AMERICAN WAY OF LIFE

EDITOR—Martin Scorsese narrates his journey through his favourites in Italian cinema.  Few people will be unmoved. 

EDITORS—The official death toll in Gaza now stands at just under 40,000, though the true number of casualties is likely far higher with many thousands of the dead unaccounted for. In one of the deadliest attacks of the entire war, Israel on Saturday bombed the al-Tabin school in Gaza City where thousands of Palestinians had sought shelter. Officials in Gaza say over 100 Palestinians were killed in the attack, many of them while they were praying at a mosque inside the school. Many of the dead were dismembered or destroyed beyond recognition, with medics reportedly collecting body parts in plastic bags. CNN has confirmed a U.S.-made GBU-39 small diameter bomb was used in the strike, which resulted in “over 100 pieces of people,” says Palestinian journalist Shrouq Aila in Gaza. “I’m saying ‘pieces’ because nobody was able to recognize the full body of their beloved ones.”

KIERAN SUCKLING—Senators Joe Manchin and Lindsey Graham share a common goal: making North Atlantic right whales extinct.

They proposed a bill that would put off slowing down boats and ships in right whale habitat. And vessel strikes are a leading cause of death for these magnificent and highly endangered animals.

The Center for Biological Diversity is fighting for them. Please help by giving to the Saving Life on Earth Fund today. NOAA Fisheries has a rule in place to try to reduce vessel strikes. But it doesn’t go far enough — and right whales are paying for that.

So we filed an emergency petition to implement new rules for vessels in the coastal waters where right whales feed, have their babies, and migrate.

With its often insufferably priggish, self-satisfied tone, CBS Sunday is clearly designed as a tool to comfort and please the PMCs in the US and the “Western world”, the folks who, aside from the billionaires who really run and own the show, clearly benefit from the criminally hypocritical status quo.

For those ensconced under a rock, the “PMCs” are the professional-managerial class, the upper middle class folks operating the vital machinery of the US global empire, most particularly the MICIMATT, Ray McGovern’s apt term for the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence- Media-Academia-Think-Tank complex, doubtless the most evil aggregation of humans in modern history.

ED CURTIN—Facetiousness aside, the voting public either doesn’t know or doesn’t care that the U.S.A. is a warfare state; it’s as simple as that.  Without waging wars, the U.S. economy, as presently constituted, would collapse.  It is an economy based on fantasy and fake money with a national debt over 35 trillion dollars that will never be repaid.  That’s another illusion.  But I am speaking of pipe dreams, am I not?    And whether they choose to be aware of it or not, the vast majority of Americans support this killing machine by their indifference and ignorance of its ramifications throughout the society and more importantly, its effects in death and destruction on the rest of the world.