Here we go again – US making allegations without evidence

The war rhetoric against Russia over Ukraine keeps getting ratcheted up. We have representatives of the US government making all manner of allegations about the threatening actions by Russia, including that they are planning false flag operations and crisis actors to provoke an invasion (as if Russia taking its cues from Alex Jones) without providing any shred of evidence.

In an exchange with State Department spokesperson Ned Price, AP reporter Mike Lee presses him to provide more than assertions and reminds him about WMDs in Iraq where similar US government assertions that they had solid evidence turned out to be flat-out lies meant to serve propaganda purposes and lay the groundwork for the invasion of that country.

Watch this exchange as Lee presses Price to provide any evidence at all only to be told by Price that him merely asserting something should be all the evidence that is necessary. Lee reminds him about the Iraq lies.

More reporters should follow Lee’s lead and demand that the public be given more than their “Trust us. We know but can’t tell you” rubbish.

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Great moments in yacht design

I am puzzled by this news report that says that Dutch authorities in the city of Rotterdam are considering temporarily dismantling a bridge in order to allow the yacht commissioned by Jeff Bezos to reach open water.

A plan to temporarily dismantle a recently restored historic bridge in the heart of Dutch port city Rotterdam so that a huge yacht, reportedly being built for Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, can get to the North Sea is unlikely to be plain sailing.

Reports this week that the city had already agreed to take apart the Koningshaven Bridge, known locally as De Hef, sparked anger with one Facebook event set up calling for people to pelt the multimillion dollar yacht with rotten eggs.

However, a spokeswoman for Mayor Ahmed Aboutaleb told The Associated Press on Friday that while a request has been submitted by a shipbuilder for the bridge to temporarily be taken apart over the summer, no permit has yet been sought or granted.
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The current Hef railway bridge was opened for trains to cross the Maas River in 1927 and taken out of service in 1993 when it was replaced by a tunnel. Public protests spared it from demolition and it eventually underwent a three-year renovation that ended in 2017. The middle section of the bridge can be raised to allow ships to pass underneath, but apparently not high enough for the new yacht’s masts.

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Amnesty International issues damning report on Israel’s apartheid practices

Amnesty International is the latest mainstream organization that has finally come to the conclusion that what Israel practices with regard to the Palestinians is apartheid, joining other human rights groups like Human Rights Watch and B’Tselem that said similar things a year ago. The 280-page report outlines in great detail the reasons for saying so, pointing to what it calls decades of oppression. It says that Israel achieves this through four main methods.

Fragmentation into domains of control

At the heart of the system is keeping Palestinian separated from each other into distinct territorial, legal and administrative domains

Dispossession of land and property

Decades of discriminatory land and property seizures, home demolitions and forced evictions

Segregation and control

A system of laws and policies that keep Palestinians restricted to enclaves, subject to several measures that control their lives, and segregated from Jewish Israelis

Deprivation of economic & social rights

The deliberate impoverishment of Palestinians keeping them at great disadvantage in comparison to Jewish Israelis
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Time for another war?

The mainstream US media loves war. It provides them the opportunity, especially in the early stages when things usually are going well militarily, to openly engage in forms of jingoism that it would not be able to do at other times. It is only when things go sour, as they usually do, that they start to tone down that rhetoric. You would think that given that the US has just painfully pulled out of its disastrous war in Afghanistan, the media would be more circumspect about beating the drums for a new war. But it is startling to me how quickly the US media seems to have decided that the US has reached a point of confrontation with Russia over Ukraine.
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The NFT bubble keeps growing

I wrote a little while ago about the new thing called NFTs and my bafflement that anyone would buy one. But we are seeing them being hyped by celebrities and to my mind, it has all the hallmarks of a bubble, where something of little or no intrinsic value is talked up by famous people as a great new investment. Luke Savage points to a segment in which Paris Hilton and talk show host Jimmy Fallon give what seems like an informercial for NFTs, both having bought two slightly different versions of the same NFT featuring (I kid you not) a cartoon ape wearing dark glasses and a yachting cap.

Celebrities and social media influencers can’t shut up about them. From Serena Williams and Logan Paul to Matt Damon and William Shatner, the NFT craze quickly transcended generations and swept up an eclectic cavalcade of the rich and famous in its wake. (Jimmy Fallon, incidentally, spent more than $200,000 on the Bored Ape NFT that now graces his Twitter profile.) Beeple, name-dropped by Paris Hilton in her Fallon segment, fetched more than $3.5 million in an NFT auction.

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Why so many Sri Lankans have foreign names

My father’s first name was Leo (short for Leonard). His three brothers were Reggie (Reginald), Benny (Benedict), and Archie (Archibald) which made them sound like they could be Bertie Wooster’s pals in the Drones Club. How did they come to have such typically English first names? It was because their father (my grandfather) was working as a civilian administrator for the British army in Burma (now Myanmar) at the time they were born. My grandfather was a great admirer of the British and as befitted such an Anglophile, giving all his children English first names (his only daughter was named Eta after an English nun, I believe) would have come naturally to him. He went further and Anglicized his last name from Nallasegarasingam (polysyllabic names are not uncommon in Sri Lanka) to just Singham, relegating the Nallasegara part to a middle initial. While he gave his children that middle name and initial, the subsequent generation (mine) dropped it altogether.
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Someone seems to be gunning for Boris Johnson

I have been observing the goings on over in the UK where prime minister Boris Johnson is under fire for having parties during the lockdown, thus breaking the covid-19 restrictions that his government had put in place that severely restricted the number of people who could attend indoor gatherings. These revelations have generated fury and reinforced the strong sense that elites feel that rules are for other people, not for them. This has led to a senior civil servant named Susan Gray being given the task of evaluating the charges and her report was initially expected to come out this week. If it turns out to be damning, Johnson’s job could be on the line.

The latest revelation concerns a surprise party thrown for his 56th birthday.
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The Havana Syndrome mystery continues

I remain intrigued by the so-called ‘Havana Syndrome’, the strange affliction reported by some (mostly) US government and embassy officials when they are in other countries. Starting in 2016, these people reported hearing ringing or chirping sounds and headaches and the like. Since the first reports came from US embassy personnel in Havana, people jumped to the conclusion that the Cubans or Russians were trying out some new kind of weapon using targeted microwaves or ultrasound. But that theory always seemed implausible, both for technical and geopolitical reasons.

The US government has devoted considerable effort to try and identify the cause with little success. Now the CIA has issued yet another report that suggests that the ‘foreign power’ theory is not tenable.
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Trump’s legal problems mount

For a long time, it has been clear that Donald Trump and his family and associates were going to try and block any and all investigations into their affairs by refusing to cooperate with investigators, forcing them to go to court to get information, and then fighting those legal proceedings every step of the way. Given the way that the US legal system is structured, if you have the money, you can have your lawyers throw roadblock after roadblock to frustrate investigators who may be tempted to give up as the time and money involved mount up.

It is only the government (or an equally deep-pocketed opponent) that can go toe-to-toe against this strategy and two of them (the Attorney General’s office of the state of New York and the Congressional committee investigating the events of January 6, 2021) have been dogged.

Yesterday, the latter scored a major victory when the US Supreme Court by an 8-1 voted denied an emergency request by Trump’s team to block a ruling by the lower Appeals Court that the National Archives must hand over documents to the committee. [Read more…]