Time and again Nicaragua is showing other countries the importance of fighting for sovereignty, independence, peace and the well-being of its people.
by Nan McCurdy / August 11th, 2023
(Photo Credit: Lapaz Telesur)
On June 27, 1986, the World Court condemned the United States for illegal war and aggression against Nicaragua and ordered the US to compensate Nicaragua for damages estimated to run to US$17 billion dollars, what today would be more than US$55 billion. On June 27 of this year, President Daniel Ortega demanded that the US fulfill its obligation. He stated:
On June 27, 1986, the International Court of Justice condemned the US and directed it to compensate Nicaragua for all damages caused as a consequence of military …
Colonialism has as its aim gaining ownership/control of the land and its resources regardless of whether or not the land was already populated by an Indigenous people. Morality aside, colonialism has been very successful in the context of Turtle Island. This is also true in northwestern Turtle Island, where the colonies designated “Vancouver Island” and “British Columbia” (merged in 1866) were created through the dispossession of First Nations.
Dispossession of a people is a thoroughly nasty business, and it blatantly violates one of the biblical ten commandments, one that is encoded in law around the world, namely, “Thou shalt not steal.” …
The Far-Right takeover of the Republican Party has readied a battle plan for 2025 that will crucify commitments to fight global heat; namely, Project 2025 / Presidential Transition Project, a 920-page formal proposal to take over and reconstruct government via abandonment and/or defunding of federal agencies that protect the nation’s health and environment.
Project 2025’s call to arms: “The long march of cultural Marxism through our institutions has come to pass. The federal government is a behemoth, weaponized against American citizens and conservative values, with freedom and liberty under siege as never before.” [efn_note]”The 2025 Presidential Transition Project, A Note on …
In an historic event, the US Congress Oversight Committee, have been talking about UFOs. Except they don’t call them UFOs anymore, it’s too specific I suppose: the more ambiguous UAPs (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena) is preferred. Whatever term is used, the hearing represents a powerful sign of the extraordinary times we live in, times of revelation, when people will no longer be silenced, truth buried.
The hearing may lift the stigma of reporting sightings of UFOs/UAPs, among personnel in the armed forces (of all nations), and is a major step in revealing the level of official deceit surrounding the topic.
When the FDIC put Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and Signature Bank into receivership in March, a study reported on the Social Science Research Network found that nearly 200 mid-sized U.S. banks were similarly vulnerable to bank runs. First Republic Bank went into receivership in May, but the feared contagion of runs did not otherwise occur. Why not? As was said of Lehman Brothers fifteen years earlier, the targeted banks did not fall; they were pushed, or so it seems. One blogger shows how even JPMorgan Chase, the country’s largest bank, could be pushed — not perhaps by local …
In late July, I visited two settlements of the Landless Rural Workers (MST) on the outskirts of São Paulo (Brazil). Both settlements are named for brave women, the Brazilian lawmaker Marielle Franco – who was assassinated in 2018 – and Irmã Alberta – an Italian Catholic nun who died in 2018. The lands where the MST has built the Marielle Vive camp and the Irmã Alberta Land Commune were slated for a gated community with a golf course, and a garbage dump, respectively. Based on the social obligations for land use …
In January 2010, the then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, doing what she does best, grasped a platitude and ran with it in launching, of all things, an institution called the Newseum. “Information freedom,” she declared, “supports the peace and security that provide a foundation for global progress.”
The same figure has encouraged the prosecution of such information spear carriers as Julian Assange, who dared give the game away by publishing, among other things, documents from the State Department and emails from Clinton’s own presidential campaign in 2016 that cast her in a rather dim light. Information freedom is …
Take your pick from two definitions of modern-day Republicans: foolish hypocrites or hypocritical fools. When it comes to America’s $32 trillion federal deficit, each one is as fitting as the other. They’re hypocrites for saying one thing and doing another. They’re fools because the actions they take are driving the deficit ever higher.
Let’s listen to the words Republicans mouth. Let’s look at the laws they pass and propose. Let’s zero in on their special ways of spending—and spurning—tax dollars.
Off we go, into a world of debt created by the party that claims to be concerned about debt.
Book Review of Nicaragua: A History of US Intervention and Resistance by Daniel Kovalik
by Rick Sterling / August 9th, 2023
Many nations in the Americas have suffered from US promoted coups, dictatorships, sanctions and outright invasions. Nicaragua may take the cake for being the most victimized. Dan Kovalik has written a book which reviews the history of intervention and resistance up to the present day.
