Trina's Kitchen: This and that

I usually take my lunch to work but was juggling a hundred and one things this morning and left it. Then a friend at work said she was ordering from Five Spices House and I ordered as well. I love Five Spices to begin with. But the food got here and we also got soup (I got tomato egg drop soup). It was the best lunch I'd had in forever. Yes, the food was great -- and it's always even better when someone else cooks. But it was just so great to eat with my friend and relax. Many lunches during the week, I'm working through. So this was the perfect Valentine's Day for lunch all by itself.

I've had Mike and Elaine and their daughter (my granddaughter) here for another week and it was fun sharing that with my friend at lunch today. It has been so much fun and I'm off Thursday and Friday to really spend fun time with my granddaughter. I didn't even take a vacation last year -- we're too short handed so I didn't. I was out sick for three days but that was it. (I also worked multiple shifts on Fridays starting during the morning and not ending until Saturday morning -- I'm a nurse.)

Okay, Jane Wise (WSWS) reports:

Autoworkers in Kentucky were outraged to learn of the deliberate voter suppression by the United Auto Workers bureaucracy during the first-ever direct election of top UAW officers by rank-and-file workers. The union and court-appointed UAW Monitor are currently conducting a runoff election between two longtime bureaucrats who were declared the two top vote getters in a first round of voting, which effectively excluded 90 percent of the membership.

Last week, supporters of Will Lehman, a Mack Trucks worker and a candidate for UAW president in the first round of voting, spoke with Ford workers in Louisville, Kentucky about the official protest Lehman filed, which challenges the results of the first round. The 50-page protest, filed with the court-appointed UAW Monitor on December 19, documents the UAW bureaucracy’s failure to update members’ mailing addresses and an extensive information blackout about the first round of the election.

Will’s official protest has prevented the results of the first election from being certified. That hasn’t stopped UAW officials and the monitor from continuing the runoff election between incumbent UAW president Ray Curry and UAW International Representative Shawn Fain—neither of whom garnered votes from more than 4 percent of the membership.

Kevin Reed also has an article worth checking out. WSWS hasn't had much of late -- last six days or so -- that's interested me. That might be because I have family visiting. I don't think so though. I'm glad Kevin and Jane's articles went up. They're strong articles and this is the 25th anniversary of WSWS -- another article that went up late last night.

This is C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot" for Thursday:

Tuesday, February 14, 2023. The 20th anniversary to a massive global protest is tomorrow, a faux action loses their convicted pedophile speaker but still remains too toxic for most people to get on board with, toxic is what Iraq's become as a result of the never-ending wars, and much more.

Dr Gideon Polya (COUNTERCURRENTS) reports:

On the weekend encompassing Friday 14 February to Sunday 16 February 2003 in Australia, coordinated mass protests against the impending Iraq War occurred around the world in over 600 cities. This global mass protest was described as the largest protest event in human history. According to the BBC 6-10 million people protested in a total of about 60 countries. In Italy the Rome protest involved about 3 million people, and in Spain the protest in Madrid involved 1.5 million people.

On Friday 14 February the protesters totalled 150,000 people in my city Melbourne (I and family were there with highly visible black on white STOP WAR placards). On 16 February 250,000 people protested in Sydney, and 100,000 in Brisbane. About 600,000 demonstrated against the impending Iraq War in cities around Australia [1-5]. Between January 3 and April 12, 2003, 36 million people across the world globe participated in some 3,000 protests against the Iraq War [5].

(A). The ongoing carnage anti-war demonstrators unsuccessfully tried to stop in 2003.

The 2003 invasion of Iraq War was conceived by the war criminal Americans as part of the absurdly named post-9/11 US War on Terror that in horrible reality became a genocidal War on Muslims from West Africa to South East Asia. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 was presaged by 13 years of crippling Sanctions and US, UK and Apartheid Israeli bombing that devastated Iraq in the period 1990-2003. The US had “greenlighted” the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990 but as soon as the invasion occurred the serial invader America and its allies turned on Iraq – 200,000 Iraqis perished in the 1990-1991 Gulf War and an estimated 1.7 million Iraqis (mostly children ) perished under genocidal Sanctions that devastated a formerly prosperous Arab country that had a secular administration.

