Return of the Death Instrument?

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/06/30/boei-j30.html

US regulator approves re-certification flights for Boeing’s deadly 737 Max

In the aftermath of the crashes and the grounding of the Max 8—which both Boeing and the FAA initially opposed—a myriad of reports from aviation safety agencies internationally and leaked internal emails from Boeing employees and officials established that the company was well aware of the dangerous flaws in the aircraft, but carried out a cover-up in order to get the plane into the air.

Neither these damning facts nor the coronavirus pandemic have stopped Boeing and the FAA from plowing ahead with their plans to bring the aircraft back into service. Both the corporation and the regulator are more concerned with the value of the company’s stock, which shot up 14.4 percent, to $194.49 a share, the day the first test flight was completed. This is more than double the record low to which the stock collapsed in mid-March. The Dow Jones itself shot up 200 points, propelled by Boeing’s gains.

The company’s stock was initially bolstered by the $17 billion bailout it received as part of the bipartisan CARES Act corporate rescue package passed at the end of March. The money for Boeing was part of a broader package to inject cash into the aviation industry after air travel collapsed in response to the pandemic.

The massive sums being provided to Boeing sharply contrast with the pittance the corporate giant has provided for the 346 families that lost loved ones in the two crashes. Each family has received a mere $144,500 per crash victim from an account that is overseen by the notorious Wall Street “fixer” Kenneth Feinburg. He is working to defend the airplane manufacturer’s profits and refurbish its public image.
Even as Boeing executives have continued to make millions in salary and stock options, the corporation has slashed at least 12,300 jobs, about half of which are layoffs and half buyouts. According to CEO David Calhoun, the cuts will be focused on Boeing’s commercial division, as its defense-related projects have remained profitable. The cuts are little less than one-tenth of the company’s total workforce, and may rise to 16,000 in the near future.

Can you say corruption?

This is crapitalism at its finest. It's how the system of rule moves from late-stage capitalism, to fascism.

Something I wouldn't mind having.

https://www.akaipro.com/mpcliveii

Another essay on the failings of the 2020 Bernie Sanders US Presidential Campaign.

https://www.johnhuntpublishing.com/blogs/zer0/why-are-leftists-freaks-(a-response-to-michael-tracey-and-angela-nagle)/

It's going to take some reading and understanding to get through this.

Bombing People Is Not Feminist, No Matter How You Spin It - pretty obvious, yes?

https://fair.org/home/bombing-people-is-not-feminist-no-matter-how-you-spin-it/

Amazing how it actually needs to be published to be believed -

The term “military/industrial complex” was popularized by President Dwight Eisenhower in his farewell address to the nation, where he warned that weapons contractors were beginning to dictate state policy for their own benefit:

Now this conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the Federal government…we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military/industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

That this structure still exists, reaping untold violence across the world, only it is now headed by women, is hardly a step forward for feminism, which is about the emancipation of billions from an oppressive system that hurts everyone.

Racial Supremacy and Moral Superiority have a connection ...

 - they help the by-design inequities of today's crapitalism exist and enable the rich and the powerful to flourish.

Case in point about the former -

https://www.globalresearch.ca/ordinary-israelis-dont-perceive-themselves-ordinary-people/5717085

What a fucking surprise - COVID-19 cases rise in US.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/06/27/pers-j27.html

But already, more than twice that number have died—127,640 people, with some scientists predicting 200,000-300,000 deaths by the end of the summer, potentially eclipsing the death toll of the Second World War.
The US now has one-quarter of the world’s cases—and one-quarter of the world’s deaths—even though it only has 4 percent of the world’s population.

Something I've noticed recently when posting YouTube links.

Seems as though videos that I post by folks who have a history of getting demonized tend to not go through without fixing it later.

Jimmy Dore

Democracy At Work

Graham Elwood

Christos Availis

Ron Placone

Secular Talk

Humanist Report

Rational National

Tim Black

And several others. I wonder if it's also a coincidence that many of those listed above tend to land on the progressive side of most issues?

Senate Gives Israel $38Bil While Americans Can’t Work- from the Political Vigilante.

More info here - https://www.mintpressnews.com/senate-foreign-relations-committee-quitely-passes-aid-israel/267851/

Think white privilege doesnt exist?

I was in my open garage last night - trying to record some musical tracks on my multi-track recorder, when this white teenager with a skateboard interrupted me to ask about the microphones I was using. Or rather, he saw the ones on the stands and asked what they were.

The kid's questions were in an of itself, harmless. But it occurred to me afterwards, him being a white male teenager in a largely white neighborhood could walk onto someone's private property and simply start asking questions to a perfect stranger - without issue.

Could I as a non-white male - ever do the same thing to someone else? The recent murder in Georgia came to mind in my hypothetical scenario.

When I tried going through all the possible reasons why one was actual, and the other almost always theoretical (and thus both improbable, and likely fatal), sadly the only conclusion I could draw was white privilege.

A definition -

White privilege (or white skin privilege) is the societal privilege that benefits white people over non-white people in some societies, particularly if they are otherwise under the same social, political, or economic circumstances.

When I look at that and think back to yesterday evening -it's hard to argue that what I experienced was just as described in the definition above. This kid (a teenager) benefited from his skin color and gender to do something which if I did would end violently or fatal for me.

In many ways, it's the 'pleasant' mask of White supremacy.

