Ghigo Berni 🍉

Beyond Orwellian, we submit to A Brave New World. Retweets don’t necessarily reflect my views on that day. Besides, opinions evolve.

[Ghigo Berni 🍉 @ghigoberni]

Propaganda ensures that the majority of people with eyes and scruples, living in relative comfort, conscious that it’s often at the violent expense of others, are castrated by a doctrine of non violent protest.

And yet violence, in all its pernicious forms, exists everywhere.

[Jackson Hinkle 🇺🇸 @jacksonhinkle]

You really expect them to tell the truth about Iran or Venezuela or anywhere else?

[Greg Stoker @gregjstoker]

It’s becoming increasingly difficult to address this level of institutional delusion

[Danny Haiphong @GeopoliticsDH]

If you're ever feeling depressed or sad about the state of the world remember that people who've been targets of genocide, war and a brutal starvation blockade are defeating the US empire's vassal in rapid, historic fashion.

That's the Yemeni people.

[John Wight @JohnWight1]

'Define a woman?'

A woman is the mother who nurtured me as a child even in the midst of the chaos of her own life. A woman is the working class mothers I grew up with who would take turns to take me and my pals to school when I was a toddler.

A woman is the mother I called out for when I was on my knees covered in blood in the middle of nowhere in northern Mexico after a car accident that almost cost me my life, back in 1992.

That's a woman.

A woman is touch, a woman is feeling, a woman is sensibility. What she is not is male aggression, toxicity, and misogyny.

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

You can say what you want about Iran but they're definitely pretty unique in their communication: never seen a country threaten another with a math equation before 😅

For those who didn't get it: there is a famous monetary policy formula used by the Fed called the "Taylor rule" that says a central bank's policy rate (i) should equal the neutral real rate (r*) plus target inflation (π*), plus 1.5 times the inflation gap and 0.5 times the output gap (the "i = r* + π* + 1.5(π−π*) + 0.5(y−y*)" part of Ghalibaf's formula).

Ghalibaf adds α(SOH−SOH*) and β(BEM−BEM*): SOH referring to the Strait Of Hormuz and BEM to Bab El-Mandeb. Both have positive coefficient, meaning the more those chokepoints are choked, the higher the rate the Fed would have to set to fight the resulting inflation.

In a nutshell this is Ghalibaf trolling the Fed, telling them that Iran is - in a very real way - setting American monetary policy.

[Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt @FranceskAlbs]

“It is not Auschwitz, but it is genocide” (A Goldberg)

10,000 missing beneath the rubble.

Imagine the cries of babies, the calls of parents searching for them, fading into silence. No machinery to recover them.

A monstrosity we've been watching, rationalising, for 1,075 days

[Ghigo Berni 🍉 @ghigoberni]

A progressive liberal alternative who blindly or knowingly fails to address a paradigm that perpetuates the violence of neo colonial capitalism is possibly complicit and should be considered a Trojan horse. Blair is the archetypical precedent. Polanski may be the next

[John Wight @JohnWight1]

I have much respect and admiration for Chris Williamson. He weathered an establishment storm during the Corbyn years and didn't falter or break. He's also in it for the right reasons, which likewise marks him out.

But this is a mistake.

The Green Party is an organisation of middle class ideologues and also includes a fair smattering of outright cranks on key issues, such as trans.

Moreover, Ukraine and NATO are NOT marginal issues, they are front and centre when it comes to the rendering of class in this country.

The millions sent into Zelensky's coffers is money denied working class communities in the midst of multiple crises afflicting them in housing, homelessness, drugs and crime. We also have an antiquated public transport system in desperate need of investment, not to mention the need for move investment in our NHS.

Further still, we have members of the British establishment talking up the idea of conscription and direct military conflict with Russia.

These are huge issues.

Any support for Ukraine in this conflict is support for the inevitability of sending our own young men to be kill and be killed in this NATO proxy war.

The Greens are soft wax. On matters of war and peace they lack urgency and also constancy. They are also weak on Palestine at a time when weakness on this issue is unforgivable.

