Work is easy. Work is difficult. Work shows a lot. Work hides a lot. Work creates. Work destroys. Work is painless. Work is dreadful. Work brings victory. Work is slavish. Work is like creating a poem or a picture with joy. Work is hellish.
A poet or a philosopher may define work differently than a physicist’s definition. An economist or an historian may also have different definitions of work. A person with shackles of exploitation considers and feels work in a different way than a capitalist exploiting working people. Work may appear …
Do you think that both George Soros and China represent threats to your freedom and democratic values?
Do you think that the US government suffered a regime change in 2020, but don’t understand how Anglo-American intelligence agencies orchestrated it?
Did you know that China kicked out George Soros in 1989 and purged his minions of CIA-connected fifth columnists over the ensuing decades?
Why do George Soros and Steve Bannon sound so different on so many points, except when it comes to China which both representatives of the “left” and “right” agree must be put through a regime change in order to preserve “democratic …
by Bill Scheuerman and Sid Plotkin / February 20th, 2023
Have you ever been grilled by little kids asking the question, “Why?” Why is the sky blue? Why does Heather have two moms? Why are you going to work? Why do you need money? Before you know it they have you questioning basic social values you never even thought about. That’s why right-wing Americans attack public education from kindergarten through college. They don’t want children turning into adults who have learned how to ask the question “Why?”
Conservatives have viewed America’s higher education institutions with suspicion for years. Remember Spiro Agnew’s “nattering nabobs of negativity?” But distrust of public education …
Since the COVID-19 lockdowns several politicians have stepped down, including UK prime minister Boris Johnson, Aotearoa (New Zealand) prime minister Jacinda Ardern, Scotland’s first minister Nicola Sturgeon, and RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki in Canada.
We have a long tradition in America of Separation of Church and State that prohibits government’s promotion of religion on the one hand, and interference with its free exercise on the other. In their refusal to establish a state church or to favor one religion over another, the Founding Fathers didn’t think that religion was bad but that there was something amiss in human nature, a certain tendency, a will to power and a lust for domination, that always bore watching.
It was a virus that lay dormant until its host came to power, whereupon that person or group became suddenly …
The national flags of China and Iran fly in Tiananmen Square during Iranian President Ebrahim Raeisi’s visit to Beijing, China, February 14, 2023. (Photo by Reuters)
The key takeaway of President Ebrahim Raeisi’s state visit to Beijing goes way beyond the signing of 20 bilateral cooperation agreements.
This is a crucial inflexion point in an absorbing, complex, decades-long, ongoing historical process: Eurasia integration.
Little wonder that President Raeisi, welcomed by a standing ovation at Peking University before receiving an honorary academic title, stressed “a new world order is forming and taking the place of …
With the data becoming public attesting to the poor performance and the potential for dangerous side-effects of the experimental vaccines mandated on people, is an apology required for those people who were ridiculed as anti-vaxxers for questioning the severity of COVID-19 and the efficacy of the vax?
My title comes from a 19th century author whose name does not matter nor would it mean much if I mentioned him. It’s an old truth that has not changed a bit over the centuries. I think, however, it would be more linguistically accurate to say that most people want to be deceived, for the world, the earth doesn’t give a damn, as the French poet Jacques Prévert reminds us in “Song in the Blood”:
There are great puddles of blood on the world
where’s it all going all this spilled blood
is it the earth that drinks it and gets drunk
funny …
The victims of the devastating 7.8-magnitude earthquake in Turkey and Syria need your help now. The surviving families and children and those rescued alive from the rubble are in serious danger in affected wintertime impoverished regions. Refugees in other places fleeing their war-torn homelands are also suffering. International aid agencies are grossly insufficient for these immediate humanitarian necessities.
What are you Big Business Titans doing sitting on massive pay, profits and tax escapes? Awakening your consciousness for your fellow human beings may be a modest form of redemption. Further, you have access to logistics specialists, delivery systems, communication facilities and many …
A recent report out of West Antarctica is rattling scientists.
