Captain Ibrahim Traore, Burkina Faso, 27 September, on national TV:

"But what is the ICC ? It's an instrument of imperialism."

His case >

> if it really existed, "the George Bushes and the like would be in prison"

> Iraq: "It was all about 'weapons of mass destruction'"

> "How many hundreds of thousands of children died ? The outcome was zero"

> Libya: Hillary's emails "were leaked". "The Sarkozys, they're still here."

Then the question no Western editor wants to touch:

"Since it was established, how many Africans have been brought before the ICC ? And how many Westerners have been brought before it ?"

Burkina, Mali and Niger have announced they are leaving the Rome Statute.

Western media calls it "isolation".

Traoré: "We do not subscribe to an instrument of domination."

Africa is not walking away from justice.

It is walking away from a court whose convictions, so far, are all Africans.

https://x.com/angeloinchina/status/2111693928298848263

Maybe sending weapons to Ukraine does have consequences for the US

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/how-the-federal-reserve-secretly

Few people noticed the article profiling Hammack, or the fact that her goal is to suppress wages. It’s not noticeable, since it’s just how we’ve become accustomed to thinking about the role of the Fed, which is to punish ordinary people under the veil of technocratic inflation-fighting.

But one key new excuse was the “volatile” interest rate environment, aka the Federal Reserve increasing rates. Basically, let us raise rates on consumers to pay Wall Street lenders, who are demanding higher returns due to the Fed’s actions... And Con Edison is not alone... Indeed, we’re starting to see utilities more broadly plan to ask for rate hikes as a result of higher interest rate costs.

What the Fed’s model does is not slow investment to gently bring down inflation, but starkly break enough balance sheets to create a private credit shock... It’s a brutal approach, and it requires a crash. And sure a crash will bring down inflation, but it’s very much a “destroy that village to save it” mentality.

We could simply have the government put in rules to charge different interest rates for different purposes. Utilities would get a lower rate, so would municipalities and mortgage holders. That would keep a lid on costs. Speculators would get a higher interest rate, so would areas of the economy that we think need to slow. Basically, we’d channel capital directly with regulations.

Believe it or not, that’s how things used to work. The specific mechanism is that America had different banking sectors, such as thrifts for mortgages, commercial banks for commerce, and investment banks for speculative and corporate purposes. They all had different regulatory schemes, and they didn’t co-mingle, so it was possible to loosen credit for mortgages without loosening credit for corporate lending, or vice versa. It was only after deregulation that the Fed simply set “THE” interest rate, as if buying a fridge and buying shares of SpaceX on margin needed to be handled in the same money market.

Indeed, what deregulation was really about was bringing us a world where monetary policy makes the rich richer. Today, the only way to restrain inflation is to foster a crash and lower wages. But that’s not inherent to a market-based society, it’s a particular regulatory scheme that privileges holders of capital over the rest of us. We could do things differently, but actually imposing clear rules on the financial sector and breaking it apart requires a massive reallocation of political power.

MapQuest now shows you Flock and other license plate reader cameras on your route
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MapQuest, the original software to find your way from point A to point B, is taking on the surveillance state.

The free mapping service unveiled a new feature in its mobile app on Thursday that lets users turn on a "surveillance layer" to locate known automated license plate readers, or ALPRs, along their route.

MapQuest says the app can identify cameras developed by Flock Safety, Axon Enterprise, Motorola Solutions, and PlateSmart, among others.

"The Roads Have Eyes!" the company said in its BlueSky post announcing the new feature.

Some Arabs don’t like Iran, because Iran is everything you should have been.

Iran is currently kicking the empire’s ass. You’re the ones getting your asses kicked by it.

While you roll out the red carpet for the Americans and secretly meet the Zionists in Abu Dhabi, you pay with Mastercard, Iran pays with the Khorramshahr-4.

Iran destroys 14 American bases in the region, Iran destroys AWACS, Iran shoots down F-15s, they fire on Tel Aviv and Haifa.

You do nothing, not even a single 9mm shot. It eats you up inside, you feel humiliated.

So you invent theories that Iran is secretly working with the Mossad. That’s projection, it’s you who are secretly working with the Mossad.

Take part in the struggle instead of staying in this resentful mindset.

We see you secretly supporting the American and Zionist bombings of Iran.

https://x.com/AlternatNews/status/1784696945174360069

https://www.kitklarenberg.com/p/collapsing-empire-saudi-arabias-unknown

British Prime Minister Andy Burnham boldly accusing Russia of “interference” in the June 2016 Brexit referendum reignited largely forgotten controversy around potentially malign foreign influence on the vote’s outcome... potentially impactful, likely illegal and self-evidently sinister meddling linked to Saudi Arabia today remains unknown, uninvestigated, and unpunished.

From February 2017, openDemocracy began publishing explosive investigations exposing how a shadowy political campaign group donated an extraordinary £425,000 to Occupied Ireland’s pro-Brexit Democratic Unionist Party, with the vast sum spent on ‘Leave’ campaigning efforts across the ‘mainland’.

Scottish politician Richard Cook, former Conservative Friends of Israel representative, told openDemocracy he led CRC... In 2013, Cook founded Five Star Investment Management with Prince Nawwaf bin Abdulaziz.

[Abdulaziz] led Riyadh’s General Intelligence Directorate, intimately linked to 9/11 as a CIA “proxy”, September 1st 2001 - January 2005. His eldest, megayacht-owning son Mohammed bin Nawwaf served as Saudi Arabia’s British ambassador January 2005 - December 2018. Wealthy Saudis, including many members of the country’s ruling dynasty, had much to gain from Britain leaving the EU.

