“You leave fragments of your spirit here and there over the years.
These pieces are glued — like barnacles on a ship — to various
places, objects, people, memories, and unfinished business.
Although detaching from them can be extremely difficult,
detachment is a far more natural practice for your soul
as well as emotions and mental health than holding on
to the dead zone of your past.”
–from “Entering the Castle,” by Caroline Myss, p. 92
Today is the 40th anniversary of the quadruple terror bombing of December 31, 1982, when I happened to be serving a short sentence on the 5th floor of the Metropolitan Correction Center …
In this age of ubiquitous surveillance, there are no private lives: everything is public.
Surveillance cameras mounted on utility poles, traffic lights, businesses, and homes. License plate readers. Ring doorbells. GPS devices. Dash cameras. Drones. Store security cameras. Geofencing and geotracking. FitBits. Alexa. Internet-connected devices.
There are roughly one billion surveillance cameras worldwide and that number continues to grow, thanks to their wholehearted adoption by governments (especially law enforcement and military agencies), businesses, and individual consumers.
The Peruvian Prosecutor’s Office has placed she who claims the country’s presidency, Dina Bolurate under investigation for crimes including genocide, resulting from her government’s treatment of protesters who prefer the elected President Pedro Castillo. Now much of her government is under investigation for genocide (“genocide, qualified homicide and serious injuries”): Alberto Otarola (the prime minister who just resigned), minister of defense Jorge Chavez, minister of the interior Victor Rojas, a previous prime minister Pedro Angulo and previous Minister of the Interior Cesar Cervantes. ((“Genocide investigation opened against Peru president after protest deaths,” Agence France-Presse, Jan 11, 2023, Guardian.))
International relations remains the sum game of vast hypocrisies, a patchwork of compromises and the compromised. Every moral condemnation of a regime’s conduct is bound to be shown up as an exercise in double standards, often implicating the accusers. In the case of the military regime in Myanmar, double standards are not only modish but expected.
A number of international declarations and measures have targeted Myanmar’s regime for its blood-soaked brutality, its genocidal practices against the Rohingya, and its general contempt for the human rights of its citizenry. In a statement last November, US Secretary of State, Antony …
In 1919, South Carolina’s Charleston Museum acquired an unusually massive jar bearing the inscription “made at Stoney bluff; / for making dis old gin enuff / May 13 – 1859 – / Dave & / Baddler”. The following year another large, alkaline-glazed vessel came into the museum’s possession bearing the same date and names within its inscription. At the time little was known about South Carolina’s pre-war stoneware industry or the highly skilled enslaved labor that it relied on at every level of manufacturing. It would not be until 1930 that “Dave” was identified as the “might good” potter, David …
Probably no corporation possesses a bigger share of control over America’s Government than does the one that sells more to the U.S. Government than does any other: Lockheed Martin. Actually, its top owners, or the group of stockholders who dominate the firm and cooperatively together control its policies and determine whom the corporation’s top executives are, are, together with one-another, the individual persons who cooperatively produce the decisions that constitute this “bigger share of control over America’s Government” than any other corporation does (and vastly more than the American public does). Some of these top owners …
The policymaking apparatus behind the AUKUS security pact was shoddy from the start. It has raised questions about the extent US power will subordinate Australia further in future conflicts; it has brought into question Australia’s own sovereignty; and it has also raised the spectre of regional nuclear proliferation via the use of otherwise closely guarded propulsion technology.
The other feature of this whole enterprise, as it always is regarding the procurement of submarines, is their rate of production. The US Navy’s fast attack submarine program, …
Japan’s actions in a certain period of the past not only claimed numerous victims here in Japan but also left the peoples of neighboring Asia and elsewhere with scars that are painful even today. I am thus taking this opportunity to state my belief, based on my profound remorse for these acts of aggression, colonial rule, and the like that caused such unbearable suffering and sorrow for so many people, that Japan’s future path should be one of making every effort to build world peace in line with my no-war commitment. It is imperative for us Japanese to look squarely …
Review of Martin J. Sherwin’s “Gambling with Armageddon: Nuclear Roulette from Hiroshima to the Cuban Missile Crisis”
by Lawrence S. Wittner / January 16th, 2023
The development and the deployment of nuclear weapons are usually based on the assumption that they enhance national security. But, in fact, as this powerful study of nuclear policy convincingly demonstrates, nuclear weapons move nations toward the brink of destruction.
The basis for this conclusion is the post-World War II nuclear arms race and, especially, the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962. At the height of the crisis, top officials from the governments of the United States and the Soviet Union narrowly avoided annihilating a substantial portion of the human race by …
Whatever your feelings about the government, as a worker, you must pay into a government-administered pension plan, so receiving a pension is collecting what you are due.
The dirty bomb and its purportedly famed radiation dispersal attributes has an undeserved mythology. It serves to bloat budgets and confer grants on specious theories propounded by specious theorists. It is all rather easy to make a security threat up, and a celluloid, Hollywood scenario of a dirty bomb going off in the middle of a metropolis killing thousands is just one of those instances. Scaring people is child’s play and often the work of the unscrupulous.
This month, it was announced that staff …
What they [regular people] need, and what they feel they need, is a quality of mind that will help them use information and to develop reason in order to achieve lucid summations of what is going on in the world and what may be happening within themselves… what may be called the sociological imagination.
