Censorship is never innocent, made worse for its strained good intentions. For those responsible for setting and policing such policies, the inner judge comes out, stomping on assumed meanings, interpreting and removing things to ensure the masses are not corrupted. Children’s stories and tales have not been exempted from this train of revision, expurgation and adjustment.
In modifying the language of children’s texts, a number of agents come into play: concerned parents, worried authorities, and the considerations that reflect the temper and mores of the time. Publishers, keen to ensure a wider readership, feel pressure to alter the original text …
On February 20, the United Nations Security Council approved a statement, described in the media as a ‘watered-down’ version of an earlier draft resolution which would have demanded that Israel “immediately and completely cease all settlement activities in the occupied Palestinian territory.”
The intrigues that led to the scrapping of what was meant to be a binding resolution will be the subject of a future article. For now, however, I would like to reflect on the fact that the so-called international community’s relationship with the Palestinian struggle has always attempted …
Evaluating teachers on their students’ performance is an issue that has elicited much comment over more than a decade. In essence, this view assumes that if students aren’t learning, the fault lies squarely with their teachers alone. While the logic of this view seems compelling at first, a moment’s reflection shows that it ignores several factors over which teachers have no control, factors that have an enormous influence on students’ ability or willingness to learn, or if they are able and willing, a multiplicity of distractions get in the way.
These factors include: the home life of children; the poverty …
Financial podcasts have been featuring ominous headlines lately along the lines of “Your Bank Can Legally Seize Your Money” and “Banks Can STEAL Your Money?! Here’s How!” The reference is to “bail-ins:” the provision under the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act allowing Systemically Important Financial Institutions (SIFIs, basically the biggest banks) to bail in or expropriate their creditors’ money in the event of insolvency. The problem is that depositors are classed as “creditors.” So how big is the risk to your deposit account? Part I of this two part article will review the bail-in issue. Part II will look at …
Samira is a young Zanzibari woman who had a big dream. To leave home, have a family and study for a career. In many countries this is done as a matter of course. However, in some places there are many struggles and difficulties, both social and financial, that must be faced.
In Samira’s Dream, we follow Samira over a period of seven years as she grows and develops without losing sight of her objectives. The length of time taken to make this documentary reminded me of the fictional film Boyhood which is made and takes place over a period of 12 …
The unelected World Economic Forum has groomed many of the politicians in places of power to enact a program, the Great Reset, that has stirred antipathy among many citizens.
The only re-armament needed is intellectual and moral – on all sides
by Jan Oberg / February 24th, 2023
Introduction: 1 year of violence on top of 30 years of conflict: Too much wrong thinking
The world’s focus is on the war. On February 24, it is one year since Russia launched its so-called special military operation. Much more important is to focus on the underlying conflicts …
by Bill Scheuerman and Sid Plotkin / February 24th, 2023
Florida’s Governor DeSantis educational scheme that students need to learn the facts and nothing but the facts is likely to make teaching and learning in Florida more challenging than ever before. DeSantis’ “fact only” pedagogy mirrors that of Thomas Gradgrind, a character in Dickens’ Hard Times who sustained the Victorian status quo by teaching students how not to think. Echoing Gradgrinds’ “Teach these boys and girls nothing but facts,” DeSantis is prohibiting questions of interpretation, analysis and meaning in Florida’s classrooms. DeSantis’ Gradgrind mentality views facts as simple straight-forward bits of …
Canada, Nunavut Territory, Repulse Bay, Polar Bear (Ursus maritimus) stands on melting sea ice at sunset near Harbour Islands
Climate Code Red, a very thorough and well-respected source on climate change/global warming, recently issued a three-part study on where things stand with the climate system via looking through the rearview mirror at 2022 and reflecting that charred image into the future: “Faster, Higher, Hotter: What We Learned About the Climate System” in 2022 by David Spratt, Research Director, Breakthrough National Centre for Climate Restoration, Feb. 20, 2023.
How Nikki Haley Became Israel’s Candidate for the White House
by Ramzy Baroud / February 23rd, 2023
Though it has been argued that the so-called American dream is long dead, Nikki Haley is proof that the dream is still alive. Unfortunately, the ‘dream’ is hers alone.
Until recently, a close confidante of former US President Donald Trump and his pro-Israel circle, Haley wants to be the next United States president. On February 14, she officially declared her candidacy and, starting February next year, she will be officially competing against her former bosses in the Republican primaries.
It is true that her popularity among Republican Party supporters …
They have become the outsourcing mandarins, consultancy companies which have served to degrade expertise in the public sector while diminishing the quality of services. Along the way, they have charged astronomical fees in giving repeatedly flawed advice. Consultants, packaged as all wise gurus, have become the great confidence tricksters.
Embracing the inner voodoo of consultancy had the effect of discouraging in-house contributions and solutions within government and the broader economy. The result was a strange plea to those outside the public sector, resulting in what can only be described accurately as the consultacracy.
I wrote the following column ten years ago. Note the absence of any accountability or regret by Bush, Cheney and their co-war criminals.
Ten years ago [now 20 years ago, on March 19, 2003] George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, as war criminals, launched the sociocide of the people of Iraq – replete with embedded television and newspaper reporters chronicling the invasion through the Bush lens. That illegal war of aggression was, of course, based on recognized lies, propaganda and cover-ups that duped or co-opted leading news institutions such as the New York Times and the Washington Post.
Children play in the Rostock housing development, which, like all housing developments in the DDR, was required to include large open spaces for children.
Credit: Jürgen Sindermann,Wikimedia Commons / German Federal Archive.
