YouTube has the video Empire Files: How Palestine Became Colonized.

Previewing Abby Martin’s on-the-ground investigation in Palestine, The Empire Files looks at the long history of Zionist colonization, expansion and expulsion of Palestine’s indigenous inhabitants.

Giving critical historical context the occupation today, this timeline explores the creation of the state of Israel and how it came to cover so much land since. From the early settlements, to the Nakba, to it’s conquest of the West Bank, Abby Martin reveals the brutally honest root of what is behind the so-called “Israel-Palestine conflict.”

Previously I blogged about a book review The State of Israel ‘My Promised Land,’ by Ari Shavit.

Eventually, I did get to read the book on the suggestion of a former friend who thought I was being too harsh on Israel. When I read the book by an Israeli journalist and grandson of one of the founders of Zionism, I was introduced to more horrific facts about the founding of Israel than I had been aware of. From what I remember from the book, this video by Abby Martin is accurate. She is not spouting Palestinian propaganda.

TruthDig has the article Lee Camp: I Know Which Country the U.S. Will Invade Next.

Sorry, I can’t stand the suspense.

Well, last week, Iran finally did it: It switched from the dollar to the euro. And sure enough, this week, the U.S. military-industrial complex, the corporate media and Israel all got together to claim that Iran is lying about its nuclear weapons development.

I have been following the sequence that Lee Camp describes, but I must have been asleep at the switch last week. I did not notice what Iran did last week that Lee Camp mentions in this article.

Modern Money Theory (MMT) tells us that the USA that makes its own money and borrows exclusively in its own money has policy freedoms that the oligarchs and their politicians don’t want us to know. It is clear that if the oligarchs are willing to have the USA invade other countries if they threaten the position of the USA dollar, that the oligarchs fully understand the impact of losing the policy freedom that they pretend not to know about. (See my previous post Modern Money Theory: A Primer on Macroeconomics for Sovereign Monetary Systems.)

Earth Sky has the article Is there life in the multiverse?

Now scientists in the U.K. and Australia have taken an interesting step toward probing the multiverse. Their work, which is based on computer simulations, suggests that life could potentially be common throughout the multiverse, if a multiverse exists.

Many of the comments about this article disparaged what was studied here as just speculation. They said it wasn’t scientific research because it was “merely” based on a computer simulation.

I responded to that train of thought and to some other thoughts that were in the article.

One way to understand the importance of certain variables in a system is to see how variations of those variables would change the system. A computer simulation is about the only way you can see how sensitive a large system is. Knowing that the system is not as sensitive to the amount of dark energy as scientists had assumed from their simpler previous calculations can lead to valuable insights.

I don’t know the meaning of the luck of being in a system that supports life as we know it. If the system did not support life as we know it, we wouldn’t be around to think about it. The only way that life like us could exist to think about such things would be to live in a system that can support us.

There is no telling what we might learn from speculating about such issues, so I wouldn’t disparage such speculation. Such speculation is not something I would devote much of my life to. However, it probably is a good thing that there are a few people who want to spend their time on such speculations.

If we somehow were to restrict people’s thoughts to only what we knew for sure would be productive, then there are lots of useful discoveries we never would have had.

New Eastern Outlook has the article Will EU Block China Economic Silk Road?.

Here is an excerpt that makes on narrow point of all that is covered in the whole article.

China’s Maritime Silk Road envisions directing state investment into key sectors such as acquisition of port management agreements, investment in modernized container ports and related infrastructure in select EU states.

At present the most developed example is the Greek port of Piraeus, operated under an agreement with the Chinese state company, COSCO, as port operator. Modernization and more than €1.5 billion investment from China has dramatically increased the port’s importance. In 2016 Piraeus’s container traffic grew by over 14 percent and COSCO plans to turn Piraeus into the fifth largest European port for container traffic. Before COSCO, it was not even in the EU top 15 in 2007. In 2016 COSCO bought 51% of Piraeus Port Authority for €280 million, and now owns 66%. Last year Piraeus Port, COSCO and Shanghai Port Authority, China’s largest container port, signed a joint agreement to further boost trade and efficiency at Piraeus. Greek Deputy Economy Minister Stergios Pitsiorlas said at the time, “The agreement means that huge quantities of goods will be transported to Piraeus from Shanghai.”

