by B. R. GOWANI

the Golden Globe Awards took place on January 5, 2025

actor/stand-up comedian Nikki Glaser hosted the event:

“So much has already happened in the first half and the acceptance speeches have been on fire. Who got shouted out the most? Let’s look at the numbers, alright: cast and crew are leading the way with 11 mentions; moms are holding strong with 3 shoutouts; God, creator of the Universe, zero mention; and Mario Lopez, host of Access Hollywood 1. Alright, no surprise in this Godless town.”

on Jan 7, 2025, certain neighborhoods in Los Angeles witnessed wildfires

the fire started in Pacific Palisades and spread to other neighborhoods

a mix of reasons are responsible for the fires:

climate change, Santa Ana winds, oversights, lack of preparedness, …

some religious believers jumped on Nikki Glaser’s zero mention of God

those who want to believe will believe, no matter what

they’re not going to check whether 2+3=4 or 2+1=4 or actually it is 2+2=4

strong belief could blur their reasoning power

it could also shut people off from realities

the believer has a strange way to prove God’s existence

they’ll connect a co-incidence to pass their judgement or prove a point

while ignoring dozens of tragedies being telecast live all over

the dots were easy for believers to connect

zero mention of God resulted in wildfires which burned so much of LA

some of the comments from the Youtube video comment section:

1, “God Zero Mention okay. 2 Days Later You Have Zero Mansion.”

2, “A day later, the most devastating fires in LA history scorched their high places.”

3, “God is NOT to be mocked. Two days later & everything is toasted. DO NOT MOCK GOD. Glory be to the MOST HIGH GOD. Praise Jesus.”

5, “Now Hollywood is on fire.”

5, “Hollywood, Firewood.”

6, “Her [sic] girl is the reason of burning of Los angels…”

a friend showed me a video of a Hindu woman saying a similar thing

here is another video

the believers believe that God is the creator of the Universe

most of them wouldn’t be aware of the vastness of the Universe

there are between hundreds of billions and two trillion galaxies

galaxies are of various sizes and averages about 100 million stars

Milky way is our galaxy; our Sun is one of the 100 to 400 million stars

we don’t yet know the size of our Universe & whether it’s finite or infinite

the universe is over 13,000,000,000 years old

apes are over 20,000,000 million years old

human beings, from the ape family, are over 315,000 years old

the oldest religion is about 4,000 years old

so God can’t be very old; we created God due to our needs

now God of such colossal Universe is not worried about

US/Israeli war in Gaza

violence in Sudan

US sanctions on Cuba (Biden removed it after 65 years)

Indian terror in Kashmir

…

but is so mad at Nikki Glaser that he turned portions of LA into hell

about 40,000 acres of businesses, landmarks, and homes got gutted

at least 25 people have lost their lives

12,000 structures have been destroyed

there is no such thing as God

let’s suppose there is a God

but then we have to remember that God does not interfere in our world

She, He, It, or whatever may be screwing some planet in another galaxy …

we have our small and big gods & goddesses, and the Supreme Deity

Modi, Melony, Pakistani army, Putin, Netanyahu, MbS, Taliban, and so on

not to forget the Supreme Deity Biden (soon to be replaced with Trump)

B. R. Gowani can be reached at brgowani@hotmail.com

by JOSEPH FAHIM

Director Alexis Bloom on her shocking documentary that links the war on Gaza to the corruption trial of Israel’s leader

Every year from October to December  Oscar contenders try to crack the US film market, hoping to secure a coveted Academy Award nomination. 

Millions of dollars are spent on PR campaigns as publicists scurry about, attempting to generate positive press coverage and court influential Oscar voters. Meanwhile across Los Angeles and New York, films big and small flood cinemas before the end of the year to secure the minimum number of screenings to qualify for awards eligibility.

But of the buzzed-about pics this year, one has been largely absent: The Bibi Files, the hair-raising documentary exposee about the corruption charges brought against Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli prime minister and recipient of an ICC arrest warrant. (He and his family have denied the allegations against them.)

Produced by Oscar- and Emmy-winning documentary director Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side, Going Clear: Scientology & the Prison of Belief) and directed by three-time Emmy-nominated film-maker Alexis Bloom (We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks), The Bibi Files enjoyed a thunderous bow at the Toronto Film Festival in September.