It’s all about heat, big-time heat, encroaching upon the world’s biggest chunk of ice that locks down a couple hundred feet of sea level rise. This kind of news is enough to raise the hackles of smart well-informed people, as excessive CO2 emissions spewing like crazy ever since the turn of the 21st century are now flat-out playing with fire in a very dangerous corner of the planet.
Meanwhile, regarding this very dicey situation, what will the leading nations of the world do? A Marshall Plan operation? Or nothing? Hmm. Based upon …
The Observer, the Great Peace March, and Nord Stream
by Media Lens / February 17th, 2023
The 20th anniversary of the illegal, unprovoked US-UK war of aggression on Iraq comes at an awkward time for a UK press currently suppressing the truth of the illegal, provoked Russian invasion of Ukraine. It’s particularly awkward for our fearless watchdogs to recall the great anti-war march of 15 February 2003 when, in 2023, they are busy stifling dissent protesting America’s horrific proxy war in Ukraine.
In the Observer, Tim Adams wrote a piece under the joyous title: ‘“A beautiful outpouring of rage”: did Britain’s biggest ever …
In December 1998, Fidel Castro addressed the 7th Congress of the Young Communist League in Havana, Cuba, a year after the catastrophic ‘market failure’ in Asia, when global finance exited the region and left behind economic deserts stretching from Korea to Malaysia. ‘The world is rapidly being globalised’, Castro told the Cuban youth, and this globalisation was ‘an unsustainable and intolerable world economic order’ founded on the cannibalisation of nature and the brutalisation of social life. …
It is not farfetched to make the point that delivery systems capable of deploying nuclear weapons will lead to them carrying those very same weapons. Whatever the promises made by governments that such delivery systems will not carry such loads, stifling secrecy over such arrangements can only stir doubt.
That is the problem facing the AUKUS alliance which makes Australia a central point of reference for Washington and its broader ambitions in curbing China. The alliance is increasingly being characterised by a nuclear tone. First came the promise to furnish Australia with nuclear powered submarines, absent nuclear weapons. Then came the …
For a whole year, Israel has struggled in its attempts to articulate a clear and decisive position regarding the Russia-Ukraine war. The reason behind the seemingly confused Israeli position is that it stands to lose, regardless of the outcome. But is Israel a neutral party?
Israel is home to a population of almost one million Russian-speaking citizens, one-third of them arriving from Ukraine shortly before and immediately following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Those Israelis, with deep cultural and linguistic roots in their actual motherland, are a …
We urgently need to spark a mass mobilization antiwar movement in North America. There have been good antiwar demonstrations in recent months, but they have been very limited. We need to rapidly expand tenfold.
The Rage Against the War Machine initiative, which is organized by a diverse group of anti-war forces, could do just that. The demands and overall speaker list are very good.
For example, Demand 1 is “Not one more penny for War in Ukraine”. They explain, “The Democrats and Republicans have armed Ukraine with tens of billions of …
Outcry across the Political Spectrum to Stop War Funding
by John V. Walsh / February 14th, 2023
We in the United States are on the brink of war with a major nuclear power, Russia. If that is not a dire emergency, an acute existential threat, what is? This situation has persisted for a year now without a national protest to stop the slide to Armageddon.
Given the proximity of nuclear Armageddon, the reaction that sanity dictates has now materialized for the first time. On February 19 in Washington DC, a demonstration against the war, RageAgainstWar, will take place, with sister rallies occurring in cities distant from DC, …
by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead / February 14th, 2023
If all that Americans want is security, they can go to prison. They’ll have enough to eat, a bed and a roof over their heads. But if an American wants to preserve his dignity and his equality as a human being, he must not bow his neck to any dictatorial government.
— President Dwight D. Eisenhower
The government wants us to bow down to its dictates.
