Cambodia has often featured in the Western imagination as a place of plunder and pilfering. Temples and artefacts of exquisite beauty have exercised the interest of adventurers and buccaneers who looted with almost kleptocratic tendency.
In 1924, the French novelist and future statesman André Malraux, proved himself one of Europe’s greatest adventurers in making off with a ton of sacred stones from Angkor Wat. It is estimated that 20 statutes were taken. Malraux, along with his wife Clara and collaborator Louis Chevasson, were subsequently apprehended for their pinching efforts on the order of George Groslier, founding director of the …
Magnus gubernator et scisso navigat vello. A great helmsman can navigate even when his sail is torn.
— Seneca, Moral Letters, 30. 3.
This is as true today as it was in antiquity. A president who steers the Ship of State knows that human nature is weak and that government officials are sometimes tempted to abuse their power. It is for this reason that he welcomes a free press to ensure honesty in his administration.
Journalists asking trenchant questions are worth their weight in gold. They protect the public from dishonest public servants, who, for example, advocate for small government as a dog …
It seemed all but a done deal: Israel is finally managing to bend the Arabs to its will, and Palestine is becoming a marginal issue that no longer defines Israel’s relations with Arab countries. Indeed, normalization with Israel is afoot, and the Arabs, so it seems, have been finally tamed.
Not so fast. Many events continue to demonstrate the opposite. Take, for example, the Arab League two-day meeting in Cairo on July 31 – August 1. The meeting was largely dominated by discussions on Palestine and concluded with statements that called on Arab countries to reactivate the Arab boycott of …
by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead / August 10th, 2022
Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.
by Medea Benjamin and Natasha Lycia Ora Bannan / August 10th, 2022
Cuban firefighters (Photo Credit AP)
By now, the images of the oil explosion that erupted in the Cuban province of Matanzas on Friday, August 5 and continues blazing have become international news. When lightning struck an oil tank in Cuba’s largest oil storage facility, it quickly exploded and began to spread to nearby tanks. As of now, four of the eight tanks have caught fire. Dozens of people have been hospitalized, over 120 have been reported injured, at least 16 firefighters are still reported missing and …
When I was growing up in Queens, NYC, I paradoxically rooted for the Yankees… but I also liked the Mets. After all, their home field — Shea Stadium — was much closer to where I lived. I can still recall sneaking on the subway and sneaking into the stadium to see the Mets (or Jets) play.
Here’s a photo of the now-defunct Shea in its glory [sic] days:
Take a look at those exposed ramps. As punk kids, we’d wait for the crowd to …
There are many ways to define what is a political prisoner. The most well-known cases are those the national security state framed-up, or imprisoned with extreme sentences for an offense because of their political activism, such as George Jackson.
Each period of struggle by the working class and oppressed peoples against ruling class control results some activists locked up for their effective revolutionary work. “Political prisoner” often means those jailed for fighting their national oppression, as the case with the great number of Black Panthers. In contrast, over a century ago political prisoners were labor-Marxist-antiwar activists such as the exemplary …
Scientism is a hideous religious proposition that science is god and thus requires a priesthood of scientists to administrate its dictates upon mankind. Anthony Fauci is a perfect example of such a high priest, declaring that the rest of us are too ignorant or stupid to understand the high things of his science. However, we know from other sources that Fauci is an empty suit of fraud and corruption.
— Technocracy News Editor
The United Nations prides itself on exposing, monitoring and noting the travails and vicissitudes to be found on this troubled planet. It also prides itself on being the premier international institution that protects, or at the very least keeps an eye out for, the principles of the Charter that underpin its existence. But as with all bodies with mighty aspirations but skewed power, the grime of reality often supplies a different, less impressive picture.
