Should You Be Worried About the New COVID Strains?

By: Gleb Tsipursky

12/30/2020

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/12/30/should-you-be-worried-about-new-covid-strains

Should you be worried about the new COVID strains originating in the UK, South Africa, and elsewhere, and recently identified in the US?

The authorities claim there's no cause for alarm. They’re focusing on concerns about vaccine effectiveness, saying the vaccine will be highly successfully against the new strain.

They’re mostly right. While some legitimate concerns have been raised about the vaccines potentially being 10-20% less effective against the new strains, this small difference shouldn’t make you too worried.

However, another aspect of these new strains should make you very worried indeed: they’re much more infectious. Unfortunately, the implications of their infectiousness has received little news coverage, which is cause for serious alarm.

Such complacency reflects our sleepwalking in the pandemic’s early stages, despite many warnings from myself and other risk management experts, leading us to fail to prepare successfully for this situation. We’re about to make the same mistake with seriously tragic consequences.

'Unhinged, Lame-Duck President Wants to Start a War'

 

Thursday, December 24, 2020

By: Jake Johnson

Anti-war campaigners are warning that U.S. President Donald Trump is on the verge of launching a full-blown military conflict with Iran after the lame-duck incumbent on Wednesday blamed the Middle East nation for a rocket attack on the American Embassy in Baghdad over the weekend, an accusation Tehran rejected as "fabricated."

"Our embassy in Baghdad got hit Sunday by several rockets. Three rockets failed to launch," Trump tweeted late Wednesday afternoon, attaching a photo purporting to show the three rockets. "Guess where they were from: IRAN. Now we hear chatter of additional attacks against Americans in Iraq."

"Some friendly health advice to Iran: If one American is killed, I will hold Iran responsible," the outgoing U.S. president added. "Think it over."

میگویند امام زمان می آید

میگویند امام زمان می آید

اما نمی آید

بدبخت انسانی که منتظر است

او کیست که می آید؟چرا می آید؟

Can we save Assange?

It’s Time We Called It What It Is: Fascism

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/12/14/its-time-we-called-it-what-it-fascism

December 14, 2020

by

Robert Freeman

The epic thrash we’re witnessing is because the forces of capitalism, seeing a terminal economic crash approaching, are attempting to preemptively replace democracy with authoritarianism—fascism—so that they can control the outcome.

When the economy in a democratic but capitalist country fails, there are two alternatives. You can modify the economic system. Or, you can modify the political system.

When you modify the economic system (capitalism) but retain the political system (democracy), you have the arrangement the U.S. has lived under since capitalism failed in the 1930s, in the Great Depression.

The other alternative is where the economic system (capitalism) is retained but the political system (democracy) is discarded and replaced with authoritarianism. This is fascism and is what happened in Germany, also in the 1930s.

The battle between capitalism and democracy is the conflict that is being fought out in the U.S. right now. The epic thrash we’re witnessing is because the forces of capitalism, seeing a terminal economic crash approaching, are attempting to preemptively replace democracy with authoritarianism—fascism—so that they can control the outcome. A quick look at history shows us the pattern.

Inequality Gone Viral: The Obscene Numbers

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/11/30/inequality-gone-viral-obscene-numbers

By:

Paul Buchheit

November 30, 2020

In a distressing analogy to the relentless surge of Covid-19, which has disproportionately impacted low-income communities and people of color, there has been an unstoppable transfer of wealth from desperate Americans to the people who already had most of our nation's financial assets.

While the great majority of us have been focusing on the health and well-being — and the very survival — of loved ones, the super-rich have become "pandemic profiteers," isolating themselves from Covid while riding the stock market to its highest-ever level. At the same time we are seeing a dramatic demonstration of Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine, with the "perfect conditions for governments and the global elite to implement political agendas that would otherwise be met with great opposition if we weren’t all so disoriented."

We need to ask ourselves: In a year of disease and death and destroyed families, should a massive, inexplicable increase in new American financial wealth go to billionaires or to health care workers? Should unearned gains go to the few hundred richest Americans or to the millions of American households who have lost their means of support?

We Must Do More to Stop Dangerous Doctors in a Pandemic

 Some have crossed the line from free speech to medical practice — or something akin to malpractice.

By: Richard A. Friedman

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/11/opinion/scott-atlas-doctors-misinformation.html?searchResultPosition=1

It’s bad enough when our political leaders promote quack theories about coronavirus and its treatment; but what do we do about the doctors who enable them and use their medical authority to promote pseudoscience?

