The broad lament from commentators about global economic growth is that China is not pulling its weight. Not enough is being done to stir the sinews and warm the blood, at least when it comes to the GDP counters. And many such pundits hail from countries, most prominently the United States, which have done everything they can to clip the wings of the Middle Kingdom even as they demand greater strides in its growth. “China’s 40-year boom is over,” declared the Wall Street Journal last month in a tone of some satisfaction. “The economic model that took the country …
Jungfraujoch’s foreboding temperatures this September at the top of the world in Switzerland at 2.25 miles altitude alarmed glaciologists.
If anybody has lingering doubts about global warming’s strength of power to directly impact Earth’s ecosystems, think again. Antarctica, at the bottom of the world, experienced record high temperatures during its winter, as record high temperatures were also recorded at the top of the world in the Swiss Alps, where it’s always icy cold. As it happened, both the top and the bottom of the world hit record high temperatures, simultaneously, give or take a few days. There’s no known record of …
There are reasons for Libya’s ‘chaotic’, ‘dysfunctional’ response to the disaster. And to identify them, we need to look closer to home
by Jonathan Cook / September 15th, 2023
The reality of the West’s trademark current foreign policy – marketed for the past two decades under the principle of a “Responsibility to Protect” – is all too visible amid Libya’s flood wreckage.
Many thousands are dead or missing in the port of Derna after two dams protecting the city burst this week as they were battered by Storm Daniel. Vast swaths of housing in the region, including in Benghazi, west of Derna, lie in ruins.
The storm itself is seen as further proof of a mounting climate crisis, rapidly changing weather patterns across the globe and making disasters like …
What happened is, the prosecutor visited my blog and read a column I published in July, The Criminalization of Dissent (Revisited), which included screenshots of the alleged “hate-crime” Tweets that the original criminal investigation is based on, and that resulted in the Order of Punishment that the Berlin District Court handed down two weeks ago. So, the …
Much has been made of the September 9, 2023 simultaneous reports in The New York Times and Vanity Fair of the claims of a former Secret Service agent, Paul Landis, who was part of the security detail in Dallas, Texas when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963. Like so many reports by such media that have covered up the truth of the assassination for sixty years, this one about “the magic bullet” is also a red herring.
It encourages pseudo-debates and confusion and is a rather …
Following on from its decision to donate widely banned cluster munitions to Ukraine the US is sending armor-piercing depleted uranium (DU) munitions to fight Russia. Indifferent to the poisonous effect of these weapons, the Justin Trudeau government has remained mum on Washington’s escalatory move.
Depleted uranium (DU) is a by-product from the production of fuel used in atomic power stations. A heavy metal, DU is good for armor-piercing rounds.
But it’s also toxic. Studies have linked DU munitions to cancer and birth defects. The US DU munitions will add to the growing health and ecological damage of the war.
None of us has previously witnessed a barrage of extreme weather events of the kind that has been devastating lives across the globe this summer. Canadian wildfires the size of Austria, a Hawaiian town incinerated by a hurricane-fuelled firestorm, a Greek island devastated by three years of rainfall in a single day, a Libyan town washed into the sea after 40cm of rain fell in twenty-four hours leaving 20,000 dead, killer hurricanes fuelled by oceans overheated by climate change. And then there were the extraordinary heatwaves in …
Tsherin Sherpa (Nepal), Lost Spirits, 2014.
Dilemmas of humanity abound. There is little need to look at statistical data to know that we are in a spiral of crises, from the environmental and climate crisis to the crises of poverty and hunger. In 1993, the philosophers Edgar Morin and Anne-Brigitte Kern used the term ‘polycrisis’ in their book Terre-Patrie (‘Homeland Earth’). Morin and Kern argued that ‘there is no single vital problem, but many vital problems, and it is this complex intersolidarity …
Early morning radio listeners might’ve thought they’d tuned into the wrong station. No, they had the right one — KPFA at 94.1 FM. But yes, something was strange, weird, and even downright wrong. Listeners were hearing a pitch for improving the Military Industrial Complex, a need to build up U.S. defense industries in order to send more weapons to the proxy war in Ukraine.
