We recently discussed the troubling declaration of guilt made by President Joe Biden at the start of the investigation into border agents allegedly whipping or "strapping" undocumented Haitians trying to enter the country. The statement shattered the integrity of the investigation as well as the reputation of the federal agents. Now, President Biden has called for the Select Committee looking into the Jan. 6th riot to hold those who refuse subpoenas in contempt and for his Department of Justice to prosecute them.

During the Trump Administration, many of us criticized the President for commenting on pending investigations and crossing the line on seeking to influence the Justice Department. A chorus of legal experts declared such public comments to be an attack on the rule of law and the integrity of the Justice Department. Those voices have been largely silent on Biden's own comments.

Any contempt prosecution would be handled by the Justice Department. I have long been critical of its handling of such cases. However, Biden's call ignores the fact that most of the Democratic leadership in the House supported the Obama Administration in refusing to even submit contempt cases to grand juries. That was the case with Eric Holder who was in flagrant contempt of House subpoenas in the "Fast and Furious" investigation. If the Democrats seek the prosecution of these Trump officials, they will have to step over a mountain of hypocrisy on such cases.

There's no point talking to Ukraine, former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev says, arguing Russia should wait for a friendlier government in Kiev. The only problem is there's almost no chance of that happening any time soon.

'Nedogovorosposobnyi' is a Russian word with no English equivalent, describing somebody or something that is incapable of reaching agreements. There can be many reasons why a person or an organization is like this but, whatever the cause, talking to them is a waste of time. It's never going to get anywhere.

Ukraine's political leaders are nedogovorosposobnye, says Medvedev, who was president of Russia from 2008 to 2012 and now serves as deputy chairman of the Security Council. In a blistering article published in the newspaper Kommersant on Monday, Medvedev assaulted Ukraine's leadership and laid out four reasons why speaking to them was pointless.

We live in a far less free society than most of us think.

It looks like we're free. We don't get thrown in prison for criticizing our government officials. We can vote for whoever we want. We can log onto the internet and look up information on any subject we're interested in. If we want to buy a product we have many brands we are free to choose from.

But we're not free. Our political systems are set up to herd people into a two-party system that is controlled on both sides by plutocrats. The news media that people rely on to form ideas about what's going on and how they should vote are controlled by the plutocratic class and heavily influenced by secretive government agencies. Internet algorithms are aggressively manipulated to show people information which favors the status quo. Even our entertainment is rife with Pentagon and CIA influence.

How free is that? How free is your speech if there are myriad institutional safeguards in place to prevent speech from ever effecting political change?

It doesn't matter what you're allowed to say if it doesn't matter what you say. It doesn't matter if you're allowed to call the oligarchic puppet put in office by the last fake election a dickhead. It doesn't matter if you're allowed to Google any information you want only to find whatever information Google wants you to find.

What is the functional difference between a regime which directly censors the internet to prevent dissent and a regime which works with Silicon Valley plutocrats to control information via algorithms and has a system in place which prevents dissent from having any meaningful impact?

There is none.

Mask rules, vaccination mandates and business shutdowns have all landed in the courts during the COVID-19 outbreak, confronting judges with questions of science and government authority. Now they are increasingly being asked to weigh in on the deworming drug ivermectin.

At least two dozen lawsuits have been filed around the U.S., many in recent weeks, by people seeking to force hospitals to give their COVID-stricken loved ones ivermectin, a drug for parasites that has been promoted by conservative commentators as a treatment despite a lack of conclusive evidence that it helps people with the virus.

Interest in the drug started rising toward the end of last year and the beginning of this one, when studies — some later withdrawn, in other countries — seemed to suggest ivermectin had some potential and it became a hot topic of conversation among conservatives on social media.

The lawsuits, several of them filed by the same western New York lawyer, cover similar ground. The families have gotten prescriptions for ivermectin, but hospitals have refused to use it on their loved ones, who are often on ventilators and facing death.

Delta Air Lines is ditching a vaccine mandate for employees, according to company CEO Ed Bastian, who notably emphasized the "divisiveness" of such an order.

Bastian said announcing a plan to get all employees vaccinated, without enforcing a mandate, has worked, allowing the company to reach a 90% vaccination rate. The CEO, according to Fox Business, said:

"The reason the mandate was put in by [the] president, I believe, was because they wanted to make sure companies had a plan to get their employees vaccinated. A month before the president came out with the mandate, we had already announced our plan to get all of our people vaccinated. And the good news is the plan is working.

"I acknowledged that there will need to be religious and medical accommodations made for those who wish to remain unvaccinated while avoiding having to threaten employment status. By the time we're done, we'll be pretty close to fully vaccinated as a company without going through all the divisiveness of a mandate.

"We're proving that you can work collaboratively with your people, trusting your people to make the right decisions, respecting their decisions and not forcing them over the loss of their jobs."

Back in August, Bastian's memo warned unvaccinated employees enrolled in Delta's health care plan they would be subject to higher premiums to cover increased costs associated with COVID.