Absolute Disaster

 https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/12/07/millions-tenants-headed-absolute-disaster-after-new-year-owing-average-nearly-6000

By: 

Julia Conley

December 7, 2020

"This is like a Charles Dickens novel. It's an evolving story of how people at the bottom are suffering."

Without a coronavirus relief package centered on helping working families who have lost jobs and watched their savings dwindle amid the pandemic, millions of people are "headed for absolute disaster," one observer said Monday as Moody's Analytics reported that 12 million renters are expected to owe an average of $5,850 in back rent and utilities after the new year.

Biden Wants America to Lead the World. It Shouldn’t

 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/02/opinion/biden-foreign-policy.html?searchResultPosition=1

12/2/2020

There’s a lot we still don’t know about how President-elect Joe Biden and his foreign policy team will approach the world. But this much is clear: They believe in American “leadership.”

In a 2015 speech, Antony Blinken, Mr. Biden’s choice to be secretary of state, employed some version of the word 21 times. This spring, Mr. Biden wrote an essay in Foreign Affairs titled “Why America Must Lead Again.” Last week, when he introduced his national security nominees, he said that “America is back, ready to lead the world.”

Let’s hope not. In the post-Trump age, “leadership” is a misguided, and even dangerous, vision for America’s relationship with the rest of the globe.

Lookout for Karl Marx!

 https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/11/27/lookout-for-karl-marx/

November 27, 2020

By: Chuck Churchill

Marx wrote all of his analyses and criticisms of capitalism well over one hundred and fifty years ago. Since then the capitalists have been working overtime to discount and demonize his assessments of capitalism as a system that exploits and indeed enslaves workers in order to profit from their labor. Our big business rulers have used their monopoly over state power and the mass media to inoculate the population against Marx’ ideas and strategies, which have historically been used to organize the workers and their allies throughout the world, and thus threatened the unchecked power of capital. Our corporate rulers have sought to discount Marx’s ideas as wrong or irrelevant for our times. But if this is so, then why not show this by widely presenting these ideas for discussion and debate? After all, do we not have “democracy” and “free speech” here in the “exceptional “US? Is not our system of education a “market- place for ideas?”

Five scientists in 10 years: Iran's nuclear physicists are top targets for assassins

 https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/iran-nuclear-scientists-fakhrizadeh-targets-assassination

By: Sheren Khalel
27 November 2020

To be a nuclear scientist in Iran is to be in danger. During the past decade, up to this week, at least four had been killed in vehicle bombings and shootouts, and several others have been targeted but survived. On Friday, the alleged architect of Iran's military nuclear program joined the ranks of the slain. Armed assassins gunned down Mohsen Fakhrizadeh in his car in an ambush in Absard city, outside the capital Tehran.

Survivors of Bolivia coup massacre cry out for justice - A Grayzone orig...

Biden’s transition team

Biden’s transition team is filled with war profiteers, Beltway chickenhawks, and corporate consultants

11/14/2020

KEVIN GOSZTOLA

A glance at the Biden-Harris agency review teams should provide a rude awakening to anyone who believed a Biden administration could be “pushed to the left.”

An eye-popping array of corporate consultants, war profiteers, and national security hawks have been appointed by President-elect Joe Biden to agency review teams that will set the agenda for his administration. A substantial percentage of them worked in the United States government when Barack Obama was president.

The appointments should provide a rude awakening to anyone who believed a Biden administration could be pressured to move in a progressive direction, especially on foreign policy.

If the agency teams are any indication, Biden will be firmly insulated from any pressure to depart from the neoliberal status quo, which the former vice president has pledged to restore. Instead, he is likely to be pushed in an opposite direction, towards an interventionist foreign policy dictated by elite Beltway interests and consumed by Cold War fever.

Neocons Poised to Join New Government

 Link: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/55875.htm

By Phillip Giraldi

November 15, 2020

Donald Trump was much troubled during his 2016 and 2020 campaigns by so-called conservatives who rallied behind the #NeverTrump banner, presumably in opposition to his stated intention to end or at least diminish America’s role in wars in the Middle East and Asia. Those individuals are generally described as neoconservatives but the label is itself somewhat misleading and they might more properly be described as liberal warmongers as they are closer to the Democrats than the Republicans on most social issues and are now warming up even more as the new Joe Biden Administration prepares to take office.

To be sure, some neocons stuck with the Republicans, to include the highly controversial Elliott Abrams, who initially opposed Trump but is now the point man for dealing with both Venezuela and Iran. Abrams’ conversion reportedly took place when he realized that the new president genuinely embraced unrelenting hostility towards Iran as exemplified by the ending of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and the assassination of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad. John Bolton was also a neocon in the White House fold, though he is now a frenemy having been fired by the president and written a book.

