🇵🇸Vance B #FreePalestine

Doing my best to live life to the pessimistic fullest-which is a little less than half full or a little more than half empty depending on my mood & the vintage.

[Murray Rothbard @MurraySuggests]

The Iranian navy, which has been destroyed eight times, has apparently closed the Strait of Hormuz again, because the United States, for the seventh time, won the war that wasn’t a war, so now the United States has to open the Strait of Hormuz that was already open before the not-war began.

The not-war began because Iran had uranium that was totally, completely, beautifully obliterated, so they can’t build the nuclear bomb they weren’t building, which is why the United States had to start the not-war it definitely didn’t start.

Now the United States, which has nuclear weapons, is threatening to use nuclear weapons to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons, because nuclear weapons are far too dangerous for countries with nuclear weapons to allow other countries to have.

If the United States saw the United States doing what the United States does in other countries, the United States would invade the United States to liberate the United States from the tyranny of the United States.

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

The "exceptional nation" does not join the International Criminal Court.

Because the court is for nations that might be criminal.

The "exceptional nation" does not ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Because conventions are for nations that need external accountability.

The "exceptional nation" passes legislation authorizing military invasion of The Hague if any American is ever brought before it.

This law is called, without irony, the American Servicemembers' Protection Act.

Protection.

From accountability.

And this causes no crisis of belief among the true believers.

Because the court was for other countries.

Justice was always for other countries.

They were always the ones who got to define it.

[🇵🇸Vance B #FreePalestine @vanceyb]

@Christo50248788 @Nerdrotics Yes he was, and he was fantastic
https://t.co/iICblpiS03

[Shafiur Rahman @shafiur]

Ko Tinmaung, a Toronto-based Rohingya activist, has been released after more than 96 hours in Israeli detention following Israel’s hijacking of the Global Sumud Flotilla and the abduction of its civilian participants.

His testimony is horrifying.

He says he was beaten in a dark room by more than five people, kicked, punched, tasered in multiple places, and handcuffed so tightly that the restraints cut into his wrists and restricted blood flow. He says he still needs treatment for concussion-like injuries.

He also says he witnessed other detainees with broken ribs, head wounds, blood from their ears, eye injuries, broken noses and broken teeth. Most gravely, he alleges sexual assaults, including people being tasered on their genitals.

Tinmaung’s testimony also exposes the racial dimension of Israeli violence. He says he was mocked as “Ahmed”, assaulted further, laughed at because of his skin colour, and treated as if his passport had no value because he was brown.

This was a civilian-led humanitarian mission carrying food, aid and basic supplies to Gaza. So where is Canada? Where are the human rights organisations? Where are the global leadership councils, the moral authorities, the professional defenders of accountability?

Silence now is not neutrality. It is complicity.

(Video courtesy https://t.co/WdpDXCJTFR)

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

The Atlantic slave trade is not singled out because other slavery didn't exist.

It is singled out because it built the world we currently live in.

The financial institutions.
The insurance markets.
The shipping routes.
The racial categories.
The colonial borders.
The wealth distribution between continents that still defines the global economy today.

The Atlantic slave trade is not studied with particular intensity because historians are biased.

It is studied with particular intensity because its consequences are not historical.

They are present.

You don't single it out to assign ancient blame.

You examine it to understand current reality.

The reason your argument wants to dissolve that specificity into universal human wickedness is precisely because universal human wickedness requires nothing from anyone today.

Specific, traceable, present consequences do.

[Dr. Butch Ware @ButchWare]

There is no greater direct corruption of the principles of democratic governance than to allow a billionaire to personally purchase the highest office in a state.

If Tom Steyer can spend 200M to purchase an election, you don’t have a democracy, you have an oligarchy.

If Xavier Becerra can have corporations purchase an election for him, you have an oligarchy.

Without publicly funded elections and spending limits, democracy is a sham.

[Dr. Butch Ware @ButchWare]

“Zionism is most vulnerable inside the imperial core.”
They sent jackboots to clear encampments – in blue states. Bipartisan genocide.

Butch Ware’s answer: organize political power inside the core. That’s why he’s running for governor.

✍️ WRITE IN BUTCH WARE on your ballot.

[GBX @GBX_Press]

🚨 JUST IN:

Russia has announced that all future oil and gas deals with Europe will be priced in Russian Rubles and Chinese Yuan.

[sarah @sahouraxo]

Israel’s bulldozers are wiping out civilian homes, tourist sites, and hotels in Naqoura, South Lebanon.

Not military targets.

South Lebanon is being erased — like Gaza before it.

This is an American-backed, American-funded genocide.

[Dr. Butch Ware @ButchWare]

“The liberal is a fox. It bears its teeth – you think it’s smiling, but you’re on the menu.”