It wants us to buy into the fantasy that we are living the dream, when in fact, we are trapped in an endless nightmare of servitude and …
How do I then deftly move from housing as a human right (my last piece in DV is about housing, a job, my interviews, and getting the boot, i.e., not getting hired for a job I am perfect for — What’s It All About, Alfie?), and from the discrimination of this culture on all levels, but also in housing, against the non-White non-Hispanic, into the next and the next topic on my mind?
Vaccination Bandwagon gone rogue
How will I be able to tie in what I have expressed in THAT piece into something around the issues, …
Things are getting rather bizarre at the US Northern Command and the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD). Its increasingly prominent commanding chief, one General Glen VanHerck, has abandoned any initial sense of frankness in discussing the destruction of an alleged Chinese surveillance balloon on February 4.
Since that disproportionately violent event, more public relations than sense, three other objects have also been destroyed. “We’re calling them objects, not balloons, for a reason,” the general said cryptically in remarks made on February 12. The briefing came in the aftermath of the downing of an octagonal-shaped object over Lake Huron on …
by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies / February 13th, 2023
Fresh graves at a cemetery near Bakhmut, December 2022. – Photo credit: Reuters
In a recent column, military analyst William Astore wrote, “[Congressman] George Santos is a symptom of a much larger disease: a lack of honor, a lack of shame, in America. Honor, truth, integrity, simply don’t seem to matter, or matter much, in America today… But how do you have a democracy where there is no truth?”
Astore went on to compare America’s political and military leaders to the disgraced Congressman Santos. “…
Inside the beating heart of many students and a large number of learners lies an inner cheat. To get passing grades, every effort will be made to do the least to achieve the most. Efforts to subvert the central class examination are the stuff of legend: discreetly written notes on hands, palms and other body parts; secreted pieces of paper; messages concealed in various vessels that may be smuggled into the hall.
In the fight against such cunning devilry, vigilant invigilators have pursued such efforts with eagle eyes, attempting to ensure the integrity of the exam answers. Of late, the …
The US is a far bigger threat to Canadian sovereignty and democracy than China but you’d never know it from following the dominant media.
In recent days a CIA-linked firm got the federal government to stop research with a Chinese university, a State Department funded group convinced parliament to criticize China and the Pentagon’s panic over a balloon prompted Global Affairs to summon China’s ambassador. But even media critic Canadaland prefers to focus on Chinese interference in Canada.
According to “Big Trouble with Meddling China”, a 45-minute Canadaland podcast released last week, “the Chinese state has infiltrated Canadian democracy at …
Marshal Arthur Harris, the director of England’s Bomber Command decided, in mid-1941, to abandon the illusion of surgical strikes. Harris, nicknamed “Bomber,” mastered the ins and outs of committing war crimes from his insidious instructor, Winston Churchill.
The year was 1919. The Royal Air Force asked Churchill for permission to use chemical weapons “against recalcitrant Arabs as an experiment.” Churchill, secretary of state at the war office at the time, promptly consented. “I am strongly in favor of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes,” he explained. Bomber Harris, an up-and-coming …
“The Invaders. Alien beings from a dying planet. Their destination: the earth. Their purpose: to make it their world.
“David Vincent has seen them. For him, it began one lost night on a lonely country road, looking for a shortcut. It began with a closed, deserted diner, and a man too long without sleep to continue his journey. It began with the landing of a craft from another galaxy.
“Now, David Vincent knows that the Invaders are here, that they have taken human form. Somehow he must convince a disbelieving …
Set in postwar London, Alfie features Michael Caine as a chauffeur bent on promiscuity. After impregnating his girlfriend he takes off on vacation. He continues his life of womanizing, but he can’t hide forever. A misfortune strikes and Alfie is forced to face the product of his ways.
This not the crux of the question, since I was a monogamous dater and monogamous husband. It’s more centered around the discordance and dissheveled nature of humanity in the Western world, which unfortunately is the litmus test for much of the world now, which is another conundrum for me: why the hell would …
