“Jill and I send our deepest condolences to the families…” buh buh bup bup buhhh.
“…our prayers are with those who have seen their homes…” yada yada yada.
“…grateful to the brave firefighters and first responders…” wretch, gag, hurl.
Weak. fucking. tea.
And it took this papier-mâché president of ours a day AFTER the Hawaiian Congressional delegation BEGGED him to send help to get around to declaring the Maui fires a disaster and start directing federal resources to assist with evacuation and fire suppression efforts.
It’s tempting to say that President Biden missed an opportunity to climb on board the side of ecological right and …
The atomic bomb created the conditions of contingent catastrophe, forever placing the world on the precipice of existential doom. But in doing so, it created a philosophy of acceptable cruelty, worthy extinction, legitimate extermination. The scenarios for such programs of existential realisation proved endless. Entire departments, schools of thought, and think tanks were dedicated to the absurdly criminal notion that atomic warfare could be tenable for the mere reason that someone (or some people) might survive. Despite the relentless march of civil society against nuclear weapons, such insidious thinking persists with a certain obstinate lunacy.
by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies / August 19th, 2023
President Biden speaks to General Mark Milley after his 2023 State of the Union speech.
(Photo credit: Francis Chung/Politico) President Biden wrote in the New York Times in June 2022 that the United States was arming Ukraine to “fight on the battlefield and be in the strongest possible position at the negotiating table.”
Ukraine’s fall 2022 counteroffensive left it in a stronger position, yet Biden and his NATO allies still chose the battlefield over the negotiating table. Now the failure …
The mass media is reluctant to recognize civic heroes unless they display physical bravery such as rushing into a burning building to save a child. The media also lavishes vast coverage on sports heroes and entertainers.
Unnoticed by the mass media was how it came about that the Illinois legislature, overcome by corporate lobbyists, passed legislation allowing punitive damages for wrongful death disasters, and sent the bill to Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker who signed it last Friday.
In the words of one state lawmaker, this effort started with “that lady from New England who drove down here (to Springfield, Illinois) and shamed us all.” …
Having spent the first 40+ years of my life paying tribute to landlords, this writer knows the crime of it all. I am not referring to the system of One landlord-One Tenant that many of the neighborhoods in baby boomer Brooklyn consisted of. That was in the 50s and 60s of my youth. It made sense, as the landlord used the rental payments of his tenant to fulfill his mortgage obligation. Yes, some landlords were selfish and did as little as possible to properly maintain the tenant’s apartment. In many cases …
Al Gore, former US VP, recently held a TED talk in anticipation of COP28, the upcoming Conference of the Parties, aka: UNFCCC or 2023 United Nations Climate Conference, November 30th – December 12th, 2023, to be held at Expo City, Dubai. It increasingly looks to be a freakish show of multi-dimensional illusions and fakery that the world of climate science is falling for. After all, a crowd of 80,000 is expected to gather to resolve the climate crisis hosted by an active climate crisis participant named Abu Dhabi National Oil Company.
It should be noted that COPs have been annual events …
What did Canada’s prime minister Justin Trudeau repeat ad nauseam about COVID-19 and imposing mandates? That the “government has been focused every step of the way on following the best science”? And did he ever provide any scientific evidence to follow? Critical thinking demands that people demand evidence for questionable claims, and that is a sine qua non of science.
Mao Xuhui (China), ’92 Paternalism, 1992
In 2003, high officials from Brazil, India, and South Africa met in Mexico to discuss their mutual interests in the trade of pharmaceutical drugs. India was and is one of the world’s largest producers of various drugs, including those used to treat HIV-AIDS; Brazil and South Africa were both in need of affordable drugs for patients infected with HIV as well as a host of other treatable ailments. But these three countries were barred from easily trading with each other because of strict intellectual …
During a so-called COVID-19 pandemic, many governments issued a lockdown on the citizenry. Many protested the violations of their lost freedoms given that evidence to support the lockdowns was scanty at best, but the masses were obedient and identified with their government jailers.
