Slippin' into Darkness

You been slippin' into darkness, oh-oh-oh Pretty soon you're gonna pay, yeah

https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2024/11/20/where-life-and-freedom-stand/

Despite the game afoot PCR clings to Putin Peacemaker.,

Where Life and Freedom Stand

Where Life and Freedom Stand=excerpt

Paul Craig Roberts

I appreciate the confidence that readers show in me by their many emails asking if there really is to be war between the US and Russia and whether it is possible for Trump to achieve anything.  I cannot possibly answer  individually and continue to write and research for this website.  I try to anticipate questions and explain as clearly as I can in my postings.

Whether or not there will be war between the US and Russia depends on whether Washington continues its provocations of Russia. The latest provocation is the sending of missiles into a limited area of Russia.  This is risky and irresponsible, because the Russian government has stated that the missiles can be operated only by US and NATO personnel. Therefore, missile strikes inside Russia place the West at war with Russia.  This is especially serious, because recent changes in Russian war doctrine permit Russia to respond with nuclear weapons to any attack.  The nuclear response can be to the entire West, even if it was a conventional attack on Russia  by a US/NATO ally.

The danger of such a Russian response is mitigated by the fact that Russian President Putin is a humanitarian who does not want his rescue of the Donbas Russians from slaughter by the hostile Ukrainians to result in wider war.  Putin is unlikely to see the missile attack on Russia, which was defeated by Russian air defenses, as an excuse to teach Washington and Europe a lesson. Most certainly, Putin is not looking for an excuse to widen the war.  Widening the war is the purpose of the American Zionist Neoconservatives.  In the interest of not widening the war, Putin is likely to treat the provocation as merely a battlefield operation and not an attack on Russia herself.  The question is:  How much longer can Putin ignore Washington’s escalating attack on Russia?  Another relevant question is:  Will Putin’s ignoring of the latest provocation lead to another and another until the provocation is such that it cannot be ignored?

Agamben-November 19, 2024

Theatre and politics, as the ancients knew, are closely linked and it is unlikely that the theatre scene will be alive when the political one dies or disappears. And yet, in a country where politics now seems to be made up only of mummies who claim to direct their own exhumation, it was possible in recent days to attend in a small Venetian theatre a performance so full of life and intelligence that the spectators – as should always happen in the theatre – came away more aware and almost physically regenerated. Such a miracle did not happen by chance. Piermario Vescovo, in his exemplary knowledge of the history of theatre, lucidly resorted to a tradition that was apparently minor, but in truth, especially in Italy, certainly major, that of puppets. But he did it – and here is the novelty – by combining the presence of the bodies of six actresses with that of the puppets that they hold and move, so that between the living and the dead, between the imposing bodies of the actresses who act and the gaunt but no less present bodies of the puppets, an immeasurable exchange takes place, in which life passes incessantly in both directions and it is not clear in the end whether it is the actresses who move the puppets or the puppets who shake and animate the actresses. Nunzio Zappella, one of the last great Neapolitan puppeteers, showing his small, now worn-out Pulcinella once said: "he is my father!". Perhaps the mystery that takes place between the puppeteer and his puppet could not be defined more effectively. But Vescovo, brilliantly grafting Japanese bunraku onto the tradition of Italian comedy, has done more: he has transfigured a minor text by Goldoni (the Incognita – which had not been performed since the author's death) into something provocative and fiercely current. The lesson that can be drawn from this is that the collapse of every institution, not only political, that we are experiencing does not necessarily make us impotent: it is always possible to find in the past and preserve even in the most adverse conditions the vernalized seed that in due time will not fail to open up.