Every organisation replicates its own rationale for existence, including mechanisms to cope with problems of its own making. Such problems are rarely resolved: they are inherent in …
We see the hospital as a factory and our hospitalist group as an assembly line that is in the business of manufacturing perfect discharges.”1 These words are not hyperbole. They are the exact words written by David J. Yu, MD, MBA, Medicare & DSNP Medical Director, Presbyterian Health Plan, Albuquerque NM. Yu cites the work of management guru W. Edwards Deming as a major authority for this approach to patient care. Deming’s business principles have been given much of the credit for Japan’s industrial revival after World War Two…Theory is not practice. Ever since management and business school “experts” took …
I’ve been interviewed more times than I can remember. Those experiences have sometimes left me shaking my head when I’d find factual errors in the ensuing articles and posts about myself. After all, who better than Mickey Z. to fact-check something written about Mickey Z.?
Whenever I ponder these memories, I can’t help but see them through the lens of the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect.
Murray Gell-Mann was the physicist who discovered and named the quark. One of his close friends was novelist-turned director, Michael …
New documentary discloses the ways western publics are softened up for aggressive, global US militarism through the Pentagon’s influence over thousands of films and TV shows
by Jonathan Cook / August 8th, 2022
In what should have been an extraordinary television confession this month, John Bolton, national security adviser in the previous administration of President Donald Trump, admitted to CNN in passing that he had helped to plot the overthrow of foreign governments while in office.
Dismissing the idea that Trump had attempted a coup at the Capitol with the January 6 riots, Bolton told anchor Jake Tapper: “As somebody who has helped plan coups d’etat, not here [in Washington] but, you know, other places, it takes a lot of work.”
June 19th signaled an unprecedented shift in Colombian politics. Gustavo Petro and his left-wing coalition, the Pacto Histórico, defeated the far-right wing multi-millionaire Rodolfo Hernández in the second round of the presidential elections.
Pedro’s running mate, the environmental activist and human rights lawyer Francia Márquez, is now the first Afro-Colombian woman to ever become Vice-President. This report will therefore contextualize this impressive achievement in the broader history of Colombia’s black minority—a people who endured and continue to endure incalculable misery.
Frederick Bowser says African slaves with melancholy-scarred faces and bodies riddled with scurvy or broken bones first arrived in Colombia in 1529. …
Five new privately-operated charter schools are expected to open in West Virginia in the coming weeks. Three will be brick-and-mortar charter schools and two will be statewide virtual charter schools. More privately-operated charter schools will be permitted to open after July 2023.
As in other states and territories, privately-operated charter schools in West Virginia will be riddled with corruption and will undermine public schools and the public interest. These “innovative” and “flexible” “schools of choice” will funnel millions of public dollars from public schools into private hands, foster more segregation, dodge accountability, thwart unions, increase competition, intensify a consumerist approach …
The Legacy of the Soviet Union vs Western Colonialism
by Ramzy Baroud / August 7th, 2022
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s recent tour in Africa was meant to be a game changer, not only in terms of Russia’s relations with the continent, but in the global power struggle involving the US, Europe, China, India, Turkey and others.
Many media reports and analyses placed Lavrov’s visit to Egypt, the Republic of Congo, Uganda and Ethiopia within the obvious political context of the Russia-Ukraine war. The British Guardian’s Jason Burka summed up Lavrov’s visit in these words: “Lavrov is seeking to convince African leaders and, to a much lesser extent, ordinary people that Moscow cannot be blamed …
Regional alliances should, for the most part, remain regional. Areas of the globe can count on a number of such bodies and associations with varying degrees of heft: the Organization of American States; the Organisation of African Unity; and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. Only one has decided to move beyond its natural, subscribed limits, citing security and a militant basis, for its actions.
On April 27, the UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, prime ministerial contender, made her claim that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization needed to be globalised. Her Mansion House speech at the Lord Mayor’s Easter Banquet …
On 1 September, 1941, Chief of Reich Security Reinhard Heydrich, one of the most fanatical, mass-murdering Nazis, issued a now notorious decree ordering Jews above the age of six to wear an identifying badge in public. The Jewish Badge, a yellow Star of David with the word “Jew” inscribed inside the star, was meant to stigmatize and humiliate the Jews and was also used to segregate them and monitor and control their movements.
Nothing like that is happening currently, especially not in New Normal Germany.
