesis has become a problem not only in therapeutic practice, but also in society, as agents of the state have unsuccessfully extended the therapeutic mentality as the solution to most social issues. It has become increasingly clear that the Democrats have evolved into the Mommy Party and the Republicans the Daddy Party. And as each party pushes into unhealthy extremes, more of their followers become unhealthy extremists.” (09/02/25)
“I have always had a very acute sense of hearing, and perhaps for that reason have long been quite sensitive to loud background noise. Whenever I would go to a rock concert or a discotheque with friends in high school or college, I would soon find myself counting the minutes until the moment we would leave. As I grew older, I solved the problem by simply avoiding such situations. However, in recent years, especially since the beginning of the Covid operation, this has become much more difficult to do. … if I were a member of a super-elite cadre bent on further extending its control over the lives of the many, I’d do everything in my power to ensure that such moments of silence and relative calm become ever more scarce in society.” (09/02/25)
“I have spent the bulk of my career — on and off since the late Carter Administration — following the money that drives war and repression. What I have finally learned after so many decades of doing research on the war machine is that while research is critical, it must be in the service of a smart strategy backed by a lot of hard work by organizers from all walks of life. My interest in using research to promote social change was sparked by my years at Columbia University in the 1970s, when I was a researcher and advocate in the divestment movement targeting the apartheid regime of South Africa and a participant in other social justice movements like the boycott in support of the United Farmworkers Union and the opposition to the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile.” (09/02/25)
“Last Friday evening, unable to watch the Mets game due to a broadcasting blackout, I tweeted, ‘Trump is Dead. He died on Wednesday.’ Why? Well, he hadn’t been seen for a couple of days, and it seemed sort of funny to me. I didn’t really have any intent while doing this. It was, in the parlance of our times, a shitpost. And not even that, because that implies a desire to troll or disconcert. I didn’t have any developed motive; I had an impulse. I noticed that some of my funnier friends seemed to think it was funny and were liking it. (Some likes are better than others.) A success! I went to bed. The next morning, I woke to discover it had received hundreds of thousands of likes and thousands of retweets.” (09/02/25)
Source: Caitlin Johnstone, Rogue Journalist
by Caitlin Johnstone
“The International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) has determined that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. This is the world’s largest association of genocide scholars, with around 500 experts on the subject including many Holocaust scholars. The consensus was reached by an overwhelming supermajority of the experts — 86 percent, to be exact. Everyone needs to understand that ‘there is no genocide in Gaza’ is not a claim that can be taken seriously in the year 2025. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, UN human rights experts, Israeli human rights groups like B’Tselem, and the overwhelming majority of genocide scholars all agree it’s a genocide. The debate is over. The hasbarists lost. Israel’s Foreign Ministry is of course claiming that the IAGS assessment is ‘entirely based on Hamas’s campaign of lies.’ That’s right folks, the genocide scholars are Hamas. They’re just so unbelievably evil.” (09/03/25)
Source: Chris Matthew Sciabarra
by Chris Matthew Sciabarra
“It is ironic that Charlie called Uncle Sam a ‘flag waver.’ A bolder and more patriotic American you’d be hard pressed to find. But in the aftermath of World War II, he had had enough with politicians. He recalled voting for Franklin Delano Roosevelt because he was convinced that the President would preserve the peace. ‘The President had said that American boys would not fight on foreign soil. He forgot to add: ‘They’d be buried in it.’’ For thirty years thereafter, Sam refused to vote in any election. Over time, he learned to question everything.” (09/02/25)
“The South Side of Chicago is a war zone. In 2023, the city recorded 617 homicides and more than 2,000 shootings, with neighborhoods like Englewood and Woodlawn hit the hardest. Just a few weeks ago, I stood over the body of a man who had been shot dead. Hundreds of young souls will be killed by year’s end. So I was not surprised when President Donald Trump said, ‘Chicago’s a mess. You have an incompetent mayor, grossly incompetent. And we’ll straighten that one out probably next.’ After all, the government’s first responsibility is to protect its citizens.” [editor’s note: The government’s “first responsibility” has always been to transfer wealth from the productive class to the political class. Anything else is decorative in nature – TLK] (09/02/25)
