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JFK’s World Peace Speech and National Security State Takedowns of US Presidents
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,
I am talking about genuine …
Peter Pan Man: Elon Musk’s Rebranding of Twitter
“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, …
Why Neopagan Marxists are Not Pantheists or Animists
How Far Back Does the Internality of Nature Go?
Orientation
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 …
War on Food: Science and Public Interest Halt the Push for GM Crops in India
Approval by Contamination?
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.
In the December 2016 paper Future urban land expansion and implications for global croplands, it was projected that by 2030, globally, urban areas will have tripled in size, expanding into cropland and undermining the productivity of agricultural systems.
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 …
The Wild Nation
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 Wars: Cooling the Data Centres
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 Use the Swap with China to Pay the IMF
News on China No. 158
This week’s News on China.
• 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
Add Homo sapiens to the Endangered Species List
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 …
Fitch Downgrades US Debt Rating
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 …
“Social Lies against which an Independent, Intelligent Human Must Wage War”
“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! …
The Urge to Destroy
System Fail 25
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.
Meanwhile …
Election Fever: A Fever Dream?
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 …
There Are Enough Resources in the World to Fulfill Human Needs, But Not Enough Resources to Satisfy Capitalist Greed
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 …
The Atomic Genie Escapes
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 …
Evolved Homo Sapiens (and the frustrated “ID”)
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 …
Building for War: The US Imperium’s Top End Spend
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 …
On the Use and Misuse of the Term “Jewish Supremacist”
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?
Years before forming his …
Ostriches?
It is a myth that ostriches put their heads in the sand when afraid. What about when humans bury their heads in the sand?
Vacation Autopsy
There’s something about a mass-market Luxury Cruise that’s unbearably sad. Like most unbearably sad things, it seems incredibly elusive and complex in its causes yet simple in its effect: on board the Nadir (especially at night, when all the ship’s structured fun and reassurances and gaiety ceased) I felt despair.
— David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I will Never do Again, 1997Leopards break into the temple and drink all the sacrificial vessels dry; it keeps happening; in the end, it can be calculated in advance and is incorporated into the ritual.
— Franz Kafka, The Zürau Aphorisms, 1931
This will constitute …
What the Government Does When It Doesn’t Want to Answer a Question
And what does a typical government response indicate.
John F. Kennedy on Ending the US War on Vietnam: His Own Words
With the advent of a new Kennedy running for president, new life was given to JFK’s World Peace speech on June 10, 1963, both among some progressives, and even the LaRouche Schiller Institute. Their thesis is that Kennedy was planning on making peace with the Soviet Union and was going to withdraw US troops from South Vietnam. They allege that JFK had undergone a profound change since the near nuclear war he provoked with the Soviet Union the previous October, and had transformed into a genuine liberal, who would fight for peace and social justice. JFK had morphed into …
Western Tales About China are Just Tales
Book Review of The East is Still Red, by Carlos Martinez
Introduction
Western media never stop warning us of China: it menaces Taiwan, threatens its neighbors and shipping lanes in the South China Sea, and sticks military bases on Cuba. China, we are told, spies on us by the most devious means, through TikTok, Huawei 5G, and weather balloons. And China, say our media, ensnares Africa with debt traps. Meanwhile, the US government and its media-echo decry China’s abuses of its own people. China, the US says, has committed “cultural” and literal genocide against Uyghur muslims in Xinjiang. As for the Covid-19 pandemic, the West with whiplash-inducing self-contradiction accuses China of mishandling …
What Do “Soft Nails” the US Encountered in South Pacific Indicate?
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken just wrapped up his visit to South Pacific island countries. During the visit, he tried to sow discord between China and these countries. In recent years, such practices have become the must-do and highlights of the visits by US officials such as Blinken and US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. Nonetheless, Tongan Prime Minister Siaosi Sovaleni said he was not concerned about the large amount of money his country had borrowed from China; Foreign Affairs Minister of New Zealand Nanaia Mahuta shut the door on joining the AUKUS alliance; Prime Minister James Marape of Papua …
Trolls
The useless scourge of the internet.
Technocensorship: The Government’s War on So-Called Dangerous Ideas
There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.”
— Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
What we are witnessing is the modern-day equivalent of book burning which involves doing away with dangerous ideas—legitimate or not—and the people who espouse them.
Seventy years after Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451 depicted a fictional world in which books are burned in order to suppress dissenting ideas, while televised entertainment is used to anesthetize the populace and render them easily pacified, distracted and controlled, we find ourselves navigating an eerily similar reality.
Welcome to the age …
The Day Australian Sovereignty Died
If a date might be found when Australian sovereignty was extinguished by the emissaries of the US imperium, July 29, 2023 will be as good as any. Not that they aren’t other candidates, foremost among them being the announcement of the AUKUS agreement between Australia, UK and the US in September 2021. They all point to a surrender, a handing over, of a territory to another’s military and intelligence community, an abject, oily capitulation that would normally qualify as treasonous.
The treason becomes all the more indigestible for its inevitable result: Australian territory is being shaped, readied, and purposed for war …
If Only …
Why did the people live happily ever after?
Let Them Eat Bugs: Challenging the WEF’s Corporate-Driven Food Reset
The prevailing globalised agrifood model is built on unjust trade policies, the leveraging of sovereign debt, population displacement and land dispossession. It fuels commodity monocropping and food insecurity as well as soil and environmental degradation.
It is responsible for increasing rates of illness, nutrient-deficient diets, a narrowing of the range of food crops, water shortages, chemical runoffs, increasing levels of farmer indebtedness, the undermining and destruction of local communities and the eradication of biodiversity.
The model relies on a policy paradigm that privileges urbanisation, global markets, long supply chains, external proprietary inputs, highly processed food and market (corporate) dependency at the expense …
The Second Coming of Literal Hitler
So, the quadrennial simulation of democracy in the USA is getting underway, and personally, I couldn’t be happier. It’s been a challenging few years for unincorporated political satirists like myself. The roll-out of the new global-capitalist totalitarianism hasn’t been particularly funny. In fact, it has been extremely not funny. Squeezing a little humor out of it has been like trying to suck a golf ball through a garden hose.
Not that the New Normal Reich is history … on the contrary, it is just getting started. Yes, the shock-and-awe campaign is over. It’s been over for the better part of a …