Kovalik includes his own experiences from several decades visiting Nicaragua. The first time was with a Veterans for Peace (VFP) convoy of trucks bringing aid to Nicaragua in 1987. Incredibly, for two months the US government blocked the aid trucks from exiting the US en route to …
by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead / August 9th, 2023
Every day in communities across the United States, children and adolescents spend the majority of their waking hours in schools that have increasingly come to resemble places of detention more than places of learning.
This is what it means to go back-to-school in America today.
Instead of being taught the three R’s of education (reading, writing and arithmetic), young people are being drilled in the three I’s of life in the American police state: indoctrination, intimidation and intolerance.
Indeed, while young people today are learning first-hand what it means …
President Kennedy’s World Peace speech on June 10, 1963,where he championed nuclear disarmament and lasting peace with the Soviet Union, is given renewed attention with a Kennedy now running for president and by the present war with Russia. JFK supposedly underwent a transformation after the near mutual nuclear annihilation with the Soviet Union during the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962. It is claimed JFK had decided to withdraw from Vietnam, break up the CIA and the power of the Pentagon chiefs, and end the Cold War.
In his World Peace speech President Kennedy states,
“X” marks the spot. For the modern advertiser, this is problematic. It breathes pornographic escape, self-denial, elusive treasure, irresistible capture, compelling lasciviousness. And now Elon Musk has decided to impose himself upon a brand he loved as a plaything of juvenile ecstasy. Farewell the bird of Twitter; welcome the X of Musk.
The company rebrand is certainly all Muskian in manner, part of his monomaniac obsession with the letter. In 1999, he created the online bank X.com, which eventually merged with PayPal the following year. Just shy of two decades later, Musk reacquired the X.com site from PayPal. Over time, …
In human life it is clear that we are external nature – we have an affinity with other life forms like primates as real, objective beings. However, we also have an internal nature – a psychology – of mental states, goals, imagination and sexual urges that is internal to us. We know from cosmologists that the natural world goes all the way back to subatomic particles. But how far back does internal nature go?
Nine Ways of Understanding the Body-Mind Problem
Descartes’ mind-body dualism
In the history of philosophy, David Skrbina tells us there …
Between 1991 and 2016, the population of Delhi and its suburbs increased from 9.4 million to 25 million. In 2023, the World Population Review website estimates Delhi’s population to be 32.9 million.
Around 60% of the world’s cropland lies on the outskirts of cities. The paper states that this land is, on average, twice as productive as land elsewhere on …
America is the most weaponized nation domestically and internationally in the entire world. Our military orders so many weapons that the war industries can hardly keep up with the demand. America has never stopped being its own “Wild West.” Yet, despite domestic gun violence and deaths reaching epidemic proportions, Congress remains chained to the gun and ammunition industries and their lobbyist, the National Rifle Association (NRA). The 2nd Amendment of the U.S. Constitution is invariably trotted out to defend their position even though this amendment was written to protect the framers should the masses revolt. The NRA even went so …
Water. Data centres. The continuous, pressing need to cool the latter, which houses servers to store and process data, with the former, which is becoming ever more precious in the climate crisis. Hardly a good comingling of factors.
Like planting cotton in drought-stricken areas, decisions to place data hubs in various locations across the globe are becoming increasingly contentious from an environmental perspective, and not merely because of their carbon emitting propensities. In the United States, which houses 33% of the globe’s data centres, the problem of water usage is becoming acute.
As the Washington Post reported in April this year, …
• Argentina will pay the IMF in yuans
• Yuan overtakes the dollar in China’s bilateral trade
• Floods in the north of the country
• Cunchao, the rural soccer phenomenon
Preventing extinction of species is a major concern of many countries in the world today. Legislation to accomplish this is usually based on an endangered species list. Such a list should include any animal or plant species that has been deemed likely to go extinct in a few generations. Listing would normally trigger protective actions to increase the population size of the dwindling species; these include introducing them to unoccupied suitable habitats and measures that would increase birth rates or decrease death rates. Unfortunately, one important species at risk in today’s world …
On Tuesday, Fitch Ratings, one of the leading three US credit rating agencies, announced: US’ long-term foreign-currency issuer defaulting rating would be downgraded. Among other factors pushing this downgrading, Fitch cited issues with governance, rising deficits and a looming recession.