MintPress News‘ Dan Cohen is joined by scientist Denis Rancourt to discuss his latest research paper on mass COVID-vaccination. They will discuss lockdowns, climate and the permanent war state, and how all of these issues are related.
Throughout thousands of years of human history, dictatorships have been the norm, not the exception, and all of them have been by the aristocracy, against the public. (Sometimes, the aristocrats are led by one person, a “monarch,” Führer, etc.; but he or she then REPRESENTS the aristocracy, NOT the public.)
Aristocrats are the nation’s few super-rich; the public are everyone else.
Usually, the aristocracy ‘justifies’ its ‘superiority’ as being god-ordained, and they hire (donate to) some clergy to allege this in order to keep the public fighting for them and maybe dying for …
COVID-19 mRNA vaccine BNT162b2, developed by Pfizer and BioNTech, points to a fast up-take of into human liver cells where BNT162b2 mRNA is reverse transcribed intracellularly into DNA in as fast as 6 h upon BNT162b2 exposure. PDF of study.
Those who are never lost are forever lost. Only those who know they are lost and that life is a shipwreck have a chance to find their way to shore.
The world’s great religions, including Taoism and Existential philosophy, understand that at the heart of human existence is the presence of the not (death, emptiness, void), but this negative reality, this “nothingness” interpenetrates with the positive of being alive so that our knowledge coincides with our ignorance, our lives with our death, and our truth with untruth. This is also common …
In 1980 we produced a report titled How to Appraise and Improve Your Daily Newspaper: A Manual for Readers, authored by David Bollier, one of our precocious interns, who had just graduated from Amherst and went on to become an expert on the Commons (See, bollier.org). I thought about this past initiative to empower readers/consumers while contemplating what is happening in recent months to the print edition of the New York Times.
The editors call it an historic revamping in the digital age that is absorbing a growing, aliterate younger generation. I call it a frantic overreach replacing serious content …
Israel has attacked Gaza again and it’s time Canadians understood their country’s contribution to the brutal treatment of those living in the 360 square kilometre strip of land.
Today Israel killed at least 10, including a five-year-old girl, in Gaza. Seventy-five more Palestinians were injured in the latest outburst of Israeli violence.
Most of those living in Gaza were driven from their homes in 1947/48. Canada played a central role in drafting and promoting the 1947 UN partition plan, which legitimated the Zionist movement’s ethnic cleansing. Before that Royal Military College of Canada graduate Charles Macpherson Dobell commanded Britain’s 1917 …
The note on Radio National’s Background Briefing on the morning of July 31 was sombre. A student, who did not divulge his real name (he is professionally pseudonymised as Ramesh), talks about services that aid him in his study. Aid is less accurate than do – given that he is working gruelling night shifts in the fast-food industry, he is incapable of making morning classes at the said unnamed university. Flipping burgers in greasy splendour takes precedent.
The student, along with others featured in the programme, talk about accessing a multitude of websites that provide “support services” that aid the …
Hoover Dam’s Lake Mead is dangerously close to dead pool status for the first time since construction in the mid 1930s. A vicious hammering drought sequence for over two decades throughout the West threatens to bring America’s biggest water reservoir to its knees.
In a word, the implications are unspeakable.
America’s monuments, the Statue of Liberty, Mount Rushmore, the Lincoln Memorial, and Hoover Dam are the foundations of Americana, the essence of America, its character, its culture. Hoover Dam, one of the greatest engineering feats of all time, 96 lives lost during construction, defines America’s true grit during a bygone era that …
In Europe, life insurance death claims are reported to have skyrocketed after, according to the European database, 40,000 deaths following COVID shots.
In America, life insurance claims for 2021 after COVID-19 vaccine roll outs point to a 40% rise in deaths among the 18-64 age range.
I feel for American basketball player Brittney Griner. Did she break the law? Yes, she did, and she pled guilty at trial. But a sentence of nine years — to be spent in what the New York Times calls a “penal colony” — for bringing hashish into Russia for self-treatment (assuming this is true) seems overly harsh. But the law can be an ass. If humans have sovereignty over their own bodies, then it is just plain wrong to be hassled for what one chooses to consume.
