Fan Wennan (China), 中国 2098: 太阳照常升起 (‘China 2098: The Sun Rises Just the Same’), 2019–2022.
At the 2012 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development held in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), member states decided to replace the Millennium Development Goals (established in 2000) with Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The first SDG was to ‘end poverty in all its forms everywhere’. Despite the enthusiastic verbiage, it was clear that poverty was simply not going to be ended across the world. …
A 2-inch (50.8 mm) gallium oxide wafer is displayed at Hangzhou International Science and Technology Innovation Center of Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province on May 30, 2022. Photo: VCG
The measures taken by China in recent years to safeguard national security and interests have often been subjected to excessive interpretation and reaction from the US and Western countries. The recent decision by China to implement export …
by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead / July 5th, 2023
Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.
How many Americans have actually bothered to read the Constitution, let alone the first ten amendments to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights (a quick read at 462 words)?
Take a few minutes and read those words for yourself—rather than having some court or politician …
While the monopoly-controlled media incessantly promotes disinformation, incoherence, and irrationalism about the U.S. economy, real people are experiencing harder economic conditions with each passing month. Below are 30 recent statistics that bear this out.
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“More than half — 54% — of American millennials and Gen Z are still financially dependent on their parents, according to a survey from credit bureau Experian released on Monday [June 26, 2023].”
What are the English other than their excruciatingly worn class, kitted out with a code of manners revocable at an instant? A streak of traditional Englishness, as A. A. Gill wrote, stresses bullying. It made them great in the hope of making others small. A towering creature like Charles James Fox may well have added his worth to the abolition of slavery, but he was an inveterate, stinking bully. And there was much of this recently in the normally staid atmosphere at the so-called home of cricket, a game invented to preserve an Englishman’s sense of providence and eternity.
Why are we at Media Lens utterly terrified by climate collapse while other people we know are mildly concerned, blithely indifferent or cockily contrarian?
The simple answer is that we are doing this full-time and ‘doing this’ includes reading the unfiltered reports and thoughts of top climate scientists on social media all day, every day.
Whenever we take a break from social media, the tendrils of the corporate body-snatchers again start to insinuate themselves. We are soothed by entertainment, by infotainment, by presstitute prestidigitation normalising the unthinkable. Despite a mountain of evidence, we …
Reflections on the Security State and the Anti-war Movement
by Roger D. Harris / July 3rd, 2023
Daniel Ellsberg marches in the San Francisco Pride Parade to free whistleblower Chelsea Manning, June 29, 2014 (Photo by R.D. Harris)
Daniel Ellsberg died on June 16, fighting to the end to warn of the existential threat of nuclear war. The 92-year-old whistleblower left a legacy of peace activism dating to his courageous release of the Pentagon Papers in 1971. Given the advancing security state and the atrophying peace movement, could his accomplishments be repeated today in this time of war in Ukraine?
The icy wind was working up to a squall when King Hamlet (Sr.), contentedly stretching after enjoying a sumptuous luncheon repast, sauntered outside to his garden — his favorite spot to lie down for a siesta. Of course, such outdoor naps, even when bundled-up, were not always advisable on his remote, rocky Danish jutland of Elsinore Castle. But he was a fresh-air fiend, and no foe to the rigors of damp, rheumatic conditions. After all, he lived in a badly-heated castle — not much firewood available on that rocky promontory!
What happened next is uncertain. Two hours later, he was found …
The humourless comedian Hannah Gadsby has much to thank one of the twentieth century’s titans of art. By placing him in the stockade of feminist disapproval, the Australian was picking the easiest target and avoiding the most profound questions of his oeuvre. To be so personal, and play the man with such indignation, is the first refuge of the talentless.
While Gadsby’s Netflix run known as Nanette happily dabbled with Picasso as the problem figure for women, a mere phallic “kaleidoscope filter” who was “rotten in the face cavity”, another frontier needed to be conquered. Art graduate credentials stirred. Dangerously, Gadsby …
According to this article (sent to me by Allyn in New Zealand), “the number of Victoria Police employees self-identifying as ‘gender neutral’ has more than quadrupled since last year as the force confirms it is investigating reports some of its officers are gaming the HR system in order to gain an extra $1300 a year.”
ACANB? (all cops are non-binary)
“In its annual report last year, Victoria Police only had 32 employees who were so-called ‘self-described’ …
In virtually every country that’s allied with the U.S. Government against Russia and against China, there is a low public job-approval-rating for its head-of-state and for its Government, and a rating that is far lower than is the public job-approval for the leaders of the countries that the U.S. gang are trying to regime-change. If a given nation’s leader’s net public job-approval rating (% who approve, minus the % who disapprove) is above 0%, or positive, then that is an indication the nation’s Government is a democracy, because then that leader …
This year marks the 10th anniversary of President Xi Jinping’s launch of China’s flagship, One Belt One Road (OBOR), later referred to as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Echoing the historic Silk Road, the ancient trade network of Eurasia that connected the East and West, BRI is the most ambitious and expensive infrastructure plan in world history. Writing about BRI’s future, the British Economist once worried that “All roads lead to Beijing.”
In September 2013, on a visit to Nazarbayev University, Kazakhstan, President Xi advocated the establishment of a “Silk Road Economic Belt.” A month later, addressing the Indonesian parliament, …
A kid that already has handfuls of candies wants to take another whack at the piñata before others have had their first turn. That about sums up the foreign minister’s position on Canadian power in international affairs.
Canada needs greater international influence, according to Melanie Joly. While the Foreign Affairs Minister’s recent comment elicited some commentary, no one has mentioned the inegalitarian, even supremacist, nature of her position.
