It is an atomic bomb. It is the greatest thing in history.
— President Harry S. Truman (August 6, 1945)
One of the seemingly endless Good [sic] War myths goes a little something like this:
The U.S. had no choice but to drop atomic bombs on civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Had they not done so, the fanatical Japanese would have never surrendered. Countless millions of brave American soldiers would have perished in the ensuing invasion of the Japanese islands.
As we mark the 77th anniversary of the deliberate use …
On 9 July 2022, remarkable images floated across social media from Colombo, Sri Lanka’s capital. Thousands of people rushed into the presidential palace and chased out former President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, forcing him to flee to Singapore. In early May, Gotabaya’s brother Mahinda, also a former president, resigned from his post as prime minister and fled with his family to the Trincomalee naval base. The public’s raw anger toward the Rajapaksa family could no longer be …
Until recently, Israeli politics did not matter to Palestinians. Though the Palestinian people maintained their political agency under the most demoralizing conditions, their collective action rarely influenced outcomes in Israel, partly due to the massive discrepancy of power between the two sides.
Now that Israelis are embarking on their fifth election in less than four years, it is important to raise the question: “How do Palestine and the Palestinians factor in Israeli politics?”
Israeli politicians and media, even those who are decrying the failure of the ‘peace process’, agree that peace with the Palestinians is no longer a factor, and that Israeli …
The World Health Organization has been one of the easier bodies to abuse. For parochial types, populist moaners and critics of international institutions, the WHO bore the brunt of criticisms from Donald Trump to Jair Bolsonaro. Being a key institution in identifying public health risks, it took time assessing the threat posed by SARS-CoV-2 and its disease, COVID-19.
Little time has been spent waiting for the growing threat that is monkeypox (MPXV). The WHO has now declared it a “public health emergency of international concern”. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) global map charting the outbreak has the …
Oh, so much in the news, in the stupendous news of the UK and EU and USA and Klanada and Ukraine. So much news about Japan wanting nukes, wanting the rising sun banner, again, lifting up with its imperial rays. So-so much about how dead the lands are becoming. First it was those cold winters and sanctioning Russian gas, but now, temperatures in Lisbon and Madrid, hitting 116 F!
The chaos is the message, and the messangers are the …
A review of The Courage to Face Covid-19: Preventing Hospitalization and Death While Battling the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex
by Aruna Rodrigues / August 3rd, 2022
John Leake is a best-selling “experienced non-fiction, true crime author.” Having just read what must be described as an extraordinary ‘telling’ of the COVID-19 saga, The Courage to Face Covid-19 is the narration of true crime on a scale that could top the list in the history of ‘man’s inhumanity to man.’
The book chronicles the unique role of national governments across the world and their health agencies, led by the USA and WHO, which followed an agenda that led to completely avoidable fatalities numbering several million. The …
Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s visit to Sarajevo in 1914 was an instructive lesson on how the dumb do, at some point, ask for it. Bosnia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, was desired by the Kingdom of Serbia. With the Serbs also well represented in Bosnia, a visit by the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne was always to be tricky, if not downright foolish.
This was not all. Already unpopular, Ferdinand took his cue to visit on a day regarded with mournful reverence by Serbs: Vidovdan (or St. Vitus’ Day). In 1389 on that blood-inked day, the Serbs fought the Turks in …
Roughly 150-200 privately-operated “innovative” charter schools close every year across America, leaving thousands of minority families high and dry. This trend has persisted for at least 30 years. Indeed, to date about 5,000 charter schools have closed since 1991. This is a huge number given the fact that there are only about 7,500 charter schools in existence today.
The reasons for such closures are numerous but typically involve some sort of fraud, corruption, dysfunction, mismanagement, or malfeasance. Thus, for example:
An administrative law judge Friday [July 29, 2022] upheld a decision by the Osceola County School Board [in Florida] to …
British professor Orlando Figes, who specializes in Russian history, wrote that the 2008 Russian intervention in Georgia on the side of the breakaway enclaves of Abkhazia and South Ossetia had exposed American timidity and scuppered NATO membership hopes for Georgia. [Figes, The Story of Russia, (Metropolitan Books, 2022): 285-286.] Was there a lesson learned by the West?
In 2021-2022, Ukraine joining NATO was identified as a red line by Russia. US, Ukraine, and NATO paid scant heed to Russian security concerns and the outcome is the current fighting in Ukraine.
Putin had issued a warning in April 2021: “But if someone mistakes …
A graphic representation of a story transcribed via parts of a revelatory interview, “How the Banker Run Foundations are Shaping the World,” with Norman Todd, chief investigator in 1953 for the Special Committee on Tax Exempt Foundations.
I feel fortunate to be reaching so many new people. Thank you. It inspires me to start revisiting articles I wrote before I started this Substack. For example, here are some edited excerpts from something I penned in April 2021.