Gibney aspired to secure US theatrical distribution deals but they never materialised: instead the film screened for one week at the Laemmle Monica Film Center in southern California, where this writer watched it, and the IFC Center in New York. 

Numerous US media outlets have baulked from coverage: in December, Gibney said that “no mainstream outlet will show the film in the US”. Despite this, The Bibi Files made the shortlist of 15 documentaries that Oscar voters will now reduce to five nominations ahead of the awards ceremony on 3 March 2025.

In Israel itself, Netanyahu failed in his bid to ban The Bibi Files, although it is still not being screened. And while it’s starting to receive coverage in Europe, including in the UK, the US remains “nervous” as Bloom puts it.

Netanyahu under pressure

After only a few minutes, it becomes apparent why The Bibi Files has caused a stir. 

Netanyahu creeps onto the screen, sporting his signature sinister smirk – but something is distinctly different about his facial expressions and body language. There is a visible discomfort bogging him down. His demeanour reeks of restlessness. His familiar guise of confidence fails to conceal a palpable weakness; his quiet dread at a looming danger that constantly threatens to blow his cover. 

This is Netanyahu like you’ve never seen him before – and it’s a sight to behold.

The crux of the film is the never-seen-before police interrogation footage of Netanyahu, his wife, Sara and their eldest son, the ultra right-wing Yair. Other figures who are shown being questioned include Hollywood billionaire producer Arnon Milchan; Israeli-American billionaire Miriam Adelson; Israeli telecom mogul Shaul Elovitch; and Nir Hefetz, a former spokesman for Netanyahu. 

Middleeast Eye for more

by FRED LEWSEY

Conversational AI agents may develop the ability to covertly influence our intentions, creating a new commercial frontier that researchers call the “intention economy”.

Public awareness of what is coming is the key to ensuring we don’t go down the wrong pathJonnie Penn

The near future could see AI assistants that forecast and influence our decision-making at an early stage, and sell these developing ‘intentions’ in real-time to companies that can meet the need – even before we have made up our minds.

This is according to AI ethicists from the University of Cambridge, who say we are at the dawn of a “lucrative yet troubling new marketplace for digital signals of intent”, from buying movie tickets to voting for candidates. They call this the Intention Economy.

Researchers from Cambridge’s Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (LCFI) argue that the explosion in generative AI, and our increasing familiarity with chatbots, opens a new frontier of ‘persuasive technologies’ – one hinted at in recent corporate announcements by tech giants.

‘Anthropomorphic’ AI agents, from chatbot assistants to digital tutors and girlfriends, will have access to vast quantities of intimate psychological and behavioural data, often gleaned via informal, conversational spoken dialogue.

This AI will combine knowledge of our online habits with an uncanny ability to attune to us in ways we find comforting – mimicking personalities and anticipating desired responses – to build levels of trust and understanding that allow for social manipulation on an industrial scale, say researchers.

“Tremendous resources are being expended to position AI assistants in every area of life, which should raise the question of whose interests and purposes these so-called assistants are designed to serve”, said LCFI Visiting Scholar Dr Yaqub Chaudhary.

“What people say when conversing, how they say it, and the type of inferences that can be made in real-time as a result, are far more intimate than just records of online interactions”

“We caution that AI tools are already being developed to elicit, infer, collect, record, understand, forecast, and ultimately manipulate and commodify human plans and purposes.”

Dr Jonnie Penn, an historian of technology from Cambridge’s LCFI, said: “For decades, attention has been the currency of the internet. Sharing your attention with social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram drove the online economy.”

“Unless regulated, the intention economy will treat your motivations as the new currency. It will be a gold rush for those who target, steer, and sell human intentions.”

“We should start to consider the likely impact such a marketplace would have on human aspirations, including free and fair elections, a free press, and fair market competition, before we become victims of its unintended consequences.”

In a new Harvard Data Science Review paper, Penn and Chaudhary write that the intention economy will be the attention economy ‘plotted in time’: profiling how user attention and communicative style connects to patterns of behaviour and the choices we end up making.

“While some intentions are fleeting, classifying and targeting the intentions that persist will be extremely profitable for advertisers,” said Chaudhary.

