On 24 February 2023, the Chinese Foreign Ministry released a twelve-point plan entitled ‘China’s Position on the Political Settlement of the Ukraine Crisis’. This ‘peace plan’, as it has been called, is anchored in the concept of sovereignty, building upon the well-established principles of the United Nations Charter (1945) and the Ten Principles from the Bandung Conference of African and Asian states held in 1955. The plan was released two days after China’s senior diplomat Wang Yi …
This free eBook — The Pentagon’s B-Movie: Looking Closely at the September 2001 Attacks (rat haus reality press, 15 March 2023) — by Graeme MacQueen contains a collection of his articles and essays on the attacks of September 11, 2001, the subsequent anthrax attacks, and analyses of other false flag operations. They are profoundly important and shatter the official versions of those events. No one reading this book can come away from it not convinced that the U.S. government is a terrorist state. …
Brick-and-mortar charter schools are notorious for being low-performing schools, even though they often cherry-pick their students to get the “best test results.” Poor academic performance is one of the three main reasons charter schools, which are privately-operated, close every week, leaving many parents, students, and teachers high and dry. Mismanagement and financial malfeasance are the other two key reasons charter schools close every few days. All three usually occur together. Not surprisingly, such chaos and anarchy leave a bad taste in the mouths of many.
But virtual charter schools, also known as cyber charter schools, perform even worse than …
He was standing before a lectern at Downing Street. The words on the support looked eerily similar to those used by the politicians of another country. According to UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, Stop the Boats was the way to go. It harked back to the same approach used by Australia’s Tony Abbott, who won the 2013 election on precisely that platform.
The UK Illegal Migration Bill is fabulously own-goaled, bankrupt and unprincipled. For one thing, it certainly is a labour of love in terms of the illegal, as the …
As hundreds of thousands, throughout Israel, joined anti-government protests, questions began to arise regarding how this movement would affect, or possibly merge, into the wider struggle against the Israeli military occupation and apartheid in Palestine.
Pro-Palestine media outlets shared, with obvious excitement, news about statements made by Hollywood celebrities, the likes of Mark Ruffalo, about the need to “sanction the new hard right-wing government of (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin) Netanyahu”.
Netanyahu, who sits at the heart of the current controversy and mass protests, struggled to find a single pilot for the flight carrying him …
The levels of wealth inequality we are currently witnessing in this country are unprecedented and alarming. The very richest among us have succeeded in grabbing ever more of the proverbial pie, and the trend is only worsening. Wealth inequality is proving disastrous for America. On both collective and individual levels, we are suffering because of the ever-growing concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny few. What is to be done? As we explain below, raise taxes on the topmost bracket of earners, and begin realizing the potential and promise …
by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead / March 15th, 2023
I know the capability that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.
— Senator Frank Church on Meet The Press, 1975
If you give the government an inch, it will always take a mile.
This is how the slippery slope to all-out persecution starts.
Martin Niemöller’s warning about the widening net that ensnares us all, a warning issued in response to …
Bill Gates is not a medical doctor, not a virologist, not a scientist and not even a college graduate, yet we as a society hang on his every word when it comes to proper response to a viral pandemic. Why? It probably has something to do with the millions of dollars he’s “donated” to the World Health Organization and otherwise spent to become a go-to mouthpiece for a range of financial interests, from food to vaccines. Jimmy and guest Robert F. Kennedy jr. discuss how Gates made $500 million off of the COVID vaccines he was wildly promoting, then cashed …
Likewise, an incompetent, historically ignorant, politically naive, diplomatically challenged, shallow, impulsive, narcissistic reality show host elected by a conned citizenry to the highest office in the land can occasionally get a few things right as well.
I won’t get into a spitting contest over whether the election was rigged to an extent necessary to “steal” it from Trump. Every election is rigged, to varying degrees. To deny that is to be out of touch with how fundamentally corrupt our electoral system is at all …
One year in Italy with their eyes open would be worth more than three at Oxford; and six months in the fields with a platyscopic lens would teach them strange things about the world around them that all the long terms at Harrow and Winchester have failed to discover to them. But that would involve some trouble to the teacher.
What a misfortune it is that we should thus be compelled to let our boys’ schooling interfere with their education!
— Grant Allen, Post-Prandial Philosophy, 1894 ((See the Quote …
It is comical how easily one can be ignored for pointing out that new technology is dangerous and fetishistic. So-called “smart” cell phones are a prime example. For years I have been pointing out their dangers on many levels. To say most people are devoted to them is an understatement. Maybe it is an exaggeration to say they revere them, but if asked, they will say they couldn’t live without them. It’s sort of like saying I don’t revere my partner but couldn’t live without her or him. Ah love!
But what’s love got to do with it? Love and romance are out of date. Sex …
On March 18, protesters will gather at the White House to call for an end to Joe Biden’s cruel proxy war. “Cruel” is the operative word, because the war cynically uses Ukrainians as cannon fodder to weaken Russia and bring about regime change.
We should all be there – or at one of the 5 sister demonstrations in other cities listed here.
So many people I know get very defensive when I discuss the plandemic machinations. They either can not accept that manipulation is the standard operating procedure for those in charge or that they would ever be gullible enough to be tricked on a regular basis.
That’s when I tell them about the Gruen Transfer.
Victor Gruen was an Austrian architect who loved the cafes and public squares of Vienna. Upon starting work in the U.S., Gruen was responsible for something …
History is filled with failed planners and plans, threats thought of that did not eventuate, and threats unthought of that found their way into the books. The AUKUS agreement is an attempt to inflate a threat by developing a number of fictional capabilities in an effort to combat an inflated adversary.