In “‘We need to increase our influence’: Joly wants to increase Canada’s impact on the world stage”, CTV quoted the minister saying, “What we’re seeing is that the world’s power structures are …
On March 28, 2022, the Biden administration sent to Congress a revised version of its classified National Defense Strategy. The new version removed the longstanding doctrine of “no first use” of nuclear weapons, and opened the door to a nuclear response to a non-nuclear threat. Within months of the new U.S. policy, but without referring to it, the Putin administration responded that it might consider first use in case of an existential threat to Russia, including a non-nuclear one. More recently, Sergei Karaganov, head of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, a non-governmental Russian think tank, …
• Alibaba Cloud will broadcast 2024 Olympics
• Taiwanese leader’s popularity slumps
• World’s largest hydro-solar power plant
• Village basketball and football championships
by Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East / July 1st, 2023
Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME) welcomes the renewal of Canada’s funding to Palestinian refugees for the next four years, but is disappointed that the latest pledge represents a cut of $5 million annually. CJPME urges Canada to increase its funding to meet the needs of the current humanitarian and human rights crisis, and to complement its financial support with political support for UNRWA and Palestinian refugees on the international stage.
“75 years after the Nakba and the creation of the world’s longest-running refugee crisis, it is time for Canada to finally commit to supporting Palestinian refugees,” …
David Ignatius, a long-time Washington Post columnist on military intelligence topics, probably never dreamed his newspaper would fill over three full pages serializing his latest work of thrilling fiction, “The Tao of Deception.” On June 28, 2023, the “Breaking news and latest headlines” in the A section of the paper featured the first installment. Part II appeared today, Friday, June 30th.
What’s occurring at the WashingtonPost, the New York Times and big regional daily newspapers is a flight toward stupefying their material in a desperate plunge to retain readers – print and online. Maybe surveys show a tsunami of aliteracy from the rising iPhone generations.
The need for unified mass demonstrations in the streets calling for urgent action on the climate emergency, with a central demand that the race and class issues involved be a top priority, is off-the-charts needed now. Fortunately, a worldwide mobilization doing just this is coming together for actions September 15-17 in New York City and around the world.
Why those dates? Because on September 20 there will be a Climate Ambition Summit at the United Nations convened by the UN’s Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres. The purpose of this summit, in his words, is to generate “credible, serious and new climate action and …
Samia Halaby (Palestine), Palestine, from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River, 2003.
On 24 June 2023, Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) Herzl Halevi, Chief of Shin Bet (Intelligence) Ronen Bar, and Police Commissioner Kobi Shabtai released a joint statement. They pointed to ‘violent attacks… by Israeli citizens against innocent Palestinians’, which they characterised as ‘nationalist terror in every sense’. Such a statement is rare, particularly the description of the violence as ‘nationalist terror’ and the rendering of Palestinian victims as …
Why is eyewitness testimony been proven so fallible in courts? How do we account for emotional outbursts which, at their worst, cost us relationships?
Why are we so inept at gauging probabilities? Why do we have to be taught methods for developing an unbiased sample in research projects? Supposedly, in the scientifically evolved West, many people in Mordor can still believe in ghosts and millions sincerely believe that they’ve been abducted by space aliens. If we know that superstitions are silly why do modern architects systematically avoid calling the 13th floor …
Amidst this week’s strange attempt to instigate a military coup from the head of Russia’s Wagner Group, President Putin took a loud stand calling out the operation as a foreign directed insurgency with parallels drawn from the chaotic revolution of 1917.
Just as in 1917, the nation was at war with an enemy on the verge of defeat, and just as 1917, foreign manipulations using fifth columnists resulted in sucking the nation into Civil War. Putin stated:
Exactly this strike was dealt in 1917 when the country was in WW1, …
Oceans of the world are in a dangerous red zone that exceeds safe limits for marine and terrestrial life because of excessive heat. Several statements by climate scientists show heightened concerns about how this plays out, as 2023 could be a major inflection point with global warming suddenly turning much worse. For example, the recent work of Annalisa Bracco, Ph.D., Professor School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Georgia Tech, Ocean Heat Is Off The Charts – Here’s What That Means for Humans and Ecosystems Around the World, Phys.org, June 21, 2023.
The backgrounder for ocean heat taking center stage includes major …
Since the start of the conflict in February 2022, billions of dollars’ worth of military hardware has been sent to Ukraine by the EU. By late February 2023, it had forwarded €3.6 billion worth of military assistance to the Zelensky regime via the European Peace Fund. However, even at that time, the total cost for EU countries could have been closer to €6.9 billion.
It all began with baseball. I was growing up in the 1940s in Rochester, N.Y., a farm team for the St. Louis Cardinals. I couldn’t get enough of them in the first newspaper I ever read, the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle. The instant it came I grabbed the sports pages, flopped myself down on the living room floor, and lost myself at the ballpark.
Eight decades later the Cardinals are still my favorite team, but my heart has moved on. These days I’m clinging to a deeper love: print newspapers.
We’ve lost more than 2,500 since 2005. They’re currently dying …
Nonstop disinformation from charter school promoters that charter schools are amazing and successful is belied by the failure and closure of charter schools every week.
Not a week goes by that we do not hear of yet another charter school failing, closing, and abandoning hundreds of parents, teachers, students, and principals. Below are many examples.
These closures are often sudden and abrupt, which is why parents, teachers, students, and principals always say they are shocked by the closure announcement. They didn’t see it coming, they often say. They always feel blind-sided and like …
