What is the truth, and where did it go?
Ask Oswald and Ruby, they oughta know
“Shut your mouth,” said the wise old owl
Business is business, and it’s a murder most foul
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Don’t worry, Mr. President
Help’s on the way
Your brothers are coming, there’ll be hell to pay
Brothers? What brothers? What’s this …
Soon after arriving in Oslo, my taxi zigzagged through the city’s well-organized streets and state-of-the-art infrastructure. Large billboards advertised the world’s leading brands in fashion, cars, and perfumes. Amid all the expressions of wealth and plenty, an electronic sign by a bus stop flashed the images of poor looking African children needing help.
Over the years, Norway has served as a relatively good model of meaningful humanitarian and medical aid. This is especially true if compared to other self-serving western countries, where aid is often linked to direct political and military interests. Still, the public humiliation of poor, hungry and diseased …
Gianni Infantino, president of FIFA, the most famous 52-year-old brat of the world football federation, has not been much in the news of late. Such creatures of authority do their best (and worst) work in the shadows. But given that the FIFA Men’s World Cup is upon us, he thought it wise to address a few issues that had irked his pure, troubled self. They were addressed to the naysayers and critics, those critical of Qatar’s human rights record, its approach to sexual minorities, its lamentable labour safety record, its successful bribing efforts to secure the bid in the first …
There’s a blaze of light in every word
It doesn’t matter which you heard
The holy or the broken Hallelujah
– Leonard Cohen. Hallelujah
The last time I was in Montreal, Leonard Cohen, who had been dead two years, was on my mind. How could it be otherwise for one who has admired his songs since his first album. My daughter is named after perhaps his greatest song – Suzanne – (a heresy to some in light of this article about “Hallelujah”), and all his work has enchanted not just me but millions of other …
The author with Pyatnashka commanders at outpost near Avdeevka, Donetsk People’s Republic. [ Source: Photo courtesy of Eva Bartlett] America is widely understood to be a key instigator behind conflict in Ukraine that has pitted brother against brother
Smeared, stigmatized, and lied about in Western media propaganda, the mostly Russian-speaking people of the Donbass region were being slaughtered by the thousands in a brutal war of “ethnic cleansing” launched against them by the neo-Nazi regime in Kyiv, which the U.S. installed after the CIA overthrew Ukraine’s legally elected president in …
Poor, silly, protuberant Mike Pompeo. The stocky, irritated former CIA director and former Secretary of State is rather upset that those who worked under him dared wag their tongues about Julian Assange. The wagging so happened to relate to contemplated plans of abduction and assassination, something the US executive formally disallows though permits via various devious mechanisms.
It’s not every day that officials of the Central Intelligence Agency open up about their operations but on the occasion of the Yahoo! News report, it was clear that Assange had driven a number to sheer distraction. Had these security types caught the …
A Rabble interview with the Macdonald-Laurier Institute’s Kaveh Shahrooz offers a troubling window into Canadian politics.
Last month the left-wing website, for whom I’ve written for two decades, published “Understanding the dynamics of the protests in Iran”. Everything about the article should have raised red flags.
Described as “a lawyer and human rights activist”, Shahrooz is a Senior Fellow with the Macdonald-Laurier Institute’s Centre for Advancing Canada’s Interests Abroad. A hub of pro-corporate and imperialist thought, MLI is a “right-wing charity” reported the Broadbent Institute. Alongside funding from the wealthy and corporations, MLI’s pro-NATO and anti-China politics are financed …
K.C.S. Paniker (India), Words and Symbols, 1968
In 1845, Karl Marx jotted down some notes for The German Ideology, a book that he wrote with his close friend Friedrich Engels. Engels found these notes in 1888, five years after Marx’s death, and published them under the title Theses on Feuerbach. The eleventh thesis is the most famous: ‘philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it’.
For the past five years, we, at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, have considered this thesis with great …
Washington Humiliated, Cuba Lifted Up, at the 2022 United Nations Vote Against the US Blockade
by Ike Nahem / November 18th, 2022
For the 30th consecutive time, dating back to 1992, the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) has overwhelmingly voted in favor of a Cuban-sponsored Resolution on the “Necessity of Ending the Economic, Commercial, and Financial Embargo by the United States of America Against Cuba” [N2263517.pdf]. It was accompanied by a thorough, country-by-country damning official report by the UN Secretary General [N2128802.pdf].
International Moral and Political Shield
This 30th consecutive UNGA vote is obviously “non-binding.” That is, it carries no punitive measures of enforcement against the US government and has no counter-measures to deter or block the implementation of the illegal – by the …
Rain, Greenland Summit Station (Getty Image)
A new study finds Greenland’s ice sheet thinning much further into the ice sheet core than previously thought, 100 miles inland. ((S. Khan, et al, “Extensive Inland Thinning and Speed-Up of North-East Greenland Stream”, Nature, November 9, 2022.))
The implications are extremely concerning and far-reaching especially for sea level rise. It is a significant development that will prompt climate scientists to recalculate global warming’s impact.