The “excuses” for invasion of Sanctions- and bombing-crippled Iraq in 2003 were utterly false. No Iraqis were involved in the 9/11 atrocity in 2001 according to the “official lying Bush conspiracy theory about 9/11”. However the US and UK governments presented their people and the world with utterly false assertions about Iraqi support for Al Qaeda terrorists (the opposite was true, with the secular Iraqi regime being opposed to Islamist terrorists), and with falsely alleged Iraqi possession of “Weapons of Mass Destruction” (WMDs) that after the conquest of Iraq were simply not found. The invasion of Iraq by US, UK and Australian forces formally commenced on about 20 March 2003. The already economically and militarily devastated Iraqis having no air force, no navy and no defence industry were quickly defeated by the genocidal US Alliance “shock and awe” tactics.

Nevertheless Indigenous resistance continued. The Iraqi leader Saddam Hussain was hunted down and killed (the same fate befell Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi after the France-UK-US (FUKUS) Alliance invaded and destroyed Libya) [6, 7]. The US Alliance mostly left devastated Iraq in 2011 having installed a Shia-dominated government to their liking. The subsequent Sunni revolt gave rise to the Islamist ISIS and thence the excuse for the return of the US Alliance to further devastate Iraq, and to also wreck and Balkanize Syria [6-20]. Fallujah (the City of Mosques) was destroyed in the Iraq War but was again besieged and devastated a second time by the barbaric Americans in the subsequent war on the barbaric ISIS insurgents [17-19]. The western half of the huge city of Mosul was destroyed by the US Alliance together with the lives of 40,000 of the residents (pre-war Mosul population 2 million) [19].

The Iraq War and the Syrian War continue. The US has a large number of temporary military bases in Iraq, mostly a type of forward operating base (FOB), plus 2 major airbases [21]. In January 2020, the Iraqi PM, the Iraqi Parliament and the Speaker demanded that the US Alliance forces leave Iraq. The US, UK, Australia, Canada and Germany rejected the Iraqi Parliament’s Quit Iraq demand, with the US threatening to instantly collapse what was left of the Iraqi economy by a banking freeze if Iraq insisted on US Alliance withdrawal from its territory [22]. Syria is largely held by the Syrian Government with the help of Russia. However Turkiye occupies a northern strip, US-backed rebels occupy a north western enclave, Kurdish forces occupy a north eastern region, ISIS remnants still exist, Apartheid Israel has illegally annexed the Syrian Golan Heights, and the US illegally maintains a major base in Syria. The active and passive killing of Iraqis and Syrians by the US and Apartheid Israel continues. Despite the immense earthquake horrors in north east Syria, the US and its allies maintain deadly sanctions against war- and earthquake-devastated Syria. Apartheid Israel continues to routinely bomb Syria and Iraq. Indeed Apartheid Israel tried to broker a Ukraine-Russia peace deal to bolster Russian cooperation over Israeli warplanes in Syria but this was scotched by the genocidal US [24].

Tomorrow is the anniversary of the massive, worldwide protests against the Iraq War. You had people taking to the streets and making a huge statement. You had people like Janeane Garofalo, Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins, Harry Belafonte, Danny Glover, Jane Fonda, Ani DiFranco and many others speaking out and being attacked for it. And Meg Ryan. She got trashed by Al The Pig Franken. His embarrassment of a radio show needed guests because Randi Rhodes was outdoing him daily on AIR AMERICA. So he gets Meg to be a guest while he's doing a show on a college campus. Meg calls out the war and says the troops need to come home. Al grins and chuckles and as soon as she's gone explains on air that she's just too stupid -- unlike him -- to know about stuff like war. He was a piece of filth ahead of the war, by the way, urging Democrats in Congress to vote for the authorization.

Hans Blix, Clare Short and Tony Benn may be names from the past for many people in Britain but the wider world has not moved on from the war they tried to prevent in Iraq, says the filmmaker Amir Amirani, and neither has he.

After spending nine years interviewing such people for his film We Are Many, about the global anti-war marches on February 15, 2003, Amirani is still engrossed in the topic: working on a release in America, thinking of writing a book, and developing an offshoot project he is keeping under wraps for now.