Biden's Transition Team

 One Third of Biden's Pentagon Transition Team Hails From Organizations Financed by the Weapons Industry. The president-elect is drawing from hawkish think tanks funded by arms companies.

By: Sarah Lazare   11/11/2020

Link: https://inthesetimes.com/article/joe-biden-department-of-defense-pentagon-transition-team-weapons-industry-military

In July 2019, while cam­paign­ing for the Demo­c­ra­t­ic nom­i­na­tion for pres­i­dent, Joe Biden declared in a for­eign pol­i­cy speech, ​“It’s past time to end the For­ev­er Wars, which have cost us untold blood and trea­sure.” But the pres­i­dent-elect — who as vice pres­i­dent over­saw wars in Yemen, Libya, Afghanistan and more — is already embrac­ing per­son­nel with strong ties to the mil­i­tary appa­ra­tus dri­ving this end­less combat. 

آیا گسترش گیتی بینهایت است؟

از شماره دسامبر ماهنامه "کشفDiscover "، صفحه ۱۳

در سال ۱۶۱۰، زمانیکه گالیله تلسکوپ تازه ساز خود را به سمت آسمان نشانه گرفت، به جهانی پی برد که تا آن زمان ناشناخته بود. او ستارگان بیشماری را در پهنه راه شیری دید که تا آن زمان از چشمان غیر مسلح پوشیده بودند. کیهان در آن لحظه بطرز وسیعی گسترش یافت. حدود سه قرن پس از آن، زمانی که دانشمندان تلسکوپی ساختند که نشان داد که راه شیری تنها یکی از "جزایر عالم وجود" بود، کائنات بار دیگر بطرز وسیعی گسترش یافتند. از آن زمان به بعد، با توسعه در پیشرفت های تلسکوپی، جهان قابل دید به ۹۲ بیلیون سال نوری که در بر گیرنده دو تریلیون کهکشان است، وسعت پیدا کرده است. و همچنان اختر شناسان در شگفت میباشند که پیشرفت آن قسمت از این جهان که از دید ما خارج است، چه اندازه است.

Biden: A War Cabinet?

 https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/11/02/biden-a-war-cabinet/

11/2/2020

BY MARIAMNE EVERETT

“Let’s bring decency and integrity back to the White House.” I can’t count the number of times I have heard and read this phrase uttered by U.S. expats here in Paris, France. As one of many American expats living here, of course I share in the desire for an end to a Donald Trump presidency. But at what cost? And will a Biden presidency — which promises a return to “normalcy” — really merit the sigh of relief that so many think it will? Below I summaries some of the most troubling information I have uncovered about some of the most likely foreign policy picks for key positions in a Biden cabinet.

دموکراسی چیست؟

دموکراسی چیست؟ کشورهای خاورمیانه به عنوان ممالکی با دولتهای دیکتاتوری شناخته میشوند، که اکثرا یک نفر یا یک خانواده یا یک قوم آنها را اداره میکنند. کشورهای غربی، از طرف دیگر به عنوان ممالکی با دول دموکرات به ما معرفی میشوند. ولی آیا این چنین است؟ پاسخ به این پرسش را باید با نگرشی به طرز حکومت این کشورها یافت. کشورهای عربی که یک خانواده (ملک فیصل به عنوان نمونه) آنها را اداره میکنند دقیقا چنین مشخصه ای دارند. انهایی که دولتشان از طریق آراء مردم برگزیده میشوند، تحت نظر رهبری که در بالای دولت نشسته است (مانند خامنه ای) عموما از طرف گروه خاصی حمایت میشوند، و یا رییس جمهور مادامالعمر هستند (مانند مصر)، و یا اشراف و یا طبقه مذهبی و یا مالی آنها را به آن مقام میرسانند. جالب است که دقیقا همین طرز حکومت را میتوان در کشورهای غربی نیز جست.

 

A Divided Nation Agrees on One Thing: Many People Want a Gun

 Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/27/us/guns-2020-election.html?searchResultPosition=2

Oct. 27, 2020

By Dionne Searcey and Richard A. Oppel Jr.

CHANTILLY, Va.— Like many Americans, two women a thousand miles apart are each anxious about the uncertain state of the nation. Their reasons are altogether different. But they have found common ground, and a sense of certainty, in a recent purchase: a gun.

Ann-Marie Saccurato traced her purchase to the night she was eating dinner at a sidewalk restaurant not long ago in Delray Beach, Fla., when a Black Lives Matter march passed and her mind began to wander.

