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Did Santayana reveal the way of the crystal ball?

Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.  The now departed chief executive of the National Rifle Association of America (NRA) should know.  Wayne LaPierre’s time had come to resemble a dictatorship in a hurry, pinching the silver and stomping on the dissenters on its way out.  Allegations were already being made at the NRA’s annual meeting in Indianapolis in 2019, many barbed with the question as to where money from donors was actually going.

There were, for instance, LaPierre’s said suit purchases from the Zegna store in Beverly Hills between 2004 and 2017 amounting to a head shaking $274,695.03, for which …

[The following is a sequel to Sir Henry Kissinger: Midwife to New Babylon]

We had run up against the Judeo-Christian commitment to one God, one religion, one reality, that has cursed Europe for centuries and America since our founding days. Drugs that open the mind to multiple realities inevitably lead to a polytheistic view of the universe. We sensed that the time for a new humanist religion based on intelligence, good natured pluralism and scientific paganism had arrived.

If the International Court of Justice rules that Israel has committed, and is committing, genocide, will it save Gaza? On January 11-12 the ICJ (AKA the World Court) will hear the petition  brought to it by South Africa. Specialists in International law Francis Boyle and (independently) Daniel Machover firmly believe that this is how the ICJ will rule, and that it will invoke the requirement that all 152 countries belonging to the genocide convention – including Israel and the US – must comply by desisting (in the case of Israel) …

They are unlikely to be revelatory, will shatter no myths, nor disprove any assumptions.  Cabinet documents exist to merely show that a political clique – the heart of the Westminster model of government, so to speak – often contain the musings of invertebrates, spineless on most issues such as foreign policy, while operating at the behest of select interests.  Hostility to originality is essential since it is threatening to the tribe; dissent is discouraged to uphold the order of collective cabinet responsibility.

The recent non-story arising from the cabinet documents made available as to why Australia participated in a murderous, …

Not every person scoops up after his dog.

Antarctica has finally succumbed to rapid climate change. This past year (2023) brought changes to the icy continent that left climate scientists feeling a “punch in the gut.” (“Red Alert in Antarctica: The Year Rapid Dramatic Change Hit Climate Scientists Like a “Punch in the Guts“, The Guardian, December 30, 3023.)

Antarctic sea ice cover crashed for six months straight to a level so far below anything else on the satellite record that scientists struggled for adjectives to describe what they were witnessing.

Global warming’s impact on Antarctica is serious, dangerous, threatening, hard to believe, and maybe unstoppable. Warnings like this, but …

AUKUS, the trilateral pact between the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia, was a steal for all except one of the partners.  Australia, given the illusion of protection even as its aggressive stance (acquiring nuclear-powered submarines, becoming a forward base for the US military) aggravated other countries; the feeling of superiority, even as it was surrendering itself to a foreign power as never before, was the loser in the bargain.

Last month, Australians woke up to the sad reminder that their government’s capitulation to Washington has been so total as to render any further talk about independence an embarrassment.  Their …

The killing of an Australian-Lebanese national Ibrahim Bazzi, his Lebanese wife Shorouq Hammoud, and his brother Ali Bazzi by the Israeli Defence Forces in a missile strike in southern Lebanon, has been an object exercise in selective outrage, selective ethical concern, and, generally speaking, selective morality.

The strike took place on a home in the neighbourhood of Al-Dawra in the town of Bint Jbeil, said to belong to the Bazzi family.  On paper, the case demands investigation, explanation, even reparation.  But the Australian government has pounced on an opportunity to ignore the killing of Ibrahim and his wife – both civilians …

The rarely discussed war.

Starting in the mid-20th century, companies began distorting and manpulating science to favor specific commercial interests.

Big tobacco is both the developer and the poster child of this strategy. When strong evidence that smoking caused lung cancer emerged in the 1950s, the tobacco industry began a campaign to obscure this fact.

The Unmaking of Science

The tobacco industry scientific disinformation campaign sought to disrupt and delay further studies, as well as to cast scientific doubt on the link between cigarette smoking and harms. This campaign lasted for almost …

Standing there I wondered how much of what we had felt on the bridge was just hunger. I asked my wife and she said, ‘I don’t know, Tatie. There are so many sorts of hunger. In the spring there are more. But that’s gone now. Memory is hunger.
– Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, 1964

Now that our revels are ended, the holiday celebrations and feasts, if one had them, just a dream melted into thin air, our hungers perhaps richly satiated temporarily or not, our visions project us into a new year in which we hope to …

What causes one’s BS detector to sound?

The desperate smear campaign to defend Israel’s crimes highlights the toxic brew of lies that’s been underpinning the liberal democratic order for decades.

In a popular British comedy sketch set during the Second World War, a Nazi officer near the front lines turns to a fellow officer and, in a moment of sudden – and comic – self-doubt, asks: “Are we the baddies?”

For many of us, it has felt like we are living through the same moment, extended for nearly three months – though there has been nothing to laugh about.

Western leaders have not only backed rhetorically a genocidal …

A bright star in the firmament of justice has gone out.  One of the greatest journalists of our era has passed away.

John Pilger was always on the side of the oppressed. He denounced Imperialism and all its violent predations–war, genocide, exploitation–as well as its endless lies and propaganda.  Till his death, he fought tirelessly for the freedom of Julian Assange, and his last article was a call to solidarity.

John gave voice to the invisible and the voiceless: the hungry, …