In an intention economy, Large Language Models or LLMs could be used to target, at low cost, a user’s cadence, politics, vocabulary, age, gender, online history, and even preferences for flattery and ingratiation, write the researchers.

This information-gathering would be linked with brokered bidding networks to maximize the likelihood of achieving a given aim, such as selling a cinema trip (“You mentioned feeling overworked, shall I book you that movie ticket we’d talked about?”).

This could include steering conversations in the service of particular platforms, advertisers, businesses, and even political organisations, argue Penn and Chaudhary.

While researchers say the intention economy is currently an ‘aspiration’ for the tech industry, they track early signs of this trend through published research and the hints dropped by several major tech players.

These include an open call for ‘data that expresses human intention… across any language, topic, and format’ in a 2023 OpenAI blogpost, while the director of product at Shopify – an OpenAI partner – spoke of chatbots coming in “to explicitly get the user’s intent” at a conference the same year.

Nvidia’s CEO has spoken publicly of using LLMs to figure out intention and desire, while Meta released ‘Intentonomy’ research, a dataset for human intent understanding, back in 2021.

In 2024, Apple’s new ‘App Intents’ developer framework for connecting apps to Siri (Apple’s voice-controlled personal assistant), includes protocols to “predict actions someone might take in future” and “to suggest the app intent to someone in the future using predictions you provide”.

University of Cambridge for more

by BELEN FERNANDEZ

Twenty years ago this month, on December 10, 2004, former San Jose Mercury News investigative reporter Gary Webb died by apparent suicide, following a stretch of depression. The subject of the 2014 film Kill the Messenger, Webb had left the newspaper in 1997 after his career was systematically destroyed because he had done what journalists are supposed to do: speak truth to power.

In August 1996, Webb penned a three-part series for the Mercury News (8/18–20/96) that documented how profits from the sale of crack cocaine in Los Angeles in the 1980s had been funneled to the Contras, the right-wing, CIA-backed mercenary army responsible for helping to perpetrate, to borrow Noam Chomsky’s words, “large-scale terrorist war” against Nicaragua. At the same time, the crack epidemic had devastated Black communities in South Central LA—which meant that Webb’s series generated understandable uproar among Black Americans across the country.

But Webb’s revelations should hardly have been a newsflash. As FAIR’s Jim Naureckas (10/21/14) noted in a 2014 dispatch, the CIA was informed

as early as September 1981 that a major branch of the Contra “leadership had made a decision to engage in drug-smuggling to the United States in order to finance its anti-Sandinista operations,” according to the CIA inspector general’s report.

Not that the CIA was any stranger to drug-running—as indicated by, inter alia, a 1993 op-ed appearing in the New York Times (12/3/93) under the headline “The CIA Drug Connection Is as Old as the Agency.” The essay traced CIA ties to narco-trafficking back to the Korean War, while the Vietnam War reportedly saw heroin from a refining lab in Laos “ferried out on the planes of the CIA’s front airline, Air America.” The piece went on to emphasize that “nowhere…was the CIA more closely tied to drug traffic than it was in Pakistan” during the Afghan/Soviet war of 1979 to 1989.

Decade-long suppression of evidence

And yet, in spite of such established reality, Webb was subjected to a concerted assault by the corporate media, most notably the New York Times, Washington Post and LA Times, as detailed in a 1997 intervention by FAIR’s Norman Solomon (Extra!, 1–2/97). The media hit job relied heavily on denials from the CIA itself—as in “CIA Chief Denies Crack Conspiracy” (11/16/96), one of the examples cited by Solomon—which is kind of like saying that the bear investigated the sticky goo on his paws and determined that he was not the one who got into the honeypot. In December 1997, the same month Webb left the Mercury News after being discredited across the board and abandoned by his own editors, the New York Times (12/19/97) reassured readers that the “CIA Says It Has Found No Link Between Itself and Crack Trade.”