[John Wight @JohnWight1]

I have much respect and admiration for Chris Williamson. He weathered an establishment storm during the Corbyn years and didn't falter or break. He's also in it for the right reasons, which likewise marks him out.

But this is a mistake.

The Green Party is an organisation of middle class ideologues and also includes a fair smattering of outright cranks on key issues, such as trans.

Moreover, Ukraine and NATO are NOT marginal issues, they are front and centre when it comes to the rendering of class in this country.

The millions sent into Zelensky's coffers is money denied working class communities in the midst of multiple crises afflicting them in housing, homelessness, drugs and crime. We also have an antiquated public transport system in desperate need of investment, not to mention the need for move investment in our NHS.

Further still, we have members of the British establishment talking up the idea of conscription and direct military conflict with Russia.

These are huge issues.

Any support for Ukraine in this conflict is support for the inevitability of sending our own young men to be kill and be killed in this NATO proxy war.

The Greens are soft wax. On matters of war and peace they lack urgency and also constancy. They are also weak on Palestine at a time when weakness on this issue is unforgivable.

[George Galloway @georgegalloway]

The cartoon they try to ban always goes to the top of my charts… #BoycottAdidas

[Echoes in the Tape Deck @Analog_Hearts75]

This Mortal Coil/Elisabeth Frazer - "Song To The Siren". (1983). Back in 1983, Elizabeth Fraser teamed up with the collective This Mortal Coil, delivering what’s since been widely considered the absolute pinnacle of the ethereal wave sound. It’s not quite New Wave...(1/4)👇

[🇬🇧King 🇬🇧 @King0243_PJC]

Act shocked, everyone.

The US government just used 'diplomatic protection' to rescue an embassy staffer accused of child abuse images from a British police interview.

With this level of dedication to protecting predators, it’s a complete mystery why nobody from the Epstein scandal is behind bars. Consistent as always.

[Glenn Diesen @Glenn_Diesen]

Saudi Arabia had to shut down the East-West Pipeline for export oil through the Red Sea. The Houthis also acquired new territory to tighten the blockade of the Bab al-Mandab Strait. Saudi Arabia’s attack on Yemen was a great mistake, which also transforms the Iran War.

[John Wight @JohnWight1]

Chilean President Salvador Allende's final words during the original 9/11 of 1973.

With the material support of the Nixon administration in Washington, Chile's fascist General Augusto Pinochet led the military coup that would over turn Chilean democracy in the name of US big business and its exploitative interests in Chile and across Latin America.

Castro had urged Allende to arm the people, but Allende failed to do so and the result was his tragic demise.

Socialism anywhere is a threat to capitalism everywhere, while capitalism is a threat to humanity everywhere.

[Ghigo Berni 🍉 @ghigoberni]

@JohnWight1 We can rightly focus on his legacy but we risk missing the wider transnational phenomenon which fuels elite hegemonic interests as we hurtle toward global feudalism and the violence, in all its forms, which it brings.

[Ghigo Berni 🍉 @ghigoberni]

@JohnWight1 This Fabian fuck is an executive ideologue and his Teflon coating comes as standard. John Pilger warned about the coming war on China over a decade ago, well after Gen Wesley Clarke declared that Iran was the final necessary chess piece in the grand global hegemonic design 1/…

[Afshin Rattansi @afshinrattansi]

The legacy of Chile’s🇨🇱 9/11:

On this day in 1973, General Augusto Pinochet, backed by the CIA, launched a coup against Chile’s democratically-elected socialist President Salvador Allende after a protracted US campaign to sabotage and impoverish the Chilean people. 

Pinochet’s neoliberal economic policies designed by the ‘Chicago Boys’ economists would prove to be utterly disastrous, benefitting only the elite classes and those tied to Western corporations.

Before Pinochet’s fascist dictatorship, Chile had a poverty rate between 17-20% in 1970. During the 1980s under Pinochet’s ‘shock therapy’, poverty doubled to 45-50% of the population. The extreme poverty rate tripled. 