Advertising vs. Democracy: An Interview with Jean Kilbourne

Oct. 23, 2020

By Hugh Iglarsh

Link:https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/10/23/advertising-vs-democracy-an-interview-with-jean-kilbourne/

There it is, on page 56 of Jean Kilbourne’s book Can’t Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We Think and Feel: the graphic that stopped me cold and made me realize just how prophetic was her work (originally published in hardcover in 1999 as Deadly Persuasion: Why Women and Girls Must Fight the Addictive Power of Advertising). It was an ad for a German marketing firm, contained within a decades-old issue of the trade journal Advertising Age. Beneath a corporate cornucopia of All-American legacy brands and products – Levi’s, Pepsi, Camel cigarettes, a Chiquita banana, a Big Mac, etc. – was the caption, “Let’s make America great again.”

With its depiction of American “greatness” as a collage of heavily advertised commodities, the ad would have seemed crass and stupid when it first appeared, but hardly remarkable. Now, of course, that cluster of words and pictures glitters with irony and implication. The caption of this homage to consumerism suggests a link between the slick hucksterism of the ad business and the fanatical nationalism of the MAGA cult. Is the connection real? If so, how does the Trump phenomenon – that cheesy mash-up of reality TV and Triumph of the Will – relate to the marketing and PR that saturate American culture and consciousness? Is Trump’s ugly but compelling political spectacle, which hogs the media foreground, an outgrowth of the inescapable, desensitizing background noise that is advertising?

The Shrinking of the American Mind

 By Roger Cohen

Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/23/opinion/Trump-biden-debates.html?searchResultPosition=1

Among the words or phrases that were never spoken in the two presidential debates were:
Syria, human rights, drones, democracy, inequality, dictatorship, Israel, Palestine, Middle East, United Nations, World Health Organization, Guantánamo, European Union, Britain, Brexit, France, Italy, Hong Kong, Africa (or any single African state), South America, terrorism, multilateral, authoritarianism, alliance.
That’s a pretty good measure of the shrinking of the American mind.
President Trump never mentioned Afghanistan, where the United States lost more than 2,400 lives and spent some $2 trillion over the past two decades. Joe Biden did, once.
One of the characteristics of a nightmare is that it is all-consuming. Everything beyond it fades into the murk. President Trump, in an extraordinary sustained broadcast of his self-obsession, has managed to corral the world into the shadow of an orange colossus.
Yes, Trump was more civil in the second debate, and Biden, ahead in the polls, did himself no harm. Still, it was an affair of stunning mediocrity and myopia.
 

Who’s the Tax Cheat: The Lady in Jail or the Man in the White House?

Oct. 10, 2020

By Nicholas Kristof

While reading that President Trump had claimed $70,000 in highly dubious tax deductions for hair styling for his television show, I kept thinking about a homeless African-American woman named Tanya McDowell who was imprisoned for misleading officials to get her young son into a better school district.

McDowell was sentenced to five years in prison in 2012, in part for drug offenses and in part for “larceny” because she had claimed her babysitter’s address so her son could attend a better school in Connecticut.

U.S. Slides Backward In Social Progress Index

 As the world makes slow if uneven progress on social and environmental performance, the United States is falling behind its peer nations, among the few countries to see its Social Progress Index (SPI) score decline during the past decade.

Prof. Richard Wolff - Is Capitalism On Life Support?

COVID-19 Cases as of September 29, 2020

Recent global statistics disclose number of Coronavirus cases and fatalities as a result of that. A quick view is presented below. Special attention is to the cases per one million and comparison of countries in this respect. 

Will Michele Flournoy Be the Angel of Death for the American Empire?

 Link: https://original.antiwar.com/mbenjamin/2020/09/22/will-michele-flournoy-be-the-angel-of-death-for-the-american-empire/

By: Medea Benjamine and Nicolas JS Davies

If the Democrats manage to push Joe Biden over the finish line in November’s election, he will find himself presiding over a decadent, declining empire. He will either continue the policies that have led the American empire to decadence and decline, or seize the moment to move our nation into a new phase: a transition to a peaceful and sustainable post-imperial future.

The foreign policy team Biden assembles will be key, including his choice for Secretary of Defense. But Biden’s rumored favorite, Michele Flournoy, is not the gal for this historic moment. Yes, she would break the glass ceiling as the first female Secretary of Defense, but, as one of the architects of our endless wars and record military budgets, she would only help to steer the American empire farther down its current path of lost wars, corrupt militarism and terminal decline.