As Solomon argued, “The elite media’s attacks on the series were clearly driven by a need to defend their shoddy record on the Contra-cocaine story—involving a decade-long suppression of evidence” (Extra!, 7/87; see also 3–4/88). Time and again, the nation’s leading media outlets had buried or obstructed news suggesting Contra-cocaine links; Naureckas (10/21/14) pointed out that the Washington Post

ignored Robert Parry and Brian Barger’s groundbreaking AP article (12/20/85), which first revealed the involvement of Contras in drug-running, and then failed to follow up as smaller papers reported on Contra-related cocaine traffic in their backyards (In These Times, 8/5/87).

As a senior Time magazine editor acknowledged to Laurence Zuckerman, a staff writer whose 1987 story on Contra-related cocaine traffic was ultimately scrapped (Extra!, 11/91) : “Time is institutionally behind the Contras. If this story were about the Sandinistas and drugs, you’d have no trouble getting it in the magazine.”

Fairnes & Accuracy In Reporting for more

by VICTOR GROSSMAN

It’s reached that time again, a time to look forward but also, for an old geezer like me to look backward. Being 96 for a while yet (until March), I can permit myself some retrospection (while noting that those two digits, if only reversed and embodied, might well have been greatly preferable. Wot-the-hell, while I can still enjoy each new spring and fall and even a snowy winter (if I ever see one again), why shouldn’t I review the many happenings I observed or was part of the worst of them, luckily, from a distance. (But if you’ve read my “Crossing the River” or “A Socialist Defector” you can skip all that follows.)

I’m old enough to remember, just barely, the Great Depression: lines of shabby men waiting for free soup, better-dressed men selling apples on streetcorners, miles of evil-smelling, self-made shacks in a Hooverville near Newark. A few years later, with my cousin at Times Square, I recall collecting money to “Save Madrid!”—and admiring the Soviets for trying to help do just that, alone (with Mexico) for two years against all the other countries. (And, also largely alone, for bypassing the Depression, building the giant Dnepropetrovsk dam and the model Moscow marble subway stations at New York’s World Fair. In February 1937 I recall the movie newsreel with happy, unshaven sit-down strikers at GM in Flint, waving from the factory windows in a dramatic (Communist-led) victory which changed the USA.

And, in a friendly teacher’s room in September 1938, I recall hearing Hitler boast of seizing much of Czechoslovakia, with British and French compliance—and the tears of my Czech classmate Natalie. A year later, as the only lefty in my class at posh Dalton School, I did my 11-year-old best to convince classmates that Stalin had to sign the pact with Hitler to avoid being hit from all sides; Japan in the East, Germany in the West, with the acquiescence of Chamberlain and Daladier as in Spain and Munich, hoping they might wreck each other. “The USSR needs time to strengthen its defenses.”

I triumphed later when Pete Seeger, in one of his first concerts, had all the kids singing leftwing, CIO songs. June 1941, when the Wehrmacht stormed in, I felt sure the great USSR would smash them. It did, but only after years of sacrifice and slaughter, perhaps 27 million dead, untold destruction—while we in safe but darkened, rationed New York felt deep fear—and then enthusiasm as the tide turned.

Saddened and worried by the death of the only president I had ever known, I rejoiced at the photo of the GI-Red Army handshake on a broken Elbe bridge, not dreaming that, 25 years later, I would be commemorating that event at the bridge at Torgau.

Grateful that V-E Day against German y and V-J Day against Japan saved me , at 17, from the draft and the war—and from a fate like that of my cousin Jerry, taken prisoner at the Battle of the Bulge and, being Jewish, slaved till his death in a Buchenwald outlier camp in Thuringia. Spurred by Hiroshima-Nagasaki, post-war racist lynching and a big CIO strike offensive, I helped build a Communist Party branch at Harvard, covert in name but active against Jim Crow and in “Win the Peace” actions, like our anti-atomic weapons parade through staid Harvard Yard. In the summer of 1946 , in a lone hitchhike to California and back, I got to know more of my country’s many beauties—and many problems. I had a trip through France and wrecked Germany—and six wonderful weeks at the first World Youth Festival in Prague (1947), with anti-fascist partisan veterans from Europe, freedom fighters from Greece, Vietnam, Burma, Africa, and new friends from Tirana, Bucharest, Moscow, Capetown, Prague—and shared with thousands my hopes for a new-born world.

