British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak looks as much a deep fake projection as a thin, superficial representation of reality. His robotic, risible awkwardness makes a previous occupant of his office, Theresa May, look soppily human in comparison. But at the AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park, the nervous system of code breaking during the Second World War dominated by such troubled geniuses as Alan Turing, delegates had gathered to chat about the implications of Artificial Intelligence.
The guest list was characterised by a hot shot list of Big Tech and political panjandrums, part of an attempt by the UK to, as …
National Geographic’s November 2023 cover story is entitled “The Race to Save the Planet. Can Technology Help Fix the Climate Crisis?” by Sam Howe Verhovek. This headline puts climate change squarely in crisis mode, and by implication “the race to save the planet” signals the onset of a mad scramble to work our way out of the biggest jam in human history.
It’s hard to find a climate scientist who does not agree with that sentiment. According to the renowned climate scientist Bill McGuire, emeritus professor of geophysical and climate hazards, University College London:
Presumably, if Israeli Jews were not occupying the majority of historical Palestine, laying siege to Gaza, oppressing, humiliating, dehumanizing, liquidating, and refusing statehood to the Palestinian people that Hamas, a Palestinian resistance, would not have been driven to launch an attack on Israelis.
Placing the Palestinians under oppression, occupation, and siege was an undeniable denial of security for Palestinians.
Thus, by denying the security of Palestinians, Israeli Jews were putting their own security at risk by fomenting a justifiable resistance. The Ukrainians and NATO are aware of this as …
An occupier does not have the right to use arms in “self-defence.”
by Kieran Kelly / November 2nd, 2023
Is the mass slaughter of civilians self-defence? Every person has the right to life and to self-defence, but Israel’s “right to self-defence” is constantly being used to obfuscate the non-defensive nature of its military violence in Palestinian territory. Israel’s self-defence is a lie, not just because their actions are not defensive but because Israel cannot legally use its military in self-defence against Palestinians. Let me repeat that, Israel cannot legally use its military against Palestinians in self-defence. That is the big lie at the heart of the current horrors
There are four reasons why Israel cannot cite a legal right to …
Following the spectacular “Al-Aqsa Flood” operation launched by the Palestinian resistance in Gaza, the army of occupation has inflicted an unprecedented level of massacre and destruction on its defenseless civilian population, trapped in the world’s largest concentration camp. While Israel’s official stated aim is the annihilation of the Palestinian resistance, its unofficial objective seems to be the ethnic cleansing of the entire Gaza Strip, where everything is being done to make life impossible, paving the way for the definitive liquidation of the Palestinian cause.
Since the beginning of this crucial phase in the Arab-Israeli struggle, where the stakes seem existential on …
Sangho Lee (South Korea), Long for Korean Reunification, 2014.
It is impossible to look away from what the Israeli government is doing to Palestinians not only in Gaza, but also in the West Bank. Waves of Israeli aircraft pummel Gaza, destroying communications networks and thereby preventing families from reaching each other, journalists from reporting on the destruction, and Palestinian authorities and United Nations agencies from providing humanitarian assistance. This violence has spurred on protests across the world, with the planet’s billions outraged by the asymmetrical destruction of the Palestinian people. …
It is journalistic malpractice for the media to still be repeating so credulously the Israeli military’s account of that day
by Jonathan Cook / November 2nd, 2023
The BBC’s Lucy Williamson was taken once again this week to view the terrible destruction at a kibbutz community just outside Gaza attacked on October 7. As we have been shown so many times before, the Israeli homes were riddled with automatic fire, both inside and out. Sections of concrete wall had holes in them, or had collapsed entirely. And parts of the buildings that were still standing were deeply charred. It looked like a small snapshot of the current horrors in Gaza.