It Can Happen Here

 By: Cass R. Sunstein

Link: https://getpocket.com/explore/item/it-can-happen-here?utm_source=pocket-newtab

Many accounts of the Nazi period depict a barely imaginable series of events, a nation gone mad. That makes it easy to take comfort in the thought that it can’t happen again.

Liberal democracy has enjoyed much better days. Vladimir Putin has entrenched authoritarian rule and is firmly in charge of a resurgent Russia. In global influence, China may have surpassed the United States, and Chinese president Xi Jinping is now empowered to remain in office indefinitely. In light of recent turns toward authoritarianism in Turkey, Poland, Hungary, and the Philippines, there is widespread talk of a “democratic recession.” In the United States, President Donald Trump may not be sufficiently committed to constitutional principles of democratic government.

The Social Fabric of the U.S. Is Fraying Severely, if Not Unravelling

Glenn Greenwald

https://theintercept.com/2020/08/28/the-social-fabric-of-the-u-s-is-fraying-severely-if-not-unravelling/

THE YEAR 2020 has been one of the most tumultuous in modern American history. To find events remotely as destabilizing and transformative, one has to go back to the 2008 financial crisis and the 9/11 and anthrax attacks of 2001, though those systemic shocks, profound as they were, were isolated (one a national security crisis, the other a financial crisis) and thus more limited in scope than the multicrisis instability now shaping U.S. politics and culture.

Wolff Responds: Capitalism on Life Support

If you liked this short response, you can also check the followings:



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3a19Jgj5fM



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGNjniz5zzU

چه باید کرد

پس از سالیان دراز که ایرانیان با حکومت ملاها مدارا کرده اند، نه تنها این حکومت منحوس عقب نشینی نکرده است، بلکه با توجه به نادانی عده قلیلی، بر شقاوت و ستمگری خود افزوده است. متاسفانه گروهی آنچنان به غرب وابسته شده اند که به سختی میتوانند تفاوتها را تشخیص دهند. بر کسی پوشیده نیست که حکومت آخوندی هیچگاه مطابق میل ایرانیان نبوده است و طرفداری گروههای سیاسی ان زمان از خمینی به عنوان کسی که میتوانست گروههای مخالف رژیم شاهی را موتلف کند، به دلیل حمایت از رژیم جدیدی به رهبری این آخوند به ظاهر ساده، نبود. ولی چنانکه در نهاد هر رهبر مذهبی اینرا میتوان جست، سو استفاده از شوق انقلابی توده برای استفاده شخصی، در مورد خمینی نیز مصداق داشت. کسانی که در زمان انقلاب حضور نداشتند، به عنوان نمونه نسل پس از انقلاب، جوانان آن زمان را ناآگاه، و تشخیص آنها را از حکومت شاهی گمراه میدانند. در اینکه انقلابیون خمینی را آنچنان که بایست نمیشناختند و او را به غلط شخصی مصلح به مصالح عموم انگاشته بودند، شکی نیست. البته او در همان یکسال نخست با  خشونتی که در مقابله با مخالفینش نشان داد، مانند اعدام و کشتار و جنگ و تبعیضات جنسی، فطرتش را شناسانده بود. لیکن قدرت نظامی و خشونت او آنچنان پیشرفته بود که مقابله با آن بسیار دشوار مینمود، و پس از چهار دهه، بی عدالتی و خشونت و دزدی و پستی به عنوان سیاست حکومت از ان کوچک مرد همچنان جاری است، و میراث او به نیکی نگاهبانی میشود.

چرا چین از طریق دوستی با غرب قدرتمند شد، اما ما نه

 

 Source: Virgool

بعد از جنگ تحمیلی، تقریبا همان زمانی که صنایع آمریکایی ناگهان به چین سرازیر شدند و رشد سریع و بی سابقه چین شروع شد، ایران هم تقریبا اهداف مشابهی را دنبال می کرد. دوران ریاست جمهوری آیت الله رفسنجانی بود و اولویت کشور توسعه اقتصادی بود، آن هم از طریق گسترش روابط تجاری با غرب. سی سال جلوتر، یعنی امروز، چین اولین قدرت اقتصادی جهان است و اخیرا حتی از آمریکا هم سبقت گرفته است. اما ایران درگیر مشکلات عدیده اقتصادی است که عمدتا ناشی از وابستگی اقتصادی به غرب و نتیجتا آسیب پذیری در مقابل تحریمهای اقتصادی غرب است. چه تفاوتی میان مدل توسعه چین و ایران وجود داشته که نتایجی تا این اندازه متفاوت بدست آمده است؟