YouTube has the video ‘John Bolton tried to assassinate me’: Interview with Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal sits down with Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in Caracas. We discuss the plots to kill him, US sanctions on food distribution, corruption allegations, and the corporate media’s industrial grade demonization campaign against him and his elected government.

We cannot let the oligarchs’ news media keep silent about Venezuela while the USA government formulates more attacks on Venezuela. After they are done covering the mass murders in the USA, the media will refocus on some country we are attacking. I fear for when it is Venezuela’s turn again to be in the spotlight for being the brunt of our latest war effort.

Naked Capitalism has the article Neoliberalism: Political Success, Economic Failure.

It is much harder to articulate the case for a mixed economy than the case for free markets, precisely because the mixed economy is mixed. The rebuttal takes several paragraphs. The more complex story holds that markets are substantially efficient in some realms but far from efficient in others, because of positive and negative externalities, the tendency of financial markets to create cycles of boom and bust, the intersection of self-interest and corruption, the asymmetry of information between company and consumer, the asymmetry of power between corporation and employee, the power of the powerful to rig the rules, and the fact that there are realms of human life (the right to vote, human liberty, security of one’s person) that should not be marketized.
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The political reversal of neoliberalism can only come through practical politics and policies that demonstrate how government often can serve citizens more equitably and efficiently than markets. Revision of theory will take care of itself. There is no shortage of dissenting theorists and empirical policy researchers whose scholarly work has been vindicated by events. What they need is not more theory but more influence, both in the academy and in the corridors of power. They are available to advise a new progressive administration, ifthat administration can get elected and if it refrains from hiring neoliberal advisers.

This is a more detailed defense of mixed economies than the brief defense I have been stating. I have just said that profit-driven, free market systems are not good at delivering some of what society needs. This article goes into a lot of the details that explain why my observation is true and relevant.

YouTube has the video CNN Caught Blocking Bernie Supporters From Camera w/Jordan Chariton.

If you are still focused on the Russians trying to interfere in our elections, boy do you have your sights set on the wrong target.

statuscoup.com has the original article EXCLUSIVE: Bernie Sanders Supporters Allege Bernie Black Out by CNN at Detroit Debate

The Grayzone has the article How Joe Biden’s privatization plans helped doom Latin America and fuel the migration crisis. You may know that Joe Biden has been a long term evil influence in the world, but until you read this article, you don’t know the half of it. This could be the most important article you may ever read.

“Biden is taking credit for doing something constructive to stop the migration crisis and blaming the concentration camps [on the US-Mexico border] on Trump. But it’s Biden’s policies that are driving more people out of Central America and making human rights defenders lives more precarious by defending entities that have no interest in human rights,” explained Adrienne Pine, a professor of anthropology at American University and leading researcher of the social crisis in Honduras, in an interview with The Grayzone.

The Real News Network has the video House Anti-BDS Resolution Reveals the Power and Limits of the Israeli Lobby.

The defense of Palestinian rights has become more acceptable and accusations of anti-Semitism have become more sparing in the mainstream media, despite the House’s recent resolution against the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, says IPS’s Phyllis Bennis

Bennis enumerates some of the lies in the House Resolution. The presence of these lies is why I believe Tulsi Gabbard should not have voted for this resolution no matter what her opinion of BDS or Palestinian rights. If the House is going to vote for a resolution, the least we should require is that it presents the issues honestly.

It occurs to me that the BDS movement could say “In light of the fact that Israeli actions have made the two state solution impossible, the only way we can accept a one state solution is for the Palestinians to have the right of return to their lands that were illegally confiscated.”

Israel would then be faced with the choices of reversing what it has done to make the two state solution impossible, or accepting true democracy for all people in Israel, and risk being voted out of existence as an exclusively Jewish state.

Counter Punch has the Michael Hudson article The Coming Savings Writedowns.

Debts that can’t be paid, won’t be. That point inevitably arrives on the liabilities side of the economy’s balance sheet.

But what of the asset side? One person’s debt is a creditor’s claim for payment. This is defined as “savings,” even though banks simply create credit endogenously on their own computers without needing any prior savings. When debts can’t be paid and debtors default, what happens to these creditors?

I am a follower of Michael Hudson. I have read part of his book “… and forgive them their debts“. This might be from the part I haven’t read yet. I understood the write-down of debts, but somehow the write-down of savings as a necessity had escaped me.

The windows in my house are just not suitable for a window air conditioner. Several years ago, I bought a roll-around air conditioner shown in the picture below.

If you have one of these, you know that it vents the hot air out through a duct that goes from the back of the unit to a nearby window. One problem with this arrangement is that the duct gets fairly hot. I have always felt that the air conditioner can barely keep up with the heat it is generating itself and putting into the room because of the hot duct.

After about 5 years of ownership of this unit, I finally had a bright idea. Today is the first day it has been hot enough outside to see if my idea works. It does.

