Latest articles
by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead / January 24th, 2024
In a closed society where everybody’s guilty, the only crime is getting caught.
— Hunter S. Thompson
According to the FBI, you may be an anti-government extremist if you’ve:
a) purchased a Bible or other religious materials,
b) used terms like “MAGA” and “Trump,”
c) shopped at Dick’s Sporting Goods, Cabela’s, or Bass Pro Shops,
d) purchased tickets to travel by bus, cars, or plane,
e) all of the above.
In fact, if you selected any of those options in recent years, you’re probably already on a government watchlist.
That’s how broadly the government’s net is being cast in its pursuit of domestic extremists.
We’re all fair game …
Scott Morrison Departs
by Binoy Kampmark / January 24th, 2024
His type should never be seen again. Born from the dark well of swill and advertising, former Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison was always the apotheosis of politics’ worst tendencies: shallow form, public service for private interest, and, ultimately, the scrap for survival at the expense of the grand vision. Get the vote, keep the seat. Get the party in, forget the intellectual or social picture. Bugger the broader society with a hefty stick, sod the beastly populace, betray your colleagues and everybody else besides: there is only me, Scomo, the man who will reliably fail you at every turn …
by Greg Godels / January 23rd, 2024
The US corporate media has maintained a near unanimous support for the Israeli destruction of Gaza – the home of 2.2 million Palestinians. While pundits engage in parlor games over what degree of violence is “justified” by the Hamas attack upon Israel, while public intellectuals fall in line with the gutless unconditional support of Israeli punitive actions, tens of thousands of Palestinian people – largely men, women, and children going about their day-to-day lives– have been killed, maimed, wounded, or terrorized.
Corruption, racism, and cowardice come together to produce a rare near-total US ruling-class consensus behind the brutal action of the …
What can be done?
by Nayvin Gordon / January 23rd, 2024
There have always been some people who believe that they are entitled to rule over the rest of humanity. This is because human behavior is driven by emotions. Decades of research has demonstrated this truth. Human nature is, for the vast majority, powered by empathy and concern for the common good. There are some whose nature can be described as aggressively assertive, dominating, and driven by selfishness, greed, and power.
The anthropologist, Douglas P. Fry comments, “ Social stratification and resulting positions of leadership open the door for a plethora of injustices and cruelties that come with warfare, slavery, and other …
Temperature and repression of dissent are on the rise around the world. In Italy, right-wing government forces are now branding nonviolent eco-activists as terrorists
by Alexandria Shaner / January 23rd, 2024
Rivers turn green to denounce the failure of COP28. Banners: The government speaks, the earth sinks. | XR Italia – 9 Dec 2023
Rome, Venice, Milan, Turin, Bologna, & Bari, Italy
In a dimly lit room at the back of a little independent bookstore, two dangerous radicals, members of the notorious Green Mafia, plot against the fossil-capital regime:
Johnny Frontline: [panicking] “Godfather, I don’t …
by Allen Forrest / January 23rd, 2024
Since 2014 the U.S. has become the world’s “top oil and natural
gas liquids” producer (2022: 19.1 million barrels per day). It even
leads Saudi Arabia and Russia so it’s no longer dependent on Mideast
oil.
by Barbara G. Ellis / January 23rd, 2024
When my husband and I were flying to Beirut, Lebanon to co-edit the English-language Daily Star, we noticed our tickets were paid by ARAMCO (since 1988, “Saudi Aramco,” then one of the world’s largest American oil companies. That was a factor the publisher somehow neglected to explain, along with the pro-West bias of this influential and major Arabic newspaper chain. Not long after, we took a bomb in the lobby that shook the building, but no one was killed.
Having then just departed from two years in Tulsa—he on the World, me, as a journalism professor—we were well aware of …
by Binoy Kampmark / January 23rd, 2024
So much for that. Much had been promised by Florida Governor Ron De Santis to derail Donald Trump’s bid to return to the White House. But the attempt to wrest the Republican Party from the orange ogre’s meaty, waving hands was never convincing. In the end, DeSantis was more stumbler than balancer, a woeful mismatch before the forces he never staved off.
While he made his name fluorescent bright in Florida’s politics, launching attacks on Disney, skirmishing with public health officials regarding pandemic measures, and railing against minorities (LGBTQ youth figured highly), he seemed awkward away from the swamp. On the …
by Eric Zuesse / January 23rd, 2024
The U.S. regime carries out its oppression by coercion, and by delay and outright suppression of news-reporting about the key facts of the case. It does this both in domestic matters and in international ones, as will here be exemplified first by the example of an innocent man who was framed by the U.S. regime and given a life sentence in a murder-case, and then by the example of the deeply corrupted Ukrainian nation which was grabbed by the U.S. regime in a February 2014 U.S. coup …
The US, China, and Taiwan context
by Kim Petersen / January 22nd, 2024
In an online video interview, libertarian judge Andrew Napolitano asked University of Chicago political scientist and international relations professor John Mearsheimer to “translate” president Xi’s remarks in his New Year speech.