I don’t make a fundamental distinction between two capitalist, imperialist, white supremacist parties.

[Cool_Ustaaz ☪ @Cool_Ustaz]

BREAKING: 🇨🇳 President of China, Xi Jinping:

“A certain country, obsessed with maintaining its hegemony, has done everything possible to cripple emerging markets and developing nations. Whoever progresses rapidly becomes a target of containment; whoever catches up becomes a threat. But all of this is futile. The world we live in today is a community with a shared future. People do not want a new Cold War; they want a world of lasting peace and universal security."

[Dr. Butch Ware @ButchWare]

“The liberal is a fox. You think it’s smiling, but you’re on the menu. The conservative is a wolf. No illusion.” – Malcolm X

That’s why I never ran as a Democrat.

63% of voters want a third party. 53% of Democrats agree.

[sarah @sahouraxo]

Professor Norman Finkelstein:

“Israel is now a madman.”

“It didn’t get its way with Iran, and so it is totally destroying Lebanon now.”

“It is in a state of catatonic lunacy.”

“I’ve said this for years. Now it’s the consensus.”

“Israel is a lunatic state. A lunatic society.”

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

James Baldwin said it fifty years ago and it has not aged a single day:

"Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced."

The American empire has produced a population that is, in significant part, constitutionally unable to face.

Not stupid. Not evil. Unable to face.

There is a difference.

They were given a story so total, so woven into their education and entertainment and national ritual, that facts which contradict it do not land as information.

They land as attack.

This is what empire does to the people it claims to serve.

It doesn't just extract resources from the Global South.

It extracts honesty from its own citizens.

It gives them comfort and takes their capacity for clear sight.

And then it needs them to stay comfortable, because the moment they can actually see, the whole arrangement becomes very difficult to justify.

[Israel Exposed @xIsraelExposedx]

'Watch Palestine 36'. - Hollywood actor Mark Ruffalo urges Americans to watch the film and understand the history that has been hidden from them by the Epstein class.

[sarah @sahouraxo]

This Easter, we remember:

Israel obliterated the mausoleum of Simon Peter, the Apostle of Christ, in Shama, southern Lebanon.

A sacred site that stood for over 2,000 years, now in ruins.

This is a war crime.
This is a crime against history.

[Dr. Butch Ware @ButchWare]

Eric Swalwell has been credibly accused of multiple inappropriate relationships with young staffers. Katie Porter verbally abuses hers. Both have accepted mounds of cash from the Israel lobby.

Tom Steyer has spent $100M of the money he made on the prison industrial complex buying ads to convince you that an anti BDS billionaire is a ‘progressive.’

Gavin Newsom and Shirley Weber are working overtime to try to knock me off the ballot because I’m only 5 points behind the three corporate frauds named above. The moral bankruptcy of the California Democrat Party is total.

And the Repubs, like the Dems are all Israel-firsters.

CA, I’ll keep this simple. You can either vote for AIPAC, or Butch Ware.

[🇵🇸Vance B #FreePalestine @vanceyb]

I'm voting for Dr @ButchWare even if the corrupt SOC (@DrShirleyWeber ) is acting against democracy in California
https://t.co/R4fwsES0CM

[Voice of Rabbis @voiceofrabbis]

🚨 BREAKING

Spain breaks diplomatic ties with Israel. Madrid has just recalled its ambassador and is planning to close its embassy in Tel Aviv.

Israel condemned the move, calling it "highly antisemitic."

Antisemitism is hatred of Jews.

Criticizing Israel is not hatred of Jews.

Zionism is not Judaism.

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

There is a mythology the U.S. built around the American War in Vietnam. It goes like this:

Young idealistic soldiers were sent into an unwinnable situation by confused politicians.

They came home broken and unappreciated.

It was a tragedy. A mistake. A lesson learned.

Notice what that story does.

It centers Americans.

Their trauma. Their confusion. Their homecoming. Their feelings.

In this story, the Vietnamese people are a backdrop.

A jungle. An obstacle. An abstraction.

Three million dead Vietnamese people are the scenery for a story about American self-discovery.

They made hundreds of movies about Vietnam.

The Deer Hunter. Apocalypse Now. Platoon. Full Metal Jacket. Born on the Fourth of July. Hamburger Hill.

Count how many of them center a Vietnamese character with a full human life, a family, a name you remember after the credits roll.

They turned our genocide into their coming-of-age story.

They lost the war and still managed to make themselves the main character.

And then, with extraordinary arrogance, they put their soldiers' names on a wall in Washington and call it a memorial, as if the dead to be mourned were the people who flew 10,000 miles to do the killing.

Where is the wall for our three million?

There isn't one.

Because in their telling, we were never quite real enough to mourn.