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Was COVID just a warm-up?

Last week tens of thousands took to the streets of Lima. Thousands traveled from across the country to Peru’s capital to participate in the Third Takeover of Lima since elected president Pedro Castillo was overthrown in December. The protesters are calling for the removal of deeply unpopular usurper president Dina Boluarte.

Eight months since Castillo’s ouster demonstrations continue despite significant state violence. About 70 have been killed and Castillo remains in prison. Two months ago Amnesty International released “Lethal racism: Extrajudicial executions and unlawful use of force by Peru’s security forces”, which documents the post-coup repression. “The grave human …

Over five hundred and twenty-five days ago, between the evening of February 13 and afternoon of February 14, 2022, four men were arrested for their participation in Freedom Convoy protests at the Alberta border town of Coutts.

They were charged with conspiracy to commit murder of police officers in support of a plot to overthrow the Government of Canada. They have been dubbed the ‘Coutts Four.’

The accused are self-employed fisherman Chris Carbert, who ran a landscaping and fencing business with nine employees. A Lethbridge, Alberta, resident, 42-year-old Carbert is a single father who has been raising his son since the …

As the mainstream media continues to make irrational and diversionary statements about the economy, facts show and experience confirms that people’s living and working standards continue to steadily decline. The economy continues to move in the wrong direction. Poor economic conditions persist, which is why the vast majority remain pessimistic about the economy and recognize that the current direction is unsustainable. The 30 statistics below speak volumes about actual economic conditions and cut through the worn-out media disinformation that “the economy is doing great.”
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“28 million Americans still lack health insurance.”

“21 million workers are still paid less …

Just viewed, for the first time, the 2012 ESPN documentary Ghosts of Ole Miss written by Wright Thompson and directed by Fritz Mitchell. The film covered the 1962 segregationist riot at the University of Mississippi in opposition to the first African American student being enrolled there, James Meredith. Interspersed into it all was the undefeated Ole Miss football team and how they had to maneuver through all this mayhem. Their coach made sure to keep the players, as best he could, secured in their dorm rooms while the violent mob fought with the federal Marshalls. One player, whose name now …

Thursday, several colleagues and I, sent an open letter to all 535 members of Congress about reducing their five-week vacation and remaining in Congress to address crucial long-delayed tasks.

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July 27, 2023
Open Letter to Members of Congress: Crises Demand More Work Time Shorter Vacation
The Congress is about to embark on the longest of its annual numerous “recesses” – some would call these five weeks until after Labor Day in September a vacation from your Washington, D.C. workplace. Does it seem reckless not to be in session, holding hearings, floor deliberations, personally communicating with one another, and legislating at …

I have written ad nauseam about experts’ predictions of one form or another of Doomsday later this century, less than three generations away.[efn_note]Brumback, G.B. Pp. 150-151. “911!” KDP, 2019.[/efn_note] I have made appeals for super rich people whose wealth was not ill-begotten to fund my comprehensive strategy to end war and human misery while emphasizing that I had no financial interest and would play the role of a non-paid consultant in the background. This brief article shares with readers the deafening and deadening silence that met me.

While the bluster about cluster bombs covers the subject of murder with liberal prattle about how it’s committed, one of humanity’s oldest but ever more dangerous problems continues as a major profit creator while adding to humanity’s losses. Hairs are split over how skulls are shredded and bodies made unrecognizable as though its all okay if allegedly civilized people just obey “rules based societies” teaching about how to maim, slaughter, destroy, reduce cities to wreckage and bodies to pulp the proper way, in adherence to higher education taught forms of mass murder which can be performed in civilized ways, according …

As the ancient Greeks reminded us, bone cold definitions as starting points are essential in any discussion.  One current discussion, insignificant to posterity but amusing for advertisers and the presently bored, is the ludicrous reactions to a plastic doll rendered into celluloid form.  And as a doll, it can be no other.  Mattel’s Barbie has become, courtesy of Greta Gerwig, a talking point so silly it deserves to be treated trivially.  But money, advertising, and Mattel, won’t allow that.

Commentators, whatever their ilk, cannot help themselves.  Jourdain Searles, evidently struggling to earn a crust or two, asks two banal questions.  …

Angela Davis with DDR Minister of Education Margot Honecker and Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, East Berlin, 1973. Credit: ADN-Bildarchiv.
From 28 July to 5 August 1973, eight million people, including 25,600 guests from 140 countries, participated in the 10th World Festival of Youth and Students in East Berlin (German Democratic Republic or DDR). The festival was a key activity organised by the World Federation of Democratic Youth (WFDY), formed at the World Youth Conference held in London (United Kingdom) in November 1945. …

“We are fighting against the Yankee enemy of humanity,” explained Nicaraguan Vice President Rosario Murillo, setting the tone of the 44th anniversary celebration of their revolution.

Later, her husband Daniel Ortega, the country’s president, elaborated in his hour and a half address: “When we use the term Yankee we mean those who have a racist, imperialist attitude, which is not the case with the US people…Indisputably, given the weight of the capitalist system, the weight of the military-industrial complex will bend any president, who despite many promises he makes then comes to occupy the presidency of the US.”

In the first part of this paper, “Authoritarian Sadism in U.S. “Foreign Policy” (Part 1),” Dissident Voice, July 25, 2023, I introduced some psychoanalytic concepts and explained their application in revealing the latent motivations of high-ranking policy-makers in recent U.S. presidential administrations.  This approach was long ago studied by the eminent political scientist Harold Lasswell, who concluded that a political leader’s manifest “policies” are often a rationalization of his unresolved psychological conflicts.[efn_note]Harold Lasswell, Psychopathology and Politics. Viking Press, 1930.[/efn_note]

I have already examined, in relation to sadistic motivations, the personality of President Barack Obama (see: “Obama: ‘I’m Really Good …

She doesn’t love you, she doesn’t care for you, and she doesn’t know you.  But does her team pretend to, confecting an image of faux empathy and interest, sorting out the wheat from the chaff.  The predatory, fan sucking phenomenon of the Taylor Swift marketing machine is something to behold.  Leaving aside the sort of music that will eventually be tinned like a footnote memento of history, Swift has become a corporate phenomenon, a Mammon beast of vast scale and proportion.  And like most corporate phenomena, they tend to be predatory.

A central aspect to the Swift machine is the use …

There’s a meme that circulated on social media a while back that perfectly sums up the polarized, manipulated mayhem, madness and tyranny that is life in the American police state today:

If you catch 100 red fire ants as well as 100 large black ants, and put them in a jar, at first, nothing will happen. However, if you violently shake the jar and dump them back on the ground the ants will fight until they eventually kill each other. The thing is, the red ants think the black ants are the enemy and vice versa, when in reality, the real …

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Fleet-footed agility and sharp thinking rarely characterise the plodding bureaucrat.  An argument can be made that different attributes are prized: cherished incompetence, spells of inattentiveness, and dedication to keeping things secret with severity.  What matters is not what you did, but what you pretended to do.

Even with maintaining secrecy, the plodding desk-job hack can face problems, all falling under the umbrella term of “human error”.  Papers and files can stray.  The occasional USB stick can find its way into unwanted hands. And then there is that damnable business about the cloud and who can access it.

Despite repeated warnings over a …