Tim Stickings (THE NATIONAL) reports:

There were many brave people speaking out -- most are forgotten especially by the idiots propping up registered sex offender Scott Ritter. I hit campuses starting in February of 2003, one month ahead of the war, filling in for a friend who got a more prominent campus speaking gig and needed to do that to reach a larger audience. I was asked to fill in and I did that for years and years until the pandemic hit. My point in raising that now is I never even heard of Scott Ritter until long after the war began. He was not the brave voice everyone thinks he was. He wasn't, for example, Katharine Gun -- but don't they try to rewrite history and make him that.

And on the rewriting of history: Sy Hersh. I have a long history of him and I noted that when I reviewed his bad book here. If you're late to the party, you can read Elaine's "Seymour Hersh" for a primer. And, yes, I know it and Coretta knew it, that Sy was feeding information about us and others to his government sources in exchange for tidbits. He's a snitch. And I love how his 'greatest hits' being listed currently never acknowledge the reality that he had many, many 'scoops' implode over the years. He's only as good as his source because he's just a stenographer. The JFK book really damaged his legacy -- but don't expect the political equivalent of twinks to know about that. We should all know that he pimped the narrative that Seth Rich was murdered not in a robbery but for leaking to WIKILEAKS.

Was Seth murdered by the DNC or the government? I have no idea but my guess would be no. Until Sy starts appearing on shows dropping crumbs here and there. The fact that he's doing that means it may be true. Or it could be a bad source. Again, Sy is not an investigative reporter. He writes what he is told. That's all he's ever done. Some sources are solid and some are not.

It's a shame that the shallow are so shallow yet so convinced that they learned something.

Real actions took place 20 years ago today.

The Scott Ritter fan club is not holding a real action in DC.

Black Alliance for Peace issued the following:

The Final Deathblow to Imperialism Will Only Come Under The Leadership of The Organized Colonized Masses

Efforts to marginalize, disregard, and erase the presence of radical Black-, Brown-, and Indigenous-led anti-imperialist organizations, as well as our political positions, is proving to be endemic to the politics of too many who consider themselves radical anti-imperialist and anti-war activists. For this reason, the Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) reiterates that the peoples who bear the brunt of the brutal and lethal practices of U.S. imperialism are at the forefront of the struggle to dismantle the global system of white supremacist, patriarchal capitalism.

The colonized within the U.S. settler state see more clearly than the privileged the holistic nature of the system as well as the interdependencies between our domestic repression and U.S. wars abroad. Some forces that claim to be anti-war have an unsophisticated understanding of peace.

We understand that peace is not the absence of conflict, but rather the achievement, by popular struggle and self-defense, of a world liberated from the interlocking issues of global conflict, nuclear armament, and unjust war. A condition for real peace is the defeat of global systems of oppression that include colonialism, imperialism, patriarchy and white supremacy. Anyone with genuine concern for the well-being of humanity and the planet should be deeply concerned that some supposed “leftist” forces consider it easier to find common cause with right wing libertarian forces than with the Black radical movement, as BAP Coordinating Committee member Jacqueline Luqman writes in this Black Agenda Report piece.

And as Chair of the BAP Coordinating Committee, Ajamu Baraka points out:

“The white left in the U.S. is deeply delusional. Elements of the left actually believe a radical movement leading to revolutionary change will be led by white activists with Black & colonized people as backdrops. #AntiWarSoWhite”

We cannot afford any confusion, complicity, silence, or outright collaboration with some “liberal/left” forces on armed intervention into Haiti, the reactionary role of NATO, the intensification of state repression in the United States, the plight of the working class being subjected to an induced recession, and austerity. For BAP, all of these contradictions reaffirm why it is absolutely necessary for colonized people to be organized or face an inescapable subjugation and eventual annihilation. The comfortable will dismiss this as hyperbole.

We—the colonized, the exploited, the oppressed—are in the midst of a war. It is clear that the colonial-capitalist rulers will continue to deceive, mislead and co-opt to maintain their dominance. Our responsibility in opposition is to keep the focus on the imperialists and not be confused by the machinations of their supporters. That task and responsibility will continue to inform our work in 2023.