This new show was “Background Briefing,” hosted by Ian Masters. He came to KPFA in April 2023.
“I had never heard of him until I tuned in at 5 a.m., and there he was,” a listener emailed. “I …
Monday, September 11, 2023 marked the 22nd Anniversary of the NYC 9/11, a day of global mourning, the beginning, or activation, of a crime of biblical proportions like never before in history remembered. Activation stands for onslaught of a colossal War on Humanity. What the small supremacist elite calls War on Terror is nothing less than an endless war on mankind. A war waged by a death cult. The preparation for the war started decades or probably hundred-plus years before.
Two planes hitting the twin towers of the NYC World Trade Center (WTC) on September 11, 2001 – probably remote-controlled – …
About eight months ago, the Michigan Department of Education revealed that at least 36 charter schools are failing in the state of Michigan. Many other charter schools are considered close to “low-performing.” This is not a small number of charter schools. It is not unreasonable to assume that several dozen more charter schools are in troubled waters (see here, here, and here).
The vast majority of charter schools in Michigan are openly for-profit charter schools. A chaotic “Wild West” pro-competition ethos prevails in the state because of the proliferation of such deregulated schools governed by unelected private …
“[I]t seemed so obvious from a purely psychological perspective that ‘face coverings’ were a bad idea that I believed my principal question would be: ‘How come we got saddled with the practice?’” — Alan Kennedy, emeritus Professor of Psychology at the University of Dundee
The tear-squeeze remembering those who died in the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington has become an annual event. In the words of US President George W. Bush, it was an attack on “our very freedom”. The US had been targeted because it was “the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world.”
Five decades ago, that brightest beacon of freedom and opportunity proved instrumental in destroying a democracy in Latin America. (Others before and since followed.) The 1973 coup that overthrew the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in favour of General Augusto Pinochet, an …
A treasure stumbled upon, suddenly; not gradually accumulated, by adding one to one. The accumulation of learning, ‘adding to the sum-total of human knowledge’; lay that burden down, that baggage, that impediment. Take nothing for your journey; travel light.
— Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body, 1966
These are “heavy” times, colloquially speaking. Forebodings everywhere. Everything broken. People on edge, nervous, filled with anxiety about they know not what since it seems to be everything. The economy, politics, …
The Many Ways Our Rights Have Been Usurped Since 9/11
by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead / September 11th, 2023
Those who gave us the Constitution and the Bill of Rights believed that the government exists at the behest of its citizens. It is there to protect, defend and even enhance our freedoms, not violate them.
Unfortunately, although the Bill of Rights was adopted as a means of protecting the people against government tyranny, in America today, the government does whatever it wants, freedom be damned.
In the 22 years since the USA Patriot Act—a massive 342-page wish list of expanded powers for the FBI and CIA—was rammed through Congress in the wake of the so-called 9/11 terror attacks. It has …
The Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022 has been justified by Russian President Vladimir Putin as a “special military operation” with a few barbed purposes, among them cleaning the country’s stables of Nazis. As with so many instances of history, it was not entirely untrue, though particularly convenient for Moscow. At the core of many a nationalist movement beats a reactionary heart, and the trauma-strewn stretch that is Ukrainian history is no exception.
A central figure in this drama remains Stepan Bandera, whose influence during the Second World War have etched him into the annals of Ukrainian history. His …
Highlighting the climate crisis is not ‘alarmism’, as critics say. Big Business wants an exclusive focus on climate because it downplays the true reasons for alarm
by Jonathan Cook / September 10th, 2023
A small section of my followers are excited that someone on Substack has written a “rebuttal” that supposedly “tears apart” my recent article on the climate crisis. Loathe as I am to promote climate scepticism, for those who are interested it can be read here. Its supporters seem to believe it outs me as a deep-state plant, or dupe, or shill, or some other nefarious figure you would be best advised to shun.