Globe and Mail omissions enable its wild foreign policy claims. By failing to mention crucial history Canada’s ‘paper of record’ can claim the military spreads the “democratic gospel” in Africa.
A recent front page Globe story headlined “Honduran women risk death and imprisonment as they try to access reproductive care” discussed the plight of women in the Central American country. Adding political context the article noted, “In 2009, then-president Manuel Zelaya was ousted in a coup by Honduras’s army with the support of powerful political elites. Religious leaders took on prominent positions in politics and condemned emergency contraception — …
by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead / August 17th, 2023
When players are piled on top of each other after a mad scramble for a loose ball, it’s a free-for-all. There are no rules. Anything goes. That’s because there’s nobody in the pile to monitor what’s going on.
— Mike Thomas, sports editor, Sportscasting, November 9, 2020
What is playing out before our eyes right now should be familiar to any fan of football: it’s called the pile on, a brutal, frenzied, desperate play to seize control and gain power while crushing the opposition.
In this particular analogy, “we the people” are trapped at the bottom of that pile, buried under a …
Just a short time ago it would have seemed like a Quixotic adventure in the colonised, neocolonised, or even the imperialist nations themselves to make any attempt to create films of decolonisation that turned their back on or actively opposed the System.
— Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino – “Towards a Third Cinema”
From the short black and white films of the Lumiére brothers to the technically superb blockbusters of today, cinema has been analysed from every kind of social and political perspective. Yet, it is still a relatively young art, …
It was a shallow affair. Reputed to have exceptionally poor hairdo, the figure who became one of Europe’s, and indeed one of the globe’s most lasting and influential politicians, inspired memes aplenty for what she sported on her bonce.
The teases, the parodying, the satire, began to bite. Stylists were sought in an attempt to do away with the soup bowl severity of her hair, all part of the rebrand in running against Chancellor Gerhard Schröder in 2005. There was Udo Walz, whose clients included Chancellor Schröder himself, and celebrity terrorists such as Ulrike Meinhof.
Former world hairdressing champion, Martina Acht also …
“JFK, RFK, MLK, Jr. assassinated by their own government.”
“We deny it!”
“Conspiracy Theory!”
“Power elite of war industry in collusion with the US government (i.e., the “corpocracy”) killing hundreds of millions of people for profit, plunder, and more power.”
“We deny it!”
“Conspiracy theory!!”
“The power elite cause widespread poverty.”
“We deny it!”
“Conspiracy theory!!”
“911 tragedy was an inside job.”
“We deny it!”
“Conspiracy theory!!”
“US operates a criminal injustice system.”
“We deny it!”
“Conspiracy theory!!”
“Covid-19 was a CIA operation.”
“We deny it!”
“Conspiracy theory!!”
“US industry buys and bribes politicians’ votes.”
“We deny it!”
“Conspiracy theory!!”
“US corpocracy “dumbs down” Americans via contrived public education, …
A year prior to Italy’s 2022 elections, Giorgia Meloni was invited to join the Aspen Institute, a Washington based strategic think tank with close relations to the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the Atlantic Council and the military industrial complex:
“The Aspen institute is also involved in the arms industry, with links to arms manufacturing giants such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin. It has typically supported the US’s ‘democracy-defending’ or ‘democracy-propagating, humane and civilized’ wars.”
Prominent US politicians including Madeleine Albright, Condolezza Riceas well as Victoria Nulandhave actively collaborated with the Aspen Institute.
At every stage of its proceedings against Julian Assange, the US Imperium has shown little by way of tempering its vengeful impulses. The WikiLeaks publisher, in uncovering the sordid, operational details of a global military power, would always have to pay. Given the 18 charges he faces, 17 fashioned from that most repressive of instruments, the US Espionage Act of 1917, any sentence is bound to be hefty. Were he to be extradited from the United Kingdom to the US, Assange will disappear into a carceral, life-ending dystopia.
In this saga of relentless mugging and persecution, the country that has featured …
It’s never a very enjoyable experience, facing the fact that you’ve been bamboozled. Realizing that you’ve fallen prey to an elaborate con, or PYSOP, is painful. It’s embarrassing. People feel ashamed. No one likes to see themselves as a sucker. It’s humiliating. It makes people angry. It makes them want to lash out at someone.
