JIMI HENDRIX - i DON'T LIVE TODAY.flv

San Diego Sports Arena, May 25, 1969

Combination of the Two (Live at the Winterland Ballroom, San Francisco, CA - April 1968)

60's tribal music....

Sednaya Prison and the CIA

As rebel forces poured into Syria’s capital and President Bashar al-Assad fled to Russia, Syrians surged to the streets to celebrate. Some rushed to Sednaya, the military prison they tagged “the human slaughterhouse” to search for missing family.

Ignored in the ignominious details of horrific torture is the rather nasty fact that even before 9/11, as the US hunted for terrorists, the CIA launched “extraordinary rendition”—an ingenious scheme to interrogate “high-value” suspects outside the country and thus avoid US laws on torture. The first suspects were taken to Egypt in the mid-1990s and the program continued until 2007.

Here’s how rendition worked. The CIA created lists of suspects it sought and hired small airlines (with unmarked planes) to fly its agents to grab them. Once they collected their human cargo, they were flown to allies the US knew had zero qualms about interrogation techniques. Besides Syria, the CIA dispatched suspects to Egypt, Uzbekistan, Morocco, Algeria, Jordan, Pakistan, Poland and Romania.

To clarify US procedures, White House lawyer John Yoo wrote in August 2002 what has been called the “torture memo,” stating what the CIA could do with suspects. George Tenet and Michael Hayden, CIA directors from 2002 to 2007 approved the memo. So too did the House and Senate intelligence oversight committees; and Vice President Dick Cheney had overall authority for counterterrorism activities.

https://www.thenation.com/article/world/torture-prisons-syria-war/

Little Steven and the Disciples Of Soul "Can't Be So Bad" featuring Jerry Miller

Jerry Miller, Moby Grape founder and guitarist passed away last July. Here he performs one of his songs with Little Steven in Seattle.

Wooden Ships (2005 Remaster)

Junior Senior - Move Your Feet - live

A little Danish Pop to improve the spirts.

Violence begets violence. Hate begets hate. Trump should listen to what he has been saying.

Matin Luther King

Hate begets hate; violence begets violence; toughness begets a greater toughness. We must meet the forces of hate with the power of love... Our aim must never be to defeat or humiliate the white man, but to win his friendship and understanding.[7]

The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy, instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate. Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence_begets_violence

Cosmic Charlie

Robert Reich "The most important thing I teach my students"

Friends,

The most important thing I teach my students is to seek out people who disagree with them.

That’s because the essence of learning is testing one’s ideas, assumptions, and values. And what better place to test ideas, assumptions, and values than at a university?

Apparently, Columbia University’s president, Nemat Shafik, does not share my view. Last week she prostrated herself before House Republicans, promising that she would discipline professors and students for protesting the ongoing slaughter in Gaza in which some 34,000 people have died, most of them women and children.

Can we be clear about a few things? Protesting this slaughter is not expressing antisemitism. It is not engaging in hate speech. It is not endangering Jewish students. It is doing what should be done on a college campus — taking a stand against a perceived wrong, at least provoking discussion and debate.

A good read from Dr Reich
More at link
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/the-most-important-thing-i-teach?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=365422&post_id=143862252&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1bkzst&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

Viktor Orbn's Authoritarian Playbook

This article is from 2020 but is relevant to the US today.

Scapegoat minorities
Like most strongmen, Orbán scapegoats minorities in order to draw the public’s attention away from real problems. In Orbán’s case, migrants and refugees, especially if they are from Muslim countries.
In 2015, Orbán cited the European refugee crisis to justify giving police the power to conduct searches without a warrant and collect bulk phone data.

Undermine the judiciary
Constitutional amendments enacted in 2013 — and criticized by the EU, the United States and human rights groups — annulled previous Constitutional Court rulings and barred the court from overturning laws that had the support of two-thirds of lawmakers.
After winning reelection in 2018, Orbán created a separate, administrative court system for issues related to asylum, elections and police violence, with judges handpicked by Orbán’s justice minister.
Several judges inexplicably resigned from the independent National Judicial Council before it was due to announce the result of an inquiry into allegations that Tünde Handó, an Orbán loyalist, had packed the courts in her capacity as chief of the judiciary. Orbán elevated her to the Constitutional Court a year later.

Control the media
One of the first things Orbán did after coming to power in 2010 was smother the voices of critics. A new media law ordered outlets to register with a media control body, whose members were appointed by parliament. The panel can impose fines of up to €1 million for “imbalanced news coverage”. News programs are not allowed to devote more than 20 percent of their airtime to crime stories. Journalists have been stripped of legal protection to keep their sources confidential.
The law was widely condemned, including by the European Parliament. It had little effect. Orbán’s government systematically dismantled the free press. The state pulled advertising from critical outlets, depriving them of income. Népszabadság, the biggest independent newspaper, was forced to shut down in 2016. Hundreds of private news media were simultaneously donated to a single holding company run by Orbán’s friends in 2018. Orbán barred regulators from scrutinizing the transaction, arguing it was in the “national interest”.

more at link
https://atlanticsentinel.com/2020/10/viktor-orbans-authoritarian-playbook/