Fitch, on an earlier occasion, put the US on watch for a potential downgrade. At that time, it warned: The US could soon lose its AAA score due to an inability to pay its bills, within a matter of days.
Reports by CNN and other leading parts of the US media said:
Fitch downgraded its US debt rating on Tuesday afternoon …
“The majority never has right on its side. Never I say! That is one of those social lies against which an independent, intelligent man must wage war. Who is it that constitute the majority of the population in a country? Is it the clever folk or the stupid? I don’t imagine you will dispute the fact that at present the stupid people are in an absolutely overwhelming majority all the world over. But, good Lord!—you can never pretend that it is right that the stupid folk should govern the clever ones! …
As humanity recons with a never ending cavalcade of catastrophes, large segments of the population have succumbed to despair or distraction through culture wars or a series of vain cultural phenomena. [Insert Barbenheimer joke here.]
Many youth, particularly in France, have channeled this hopelessness into rage. For the past several months the country had been seeing a series of strikes and riots in response to the raising of the retirement age, and these riots intensified in late June after the police murder of 17-year-old Nahel Merzouk during a traffic stop. As the dust settles, inept politicians blame bad parenting and TikTok.
With nearly sixteen months to go, we are well into the silly season. The campaigning, fund raising, maneuvering, plotting, and mud-slinging have already reached a fever-pitch. We are told that the 2024 Presidential election — like every Presidential election in my lifetime — holds the fate of the country in its grip.
But it is almost impossible to see how the existing political machinery — the two-party system, fueled by vast sums of money, and lubricated with the influence of a toadying, sensationalist media — can generate any real answers to …
Kurt Nahar (Suriname), Untitled 2369, 2008.
On 20 July, the United Nations (UN) released a document called A New Agenda for Peace. In the opening section of the report, UN Secretary-General António Guterres made some remarks that bear close reflection:
We are now at an inflection point. The post-Cold War period is over. A transition is under way to a new global order. While its contours remain to be defined, leaders around the world have referred to multipolarity as one of its …
Never have scientists so fervently prayed. Slumping against a wooden post, Robert Oppenheimer reminds himself not to weaken: “I must remain conscious!”
The countdown proceeds: “five . . . . four . . . . three . . . two . . . ” Afraid it may electrocute him, the normally unflappable Sam Allison drops the microphone at the last second. At 5:29 a.m. he shouts, “Zero!”
Interminable silence . . . then suddenly the horizon ignites and a reddish-orange fireball infinitely brighter and ten-thousand times hotter than the sun rises majestically over the desert, turning darkness …
As we move further into the 21st century, shared delusions about human complementarity with robots, “artificial intelligence”– or even the bizarre fantasy of a forthcoming “trans-human” fusion with AI (Ray Kurzweil’s “Singularity” [efn_note] It is hardly coincidental that Kurzweil has worked as Director of Engineering at Google..[/efn_note] ) — are becoming all-pervasive. In a previous article, “Homo Sapiens: Not a Machine!,” I offered a trenchant critique of this growing technophilia, with its false definition of the human organism as just another machine. Furthermore, in my article “The Blank Slate: A Liberal-Totalitarian Dogma,” I warned of the now-prevailing notion …
The AUSMIN 2023 talks held between the US Secretaries of State and Defense and their Australian counterparts, confirmed the increasing, unaccountable militarisation of the Australian north and its preparation for a future conflict with Beijing. Details were skimpy, the rhetoric aspirational. But the Australian performance from Defence Minister Richard Marles, and Foreign Minister Penny Wong, was crawling, lamentable, even outrageous. State Secretary Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin III could only look on with sheer wonder at their prostrate hosts.
Money, much of it from the US military budget, is being poured into upgrading, expanding and redeveloping Royal Australian Air …
Should a person who defends and promotes a state that actively endorses Jewish supremacy be called a Jewish supremacist?
In the recent Globe and Mail commentary “Canada must rethink its friendship with Israel” establishment commentator Thomas Juneau noted that the current hard-right Israeli government “includes Jewish supremacists”. In response Norman Levine tweeted, “the term ‘Jewish supremacists’ borders on antisemitism. I’m shocked the editors at Globe and Mail allowed an article including that term to be published.”
While Levine’s objection is nonsense, Juneau’s use of the qualifier “includes” is absurd. Is anyone in Benjamin Netanyahu’s government not an aggressive Jewish supremacist?
