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In other words, a continuance of the status quo.

With over 20 million inhabitants each, Shanghai and Beijing are among the “hypercities” of the Global South, including Delhi, São Paulo, Dhaka, Cairo, and Mexico City, far surpassing the “megacities” of the Global North like London, Paris, or New York.[efn_note]A metropolitan area that has a population between 20 million and 40 million is called a “hypercity,” and between 10 million and 20 million is a “megacity.”[/efn_note] Walking the streets in China’s cities, you will however, quickly notice one marked difference – the absence of large slums or pervasive homelessness that is so common …

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Again, he was at it, that charming show on two legs, playful and coy.  Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been burning the charismatic fuel of late, making the necessary emissions in visiting friendly countries.  Each time, he seems to be getting away with more and more, currying (pun intended) favour with his hosts and landing the necessary deals.

For all the excitement of going to a fellow cricket loving state such as Australia, no one was under any illusion about the prize.  Easy gains there on matters of commerce, education and security: a pliant PM, a pliant Cabinet, a political …

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley).

Julian Assange is a journalist who’s been imprisoned for doing journalism on war crimes, by an empire that claims to defend journalists and oppose war crimes.

Assange and his persecution expose the giant plot holes in every story the western power structure tells about itself. About its love of free speech and the free press. About its opposition to tyranny. About its wars and why it wages them. Assange exposes the empire’s true face.

And in that …

It was a bright sunny March morning in 1980. Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero was saying mass at a church hospital in San Salvador when a bullet from a sniper rifle ripped through his heart. He stumbled and fell to the ground, dead.

Romero started life and ministry as a conservative. But, after his friend Rev. Rutilio Grande was assassinated to discourage other faith leaders from supporting Salvadorian peasants, Romero underwent a political and theological conversion. Picking up where Grande left off, Romero embraced a “theology of liberation,” a perspective that espouses G-d’s …

What does it mean to be antisemitic in modern Britain? The answer seems ever more confusing.

We have reached the seemingly absurd point that a political leader famed for his anti-racism, a rock star whose most celebrated work focuses on the dangers of racism and fascism, and a renowned film maker committed to socially progressive causes are all now characterised as antisemites.

And in a further irony, those behind the accusations do not appear to have made a priority of anti-racism themselves – not, at least, until it proved an effective means of defeating their political enemies.

And yet, the list of those …

As most compare Putin to Hitler, turn a blind eye to the U.S. sending cluster bombs to Zelenskyy the grifter, and witness the latest madness about Ukraine and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), please remember:

During the 1990 discussions to re-unify East and West Germany, the Western parties sought to defuse Moscow’s fears that a reunified state in the heart of Europe would present a threat to the Soviet Union.

Mikhail Gorbachev only accepted German reunification — over which the Soviet Union …

“Rather than collecting taxes from the wealthy,” wrote the New York Times Editorial Board in a July 7 opinion piece, “the government is paying the wealthy to borrow their money.”

Titled “America Is Living on Borrowed Money,” the editorial observes that over the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), annual federal budget deficits will average around $2 trillion per year. By 2029, just the interest on the debt is projected to exceed the national defense budget, which currently eats up over half of the federal discretionary budget. In …

Let’s be frank: watching Utopia hurts. It involves stinging your eyeballs, tearing your hair, and taking yourself to the ledge of a skyscraper to call the whole thing off.  The fact that the characters are meant to be faux pleasing is no excuse not to loathe them.

This Australian satire on bureaucracy, specifically featuring the bureaucracy of infrastructure development, displays buffoonery, stupidity, and workplace retardation of hideous scale.  It is a micro snapshot of the public service and its poisonous symbiosis with the political class, an insight into virtually any modern organisation in retreat from its principles.  In it, we see …

The Canadian government’s plan to double its semipermanent military force on Russia’s border ratchets up tensions that should be reduced. It highlights the West’s betrayal of promises made to Soviet officials and Canada’s addiction to stationing troops in Europe.

On Monday Justin Trudeau announced that Canada will ramp up its military presence in Latvia. The government will add about 1,200 military personnel to the nearly 1,000 Canadians already deployed on Russia’s border. As part of the announcement Trudeau committed $2.6 billion over three years to expand Latvia-focused Operation REASSURANCE. “Canada will also procure and pre-position critical weapon systems, enablers, supplies …

World Wars I and II were contests between empires, and so America’s President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) was determined that after WW II, all empires would be outlawed and all international relations (between nations) would be controlled only by a global all-inclusive federation of nations, which in 1941 he referred to would be called “the United Nations” and which would exclusively possess the Executive, Legislative, and Juridical, powers and authorities  — to make and enforce the international laws that would be created by that international Legislature of all nations, subject to that Supreme Court which would interpret that Legislature’s constitution …

The government keeps telling us they are “guided by the science,” but this mantra does not fit the facts.

The Biden Administration’s recent decisions to send deadly cluster bombs to Ukraine and to appoint despicable imperialist Elliott Abrams to a State Department Commission on Public Diplomacy are the latest examples of how progressives just cannot trust them to do the right thing.

Who is Elliott Abrams? Here is how he was described in an article distributed by the Fellowship of Reconciliation:

Abrams was a defender in the 1980’s of the Guatemalan Montt government, a regime so brutal that its actions — mass murder, rape, and torture of the indigenous Ixil Mayan people — were later classified as genocide by the United …

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Caricature of the Third Estate carrying the First Estate (clergy) and the Second Estate (nobility) on its back. “You should hope that this game will be over soon.”
The Counter-Enlightenment is the name given to the oppositional forces that formed during the Enlightenment that fought against the philosophes‘ writings on democracy, republicanism and toleration. These forces were known as the anti-philosophes and sought to maintain the dominance of the monarchy and the church.

The philosophes (French for ‘philosophers’) were eighteenth century intellectuals who …

We find that you Romans have not got very good memories about the terms of treaties.

— Parthian general Surena, upon confronting Crassus and his invading legions.[efn_note]Plutarch. “Crassus.” In: Fall of the Roman Republic. Trans. Rex Warner, pps. 113-155, Penguin Classics; p. 153.[/efn_note]

Who was Marcus Licinius Crassus (ca. 112-53 BCE )?  Like a modern-day financier, he was a predatory (usurious) lender; like a modern-day oligarch, he acquired vast real-estate holdings at bargain prices; but ultimately, like a modern-day warmaker, he prospered hugely from the “spoils of war.”  The ugly truth, as the Greek historian Plutarch (ca. 46-120 CE) commented, was that …