Rohingya refugee kids at Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh: one can see from the quality of life in makeshift tents that international refugee aid is pouring into the Rohingya community with the largesse of an eyedropper. It is not just a matter of extreme physical distress but a health & a mental wellbeing issue that refugees be provided with proper shelter. Bangladeshi prime minister Sheikh Hasina presides over a sweatshop economy involving child labor so left to her own devices little will change for the refugees. But part of that sweatshop economy is the exponential growth of millionaires & billionaires sucking off the labor of children. Hasina can cry poor mouth till the cows come home but her government has the resources to provide decent shelter for refugees, especially if Bangladesh publicly demands other governments provide, & not just pledge, aid.
Maung Zarni, Burmese dissident in exile, on the UN Security Council that recently sat down with the Burmese generals to discuss how to force “Bengalis” (the UNSC did not refer to them by their proper name of Rohingya in deference to the genocidaires) back to concentration camps in Arakan state:
“Hey, world, it’s way past time for official funeral of the Security Council. It is as dead as a corpse or a mummy. The glorified corpse in the midst of never-ending wars & genocides. Rohingya, Syria, Myanmar & a long list of its irreversible failures.”
(Photo of mummy attached to post. Apologies to the mummy for comparison to the stinking corpse of the UNSC.)
From a human rights perspective, it really doesn’t matter if Gina Haspel is passed as CIA head or not. There is no lesser evil here. If her psychopathic ass isn’t made torturer-in-chief, some other psychopath will be. The entire agency has to be dismantled.
Is this what the Mueller investigation has come down to? Stormy Daniels & all Trump’s other one night stands? Isn’t her 15 minutes of fame up yet? Is it just my misperception or does it appear they’re trying to normalize the Trump regime?
US media commentary on North Korea is detestable. They play stupid on why the three American guys now being released by North Korea were arrested in the first place. Does CIA operatives ring a bell? When they talk about the conditions the guys endured in North Korean prisons, the commentators talk about the harshness of the totalitarian regime. Do Guantanamo & all the other US torture centers ring a bell? Does the incarceration of thousands of Black & Latino kids for smoking a joint ring a bell? What about Gina Haspel being considered for CIA head despite authorizing the use of waterboarding 80 times a month on just one prisoner? And what about all those US wars? When it comes to human rights crimes, the US government is second to none.
This is Bella who I found in 2015 along with her tiny baby girl Bellissima. Bella was emotionally vacant & had no idea how to receive love. She’s grown into a character with a strong personality who takes no guff from the other dogs, who loves to tease, who loves to be held. Bellissima is a bully & a delight. Yesterday, Bella found a way out of the yard & I spent the day looking for her by car & on foot with Bellissima in tow. Bella showed up at the fence after four hours. You never realize how much you love them till you think you’ve lost them.
(This is in an old bird cage where the dogs love to sit.)
The White Helmets are here rescuing two children. They recovered the bodies of two other children & a man after four Syrian bombing raids on the village if Nqair in the countryside of Idlib. Or as Assad propagandists would describe it, the White Helmets are here engaged in terrorism using “crisis actors” because everything to Assad propagandists & their guppies is street theater orchestrated by the CIA & Mossad. Everything that portrays the brutality of Assad’s dictatorship or the revolutionary potential of Arabs & Muslims is a lie. Blame it on US regime-change; blame it on Israel to justify why Russian & Syrian bombing of civilians is necessary to protect Assad’s national sovereignty. This rubbish hasn’t persuaded the best political thinkers of our time. It has taken those whose relevance has long since passed.
The only principled position is to demand the immediate cessation of Russian, Syrian, & US-coalition bombing of Syria & the immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all foreign military forces from Syria.