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki partially defended rising costs on everyday goods during an interview with CNN's Jake Tapper on Friday afternoon, saying that the costs were rising because demand is surging, which she called a "good thing."

"A year ago, people were in their homes, 10 percent of people were unemployed. Gas prices were low because nobody was driving. People weren't buying goods because they didn't have jobs. Now, more people have jobs, more people are buying goods, that's increasing the demand. That's a good thing.

"At the same time, we also know that the supply is low because we're coming out of the pandemic and because a bunch of manufacturing sectors across the world have shut down, because ports haven't been functioning as they should be. These are all things we're working through."

Watch:

Venezuela's government is halting negotiations with its opponents in retaliation for the extradition to the US of a close ally of president Nicolás Maduro, who prosecutors believe could be the most significant witness ever about corruption in the South American country.

Jorge Rodríguez, who has been heading the government's delegation, said his team wouldn't travel to Mexico City for the next scheduled round of negotiations.

The announcement capped a tumultuous day that saw Colombian-born businessman Alex Saab placed on a US-bound plane in Cape Verde after a 16-month fight by Maduro and his allies, including Russia, who consider Saab a Venezuelan diplomat.

The Venezuelan government in September named Saab - who was arrested in June 2020 when his plane stopped in Cape Verde to refuel - as a member of its negotiating team in talks with the opposition in Mexico, where the two sides are looking to solve their political crisis.

Rodriguez, reading from a statement, called the decision to suspend negotiations

"an expression of our deepest protest against the brutal aggression against the person and the investiture of our delegate Alex Saab Moran".

The leadership of Venezuela's opposition did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The US military is offering "condolence payments" to a family in Afghanistan after a badly planned drone strike killed 10 civilians, including seven children, in the country's capital in August, though did not provide any numbers.

Pentagon spokesman John Kirby revealed the offer on Friday, stating that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin made a "commitment" to the Akhmadi family for compensation following the August 29 drone strike, "including offering ex gratia condolence payments" and State Department assistance in relocating family members to the United States.

The offer was raised during a virtual meeting between Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Colin Kahl and Dr. Steven Kwon, who employed one of the Akhmadis killed in the strike at his US-based aid organization, Nutrition & Education International, long active in Afghanistan. Kirby went on:

"Kahl noted that the strike was a tragic mistake and that Mr. Zemari Akhmadi and others who were killed were innocent victims who bore no blame and were not affiliated with ISIS-K or threats to US forces."

Before 'Zero Covid' surfaced as the apparent goal of governments in the 'War Against The Virus', 'Zero Carbon' had become their goal in the 'War Against Climate Change'. What is up with this strange 'zeroing in' on the primary carbon source for life on Earth, and an ubiquitous and statistically benign coronavirus? How and why did governments decide that completely eradicating man-made CO2 would 'make the world a better place'?

Likewise with SARS-CoV-2, a virus that has likely by now infected and interacted with a majority of people on the planet, can we not adapt to live with it rather than upend our economies to 'eradicate it? Why such 'final solutions' to relatively minor factors in a complex ecosystem?

In this NewsReal, Joe and Niall discuss the extreme ideas eating away at the social fabric of global society.

** Podcast begins at 02:27 **


Running Time: 01:40:04

Download: MP3 — 68.7 MB

You can tell a lot about an item by the nicknames we give it. So what do our nicknames for the television tell us about that device?

"The idiot box."

"The boob tube."

"The tell-lie-vision."

It doesn't take a super sleuth to puzzle this one out. From the very inception of commercial television in the 1950s — when the phrase "boob tube" was first coined to lament the dumbing-down effect that the device was presumed to be having on the populace — to the zenith of the TV's cultural hegemony in the late 20th century, fears about the television's ability to create zombified couch potatoes out of its passive audience have been ever-present.

It's no coincidence that the 2006 comedy (or should that be docudrama?), Idiocracy, introduces its viewers to the eponymous future idiocracy — in which the intelligence of the population has declined to shockingly low levels — by showing a junk food-ingesting "lawyer" in the midst of enjoying the hit television show of the year 2505, Ow! My Balls! It's also no coincidence that the same movie sees protagonist Private Joe Bauers formulating a plan for heading off the development of this idiocracy by encouraging people to read books rather than watch TV.

We all know the trope: television makes you dumb, lazy and passive, and (by implication) it renders you susceptible to the lies and manipulations of those who create the TV programming. But is it true?

As it turns out, not only are concerns about the content and the presentation of TV programming well-founded, but there is an even darker side to the device than is commonly realized. There is ample research to suggest that the TV is actually designed to send you into a trance-like state that lowers your cognitive defences against the lies the TV networks (and their corporate owners) are attempting to push on their docile audience.

In order to understand this neglected part of the television story, we first have to reconsider the advent of commercial radio in the 1920s and the civilization-altering effects it wrought on the world in the 1930s.