The professor answered, “There is no question that the Chinese want Taiwan back. They want to make Taiwan part of China…. There is also no question that the Taiwanese don’t want to be part of China. They want to be a sovereign state. These are two irreconcilable goals.”
First, it must be stated that …
by Allen Forrest / January 22nd, 2024
It describes what kind of government?
by Ralph Nader / January 22nd, 2024
A teacher once said to me: “A society pays for what it values.” If so, our society values commercial entertainment, including spectator sports, orders of magnitude more than it values civics defined as the rights and duties exercised by citizens in a democracy.
What if we lived in a society that valued both equally?
1. Possibly the most visible event would be an annual Academy of Civic Heroes Awards viewed by tens of millions of people. The glitter would shine not on the winner’s wardrobes, but on their victories of justice and on …
by Abahlali baseMjondolo / January 22nd, 2024
Abahlali baseMjondolo commend the outstanding work by the South African legal team at the International Court of Justice in Hague. Many of us watched with great pride as our brilliant legal team stood in front of the world to protect humanity and end the devastating attacks against the people of Gaza that have led to the loss of more than 23 000 lives, including more than 8 000 children.
We do not see the importance of this case as being restricted to proving to the ICJ that the Israeli state is committing genocide. It is also a statement of conscience to …
by Visualizing Palestine / January 22nd, 2024
Last week, as the International Court of Justice heard South Africa’s case of genocide against Israel, we put the scale of the atrocities in perspective by visualizing how many buses it would take to carry the Palestinian children killed by Israeli forces in Gaza. We dedicated this visual to Dunia Abu Mohsen, whose first name means “world” in Arabic, and whose time in this world was cruelly cut short by genocide.
Special thanks to Hadeel Saalok for collaborating with us …
How is it that journalists are not pausing to question the outrageous improbability of so many of the evidence-poor Hamas rape stories being advanced?
by Jonathan Cook / January 21st, 2024
Speech by Hezbollah Secretary General, Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, on January 3, 2024, on the commemoration of the 4th anniversary of the assassinations of Qassem Soleimani and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis
by Sayed Hassan Nasrallah / January 20th, 2024
[…] I now come to the third part of my remarks, devoted to Operation “Al-Aqsa Flood”. This operation was launched on October 7 by our brothers from the Izz al-Dine al-Qassam Brigades (Hamas’ armed wing), and our brothers from Islamic Jihad and other Palestinian factions joined them. The causes which led to this operation were recalled by the leaders of our brothers of Hamas, (Islamic) Jihad and other factions of the Resistance, and I myself spoke about it in detail in a previous speech, namely everything concerning the oppression of the Palestinian people for 75 years, the issue of the …
The destruction has just begun
by Dan Lieberman / January 20th, 2024
Each genocide has its characteristics; the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people has unique characteristics that make it more dangerous than atrocities that damaged previous populations. Starting from the day that a Zionist stepped on Palestinian land, the machinery for the eventual genocide was being prepared. Failure of international organizations to take necessary precautions, even after Zionist intentions became clarified, led to the present daily toll of loss of life and loss of will to live. No mechanism is apparent to prevent the eventual denouement. A careless world has been unable to react to a major destruction of innocent people …
by Allen Forrest / January 20th, 2024
by Yves Engler / January 19th, 2024
While it’s near impossible to sidestep nationalist, imperialist and supremacist ideas, “leftists” should at least not promote prevailing anti-Palestinian ideological strictures. Despite the horrors Israel’s unleashed in Gaza, some who ‘stand with Palestine’ still prioritize Jewish sensitivities over opposing Canadian support for genocide.
In a hundred days 30,000 Palestinians have been killed, 60,000 seriously injured and 2 million displaced in Gaza. Half a million in Gaza are facing famine conditions and basically everyone is hungry. If Israeli-imposed hunger, disease and lack of medical care persists hundreds of thousands may end up dying. And the state perpetrating this genocide has long …
by Binoy Kampmark / January 19th, 2024
Israel has been given enormous license to control the security narrative in the Middle East for decades. This is not to say it is always in control of it – the attacks of October 7 by Hamas show that such control is rickety and bound, at stages, to come undone. What matters for Israeli security is that certain neighbours always understand that they are never to do certain things, lest they risk existential oblivion.
For instance, no Middle Eastern state will be permitted to acquire nuclear weapons on the Jewish State’s watch. Nuclear reactors and facilities will be struck, infected, or …
by Robert Hunziker / January 19th, 2024
The ultimate consequences of global warming are difficult to truly understand by the public, policymakers and by pretty much everybody. In their hearts, they do not want to believe it’ll cause an extinction event. That’s simply too hard to believe, going too far. People cannot wrap their minds around the idea that civilization, poof, is gone. After all, extinctions are not features of human civilization. Or are they?