On April 6, 2021, I got an email from the offices of AOC (she’s my congressperson) informing me that “those who lost loved ones to COVID-19 will be able to apply for retroactive reimbursements for burial costs.” A little further down in the email, something really caught my eye:
In his 2004 book on the 1914-18 European apocalypse, Cataclysm: the First World War as PoliticalTragedy, British historian David Stevenson states the war was “a cataclysm of a special kind, a man-made catastrophe produced by political acts” (from the “Introduction,” first paragraph). Indeed, that is Stevenson’s thesis, that the Great War was a political tragedy of the first order of magnitude. While Stevenson’s analysis perhaps over-emphasizes the role of the European political class, certainly terrible decision-making played a major part in both launching and then needlessly prolonging a war that wasted an estimated 10 million soldiering lives. In the …
Writing over a century-and-a-half ago, Karl Marx studied the aftermath of the 1848 revolutions that sought to drive a stake in the vitals of the European monarchies and consolidate the rule of the emerging bourgeois classes.
Contrary to his critics — especially the dismissive scholars — he applied his critical historical theories with great nuance and subtlety, surveying the class forces, their actions, and their influence on the outcomes. While Marx conceded that the revolutions were suppressed in the short run, he was able to show how they importantly shaped the future.
The clock is ticking for the greatest Australian in history. If PM Albo doesn’t do something soon, Assange will be sent away never to be seen again. We can only hope the PM is working behind the scenes to do what he knows in his heart is right.
They really do want to kill him. Perhaps it is high time that his detractors and sceptics, proven wrong essentially from the outset, admit that the US imperium, along with its client states, is willing to see Julian Assange perish in prison. The locality and venue, for the purposes of this exercise, are not relevant. Like the Inquisition, the Catholic Church was never keen on soiling its hands, preferring the employ of non-church figures to torture their victims.
In the context of Assange, Britain has been a willing jailor from the start, guided by the good offices of Washington and none …
Evangelical Monotheist, Pagan, Scientific and Political
by Bruce Lerro / July 30th, 2022
Orientation
When we think of fundamentalism, most of us think of extremely conservative monotheistic religions. But can there be fundamentalism in other fields as well? In his book The Fundamentalist Mind, Stephen Larsen claims that there is such a thing as “scientific fundamentalism”. How well do the characteristics of religious fundamentalism apply to how scientists practice science? At first this seems odd. After all, scientists are trained to be skeptical and do not advocate any promise of an afterlife. Where are the similarities and where are the differences between …
There are three basic freedoms: freedom to say NO; freedom to move away; and freedom to change what does not work.
Individual freedom requires social support. To say NO, you need others to respect your choice and not force you to obey. To move freely, you need others to support your movement and not erect walls and roadblocks. To change what does not work, you need others who are affected to accept the change.
Basically, freedom is a social relationship, where me having my freedom depends on you having yours. A system …
In an appeal to the European Union, more than 180 scientists and doctors from 36 countries warn about the danger of 5G, which will lead to a massive increase in involuntary exposure to electromagnetic radiation. The scientists urge the EU to follow Resolution 1815 of the Council of Europe, asking for an independent task force to reassess the health effects. Link to the full-text PDF
For the first time, a significant loss at the base of the marine food web has been detected. The Scottish research vessel Capepod reported the findings in equatorial waters of the Atlantic Ocean.
It’s a disturbing discovery, but first a look at the marine food web, starting with the lowest organisms: (1) phytoplankton – plant-like plankton: green algae, diatoms, and dinoflagellates eaten by (2) zooplankton – microorganisms: crustaceans, rotifers, insect larvae and mites eaten by (3) small fish: anchovies, sardines, shrimp, squid, krill eaten by (4) bigger fish: sturgeon, sunfish, sharks, manta rays eaten by (5) mammals: seals, dolphins, polar bears, …
The statistics of Australia’s longest running drama series about sickeningly idyllic suburbia will interest soap show boffins. It lasted 5,955 episodes over 37 seasons, starting in 1985. Its anaemically thin plotlines, subpar acting, and emphasis on ideals bound to cause indigestion, did not prevent Neighbours from being mandatory viewing. Neighbours was, especially for British audiences, fetish and cult, shrine and devotion.
It also provided the first airings for an assortment of performers and actors who, in time, bloomed on the global stage, which, according to most Australians, means the United Kingdom or the United States: Kylie Minogue, Natalie Imbruglia in pop; …
What do you call an “antiracist” group led by an open ethnic/religious supremacist?
Last year Israeli human rights group B’tselem published “A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is apartheid.” The landmark report provides mainstream Jewish Israeli endorsement of what’s long been clear to Palestinians and the internationalist minded: Zionism is a supremacist movement/ideology. As Osgoode Hall law Professor Faisal Bhabha put it in a 2020 debate with Bernie Farber, Zionism “is the suppression of Palestinian human rights for the purpose of ensuring Jewish supremacy.”
Chair of Canadian Anti-Hate Network, Farber is an …
117th Congress H.Res. XX
1st Session
Impeaching Joseph Robinette Biden Jr., President of the United States
For high crimes and misdemeanors
_____________________________________________________________________________ IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
July 28, 2020
Mr./Ms. Y submitted the following resolution, which was referred to the Committee on Judiciary.
Most of us play both roles of the Caller and Callee. Guess which role rules? The Callee. I’ve lost count of how many older adults tell me, week after week, how hard it is to get through to powerful Callees. Especially by telephone! The latter include your local electric, gas and telephone company, your bank and insurance company, your members (or their staff) of Congress, and your local, state and federal government agencies. It never used to be that way.
Imagine the days when you’d pick up your phone, dial and get through to a human being. You couldn’t be waylaid …