Monthly Review Online for more

by BEN NORTON

BRICS keeps expanding, adding partner countries in January 2025, after admitting new members in 2024. It now makes up roughly half of the global population and more than 41% of world GDP (PPP). It’s an economic powerhouse, with top producers of key commodities like oil, gas, grains, meat, and minerals.

Indonesia was admitted as a full member of BRICS on January 6, 2025. This was announced just two weeks after Russia had revealed that Indonesia was one of nine countries that were added as BRICS “partners”.

This means that BRICS now has 10 full members, consisting of the following:

• Brazil
• Russia
• India
• China
• South Africa
• Egypt
• Ethiopia
• Indonesia
• Iran
• United Arab Emirates

Joining the 10 BRICS members are eight partner countries that are on the path to full membership. These are:

• Belarus
• Bolivia
• Cuba
• Kazakhstan
• Malaysia
• Thailand
• Uganda
• Uzbekistan

The following is an updated map showing the members and partners of BRICS, as of January 7, 2025:

---

Original article (December 25, 2024):

BRICS, the Global South-led forum for economic cooperation, continues to grow in influence, as its seeks to de-dollarize and transform the international monetary and financial system.

…

The group is an economic powerhouse, including top producers of key commodities like oil, gas, grains, meat, and minerals.

Geopolitical Economy for more

by SIMON SPEAKMAN CORDALL

Ireland’s decision to join South Africa’s International Court of Justice (ICJ) case accusing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza continues to feed a diplomatic storm that, to many observers, has been years in the making.

On Monday, following Israel’s decision to close its embassy in Ireland, the newly appointed Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar lashed out at Ireland’s Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Simon Harris, accusing him of anti-Semitism. “There is a difference between criticism,” Saar said, “and anti-Semitism based on the delegitimisation and dehumanisation of Israel and double standards towards Israel as opposed to other countries. This is how Ireland allowed itself to behave towards Israel.”

Responding to the furore, Harris told reporters in Dublin that Ireland would not be silenced, stressing Ireland had remained consistent throughout the war in its support for Israel’s “right to defend itself” within the limits of international law.

However, “You know what I think is reprehensible?,” Harris caveated, “Killing children, I think that’s reprehensible. You know what I think is reprehensible? Seeing the scale of civilian deaths that we’ve seen in Gaza. You know what I think is reprehensible? People being left to starve and humanitarian aid not flowing.”

Al Jazeera for more

by RODRIGO DURAO COELHO

The historian and political analyst analyses some of the world’s main political events

One of the main topics of international news at the beginning of the new year is likely to be Donald Trump’s comeback to the White House. Even before taking up a new term heading the US, he has been causing controversy with a variety of threats: from “resolving” the Ukraine war in 24 hours, to the mass deportation of millions of migrants and seizing the Panama Canal.

One of his main threats is to surcharge products from other countries, in theory, to benefit US production. Punishing countries that stop using the US dollar for commercial transactions with sanctions is another variant of this threat.

“By now, 70% of developing countries around the world have US sanctions. What are they going to do? Sanction 100% of them? That would isolate the United States. I think we have to take some of these threats by Trump with a little less seriousness,” said Prashad.

To Indian historian Vijay Prashad, one of today’s most important Marxist thinkers, although he points out that the new US government must be terrible news for most nations, the billionaire’s threats shouldn’t be taken so seriously.

The Indian thinker was the last guest of BdF Entrevista in 2024. In the conversation, he reviews some of the main issues that were highlighted in the last year in the international news, such as the Venezuelan election and the US, the rise of the far right, the war in Ukraine and the genocide in Gaza, as well as climate change and artificial intelligence.

Watch the full interview (in English) and read the main topics below:

I’d like to take you through some of the most important events of 2024 that have made international news, starting with Venezuela. We had the election in Venezuela, whose result was contested by the opposition and by foreign countries, including the US and the European Union. What did you think?

The first thing I’d say is that countries that are in a situation of near war or war, it’s very difficult for them to hold an election. The immense sanctions campaign on Venezuela is effectively a war.

And I think it would be appropriate for the government to have held back on the election, frankly. There are enough experiences around the world to know that, when there is a situation like this, [it’s] very difficult to hold an election. The state apparatus was not working at full capacity, people are suffering and struggling, so many people have migrated out of the country.  