A few years ago, a minor medical problem took me to the Hospital Alemán-Nicaragüense in Nicaragua’s capital, Managua. While I was being treated, I asked the doctor, a kindly older man, if the hospital had been built in association with a German missionary organisation, given its name (in Spanish, alemán means ‘German’). No, he said: this hospital used …
On 21 February 2023, climate scientist Professor Bill McGuire issued a stark warning:
‘Remember this date. First rationing of food in UK due to extreme weather. Things will only get worse as climate breakdown bites ever harder.’
This was in response to the news that British supermarkets are rationing fresh produce, including tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers. Rationing could last weeks. The shortages were caused by ‘poor weather’, as the Guardian put it, in southern Europe and north Africa. In fact, in June and July …
These days there is a lot of discussion in the media about Chinese aggression in a wide range of areas, and the assumption is that this has huge implications for global security. Such a one-sided discussion can only lead to heightened tension and a greater possibility of misunderstandings leading to a devastating war. In order to solve global problems in a sensible, long-term way it is important to look at the situation from the perspective of all concerned. This essay will highlight some of the issues that have mostly been ignored, both in the media and in academia.
Teamwork, physical activity, positive reinforcement and community recognition and participation.
This year’s Lincoln County Special Olympics basketball teams will be hitting Turner, Oregon for state wide championship games.
Getting there has been a team effort: state level Special Olympics staff and administrators; our local Lincoln County directors, Donna and Eric Thorpe; family and friends; volunteers; and the players.
From 2020 up to part of 2022, the face-to-face S.O. games and practices were put on hold. This year, the basketball participants in Lincoln County number more than 20. Our Saturday practices have …
Aboriginal People’s Advocate Lidia Thorpe
Resigns From the Greens
by Trotskyist Platform / February 22nd, 2023
DjabWurrung Gunnai Gunditjmara woman and prominent voice for Aboriginal rights, Lidia Thorpe today quit the Greens. The federal senator, who had been the Greens First Nations spokesperson, will now sit as an independent. Announcing her resignation from the Greens, Lidia Thorpe stated that: “This country has a strong grassroots blak sovereign movement, full of staunch and committed warriors, and I want to represent that movement fully”, “It has become clear to me that I can’t do that within the Greens.”
Earlier, targeted for her strong advocacy of Aboriginal rights and her refusal …
One might as well state the matter clearly: given the realities of global warming, rampant environmental destruction, escalating imperialistic clashes, and a crisis-prone global economy, there is no hope for the world unless an international left can be resurrected. A left at least as powerful as the one that created social democracy in the wake of World War II. As complex in their origins as the world’s ills are, they can be expressed and explained in a single sentence: internationally, there is a political right, a proto-fascist far-right, and a stagnant though tenacious center, but, in effect, no left. That …
Former president Jimmy Carter is back in the news. His ongoing illness has surely caused him and his loved ones much distress and grief. For that, I wish them peace as the 39th president nears the end of his life.
However, this is also an important opportunity to recognize that corporate media whitewashing is yet again in full effect — painting Carter as a peace-loving saint who deserved a Nobel Peace Prize.
As with all U.S. politicians — regardless of party — it …
by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead / February 22nd, 2023
Autocrats only understand one word: no, no, no. No you will not take my country, no you will not take my freedom, no you will not take my future… A dictator bent on rebuilding an empire will never be able to ease the people’s love of liberty. Brutality will never grind down the will of the free.
— President Biden
Oh, the hypocrisy.
To hear President Biden talk about Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, you might imagine that Putin is the only dictator bent on expanding his military empire through the use of …
by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies / February 21st, 2023
Half a million tons of methane rise from the sabotaged Nord Stream pipeline. Photo: Swedish Coast Guard
On the other hand, Ukraine’s economy has shrunk by 35% or more, despite $46 billion in economic aid from generous U.S. taxpayers, on top of $67 billion in military aid.
European economies are also taking a hit. After growing by 3.5% in 2022, the Euro area economy is expected to stagnate and grow only 0.7% in 2023, while the British economy is projected to actually contract by 0.6%. Germany was more …
On February 7, a funeral was held in the northern Syrian town of Jinderis. It was one of numerous such funerals to be held on that day across Syria and Türkiye, following a devastating earthquake that killed and injured thousands.
Each one of these funerals represented two seemingly opposite notions: collective grief and collective hope. The Jinderis funeral was a stark representation of this dichotomy.
Earlier, rescue workers found a baby in the rubble of a destroyed home. Her umbilical cord was still connected to her mother. Quickly, they cut the cord and …
When news first emerged over explosions endured by the Nord Stream pipelines, known collectively as Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2, an army of guessers was mobilised. The accusation that Russia had done it seemed counterintuitive, given that the Russian state company Gazprom is a majority shareholder of Nord Stream 1 and sole owner of Nord Stream 2. But this less than convenient fact did not discourage those from the Moscow-is-behind everything School of Thinking. “It’s pretty predictable and predictably stupid to express such versions,” snarled Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov.
It is understood by all that at least two sides are required in a war scenario. One side must be waging war on another side. It is not required that the aggressed side fight back. To surrender to a warmaker, however, means coming under the suzerainty of the warmaker. That is almost always anathema to a people since people cherish their freedom. Therefore, succumbing to a warmaker is likened to the indignity of living on one’s knees as opposed to the dignity of dying on one’s feet.
Karl Marx famously said in the Eighteenth Brumaire that history repeats itself, “the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.” While there are many examples of this insight from history, Marx could not foresee how farce would become the staple of the US ruling class, how elites would defend what they see as their interests with a web of calculated deception extending beyond the limits of the absurd.
Like the mad General Jack D. Ripper in Stanley Kubrick’s great film, Dr. Strangelove, an Air Force four-star General, Mike Minihan, “sent a memo on Friday [January 27] to the officers …