What if someone of consequence and world attention, difficult for US monopolized and controlled media to ignore, reminded us that one year before receiving a bullet to his brain, King had made bold print headlines in newspapers worldwide reading, “KING CALLS US “GREATEST PURVEYOR OF VIOLENCE IN THE WORLD. ((“Beyond Vietnam — A Time to Break Silence” sermon delivered 4 April 1967, Riverside Church, New York City.))
Would it not weaken US deep state media credibility as it tried to explain how this world-shaking event in the life of Martin Luther King has not been known by millions who celebrate …
You and I, dear reader, if you are of the composition of say Rosa Parks, or Rachel Carson, MLK, Paul Robeson, Angela Davis (or, fill in the social justice champion of your choice), did not sign up for this, or approve of it, or okayed it in our name:
Some researchers who have long studied the technology are deeply troubled that the company, Make Sunsets, appears to have moved forward with launches from a site in Mexico without …
How many times have the publics in U.S.-and-allied countries been lied-to about invasions their Governments had made on the basis of falsehoods that their ‘news’-media knew at the time were false but nonetheless reported to them as being true? How many times have those ‘news’-media reported as being ‘a democratic revolution’ the overthrow of a foreign Government when those ‘news’-media knew, either while it was going on or else less than a month afterward, that it had actually been just another U.S. coup — and yet those same ‘news’-media still, even to …
Every Sunday about a dozen high school teenagers gather without their iPhones on a little hill in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, USA. They form a circle and quietly start to read serious books (Dostoevsky, Boethius) (paperbacks or hardbacks), or draw in sketchbooks, or just serenely sit listening to the wind.
As the New York Times reporter Alex Vadukul wrote last month these youngsters have had enough of the addictive Internet Gulag run by corporate incarcerators. “Social media and phones are not real life,” said Lola Shub a senior at Essex Street Academy. She expressed the group’s consensus: “When …
As 2022 draws to a close, we try to forget the ugly and cruel that we have witnessed throughout the year. We try to think about all the good that has happened, hoping that the next one will be even better. But if we don’t face the wrong, how will we create a better world for our children?
One of the many unpleasant news stories in December was the surfacing of the outrageous lies of US representative-elect George Santos (NY 3rd congressional district). Santos, a young Republican candidate for US Congress lied about his education (he said he attended two colleges, …
Villains often have the best tunes. In some cases, they also have the best evidence. The tendency in the latter is to suppress or distort that evidence if it is contrary to their interests. Exxon, now ExxonMobil, the world’s largest oil and gas company, has revealed, much like tobacco companies of the past, that excellent research that might prove costly to profits is best suppressed. Destroying ecological systems and ravaging mother nature are secondary considerations.
In the 1970s, it was already engaged in research of farsighted worth. As a …
I have a newly-discovered health problem, where during the day, my blood pressure readings are quite normal, or we might even say somewhat on the low side, 105-65. During the night, when I am sleeping, however, the very same indicators are just too high, 168-92.
My doctor, a very dedicated physician and caring human being has no idea why. She has asked around, but the responses have been few, and certainly not very encouraging. To be honest, most doctors don’t know the answer, and as far as the patients, how many of them do you know, that measure and record their …
The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in a democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, and our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.
— Edward Bernays
The Edward Bernays quote up top comes from his 1928 book, …
Canada, Nunavut Territory, Repulse Bay, Polar Bear (Ursus maritimus) stands on melting sea ice at sunset near Harbour IslandsNASA claims that 2022 was one of the hottest years ever recorded with record-breaking heat waves around the world, as major commercial waterways, like the Danube, Po, Rhine, Yangtze, and Mississippi rivers temporarily dried up leaving humongous river barges choking in mud.
But that was merely global-warming-lite.
The real global warming threat is invisible. It’s the oceans where 90% of planet-generated heat is captured, and it’s starting to impact the climate …
Spiridonov Yuri Vasilyevich (Sakha), Landlord of the Moma Mountains, 2006.
In 1996, the eight countries on the Arctic rim – Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden, and the United States – formed the Arctic Council, a journey that began in 1989 when Finland approached the other countries to hold a discussion about the Arctic environment. The Finnish initiative led to the Rovaniemi Declaration (1991), which established the council’s precursor, the …
Here’s one possible trajectory for ambitious print journalists. After making your name with aggressive reporting at a smaller newspaper, move up the ladder until you are at a top paper with a prestige beat. Go on the television talk shows to pontificate. Maybe snag a regular column. Offer analyses that seem critical but make sure never to challenge the conventional wisdom. Hire an agent who can get you handsome speaking fees on the lecture circuit.
Here’s P. Sainath’s trajectory. After making your name with aggressive reporting at a smaller newspaper, …
China offers a threatening alternative model of development that is non-capitalist, non-Western, and non-colonial. As such, it undermines the West’s neocolonial domination of the Third World and its debt-trap-based forced underdevelopment of subverience and exploitation.
— K.T. Noh ((K.J. Noh, “The U.S. Is Set on a Path to War with China. What is to be Done?”))
If the United States were to posit that it could eliminate the economic challenge from China by launching an atomic war, there is no evidence that the U.S. would not do so.
— John Ross ((John Ross, “What is Propelling the …