This gives away the surprise of the air conditioning solution

The duct measured 5 ½ inches in diameter. I bought duct insulation for a 6 inch duct. Now the duct is room temperature, and the air conditioner does not have to fight itself. The insulation cost me all of about $8. The insulation is too bulky for the air conditioner manufacturer to have packaged this cheap solution with the unit. They could at least have mentioned it in the user manual. It has made me go from a rather unhappy owner of such a unit, to a completely satisfied one. I may just buy another unit like this one for upstairs now that I know how to make it work.

C-SPAN has the video Peace Be upon You.

Zachary Karabell talked about his book Peace Be upon You: The Story of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish Coexistence, published by Knopf. Mr. Karabell traces the historical instances of peaceful coexistence between Muslim, Christian, and Jewish people. The author contended that throughout the past fourteen centuries the different faiths have found common ground; from peaceful debate amongst scholars in the courts of the caliphs in Baghdad to medieval Spain where Jewish sages, Muslim philosophers, and Christian monks translated the meaning of God together. The author argued that the current state of religious tensions are solvable if one studies the past. Mr. Karabell responded to questions from the audience.

I just posted about this video in the previous post Why Some ‘Fauxgressives’ Are Against the Palestinian BDS Movement, but this book and this C-SPAN video are so important that I felt this deserved a separate post. It will be easier for me to find this in the future if I have a post with the full title of the book.

YouTube has the video Why Some ‘Fauxgressives’ Are Against the Palestinian BDS Movement with Kim Iverson.

Watch the video before you read my comments. Form your own opinion.

She discusses various arguments that one might use to counter the point of view she is presenting in this video. When she makes the comparison to South Africa, I think I finally see what is driving her opinion.

Kim’s argument boils down to Palestinians are Muslims. Because of that, they don’t have democratic rights that Jews and Christians have. She doesn’t really have a grasp of history before 1948 either. A lot of her assumptions about Muslims are just wrong.

Some of my opinions have been enlightened by reading the book “Peace Be upon You: The Story of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish Coexistence” The link takes you to a C-Span video with the author of the book. I had not watched the video yet when I wrote this sentence, but I had read the book.

Zachary Karabell talked about his book Peace Be upon You: The Story of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish Coexistence, published by Knopf. Mr. Karabell traces the historical instances of peaceful coexistence between Muslim, Christian, and Jewish people. The author contended that throughout the past fourteen centuries the different faiths have found common ground; from peaceful debate amongst scholars in the courts of the caliphs in Baghdad to medieval Spain where Jewish sages, Muslim philosophers, and Christian monks translated the meaning of God together. The author argued that the current state of religious tensions are solvable if one studies the past. Mr. Karabell responded to questions from the audience.

I just finished watching the video related to the book. It would be wonderful if people like Kim Iverson could contemplate what was discussed. The author, Zachary Karabell, is not talking about utopia. He is just talking about what can happen in propitious moments in history, and perhaps how we can lessen the deviations from those propitious moments. He is not talking about changing the under lying basis of human nature. He is talking about promoting the the basis of human nature where people just want to go about their daily lives in relative peace and calm.

When people do not feel threatened, they find it easier to peacefully co-exist. This is exactly why Donald Trump’s use of threats, coercion, and sanctions is just so antithetical to achieving a modicum of peace in the world.

The ultimate question for people who want to opine on the BDS movement, the idea of BDS as a tactic, or Congressional resolutions on the topic, ask your self if what you have to say will enhance the possibilities of peaceful co-existence or not.

Mint Press News has a several part piece by Whitney Webb on some sordid history that I did not know about. The first part, which I have only partially read so far is Hidden in Plain Sight: The Shocking Origins of the Jeffrey Epstein Case.

Epstein is only the latest incarnation of a much older, more extensive and sophisticated operation that offers a frightening window into how deeply tied the U.S. government is to the modern-day equivalents of organized crime.

The second part, which is where I started, is Government by Blackmail: Jeffrey Epstein, Trump’s Mentor and the Dark Secrets of the Reagan Era.

Appalling for both the villainous abuse of children itself and the chilling implications of government by blackmail, this tangled web of unsavory alliances casts a lurid light on the political history of the U.S. from the Prohibition Era right up through the Age of Trump.

My initial reaction on reading this second part was “If 1% of this is true, one might wonder why bother anymore?”

I have mixed reaction to the prominent place that the Bronfman family plays in this story. Once, when I was growing up I remember my father mentioning some family. He claimed that our family name might originally have been something garbled which I remember as the sound “brnfmn” I never made much out of that until somehow it came up in conversation many decades later with a cousin of mine. He mentioned that what I was remembering was actually Bronfman. My grandmother had reportedly been the source of the story that there might be a family connection. My father and grandmother had long since passed away before I had this conversation, so I couldn’t check the original sources.

All I knew about the Bronfman’s was their tie to the brand name Seagrams. I used to laughingly talk about this connection after I learned about it. Now I am not so sure I should ever mention it again.