The sheer fact that a million of people have migrated out of Venezuela calls into question the ability of the Venezuelans to hold an election. So many of their embassies are understaffed and so on. Nonetheless, Venezuela went ahead with the election. Part of the reason for the election was the Barbados Agreement that the Venezuelan government have made with the opposition, brokered by the United States.

The US is desperate to get Venezuelan oil into Europe. Because of the sanctions on Russia, Europe is struggling to find energy. In fact, during 2022, the United States committed France and Italy to buy petroleum from Venezuela. There was a real hope that if the Barbados Agreement held, then Venezuelan il could enter Europe.

The election was, again, contested. It is always contested. The opposition has contested the election from the beginning of the Chávez era. That was to be expected. But then, the reaction of different countries was a little surprising. If the Europeans are desperate for Venezuelan oil, why would they then contest the election?

Particularly because they keep to trying to violate Venezuela’s sovereignty, saying, “Where are the papers? Show as the papers!” and so on. There is no obligation in Venezuela for anything to be published. In fact, the opposition candidate has to go to the government agency, the Central Election Council, and ask for a challenge. They never did because the opposition candidate [Edmundo González] ran off to Spain very shortly thereafter.  

Brasil de Fato for more

by JOHN MEYER

Mass Immigration is the most profitable business in Canada and the greatest driver of debt and inequality in the Western world.

Profitized growth sees the number and size of mortgages determining how much banks can make. The more there are and the bigger they are, the more banks rake in. Mass immigration is key to driving both bigger mortgages, through housing cost increases, and more mortgages via a bigger and always growing population.

Notice a trend? The top 2 categories are occupied by mass immigration profiteers. Banks and landlord had double the profits of the 8 productive industries on the list. Note also that the critical sectors of manufacturing and food production aren’t in the top 10. This reflects a rigged economy with the stability of a house-of-cards.

Mass immigration drives the demand for more mortgages and, at the same time, inflates housing costs and mortgage sizes.

The math of massive banking profits:
# of mortgages x the size of mortgages = size of profit

Welfare of Canadians? It isn’t in this equation.

The immense growth in mortgage debt as a consequence of immigration-driven population growth has followed the same pattern in many western countries, with Canada and Australia having the highest rates of population growth.  The American experience, and likely that of the UK, Europe, and Australia, mirrors that of Canada, as they all have the same elites and growth-before-all-else economic policies.

How to Kiss an Egalitarian Society Goodbye

Housing inflation does not generate wealth. It drives a transfer of wealth from those who produce it to those who accumulate it. In effect, it is very much a tax – a cost one cannot avoid. But instead of being funneled into public services and infrastructure, this money goes into the pockets of a very small elite. Taxation without representation or even acknowledgement that there is a tax.

The scale is unprecedented to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars annually in Canada and trillions of dollars over several decades. Bank profits are around $4000 per year per Canadian not including developer and speculator costs. This invisible tax funds unproductive wealthy domestic and foreign speculators.

Bernie Sanders makes this point in his short video on the $50 trillion Americans have lost to parasitic overhead.

• https://www.instagram.com/berniesanders/reel/DDIQuLqyXaK/
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SC4JpV-rW1M

As well, an article by Paul Constant “The wealthiest 1% has taken $50 trillion from working Americans” and redistributed it”, details the results from a study on housing inflation in the US and its effect on income distribution.

https://www.businessinsider.com/wealthiest-1-percent-stole-50-trillion-working-americans-what-means-2020-9

Why can’t young people get ahead and afford a house? Look no further than the impact of mass immigration. Canada’s cheap labour policy undermines productivity increases and real wage increases.

The combination of cheap labour and inflated housing costs is the perfect generator of inequality. Unsurprisingly, as the developed country with the highest rate of population growth over the past 5 decades, Canada’s equality level, once the second highest in the world, has plummeted to the mid-30s.

How does real estate inflation and debt suck the money from productive people even if they carry no debt? In just about every way imaginable.

The Inflation Tax: it isn’t just on housing

Margrit Kennedy’s research of several decades ago illustrates how the costs of debt and printed money spread out and permeate every aspect of our lives. How much this adds to inflation and inequality levels in different countries richly deserves to be made public with up-to-date analysis.

Sustainable Society for more