Capitalism’s Surveillance Squeeze

http://dollarsandsense.org/blog/2020/05/capitalisms-surveillance-squeeze.html

Quite the warning - especially in the wake of COVID-19 and working remotely -

Technologically enhanced worker surveillance was already pervasive in many workplaces before the pandemic. (Indeed, Charlie Chaplin presciently satirized video surveillance of the workplace in his 1936 masterpiece Modern Times.) But since many workplaces went remote, employers have made enormous new investments in surveillance software. Workers who had previously been exempt from the most intrusive forms of surveillance when in the office are now tracked through their computers at home—and now that the investment has been made there’s no reason to think the software will be turned off even if workers do return to the physical office.

The kinds of things that make me appreciate the Internet.

Let's go!

Weeks of not exercising and I still hurt.

It's odd. I've had some neck pain for some time. A surgeon recommends surgery (no surprise).

It's more or less prevented me from exercising the last few weeks.

What is odd is I haven't exactly gained weight while in COVID-19-induced quarantine. This is by no means because I'm in fantastic shape, or have some excellent metabolism.

It's actually a couple of things.

One is because I'm not exercising, I've been losing muscle mass due to the slow onset of atrophy. So even though I've probably put on some fat, I've dropped weight due to a decline in muscle.

The other reason is, while I've consumed a lot more sugar (never a good thing), my overall eating rate has gone down. I'm certainly not packing it in like I used to.

This lower rate of eating has coupled with the loss of muscle mass is the reason I think I've stayed at the same weight; for now.

Obviously if my metabolism slows down, eventually my weight will start to increase. I know I need to do something about it, as well as my neck. Both of those remain questions to be answered.

Juneteenth - A True American Day.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juneteenth

Testing, testing, testing - w/Richard Wolff and Jimmy Dore.

Whenever I've seen references to the cause of realizing Palestinian State, I always wondered why the West Bank is always excluded?

Now I know why - https://www.globalresearch.ca/palestine-declare-statehood-1967-borders-if-israel-annexes-west-bank-lands/5715963

Maybe I need to re-examine my views on Wikipedia?

After reading this, it's enough to make me question -

https://www.globalresearch.ca/wikipedia-formally-censors-grayzone-regime-change-advocates-monopolize-editing/5715810

I must say I've seen these kinds of right-wing slants in some articles for sure.

Jimmy Dore interviews Jesse Ventura

Something tells me we're going to be seeing more of these sorts of things happening a lot more often - 2020 Norilsk oil spill.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Norilsk_oil_spill

The Norilsk diesel oil spill is an industrial disaster that began on 29 May 2020 when a fuel storage tank at Norilsk-Taimyr Energy's Thermal Power Plant No. 3 (owned by Nornickel) collapsed, flooding local rivers with 21,000 cubic metres (17,500 tonnes) of diesel oil.^[1][2] Russian President Vladimir Putin declared a state of emergency.^[3] The accident has been described as the second-largest oil spill in modern Russian history.^[4]

Cause

Diesel oil is used as a backup fuel for the Norilsk-Taimyr Energy (NTEK) coal-fired combined heat and power plant.^[5] A diesel fuel storage tank failed when the permafrost it was built on began to soften.^[6] A statement from Nornickel stated: "Due to sudden subsidence of supports which served for more than 30 years without problems, the diesel fuel storage tank was damaged, resulting in a fuel leak."^[7]

Progressive International - something I need to learn more about.

https://progressive.international/

Meanwhile, what about the police killing of a black man closer to home?

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/06/06/manu-j06.html

Contradicting the claims of the Tacoma PD, footage of the arrest, posted to the Tacoma Action Collective Twitter account Friday, shows Manuel being beaten to the ground while one officer grabbed a taser gun. The woman who recorded the footage can be heard yelling, “stop hitting him.” The video ends with Manuel being restrained by the police officers on the ground.

The woman who recorded the incident, Sara McDowell, has come forward to dispute the claims by the Tacoma police, saying that the police had initiated the confrontation. She states that Manuel was speaking to them through the car window, and then one police officer threw the car door open which knocked him on the ground.

What I truly like about FAIR ...

... is never more underscored than in this article -> https://fair.org/home/there-i-fixed-it-for-you/

That the establishment media doesn't choose to accurately frame what's going, is actually a large source of the problem.

This whole notion of blaming 'antifa' for all the rioting and protesting going on is ludicrous to me at best.

https://shadowproof.com/2020/06/04/attempts-by-officials-to-blame-outside-agitators-for-george-floyd-protests-failed/

Quote from a Baltimore Sun editorial in the link above:

“It’s much easier for a politician to point a finger at people from afar than admit that the unrest is rooted in deep racial division and long-standing inequities, in systemic and individual racism; in police brutality; in lack of quality education, health care, housing and job opportunities; and in the simmering anger that comes from knowing that nothing of consequence is being done about these social ills.”

The Treason of the Ruling Class.

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/06/02/treason-ruling-class

Protests and Class War - is there a connection?

Simple - capitalism only survives by evolving into fascism. How?

1.

40 000 000 people thrown out of work
100 000+ deaths

Both of which were caused by an epidemic that could've been both prepared for and dealt with better.

2.

Along with this is the breaking point caused by the public finally being tired of over 2 centuries of racial injustice, violence, suffering,  and theft.

Yes - there is a connection between these two.

Welcome to June 2020.

We've already hit 100K COVID-19-related deaths in the USA, millions unemployed, many more evicted, hungry.

Oh, and many angry due to the injustice and racism of out of control police departments killing black people.

Think capitalism doesn't lead to fascism? Think again.