The funny thing is, it usually isn’t the person who conned them that they want to lash out at. Doing that would only make them feel more ashamed. No, typically, who people want to lash out at, when they finally realize that they’ve been bamboozled, are …
Smalltown stories scaling up to universalities all people can learn from
by Paul Haeder / August 14th, 2023
Bayside Cellars (Waldport, OR) proprietor just getting started — Community Journalism gets to the soul of humanity and our connections to the larger world. First appeared in Newport News Times
Pulling out all the skills one gains through living, working and surviving can turn a dream into a going concern. One Waldport entrepreneur is digging being her own boss, expressing creativity in her hospitality business and turning into the toast of the town. Bayside Cellars is Shauna Flynn’s wine “bar” inspired by her …
FIFA is a funny organisation. Mafia-run, obscenely corrupt, it governs the most popular game on the planet with a shameless, muscular vigour that must make other criminal enterprises green with envy. But even its members must find the curious limitations to viewing matches of the 2023 Women’s World Cup being held in Australia and New Zealand odd, especially given the organisation’s efforts to promote the appeal of the game.
Billed as the most popular women’s tournament ever, Australians have been rationed in their share of viewable matches. A mere 15 matches are available from the free-to-air service on Channel Seven. If …
• BRI investments increase, prioritizing smaller projects
• Historic drop in FDI in China
• Gig workers face lower wages
• Movies from China aimed at Chinese audiences
A leaked cable just confirms what the world has had enough of. US muscle pushed for toppling Imran Khan. Just as it has from Ukraine to Africa to Brazil, and anywhere else Uncle Sam wants to get his way.
Akeel Bilgrami’s article “Gandhi and Liberal Modernity: The Vexed Question of Caste” undertakes a materialist interpretation of Gandhi’s thought against the background of capitalism and the agrarian question. Gandhi’s idealization of precapitalist communities is given “descriptive” dignity as an implicit grasp of the inapplicability of the Marxist notion of “primitive accumulation” to India. While those dispossessed by primitive accumulation in England could move to other parts of the world as a result of settler colonialism, the impoverished Indian peasantry finds itself without such avenues for migration. This historical difference creates a divergence in the process of class formation. In …
Elements of Settler Colonialism appear in the Middle East crisis and these elements have been fitted together to obtain the accepted definition. The term is ominous; previous Settler Colonialism operations ended by either indigenous people regaining lands and dignity, as in the African nations, or evolving into the destruction of native people, as occurred in the Americas. Under Settler Colonialism, the fate of the Palestinian people leans heavily in the direction of destruction. No change in the 75-year-old monotonic trajectory of Settler Colonialism is apparent; economic, legal, and physical avenues of contention to the oppression have been explored and none …
US President Joe Biden speaks at the George E. Wahlen Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center on August 10, 2023 in Salt Lake City, Utah. Photo: AFP
At a political fundraising event in Park City, Utah on Thursday, US President Joe Biden said China was “in trouble” because of economic and population issues and slammed China’s economic situation as “a ticking time bomb” in many cases. He also said, “When …
In May last year, the Washington Post ran a fairly typical piece about what the paper perceives as an unjustified conservative mania regarding President Joe Biden’s son. While those in the US worried “about such things as inflation and the war in Ukraine, the top concerns of congressional Republicans can be ranked roughly as follows: 1) Hunter Biden; 2) Hunter Biden; 3) Hunter Biden; 4) Hunter Biden.”
None of this can get away from the fact that Hunter Biden is an inkblot for his father and the Democrats. What matters is how big that blot is, and how far …
Because there is so much personal anguish, unhappiness, and human mental and physical suffering in the world, many people often wonder how they might personally change to find happiness, contentment, or some elusive something. Or even how to change other people, as if that arrogant illusion could ever work.
This question of significant personal change is usually couched within the context of narrow psychological analyses. This is very common and is a habit of mind that grows stronger over the years. People are reduced to their family upbringings and their personal relationships, while the social history they have lived through is …