In that regard, some facts are worth repeating. Here’s one that cannot be told often enough because of the gravity of …
Ecomodernists offer no solutions to contemporary problems other than technical innovation and further integration into private markets which are structured systematically by centralized state power in favour of the wealthy…
Chris Smaje “Ecomodernism: a Response to my Critics”, Originally published September 10, 2015 by Small Farm Future
In 2017, the then Monsanto Chief Technology Officer Robb Fraley argued that his company made a mistake in not reaching out to the public about genetically modified organisms (GMOs) when they first appeared on the market in the 1990s. He felt consumers had been unduly swayed by an anti-GMO movement and the …
What if there was a time when the general population was being relentlessly coerced into taking a particular drug? How would you know what to do? Where would you turn for the necessary context? Surely you wouldn’t just take the shot without doing your homework… right? That would be irrational. And you wouldn’t blame others for being hesitant… right? That would be even more irrational. Logically, you’d look up a relatively recent, similar scenario to see what you …
Wars tend to bury facts. What comes out of them is often a furiously untidy mix of accounts that, when considered later, constitute wisps of fantasy and presumption. Rarely accepted in the heat of battle is the concept of mistake: that a weapon was wrongly discharged or errantly hit an unintended target; a deployment that went awry; or that the general was drunk when an order was given. Wars invite ludicrous tall tales and lies with sprinting legs.
In the Ukraine War, where accurate information has almost ceased to be relevant (unless you believe the sludge from any one side), the …
Of the traditional US holidays, Thanksgiving was by far my favorite. I can do without the excessive commercialization of Xmas with its cheesy music that broadcasts for weeks on end. Cancel the forced festiveness of New Year’s and the sloppy drunks it generates; ditto for the militarism of July 4th. So, what’s not good about coming together with friends and family and sharing a home cooked feast?
I don’t want to ruin the party, but before you carve up the turkey, read the opening essay in Glen Ford’s The Black Agenda. …
Photo: W. Rospondek, Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp
It feels like it’s finally over, doesn’t it, the whole “apocalyptic pandemic” thing? I mean, really, really over this time. Not like all those other times when you thought it was over, but it wasn’t over, and was like the end of those Alien movies, where it seems like Ripley has finally escaped, but the alien is hiding out in the shuttle, or the escape pod, or Ripley’s intestinal tract.
But this time doesn’t feel like that. This time it feels like it’s really, really …
Christine Anderson, a German member of the European Parliament, revealed Pfizer’s confession: “It was a gigantic lie what they [Pfizer] told us that these vaccines would prevent you from catching this virus or would prevent transmission. Well, none of that was true as it turns out, and based on that lie, all of the mandates, all of the lockdowns, all of the non-pharmaceutical measures of wearing masks, staying at home — all of that was based on that gigantic …
It all speaks to scale: the attorney generals of 40 states within the US clubbing together to charge Google for misleading users. On this occasion, the conduct focused on making users assume they had turned off the location tracking function on their accounts even as the company continued harvesting data about them.
The $391.5 billion settlement was spearheaded by Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum and Nebraska Attorney General Doug Petersen. “For years Google has prioritized profit over their users’ privacy,” stated Rosenblum. “They have been crafty and deceptive. Consumers thought they had turned off their location tracking features on Google, …
Biden and Burns’ clunky double act is likely to not impress anyone in Beijing and Moscow.
by Finian Cunningham / November 16th, 2022
U.S. President Joe Biden apparently sought to lower tensions with China this week when he promised Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping that Washington was “not seeking a new Cold War” with Beijing.
The two leaders met on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Indonesia. It was their first face-to-face meeting since Biden took office in January 2021. While Biden was all smiles for a handshake photo-op, Xi looked noticeably reserved, like a guy who was bracing himself as one about to hear loads of bullshit.
After more than three hours of private discussions, the Americans and Western media subsequently tried to …
On Sunday Bill Sloan and I interrupted a Technion Canada fundraiser to challenge its support of the Israeli military and the role of government-subsidized charities in promoting Israeli apartheid.
After entering the room, I declared “Technion Canada supports the Israeli military and the Israeli military’s war crimes. Technion Canada has projects that support the Israeli military. Free Palestine.”
In response a 65-ish man in a suit hustled across the room to punch me in the head. Sloan and many in the audience witnessed the assault. The man’s aggression can be viewed on my video of the incident. This came a week …
Peter Malinauskas, the South Australian Premier, has been the latest convert to the LIV Golf circuit, showing little to no awareness about where the lion’s share of funding is coming from. When confronted with that, he paddles away the prospect of being compromised. With LIV Golf Adelaide, scheduled for April 21-23 next year, he has made an undeniable statement on priorities.
The press release from the premier’s office claimed that the rights to host the LIV Golf event had been “hotly contested” (governments across the world are gagging for it – queue up and wait your turn). It would take …
The findings are significant not only for Brazil but also for high income countries such as the U S, Canada, the UK, and Australia, where UPFs account for more than half of total calorific intake.
Brazilians consume far less of these products than countries with high incomes. This means the estimated impact would be even higher in richer nations.
UPFs are ready-to-eat-or-heat industrial formulations made with ingredients …
by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies / November 15th, 2022
Senators Inhofe and Reed from the Senate Armed Services Committee Photo credit: AP
If the powerful leaders of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Senators Jack Reed (D) and Jim Inhofe (R), have their way, Congress will soon invoke wartime emergency powers to build up even greater stockpiles of Pentagon weapons. The amendment is supposedly designed to facilitate replenishing the weapons the United States has sent to Ukraine, but a look at the wish list contemplated in this amendment reveals a different story.
GEOFOR: How do you see the outcome of the elections: is this a victory for the Republicans or a failure for the Democrats?
Peter Koenig: So far, to the surprise of most people, there are no clear results yet of the US Midterm Elections. The Republicans have won the House of representatives, where they already had a majority before, but the Senate is not decided yet. In three States, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada, the ballots are still being counted, or they will head for a run-off on 6 December 2022.
The results are too close to call a winner. There will be …