The author’s “rebuttal” gains an air of plausibility, I suppose, because this is a rare instance where my analysis looks, at least to …
• Huawei overcomes US sanctions
• Giant hybrid rice yields up to 9,000 kg/h
• War on pollution increases life expectancy by two years
• Chinese study reveals near-extinction of humans one million years ago
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi really wanted to make an impression for his guests and dignitaries, and coarse realities would simply not do. The occasion of the G20 summit presented him with a chance to give the city an aggressive touch-up, touching up a good number of its residents along the way, not to mention the city’s animal life as well. As for those remaining nasties, these could be dressed up, covered, and ignored. Elements of the Potemkin Village formulae – give the impression the peasants are well-fed, for instance – could be used when needed.
The meteoric rise of the Religious Zionists, a sleight of hand that outdoes master Netanyahu, surprises everyone and delights few. How did this happen, who let it happen, and what can be done after the entrenchment of those who hold a prayer book in one hand and a rifle in the other hand? What happened to Theodore Herzl’s Political Zionism and its successor, David Ben Gurion’s Labor Zionism?
Political Zionism traded destruction, oppression, and decades of suffering of the Palestinian community for a contrived state, an ideal nation where all Jews safely coalesced, free from persecution and physical danger. Several wars, …
Looking at the world with perspective, it is clear that there are an overwhelming number of issues of concern needing general recognition and action. Most often, people moved to action by these concerns see the immediate need or danger with clarity: people are hungry, give them food; people are sick, give them medical care; a polluting industry is to build next to you, organize against it. Actions that arise in such direct ways address immediate needs and must be supported and have the most immediate benefit on people’s lives. But, where one begins an analysis of a problem or issue …
The headlines on climate catastrophes are becoming more informative as they become more ominous. For years the media headlines have been describing record floods, droughts, wildfires, heatwaves, hurricanes and other fossil-fueled disasters of an abused Mother Nature. The immediate human casualties are devastating.
Very recently, the headlines have been steering us toward what happens in the aftermath of natural disasters in afflicted regions around the world.
The Washington Post yesterday front-paged a huge headline “Climate-Linked Ills Threaten Humanity,” followed by the sub-headline: “Pakistan is the epicenter of a global wave of climate health threats.” The …
“The Republican Party is the most dangerous organization in human history,” says Noam Chomsky. It seems like a ridiculous statement. “Has there ever been an organization in human history that is dedicated, with such commitment, to the destruction of organized human life on Earth? Not that I’m aware of.” He has a point. Even the Nazis didn’t want to destroy civilization itself; they wanted to kill millions of people and dominate civilization, not bring it to an end. The Republican Party is much more ambitious, and more nihilistic: it is the capitalist id, or rather the capitalist death instinct, …
It all tallies. War, investments and returns. The dividends, solid, though the effort expended – at least by others – awful and bloody. While a certain narrative in US politics continues in the vein of traditional cant and hustling ceremony regarding the Ukraine War – “noble freedom fighters, we salute you!” twinned with “Russian aggressors will be defeated” – there are the inadvertently honest ones let things slip. A subsidised war pays, especially when it is fought by others.
The latter narrative has been something of a retort, an attempt to deter a growing wobbling sentiment in the US about continuing …
Scientific Method Challenges Extraordinary Claims: Part II
by Bruce Lerro / September 8th, 2023
(Image is of young skeptics in action) Summary of Part I
The purpose of this two-part article is to present an eight-step method that a self-organized community of scientific skeptics developed specifically to investigate the claims of the existence of paranormal phenomenon. I began Part I with a survey of what the Yankee population believes about the paranormal, including psychic healing, ESP, the existence of ghosts and extraterrestrials’ visitations to earth. Using the work of Jonathan Smith I categorized eight types of paranormal experience on a spectrum, based on how modest or …
