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 …
B lost both her legs in a subway accident. When I met her, she was living in a medical homeless shelter and panhandling daily in a wheelchair. B has four kids who, for a while, were living with her ex. It was not a good scenario. Very long story short: The State eventually took the kids away from him and …
Ron DeSantis was there watching us. We were crying, screaming. We were tied to the feeding chair. And he was watching. He was laughing. Our stomachs could not hold this amount of Ensure. They poured one can after another. So when he approached me, I said, “This is the way we are treated!” He said, “You should eat.” I threw up in his face. Literally on his face.”
– Mansoor Adayfi, held without charge at Guantanamo Bay, 2002-2016, describing force feeding used by guards to break hunger strike
Tax time is coming around for the year, 2022, April 15 in the U$A = The Year of Water Tiger, and that Zodiac went completey 180 degrees the other way:
The 2022 year of the water tiger promises a 15 year of positive changes. Your business will be stable, and finances will flow smoothly throughout the year. This year is favorable for new love and relationships. However, you are advised to make savings that might be needed in the future.
You might know where I am going with this. My spouse and I will pay through the nose …
What are workers? Are they human beings? Do they have only a bundle of muscles but, no brains? How do they feel and how do they think? Do they think at all? What do they face in their life – in factories, in foundries and other shops, in assembly lines, in unions?
Workers’ answers to the questions above differ from the response the workers’ masters present. The factor that draws the delineating line is, in short, class position, which is often blurred while discussing issues of life and work, be it related …
What would happen if the media and intelligence agencies applied the same standard used regarding China to the Israel lobby?
In the Globe and Mail Andrew Coyne has written two columns in recent days arguing that the discussion over Chinese interference should focus on “domestic accomplices.” “What we need a public inquiry to look into is domestic complicity in foreign interference,” noted the regular CBC commentator.
In a similar vein Justin Trudeau responded to criticism regarding purported Chinese interference by noting, “We know that Chinese Canadian parliamentarians, …
February 24 marked one year since Russian troops crossed the border with Ukraine and began its overt military intervention in what was a de facto civil war. From 2014 and the Western intervention resulting in that year’s coup against President Yanukovych, Ukraine has been a divided country engaged in a bitter, violent struggle over its future alignment. Indeed, that struggle had been simmering since Ukraine left the Soviet Union, with roots going back even further. Ukrainian nationalism has almost always sought to link independence with the protection of one powerful sponsor or another.
The Two Sessions, or Lianghui in Mandarin, are the simultaneous meetings of the National People’s Congress and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. The National People’s Congress is a legislative body and the highest authority of the Chinese state. The Consultative Conference is a united front political advisory and consultation organization with no legislative or executive functions. During the Two Sessions, the state goals for the rest of the year are established.
What is our very nature as human beings? Philosophers, poets, psychologists and other human beings ad nauseam down through the ages have addressed that question. Is it presumptuous or arrogant of me to chime in with my two cents? Or make it three cents since I will “only” tackle three attributes of human nature; thinking, believing, and seeing. To be sure, though, they comprise a big chunk of our human nature.
Before continuing to read the rest of this article ask yourself what you think or believe you will see. The more knowledge you have about the subjects of human nature, …
A battle over how to protect the planet from overheating is heating up.
Academics are coming out of the woodwork, forming coalitions, issuing declarations. A subdued debate over the merits versus demerits of solar geoengineering (SRM) has been ongoing for years. Now battle lines are forming.
The SRM controversy is coming to a head, in part, because of a small two-person startup company named Make Sunsets launching weather balloons filled with reflective sulfur particles off the coast of Baja, California with the bold idea of testing whether it is realistic to reflect sun radiation back to outer space and thus help …
Questions From a Worker Who Reads (Bertolt Brecht 1935)
Who built Thebes of the 7 gates?
In the books you will read the names of kings.
Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock?
And Babylon, many times demolished,
Who raised it up so many times?
In what houses of gold glittering Lima did its builders live?
Sheikh Zayed Road, Dubai, UAE (Photo: Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin)
Maybe the closest we can get to Elon Musk’s vision of Mars is a visit to Dubai. Imagine an alien planet where you can only live in the base settlement with a …
What the Dominion Voting System Tells Us About How the Media Sacrificed their Credibility to Partisan Falsehoods
by Nolan Higdon / March 10th, 2023
“This is direct evidence of knowing falsity” exclaimed RonNell Anderson Jones, Professor of Law at the University of Utah, in a February 2023 interview with Jon Stewart. Jones noted that in most defamation cases “the likelihood that you will find evidence of them [news outlets] saying, ‘We know this is a lie and we would like to move forward with it anyway is deeply unlikely.’” However, in the case of Dominion Voting Systems v. Fox News, “the filing contains just this trove of evidence of emails and text messages and internal memos that are ‘rare’ both in terms of …
What does it mean to think dogmatically about something? On the surface, dogmatism seems associated with religious beliefs. While most world religions can be dogmatic, this implies there is no dogmatism outside of religion. We know that is not true. Many people accuse socialists of being dogmatic. In fact, socialists accuse each other of the same thing. Instead of looking at dogmatism as connected to content, to a particular set of beliefs, suppose we treat dogmatism as a process that can be applied to any …
With each crossing of the street, with the tempo and multiplicity of economic, occupational and social life, the city sets up a deep contrast with small town and rural life with reference to the sensory foundations of psychic life.
— Georg Simmel ((Georg Simmel. “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (1903). Anthologized in many sociology article-texts.))
Five thousand years ago, the first cities emerged as, and remain today, marketplaces–concentrated centers of trade, commerce, finance. Qualitative values–sentimental, aesthetic, empathic–are replaced by quantitative ones, which could be summed up in the phrase: “How much?” In the beginning, monumental architecture symbolized the awe-inspiring omnipotence of …
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has now moved the Doomsday Clock to 90 seconds to midnight, the closest it has been to the symbolic time of the annihilation of humanity and the Earth since 1947. This is alarming, which is why leaders in the Global South have been making the case to halt the warmongering over Ukraine and against China. As Namibia’s Prime Minister Saara Kuugongelwa-Amadhila …
