GLEN FORD—According to the official numbers, Brazil’s police kill 4, 224 civilians a year. Alves asks us to “imagine a country where twelve civilians are ‘legally’ killed by the police on a daily basis.” Seventy-six percent of the dead are Black, meaning nine Black men or boys are killed by Brazilian police every day (99 percent are male). Alves notes that these statistics “do not count the ‘disappeared’ and ‘unknown’ that have turned poor and predominantly black urban communities in Brazil into macabre geographies.”
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JANINE JACKSON—The New York Times is talking about how Haspel’s nomination will “reignite the wrenching debate” over interrogation “techniques,” like waterboarding, confinement in boxes and sleep deprivation. First of all, it sounds like those being hurt are the ones who have to debate the issue, you know, or look at the photographs, rather than the people who were and who may be tortured.
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JEFF J. BROWN—Many people still harbor images of China’s century of humiliation, 1839-1949, as a technological point of reference, when Western and then Japanese parasitic colonialists sucked this country’s people and their resources dry with illegal drugs, expropriation, exploitation and war. That was China’s nadir, 110 years out of five millennia of progress. Except for those 110 years, the reality is that China has been the world’s innovation leader for most of written history. Please listen to my 600 Years podcast below and study the bilingual table I created, based on Robert Temple’s work, cited just after that. You can even print out the table on nine sheets of A3 or A4 paper, if you’d like, suitable for framing.
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CHRIS HEDGES—Brennan was the architect of the disastrous attempt to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to arm “moderate” rebels in Syria, oversaw the huge expansion of our drone wars and instigated the canard that Russia stole the last U.S. presidential election. The most astute critics of empire, including Andrew Bacevich, are banished, as are critics of corporate power, including Ralph Nader and Chomsky.
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MOON OF ALABAMA—The formulas for the various Novichok agents are not a Russian secret. The U.S. and the UK surely know how to make these. The agents are said to be made from simply components used in civil industrial processes (and agriculture, as pesticides and herbicides—Eds.). (To qualify any agent as “military grade” is by the way nonsense. Many chemical agents used in civil process are also incredibly deadly.) The Porton Down chemical weapon laboratory of the British military is only some 8 miles away from Salisbury where the Skripals were allegedly poisoned.