Between 1975-82, unemployment soared record levels as high as 30%, wages collapsed by 40% plunging millions into poverty, and entire sectors were wiped out by import competition. The early years of Pinochet’s neoliberalism produced a deeper depression than the 1929 financial crash for Chile. 

The hypocrisy and failure of neoliberalism was most evident in 1982, when Pinochet’s privatisation and free market extremism crashed the economy so badly that the country lost 15% of its GDP in a single year. The major banks subsequently collapsed, and the government was forced to nationalise the debt. 

The scale of the disaster of Pinochet’s neoliberal fascist dictatorship still haunts Chile to this day. The disastrous privatisation of education by Pinochet has created a class-based education system that persists to this day, where rich families have access to the highest quality of education available in the country, while poor families have no other option but to send their children to underfunded municipal schools. 

The same class-based horror is seen in Chile’s healthcare, where the rich have access to high quality healthcare in the best hospitals, while Chile’s poor have nowhere to go apart from the overcrowded public hospitals. 

The privatised pension system generates large profits for the private administrators, while the elderly receive extremely low pensions and live in poverty. 

Chile is also the only country on Earth with fully-privatised water, even a basic necessity such as this was not spared from the horror of privatisation. Now, Chile’s water companies are majority-owned by French companies, and Group Luksic, Chile’s wealthiest business family owns significant equity.

Even Chile’s lakes, rivers, groundwater, and aquifers were divided into tradeable private property rights in 1981, separate from land ownership. 

Now the UK��s Anglo-American, and Australia’s BHP control significant water rights in the country. 

This fascist operation to loot Chile was imposed through extreme violence. Pinochet’s fascist dictatorship would see the deaths, imprisonment, or disappearance of over 40,000 people.

The CIA-backed coup in Chile was part of establishing Operation Condor, a plan to impose de-facto continent-wide fascism in Latin America to crush socialist, communist and workers’ movements. Operation Condor is estimated to be responsible for 60,000-80,000 deaths in Latin America.

The disaster that Chile has gone through and still suffers the effects of was designed in length and breadth by the United States.

Pinochet’s barbaric, disastrous rule, and his equally barbaric, disastrous legacy of economic failure and extreme fascist violence serves as a historical and contemporary reminder of the consequences of a developing nation falling under Washington’s iron fist.

[Chay Bowes @BowesChay]

Putin: "More than 30,000 sanctions have been slapped on Russia, which is twice as much as the number of all sanctions against all the other countries of the world combined."

No other nation in history has faced this level of economic pressure.

And yet Russia's economy is still standing.

[George Galloway @georgegalloway]

Tweet of the Morning

[🇷🇺 STANISLAV KRAPIVNIK 🇷🇺 @STANISKRAPIVNIK]

Ukraine in one photo.

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

The Israeli press have published three significant revelations about the Gaza holocaust, reporting (1) that Benjamin Netanyahu concealed advanced knowledge of the Hamas attack on October 7, (2) that Israel rejected a Hamas offer to release all civilian hostages immediately after October 7, and (3) that according to an IDF drone operator, the Israeli military was intentionally firing on civilians throughout Gaza during its operations in the Palestinian territory.

The first two come from a Haaretz article titled “Revealed: Netanyahu Received an Explicit Warning Days Before Oct. 7. He Didn’t Brief Israel’s Security Chiefs”, which was released ahead of an upcoming Haaretz book about the hostage standoff in Gaza.

Haaretz describes a call between Netanyahu and UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed, citing three foreign senior sources:

“A week and a half before October 7, 2023 the Emirati ruler called Netanyahu from the Presidential Palace in Abu Dhabi and spoke with him for 45 minutes. In that conversation, bin Zayed warned that Hamas’ leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, was planning a major operation against Israel. Bin Zayed expressed concern that the event in question would not only lead to bloodshed but also destabilize the entire region and undermine the Abraham Accords.”

Haaretz reports that rather than pass these warnings on to Israeli national security officials, Netanyahu chose to sit on information which an unnamed Shin Bet official said could have “changed our entire assessment picture.”