The checklist of imminent failure for this security pact between the United States, the UK and Australia is impressive and comically grotesque. In terms of the nuclear-powered submarine component, there are issues of expertise, infrastructure, hurdles of technology transfer, the hobbling feature of domestic politics, and national considerations. There …
Those who have an insatiable appetite for war seldom heed the wreckage they have left behind
by Kathy Kelly / March 13th, 2023
The extraordinary March 10, 2023 announcement that China’s top diplomat, Mr. Wang Yi, helped broker a rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran suggests that major powers can benefit from believing that, as Albert Camus once put it, “words are more powerful than munitions.”
This concept was also acknowledged by General Mark Milley, Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff who said on January 20, 2023, that he believes Russia’s war in Ukraine will conclude with negotiations rather than on the battlefield. In November of 2022, asked about prospects for diplomacy in Ukraine, Milley noted that the …
On Friday, March 10, Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) collapsed and was taken over by federal regulators. SVB was the 16th largest bank in the country and its bankruptcy was the second largest in U.S. history, following Washington Mutual in 2008. Despite its size, SVB was not a “systemically important financial institution” (SIFI) as defined in the Dodd-Frank Act, which requires insolvent SIFIs to “bail in” the money of their creditors to recapitalize themselves.
My creed of nonviolence is an extremely active force. It has no room for cowardice or even weakness. There is hope for a violent man to be some day non-violent, but there is none for a coward. I have, therefore, said more than once….that, if we do not know how to defend ourselves, our women and our places of worship by the force of suffering, i.e., nonviolence, we must, if we are men, be at least able to defend all these by fighting.
Though violence is not lawful, when it is offered in self-defence or for the defence of the defenceless, …
Events continue to unfold at a quickening pace. Facing an alarming escalation in tensions around the world, we asked Michael T. Klare for his current thoughts.
Michael Klare is a Five Colleges professor of Peace and World Security Studies at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts; defense correspondent of The Nation magazine; and author of The Race for What’s Left: The Global Scramble for the World’s Last Resources (2012), Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy (2009), and Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America’s Growing Dependence on Imported …
Before the financial collapse come the aggressive anti-regulation lobbyists. These are often of the same ilk: loathing anything resembling oversight, restriction, reporting and monitoring. They are incarnations of the frontier, symbolically toting guns and slaying the natives, seeking wealth beyond paper jottings, compliance and bureaucratic tedium.
The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), for a period of time the preferred bank for start-ups, is the bitter …
The House of Representatives voted not to end the U.S. occupation of Syria on Wednesday. This is disappointing but not surprising. Although all is not lost, 103 leaders voted for it with 56 Democrats joining 47 Republicans to vote in favor of the bill, showing that there is at least some appetite for peace. Opponents of the bill said that they feared that troop withdrawal would revive terrorist groups n the region. Which is a good joke because the U.S. has backed terrorists groups in the region by supporting the al-Qaeda affiliated al-Nusra since the Obama administration.
Writing festivals are often tired, stilted affairs, but the 38th Adelaide Writers’ Week did not promise to be that run-of-the-mill gathering of yawn-inducing, life draining sessions. For one thing, social media vultures and public relations experts, awaiting the next freely explosive remark or unguarded comment, were at hand to stir the pot and exhort cancel culture.
The fuss began with the festival organisers’ invitation of two Palestinian authors, Susan Abulhawa and Mohammed El-Kurd. Abulhawa was specifically targeted for critical comments on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, notably regarding NATO membership, and for being a mouthpiece of “Russian propaganda”, while El-Kurd …
A new consciousness is developing which sees the earth as a single organism and recognizes that an organism at war with itself is doomed. We are one planet. One of the great revelations of the age of space exploration is the image of the earth finite and lonely, somehow vulnerable, bearing the entire human species through the oceans of space and time.
— Carl Sagan, Cosmos, 1980
All people opposed to war must be anti-imperialist. To not be anti-imperialist would render a declared antiwar position …
• Li Keqiang’s report at the Two Sessions
• US sanctioned companies at the Two Sessions
• Douyin contests the e-commerce market
• Chinese diplomats on social networks
Henry Kissinger as he launched his long and murderous career
To believe and perpetrate the “Good War” and “Greatest Generation” myths, we must ignore many sordid realities. I’ve written about some of them here, here, and here (and several other posts).
This time, I’ll focus on the memory-holed topic of AWOL American soldiers running wild in Europe.
“Paris was full of them,” remarks historian Michael C.C. Adams.
Journalist Chet Antonine has written of U.S. troops “looting the German city of Jena …
A friend just gave me a book by Richard N. Haass with the intriguing title, The Bill of Obligations: The Ten Habits of Good Citizens. Mr. Haass is a self-described member of the establishment – in his words “people and institutions that have often been vilified and blamed for the failures of democracy.” Having worked in the Pentagon, State Department and White House under four presidents, Democrat and Republican alike, followed by his present leadership of the Council on Foreign Relations, may explain why there is nothing in the index of his book under “law” or “corporation” …
Ever so rarely, the human species can reach accord and agreement on some topic seemingly contentious and divergent. Such occasions tend to be rarer than hen’s teeth, but the UN High Seas Treaty was one of them. It took over two decades of agonising, stuttering negotiations to draft an agreement and went someway to suggest that the “common heritage of mankind”, a concept pioneered in the 1960s, has retained some force.
Debates about the sea have rarely lost their sting. The Dutch legal scholar Hugo Grotius, in his 1609 work Mare Liberum (The Free Sea), laboured over such concepts …