The narrow point that I see here is that, if the western vulture capitalists are going to punish countries like Greece, countries like Greece will find a way out by allying with a more helpful China. Reading the rest of the article, I see the possibility that as the western capitalists try to convince us that unfettered capitalism is the only solution, China will foil this by proving their economic model is better for all of us.

Looks like I was right about a previous post along these lines, China’s trillion dollar plan to dominate global trade. Our reaction is essentially “We don’t need no stinkin’ infrastructure. Besides if China’s infrastructure starts to annoy us, we can just blow it up.”

The Institute For New Economic Thinking has the article The Forgotten Vision of Market Socialism.

200 years after Marx’s birth, a look at how two economists sought to reconcile his idea of common ownership with market mechanisms

I have thought that if the Social Security Trust Fund were able to invest in stocks rather than special government bonds, this ownership could lead to some of what is described in this article. It might be instructive to put these two ideas together.

The idea about Social Security was described in a previous post Saving Capitalism For The Many, Not The Few. Also see the previous post Adapting Society To The Age Of Robots. Or just look through my previous posts that mention Franco Modigliani,

YouTube has the video China’s trillion dollar plan to dominate global trade.

I can just imagine Trump’s reaction to this.

We don’t need no stinkin’ infrastructure. Besides which, if China’s infrastructure starts to annoy us, we can just blow it up.

Seriously, if you think about the building of the railroads in the history of the USA, the railroad tycoons built huge fortunes based on the profits they made on the railroads. It is foolish to think that China has to worry about countries paying back the loans to build these facilities. There will be enough profit here to repay China many times over. We already have our infrastructure that we are milking like a cash cow. I guess we don’t need any more.

Bernie Sanders has produced the video Toys “R” Us Workers Losing Their Jobs.

30,000 Toys “R” Us workers across the country are losing their jobs. This is what happens when you have a system that allows private equity firms to destroy profitable businesses and throw workers out on the streets with no severance.

I have not found the video free standing from Facebook, so you’ll have to follow the link above to see the video.

I believe that this is the real story, not the propaganda that Amazon is driving these companies out of business. This disaster has been brought to you by people like Mitt Romney and his company Bain Capital.

Imagine what would have happened if Romney had become President and started running things like one of his businesses. Well, now we have Trump, so you don’t have to use your imagination.

For those of us who used to be supporters of Barack Obama and of Deval Patrick the USA Today article Obama friend Deval Patrick joins Bain Capital, founded by Romney is like a kick in the teeth.

Former Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick is joining Bain Capital, the private equity firm founded by Mitt Romney that was disparaged by President Obama and Democrats in the 2012 presidential election.

The Jimmy Dore show has posted this in three video segments.

1. Marxist Economic Theory Easily Explained w/Richard Wolff

They don’t go into a lot of depth here, but I still think it is quite thought provoking,

I have heard Richard Wolff talk about Worker Co-Ops before, but somehow this video answers some of the questions I have had about scalability of the idea. I actually think I have heard him talk about the Spanish co-op Corporation before. I don’t know why that example didn’t stick with like I am thinking it might now,

Every now and then, I listen to some video from Richard Wolff. This is a good one. This is the part I listened to first.

IWB (Investment Watch Blog) has the article Proof that DNC manufactured the Russian controversy in June 2016.

Democrats manufactured the Russian interference story as a disinformation campaign all the way back in June 2016.

And this post will prove this beyond reasonable doubt with evidence. Not just that, but there is great circumstantial evidence of illegal activity going all the way up to the Obama administration, and provides new motive for why Seth Rich was murdered.

The evidence is presented in this post.

I can’t attest to the truth of this article. I haven’t followed the claims to inspect the documents as the article describes them. However, it the article adds some interesting speculations that are just as believable as various other sides have speculated.

In every such article there seems to be a point where the author goes overboard in inflating the certainty of the evidence. Here is the quote from this article that I find crosses the line.

The pertinent point is that: the metadata forensic proof is irrefutable that Warren Flood, or someone who owned a copy of Word registered to Warren Flood, shoehorned in obvious “Russian” fingerprints all over the documents. Guccifer 2.0 is none other than a botched DNC creation to create a false flag for Russia.

It might have been that the person doctoring the document knew who Warren Flood was, and wanted the evidence to show his hand in the conspiracy. I would hardly call that irrefutable, as I just refuted it.

You might want to refer to my previous post The Disinformation Playbook to ponder over what techniques mentioned there might have been put into play in the subject of the current blog post.