At SOCIALIST ACTION, Jeff Mackler also called the faux action out.

It's amazing to look at these people -- THE CONVO COUCH, for example -- and note that they've been willing to spend years now rescuing the right-wingers, defending the hate merchants to build up to this moment. They claim to be left but that time wasn't used to defend transgender people, for example, or to reach out to the left. Mabye tht's because they'd need to do real work for that. And, check out RT when Fiorella's on and you'll see she does no real work. She just goes on air, Russia's own Judith Miller, and 'reports' by saying, "Russian intelligence has learned . . ."

Get your cash however you can, Fiorella, but be a smart whore: Get it up front. Customer's always going to want to pay you less after he shoots his wad.

"Russian intelligence has learned"?

What a propagandist.

And I've defended her. She has every right to work for RT. But when that's what she's 'reporting' -- spitting back out what a government -- any government -- has fed her? She's a propagandist and I look at her with the same disgust I would if she were reporting for a US channel and saying, "The CIA has learned . . ."

They're idiots, this group of people.

They aren't going to sway anyone with her being seen as Tokyo Rose and registered sex offender Scott Ritter being their cause celebre. Yes, at the end of last week, Scott Ritter finally took a hint and dropped out. Though there are rumors that he will show up and speak as a 'surprise guest.' Parents, protect your daughters.

But this is what it came to. Fiorealla and other embarrassments and they're going to do something major. No.

They're bringing on homophobes, on a FOX NEWS personality who FOX fired because of complaints from young men that the judge was harassing them, they're a disgusting group of people.

And no one's going to take you seriously when you're putting on a White man convicted and sent to prison for being a pedophile.

White privilege is what kept Scott out of prison the first two times he was arrested for being a pedophile. He was able to whine to the people he met while working for the UN and they wrote character letters insisting that Scott was wonderful and this was a momentary lapse of judgement.

The third arrest didn't work out for him.

No man of color would have been able to avoid prison on two arrests for pedophilia but White Scott Ritter did.

And maybe that glorification of Scott by the group is really the glorification of White which is why it's a White Power 'action.'

You're putting people on the stage who attack Civil Rights, who attack LGBTQ+ persons, who attack women's right (including with regards to reproductive health) and you want to build that coalition. It's not going to build for you. Even if you hadn't spent weeks promoted pedophile Scott Ritter, it still wouldn't work. Hate merchants are not the answer, they never are.

But the Jimmy Dores can't get accepted among the left so they'll be a face of the left for the extreme right. That's how they'll earn their bread and butter, as trained monkeys doing the tricks that they were taught.

Tara Reade will be there -- in all her girth and non-glory. Marcia noted last night, "In other news, the ultimate Karen -- Tara Reade -- is now reTweeting Marjorie Taylor Greene. Tara, we knew you were ugly and fat, we just did not know you were also a homophobe."

There's a reason that the so-called left speaking at this event don't speak out against the hate campaigns the extreme right launches -- they agree with them. They would rather be around their friends and fellow-thinkers than defend the LFBTQ+ community. Tara has destroyed her own reputation. Some day they should make a movie out of her -- it would be a non-stop laugh riot.

We'll wind down with this from THE BRITISH MEDICAL JOURNAL:

The combination of destroyed health care infrastructure, medicine shortages, limited resources, high levels of heavy metal contamination, and poor sanitation is likely to blame, they argue.

Antibiotic resistance, or AMR for short, is rising globally at an alarming rate and is expected to cause 10 million deaths a year by 2050, if nothing is done about it, point out the authors.

Largely attributed to the overuse and misuse of antibiotics, attention is now turning to other factors, such as heavy metals and disinfectants containing quaternary ammonium compounds (QACs), which are widely used in the health care and hospitality sectors.

War has been implicated in the emergence of AMR as far back as the 1940s, but has received little attention, say the authors.

Iraq is a stellar example of this neglect, as the country has experienced a sequence of conflicts since the 1980s that have coincided with the emergence and spread of pathogens with specific patterns of antibiotic resistance, they highlight.