Archeologists tell us otherwise. Climate change and natural disasters have led advanced civilizations into utter ruin, extinction events. The Mayan Civilization, population 7-10 million, skilled as advanced astronomers that built elaborate cities without …
by B.J. Sabri / January 19th, 2024
It was not surprising that the U.S.’s earsplitting anti-Russian uproar has recently slowed down considerably. Israel’s Zionist genocidal war on the Palestinian people entrapped in Gaza (occupied first in 1967, and then totally blockaded since 2005) stole the limelight. The momentary slowdown gave Russia some breathing time, and the U.S. a possible way out of the mess it had engineered. Irrespective of Russian voices claiming the conflict has “Entered its endgame”, or American declarations talking about a “Negotiated settlement”, the conflict continues unabated.
Let us assume that Russia would accept withdrawing from Donbass in exchange for Ukraine meeting all …
by Edward Curtin / January 19th, 2024
You have to hand it to the U.S. and its henchmen for brazenness. In order to protect their client state Israel and its genocide in Gaza, the U.S., together with the UK, have in one week launched air and sea attacks on the Houthis in Yemen five times, referring to it as “self-defense” in their Orwellian lingo. The ostensible reason being Yemen’s refusal to allow ships bound for Israel, which is committing genocide in Gaza, to enter the Red Sea, while permitting other ships to pass freely.
To any impartial observer, the Houthis should be lauded. Yet, while the International …
Movies, Music, Sports and Politics
by Bruce Lerro / January 19th, 2024
Orientation
Questions about fame and celebrity
What does it mean to be famous? Does being famous go all the way back to hunter-gatherers or does it have an origin later in history? What does it mean to be a celebrity? Is it common in all societies or do celebrities emerge at a certain point in history? What is the relationship between being famous and being a celebrity? Are these terms interchangeable or are they distinct phenomenon? What fame and celebrity have in common is that they involve relations that are not:
Everyday
Kin-based
…
The Third Newsletter (2024)
by Vijay Prashad / January 19th, 2024
Tarek al-Ghoussein (Palestine), Untitled 9 from the series Self Portrait, 2002.
On 11 January, Adila Hassim, an advocate of the High Court of South Africa, stood before the judges of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and said: “Genocides are never declared in advance. But this court has the benefit of the past 13 weeks of evidence that shows incontrovertibly a pattern of conduct and related intention that justifies a plausible claim of genocidal acts”. This statement anchored Hassim’s presentation of South Africa’s 84-page complaint against …
by Allen Forrest / January 19th, 2024
Even though the science is casting a dark cloud on the promoters of a COVID pandemic, they still hang on to their refuted hypothesis.
Israeli army ‘ethics’ chief says crimes committed by soldiers against Israel’s own civilians are ‘horrifying’. How is this not newsworthy for British journalists?
by Jonathan Cook / January 19th, 2024
The Israeli Haaretz newspaper interviewed this week the army’s “ethics” chief, Asa Kasher, of Tel Aviv university, about two major incidents on October 7:
1. An Israeli commander ordered a tank to fire into a home in Kibbutz Be’eri knowing that there were 14 Israeli civilians inside, incinerating them.
2. Israeli helicopters fired missiles at dozens of cars with Israeli hostages inside, killing the inhabitants, again often by incinerating them.
In both cases, the official Israeli narrative is that Hamas was responsible for these “barbaric” acts, supposedly justifying the genocide Israel is carrying out – “in response” – against the civilian …
by Media Lens / January 18th, 2024
I find Westerners in general, and Europeans in particular, extremely indoctrinated and obsessed with perceptions of their own uniqueness. Many see themselves as chosen people, after going through a one-sided education and after relying on their media outlets, without studying alternative sources.
— André Vltchek, Soviet-born US political writer, 1963-2020.
On 20 March 2006, on the third anniversary of the illegal invasion of Iraq, BBC diplomatic correspondent Bridget Kendall declared on the Six O’Clock News:
‘There’s still bitter disagreement over invading Iraq. Was it justified or a disastrous miscalculation?’
The supposed ‘justification’ claimed by Prime …
by Binoy Kampmark / January 18th, 2024
On February 20, Julian Assange, the daredevil publisher of WikiLeaks, will be going into battle, yet again, with the British justice system – or what counts for it. The UK High Court will hear arguments from his team that his extradition to the United States from Britain to face 18 charges under the Espionage Act of 1917 would violate various precepts of justice. The proceedings hope to reverse the curt, impoverished decision by the remarkably misnamed Justice Jonathan Swift of the same court on June 6, 2023.
At this point, the number of claims the defence team can make are potentially …
by Ellen Brown / January 17th, 2024
Reading the tea leaves for the 2024 economy is challenging. On January 5th, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said we have achieved a “soft landing,” with wages rising faster than prices in 2023. But critics are questioning the official figures, and prices are still high. Surveys show that consumers remain apprehensive.
There are other concerns. On December 24, 2023, Catherine Herridge, a senior investigative correspondent for CBS News covering national security and intelligence, said on “Face the Nation,” “I just feel a lot of concern that 2024 may be the year of a black swan event. This is a national security …
