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Thirty years ago, in my economics textbook in India, the section on international trade referred to Argentina. It would be better, according to the textbook, for Argentina to concentrate on the production and export of beef, while Germany should direct its resources towards the production of electronics. This example was used to illustrate Adam Smith’s ‘absolute advantage’ principle – countries should focus on what they do ‘best’, rather than diversify their economies. It seemed churlish to me, that developing countries such as Argentina should only produce raw materials, while wealthy countries …

When one of the world’s most developed culturally elite countries, France, tosses in the towel on the IPCC 2°C barrier, it sends a loud and clear message that the global warming fight is losing the battle.

Seriously, France expects 4°C. The country is bracing for 4°C according to Environment Minister Christophe Béchu: “We can’t escape the reality of global warming.” (Source: ‘We Can’t Escape the Reality’: France is Preparing for 4°C of Warming by 2100, Euronews.green, May 22, 2023).

France’s position on global warming is heavily influenced by other countries failing to deliver their targets to keep temperatures within the …

Over the last two decades, funding in Palestine has become tied to ever-increasing restrictive conditions that are used to control and limit Palestinian civil society. We partnered with Al- Shabaka and Badil to produce the visual illustrating how restrictive funding supports Israeli colonial policies, depoliticizes Palestinian society, criminalizes resistance to Israeli colonization, and thwarts Palestinian aspirations for self-determination. We created this visual to serve Palestinian organizations that are engaging with donors toward the creation of less harmful, more liberatory funding models.

They – being the howling press, the screeching vox populi, and anybody else wishing to weigh in – were very clear about it. Kathleen Folbigg was guilty as hell and deserved her special place in it. For two decades, she spent her time behind bars in New South Wales, condemned by a jury for killing her four children, Caleb, Patrick, Sarah and Laura.

The prosecution’s approach in 2003 was glacial, instrumental and without nuance. Crudely, it was suggested that Folbigg’s diaries, given to police by her then husband, had revealed an admission of guilt for the murder of three of …

The technical achievement of advanced industrial society, and the effective manipulation of mental and material productivity have brought about a shift in the locus of mystification. . . . the rational rather than the irrational becomes the most effective vehicle of mystification.

– Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man

General, man is very uselful.
He can fly and he can kill.
But he has one defect:
He can think.

–  Bertolt Brecht, “From a German War Primer”

Langdon Winner opens his prescient book, The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology (1986), with an anecdote about John Glenn and his experience …

Rule by indefinite emergency edict risks leaving all of us with a shell of a democracy and civil liberties just as hollow.

— Justice Neil Gorsuch

We have become a nation in a permanent state of emergency.

Power-hungry and lawless, the government has weaponized one national crisis after another in order to expand its powers and justify all manner of government tyranny in the so-called name of national security.

COVID-19, for example, served as the driving force behind what Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch characterized as “the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country.”

…

A secret for perpetual optimism.

Australian concepts of sovereignty have always been qualified. First came the British settlers and invaders in 1788. They are pregnant with the sovereignty of the British Crown, bringing convicts, the sadistic screws, and forced labour to a garrison of penal experiments and brutality. The native populations are treated as nothing more than spares, opportunistic chances, and fluff of the land, a legal nonsense. In a land deemed empty, sovereignty is eviscerated.

Then comes the next stage of Australia’s development. Imperial outpost, dominion, federation, a commonwealth of anxious creation. But through this, there is never a sense of being totally free, aware, …

Are you ready?

The other day, I counted 20 copies of a book called Forbidden City (1990) in a library. I picked it up and looked at the cover, and I realized it was about the so-called Tiananmen Square massacre. It was written as an on-the-spot account by a CBC news team during that time. By reading the minutiae, it is revealed to be a fictionalized account, as almost all western monopoly media reports of a Tiananmen Square massacre are — fiction.

As I write this, June 4 is nigh upon us, and that means it is time for the western-aligned media to crank …

The sudden escalation of the situation in the Balkans in the past few days has drawn great concern from the international community. From May 26, when the Kosovo authorities forced the inauguration of the Albanian mayor, triggering protests and demonstrations from the Serbs, to May 29 when violent clashes broke out between NATO “peacekeeping” troops and Serb protesters, which injured dozens of people, and then to the commander of NATO’s “peacekeeping” troops in Kosovo’s latest warning that the situation there is very dangerous and that any incident could lead to an escalation of the situation, it makes people wonder whether …

I could go on for pages about the myriad myths of both U.S. military spending and U.S. military “glory.” In fact, I’ve written two books about it — plus hundreds of articles.

For the sake of this post, I’ll share just one example of our [sic] beloved and expensive armed forces in action:

During the 78-day U.S./NATO bombing campaign (read: war crimes) over Yugoslavia in 1999, U.S. Defense Secretary William Cohen declared: “We severely crippled the Serbian military forces in Kosovo by destroying more than 50 percent of the artillery and …

Political discourse in the United States consists largely of lies and confusions. One of the greatest of lies and confusions, which I hope to help dispel in this article, is the common delimitation of the very concepts “left” and “right”: it is claimed that to be on the right is to value freedom above all—this is what “small government” is supposed to mean, for example—while to be on the left is to value equality, if necessary an equality enforced tyrannically by an enormous, Soviet-style government. Nothing could be farther from the truth than this conventional wisdom. The opposite is closer …

The Military Budget, which devours over half of the entire federal government’s operational expenditures, has been exempted by Biden and the Congressional Republicans from any reductions in the debt limit deal just reached. Also exempted are hundreds of billions of dollars in yearly diverse corporate subsidies to big business freeloaders.

Most of the cuts will slash the domestic programs that protect the health, safety and economic well-being of the American people. Cuts will also be made to the starved I.R.S. budget, further weakening its capacity to pursue super-rich tax cheats and giant corporate tax escapees. The GOP insisted on continuing its …

It was an ugly case lasting five years with a host of ugly revelations. But what could be surprising about the murderous antics of a special arm of the military, in this case, the Australian Special Air Service Regiment, which was repeatedly deployed on missions in an open-ended war which eventually led to defeat and withdrawal?

Ben Roberts-Smith was meant to be a poster boy of the regiment, the muscular noble representative who served in Afghanistan, a war with sketchy justifications. Along the way, he became Australia’s most decorated soldier, raking in the Medal of Gallantry in 2006, the …