There is a possible reason for those similarities – one that the BBC is studiously failing …
On October 28, Craig Mokhiber, the Director of the New York Office of the U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, wrote to the U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCHR) in Geneva (and I here, in boldface, add a few links for documentation of some of his assertions):
This will be my last official communication to you. …
Dear Congressional Leaders Sen. Schumer, Rep. Johnson, Sen. McConnell and Rep. Jeffries:
We strongly urge Congress to hold public hearings, with testimony from a broad range of witnesses, before voting on President Biden’s request for an additional $14.3 billion in military funding to further subsidize Israel’s overwhelming military superiority over Hamas in the war that erupted on October 7, 2023.
We believe these questions, among others, should be examined:
1. Why should American taxpayers pay for Israeli military spending incurred because of its stupendous intelligence failure and ongoing genocidal war?
2. Does Israel need the additional aid since the United States already provides Israel …
On October 9, 2023, a complete human skeleton was found in the 12,000th block of Camp Bowie Blvd. West, near the western-most edge of Tarrant County. As the crow flies, about a mile from my home, just outside of Fort Worth, Texas.
Initially thought to be fake or maybe even a Halloween prank, the skeleton was confirmed to be human origin, and the Sheriff’s Department stated that the deceased’s remains went unnoticed for so long because it lay in “an area not visible to business patrons or passing drivers.”
There is always a responsibility of citizens to demand evidence from people and governments making claims — especially claims that can affect the health of oneself and one’s family.
Dramatic new video has emerged showing members of an uncontacted Indigenous tribe in Indonesia warning outsiders to stay away, just a few meters from bulldozers destroying their forest.
Campaigners have warned that it shows a human rights catastrophe is unfolding on Halmahera island, where logging and nickel mining operations are now penetrating the rainforest of uncontacted Hongana Manyawa people, risking their genocide.
For years, John J. Mearsheimer, that seemingly ageless, if somewhat chilly presence at the University of Chicago, has been a thorn of irritation to certain establishment ideas. With his pugnacious sense of realist politics, he has little time for the sentimentality that accompanies what he calls the “liberal delusions” of power. It’s all good to feel anguish and worry at the predations of power, but why encourage them when there is no need to?
This somewhat crude summation only does some justice to JJM’s thought process. But it does provide an interesting backdrop to the recent revelations regarding the Ukraine conflict, …
by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead / October 31st, 2023
There is something terribly wrong with this country, isn’t there? Cruelty and injustice, intolerance and oppression. And where once you had the freedom to object, to think and speak as you saw fit, you now have censors and systems of surveillance coercing your conformity and soliciting your submission. How did this happen? Who’s to blame?
We are won over by “words that work” from an Israeli training manual.
Hasbara has become a dirty word, thanks to it’s dirt practitioners and the dirty job they are trained to do.
It’s Hebrew for Israel’s sophisticated public relations machinery that’s set up to cynically justify the Jewish entity’s crimes and to create for Israel a “brand image” completely at odds with the ugly truth.
Fiction and distortion are among hasbara’s standard propaganda tools used for spinning fairy tales and propagating disinformation. And it is very effective, up to a point. The reason why it will ultimately fail is that it has …
While a serving president, George W Bush opined about the antiwar movement: “First of all, you know, size of protests–it’s like deciding, ‘Well, I’m going to decide policy based upon a focus group.’ The role of a leader is to decide policy based upon, in this case, the security of the people.” In other words, killing over a million Iraqis and Saddam Hussein was required for the security of the United States. So much for the security of Iraqis.
by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies / October 31st, 2023
Life in Gaza under Israeli bombardment. Photo credit: canada talks israel palestine
On Friday, October 27, the nations of the world voted in the UN General Assembly, by a vote of 120 to 14, for an “immediate, durable and sustained humanitarian truce leading to a cessation of hostilities” in Gaza. The resolution was sponsored by the government of sometime U.S. ally King Abdullah of Jordan.
