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This week’s News on China in 2 minutes.

• Xi-Putin meeting at the SCO
• New marriages fell to 36-year low
• Cracking down on online fraud
• Scientists discover a new lunar mineral

Young individualist-anarchists, for more than a century, have been powerfully drawn to the highly original, often poetically exultant writings of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900).  The quintessential free spirit, Nietzsche effectively used paradox, playful irony and wordplay to heap scorn on life-hating (Judeo-Christian) morality, with its sex-negative ideas of “sin” and its condemnation of healthy human desire and self-assertion.  In Nietzsche’s time and place, Calvinist-Lutheran morality warned of hellfire for the many, predestined salvation for only a few.  As a psychologically crippling ideology, it produced obedient, moralistic and loyal subjects to the authoritarian …

When Congress directs the White House Office of Science and Technology (OSTP) to coordinate with other relevant federal agencies to research a five-year scientific assessment of solar and other rapid climate interventions, it’s only too apparent that the highest levels of government have gotten the internal memo that the climate is in trouble. Even so, they are still fashionably late to the party.

Scientists have been warning about the consequences of excessive levels of CO2 and urging both Congress and the White House to take action for decades.

Now that the broken climate system has been recognized as a serious threat, as …

Once the fixated adoration with the late Queen Elizabeth II starts cooling, the accountants of public welfare and decency will be stunned to realise the costs and wealth associated with the royal institution.  Her successor, Charles III, is continuing in that vein, a jarring note of wealth and pomp even as prices rise and the hefty bills for citizens (should we say subjects?), bite.

The argument that the monarchy makes money for the British state and others in the Commonwealth starts to seem shallow the more one looks at the accounts and the standing of the institution.  But nonetheless, individuals such …

Events continue to unfold at a quickening pace. Facing an alarming escalation in tensions around the world, we asked Colonel Larry Wilkerson for his current thoughts.

Colonel Wilkerson is a renowned defense analyst and a Distinguished Adjunct Professor of Government & Public policy at the College of William and Mary. He is a retired United States Army colonel and was the former Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell.
Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson
We focus on the realities of the international power struggle unfolding in real time, specifically addressing the role of …

The midterm congressional elections will soon be upon us. We are again told, as we are every two years, that the most important election of our lifetimes is impending. However, this year the stakes appear to be even higher.

President Biden instructs us, we are “in a battle for the soul of this nation…the breath, the life, and the essence of who we are.” He intones: “There is nothing more important, nothing more sacred, nothing more American.  That’s our soul.”

Campaign rally from the gates of hell

Full of fire and brimstone, Biden’s …

One-third of Pakistan is under water. Record heat waves blanket the globe driving up temperatures beyond what humans can survive. Polar glaciers are melting much faster than scientists predicted. Droughts, fires and floods are ravaging the planet, forcing the displacement of tens of millions of people. And this is just the beginning.

It’s time to tell the truth. We can’t afford to wait any longer. We can’t afford to pretend that the same political-economic system that has caused the most historic levels of ecological destruction in human history is the same system that is going to fix it. Here, in the …

September 16 marks the 40th anniversary of the Sabra and Shatila massacre, the killing of around 3,000 Palestinians at the hands of Lebanon’s Phalangist militias operating under the command of the Israeli army.

Four decades have passed, yet no measure of justice has been received by the survivors of the massacre. Many of them have died, and others are aging while they carry the scars of physical and psychological wounds, in the hope that, perhaps, within their lifetime they will see their executioners behind bars.

However, many of the Israeli and Phalange commanders who had ordered the invasion of Lebanon, …

Here we go again, playing God and toying with Promethean fire.  Having done a comprehensively brutal job of killing off the thylacine, known in popular parlance as the Tasmanian Tiger, along with a growing number of other species, there is interest in reviving and ultimately returning them to the wild.  And, as with any deity, the choice resides in the god figure, all deciding and omniscient.  The killer becomes the chooser, the executioner, the salvager.

Interest in this venture was piqued and spurred by a A$5 million donation from a philanthropist to a research team engaged in a partnership with …

Occupy Wall Street: October 8, 2011
Douglas Rushkoff has an article (based on his latest book) called “The super-rich ‘preppers’ planning to save themselves from the apocalypse,” in The Observer.

This excerpt gives you an idea of how the barbaric brain of a billionaire operates:

Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system, and asked: “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?” The event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, …

(Full article …)

Well, gosh, this is kind of embarrassing. For approximately the last two and a half years, I have been documenting, analyzing, and occasionally satirizing the so-called “New Normal,” i.e., the new, pathologized, official ideology that has been rolled out all across the planet by the global-capitalist ruling classes under the pretext of combating an apocalyptic pandemic … or at least that’s what I thought was going on.

As it turns out, I was totally wrong.

Apparently, the global-capitalist ruling establishment (or “GloboCap,” as I often refer to the unaccountable, supranational network of global …

Turn on the television. Move to the screen.  Switch on the device – if you ever left it off.  Queen Elizabeth II may have passed, but she is everywhere in very lively fashion, a spectral manifestation that has utterly controlled large chunks of a transfixed global media system.

It helps that she has captured the media mecca that is the United States, where anything outside its coverage is either, in self-described terms, irrelevant or non-existent.  In the centre of the imperium, without a shade of irony, she and the British royal family have exercised a spiritual and celluloid existence almost abnormal …

On March 10, 2003, I gave a very well-attended lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — yeah, a high school grad speaking to post-doctoral students and faculty at M-I-friggin-T. (I also gave a talk at Yale later that year but that’s for another article.) Please allow me to introduce some context.

I once had a reasonably large global audience for my writing and commentary. My articles covered a lot of ground. I didn’t like to be pigeonholed so I wrote about virtually everything — and still do.

One of my most popular …

Global, personal, individual.  The reactions to the death of Queen Elizabeth II seemed to catch even unsuspecting republicans off guard.  In Australia, former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, who had led the Australian Republic Movement, was a mess of reflection on the passing.  The old enemy France glowed with a distant familial warmth.  In the United States, monarchical fetishism reasserted itself.

Not all the reflections were rosy. In South Africa, the Economic Freedom Fighters party admitted no mourning for the passing of the monarch of seven decades, “because to us her death is a reminder of a very tragic period in …

How to collect your 30 pieces of silver.