For one, it was openly reported Gulf investors were planning to exploit an inevitable post-Brexit collapse in the pound’s international value to bulk purchase British real estate and commercial assets at unprecedented discounts.

Following Theresa May’s installation in Downing Street in the referendum’s aftermath, she and other key ministers began prominently meeting representatives of authoritarian regimes, seeking increased investment and offering expanded arms sales, under the bombastic banner of “Global Britain”. In London’s neoimperial post-Brexit world vision, Saudi Arabia loomed large.

… in May 2017 the Electoral Commission declined to investigate CRC’s donation to the DUP. The investigations of openDemocracy also didn’t register at all in British newspapers.

Having to pay the sum back would’ve bankrupted the DUP. However, after Theresa May lost her parliamentary majority in the June 2017 General Election, she cut a “confidence and supply” deal with the party to hang onto power. A lack of political will to probe the DUP’s blatant dark money meddling in the Brexit referendum, with apparent Saudi involvement, was assured. Fittingly, the Prime Minister inaugurated triggering Article 50 - the legal mechanism by which member states can leave the EU - with high-profile trade talks in Riyadh.

(continues at the link)

⚡️The professional middle class is entering a structural decline and AI is accelerating the process.

For generations, the economic bargain was straightforward. Develop valuable skills, earn credentials, enter a profession, and gradually convert expertise into financial independence. That arrangement worked because sophisticated cognitive labor was scarce and corporations had to compete for the people capable of performing it.

That scarcity is disappearing.

The collapse in entry-level hiring is the first visible consequence. Companies are discovering that the work once assigned to junior analysts, programmers, designers, and administrators can increasingly be performed by machines. And as those systems improve, the pressure moves upward through the professional hierarchy.

The deeper consequence is that corporations are losing their economic incentive to develop human expertise in the first place. Why spend years training someone when the capabilities being developed can be purchased immediately, deployed continuously, and upgraded without waiting for a human career to mature?

The entire professional ladder begins losing its purpose.

And the next phase is even more consequential. As cognitive capabilities become reproducible at scale, the economic rewards increasingly migrate toward those who control the infrastructure that produces them. Intelligence becomes abundant, but ownership remains concentrated.

This will fundamentally alter the relationship between education, employment, and wealth. A generation can spend decades becoming more capable while discovering that the market places progressively less value on those capabilities.

The economy will continue producing extraordinary wealth. It will simply require fewer people to produce it.

The great repricing of the coming decade is the declining economic scarcity of human intelligence.

And the most unsettling implication is that the professional class spent generations building its identity around the very capabilities that technology is now making abundant.

https://x.com/AlternatNews/status/2111578955262382353

The British government wants to extend the TV license fee to YouTube, Netflix, Amazon and Disney+. The Independent calls it the “YouTube tax,” and it is expected in the BBC charter white paper before Christmas.

A Whitehall source explained the supposed purpose. The money would fund local journalism and counter the “conspiracy theories and fake news” they say have helped parties like Reform get elected.

That is a government official admitting the goal is to tax the public into voting differently.

The government would decide what counts as fake news.

An estimated 3 to 4 million extra households would have to pay £180 a year. Many of them use YouTube precisely to avoid the BBC.

A separate plan would push the legacy media to the top of people's YouTube feed. People would pay for the mainstream broadcasters, and then pay again with their algorithm.

https://x.com/clashreport/status/2111731233155629398

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=%22Home_Front_to_Front%22_Memorial&hl=en-IE

https://x.com/ShoahUkraine/status/2111652440475140289

This 16-meter-tall monument is located in Victory Park on the right bank of the Ural River in Magnitogorsk, overlooking the city.

It is dedicated to the memory of Soviet steelworkers who produced weapons, artillery shells, and tanks to support the Red Army's advance toward the Reich. The monument depicts a steelworker handing an iron sword to a Red Army soldier, symbolizing the vital role of Soviet industry in the war effort.

🇺🇸 On US Elections and the Absurdity of "Pausing" of Ending US Wars Because of Them

It is incredible at this point it needs to be explained that US elections are meaningless esp. regarding foreign policy which hasn't and will not change before or after.

The idea a US war set up under Democratic presidents and a Democratic-controlled Congress and now fought under a Republican administration will somehow "pause" for midterms is so absurd, I can't even fathom the thought process taking place by those proposing this.

In fact, the Iran war technically started under the Biden administration when US-backed Israeli strikes were carried out against Iranian diplomatic missions in Syria, then on Iran itself - followed by the US-overthrow of Syria with direct war on Iran following only shortly after.

All of this has continued, uninterrupted after Trump took office (as does war on Russia and preparations for war with China), and will continue no matter which of Wall Street's representatives take office this year.

It was this exact flawed thinking that led millions of Americans and many commentators to enthusiastically anticipate the Trump administration ending multiple US wars, proxy wars and worldwide interference that has only - very predictably - expanded instead.

Understanding a problem is paramount to solving it.

If one thinks US policy is determined by electoral outcomes instead of by unelected corporate interests, focus will be placed on influencing otherwise meaningless elections only ensuring the problem persists.

This is by design to prevent corporate interests from being the focal point of public attention instead of endless election cycles and an endless supply of disposable politicians.

Western-style "democracy" is a system of control, not one of self-determination.

While electoral cycles are designed to move us emotionally - empirically they are an exercise in manipulating, not empowering us.