Israel’s UN Ambassador responded with utter disdain, accusing those who voted in favor of the “ridiculous resolution” of supporting “the defense of Nazi terrorists” …
I’ve been thinking for quite awhile how the most depraved position of the Israeli government becomes the baseline view here in the United States, particularly in politics and media. It makes sense that the genocidal, racist, colonial project of Israel would find admiration in the ruling class of a nation founded on indigenous genocide and built by black slavery.
Here in the United States of Israel media, Hamas commits “massacres” but the Israeli government never “massacres” anyone – they do “ground operations.” (The latter typically kills 50-100-1,000 times more civilians …
My title is redundant for a reason, since the root of the word radical is the Latin word, radix, meaning root. For I mean to show how the use and misuse of language, its history or etymology, and ours as etymological animals as the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gassett called us, is crucial for understanding our world, a world once again teetering on the edge of a world war that will almost inexorably turn nuclear as events are proceeding. If our language is corrupted, as it surely is, and political propaganda flourishes as a result, the correct use of …
Guardian columnist feigns concern for two peoples ‘fated to share the same land’. But yet again he finds excuses to keep one of those people penned into a prison
by Jonathan Cook / October 30th, 2023
Will the Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland ever write a column on Israel that doesn’t rehash dishonest, Zionist talking-points that were discredited decades ago?
Snap-Apple Night, painted by Daniel Maclise in 1833, shows people feasting and playing divination games on Halloween in Ireland. It was inspired by a Halloween party he attended in Blarney, Ireland, in 1832.
The answer seems to be that we make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones. With the endless inventiveness of humankind, we grasp the very elements which are so divisive and destructive and try to turn them into tools—to dismantle themselves.
― Stephen King, Danse Macabre, April 209, 1981
A country broken by constant foreign interventions, its tyrannical regimes propped up by the back brace of the United States (when it wasn’t intervening to adjust it), marred by appalling natural disasters, tells a sad tale of the crippled Haitian state. Haiti’s political existence is the stuff and stuffing of pornographic violence, the crutch upon which moralists can always point to as the end, doom and despair that needs change. Every conundrum needs its intrusive deliverer, even though that deliverer is bound to make things worse.
Lately, those stale themes have now percolated through the corridors of the United Nations to …
As a classic settler-colonial state, Israel is doing the only thing it knows how to do. So long as the West keeps cheerleading, that includes genocide
by Jonathan Cook / October 28th, 2023
It shocks me that in my threads I keep coming across variations of the following tweet:
The Palestinians have it within them to rise up against Hamas to free themselves. Or Hamas can willingly surrender. Two real choices there.
This view isn’t just being promoted in bad faith by Israeli apologists. It seems to resonate with ordinary people who presumably know very little about the histories either of Palestine or of settler colonial movements such as the Zionist movement that founded Israel.
So let’s delve briefly into both.
First, settler colonial movements are distinguished from standard colonialism – like British rule in India – …
Eva Bartlett joins Scott Ritter and Jeff Norman to relate an on-the-ground perspective — a perspective entirely missing or marginalized from western mass media — of what Palestinians endure daily from the Israeli siege on the open-air concentration camp of Gaza. People have a right and a moral duty to be aware of what their governments are supporting.
In the midst of extensive coverage of the war in Gaza, there are questions that the U.S. mass media should address:
1. How did Hamas, with tiny Gaza surrounded by a 17-year Israeli blockade, subjected to unparalleled electronic surveillance, with spies and informants, and augmented by an overwhelming air, sea and land military presence, manage to get these weapons and associated technology for their October 7 surprise raid?
2. What is the connection between the stunning failure of the Israeli government to protect its people on the border and the policy of P.M. Netanyahu? Recall the New York Times (October 22, 2023) article …
• More US sanctions against Chinese chip industry
• China tightens graphite export controls
• Industrial renaissance in northeast China
• China approves GM soybeans and corn
Our global environmental crisis is widely understood to be reaching a crucial moment; the danger signals are flashing almost daily. Yet a certain complacency follows the many catastrophic climate events attributable to a critically injured environment. People talk easily of …