Haaretz also notes that Israel had received similar warnings about a coming Hamas attack from Egyptian intelligence, which had been reported earlier. These are just two items in the mountains upon mountains upon mountains of evidence indicating that powerful people in Israel knowingly allowed Hamas to inflict as much damage as possible on October 7 2023 in order to advance the murderous ethnic cleansing objectives we’ve seen rolled out in the years since.

Nothing will turn you into a conspiracy theorist faster than learning basic facts about what happened on October 7. But even without knowing those facts it already strains credulity to believe Israel had no advance knowledge of a complex attack which would require extensive open-air training in one of the most heavily surveilled strips of land on our planet. Especially when you look at all the pre-existing military agendas Israel was able to push forward in the aftermath.

Later in that same article, Haaretz quotes a Palestinian politician named Samir Mashharawi describing what Hamas leadership told him during his mediation efforts between Israel and Hamas after October 7:

“He told me that in the first stage, they had no problem releasing all civilians without anything in return,” Mashharawi recounts. “I swear, those were his exact words: all civilians, without anything in return. They had only one condition: They wanted us to bring in an agreed-upon mediator as quickly as possible, so that negotiations could immediately begin over everything else.”

Mashharawi said Israel rejected the offer. A senior Israeli defense official corroborated this, telling Haaretz:

“The release of the hostages did not even enter the list of war objectives formulated by the government on the night of October 7. Could the proposal have been properly discussed and a decision reached? In substantive terms, the answer is yes. But the prevailing mood was like after Pearl Harbor: We had just suffered a brutal blow, we were in the midst of war, who had the bandwidth to talk about stopping the fighting and starting negotiations now, even if it was to save the lives of dozens of people, whose final number was still unknown?”

So all that hasbara about the hostages and the Bibas kids and how Hamas needed to be destroyed because they were refusing to release innocent civilian captives was complete bunk from the very beginning. Hamas offered to release them with no conditions but the opening of communication lines. Israel refused, because what they wanted was to steal more Palestinian land. It was never about the hostages, and anyone who said it was is a liar.

Lastly, a separate report in Hebrew from Haaretz quotes an Israeli air force reserve major describing how IDF policies and culture ensured the deaths of large numbers of civilians. Here are a few quotes, translated by Israeli-American political analyst Shaiel Ben-Ephraim:

1) He was involved in the March 23, 2025 paramedic killings in Tel al-Sultan, Rafah and said, “You could clearly tell these were rescue vehicles even as fire was opened on them from the ground. For no apparent reason, the force on the ground charged the convoy. They shot the first vehicle, the medical personnel got out, hid behind the ambulances and begged for their lives, and the soldiers shot them one after another.”

2) On how the yellow line was used as an excuse to kill innocent people: “The Palestinians didn’t know it existed, and the Air Force wasn’t always updated either. From the perspective of a farmer walking onto his own land — he has no idea he’s stepping into an area the IDF suddenly decided is a fire zone. And then all kinds of retroactive justifications started coming up. ‘He came for an arms deal.’ ‘He touched the ground, maybe he’s planting an explosive.’ To me it looked like they were trying to incriminate people with no intelligence and no proof.”

3) On how all morals were lost in Gaza: “”The feeling was that something tore, everyone had already become cynical about death, you can’t understand it from the outside. It’s not just fatigue, it’s an erosion of morality, of responsibility, of the sense that someone is still managing the event. Very quickly this whole business of ‘collateral damage’ disappeared from the considerations. They fire on anyone they see. The atmosphere started to be like the stands at a soccer match. The way you shout at a player, ‘Yalla, score,’ that’s how they shout at a soldier, ‘Kill him, strike him.’”

Like the other revelations, this report further discredits the lies the public was sold about Israel’s reasons for its atrocities in Gaza. All those lies about how Israel is taking extraordinary measures to protect civilian life in Gaza and only kills civilians because Hamas “hides behind human shields” has been thoroughly discredited by copious amounts of evidence that Israel was going out of its way to kill noncombatants throughout the course of the onslaught.

The world was lied to about the Gaza holocaust, just like it was lied to about every other act of mass military slaughter that the US involves itself in. Please carry these lessons into the future.