The only shock about the UK Home Secretary’s decision regarding Julian Assange was that it did not come sooner. In April, Chief Magistrate Senior District Judge Paul Goldspring expressed the view that he was “duty-bound” to send the case to Priti Patel to decide on whether to extradite the WikiLeaks founder to the United States to face 18 charges, 17 grafted from the US Espionage Act of 1917.
Patel, for her part, was never exercised by the more sordid details of the case. Her approach to matters of justice is one of premature adjudication: the guilty are everywhere, and only …
The Arctic is turning into a dream come true for doomsayers. It’s heating way too fast! Nostradamus is dancing in the street.
Record-smashing Arctic temperatures may brighten the outlook for those who thrive, actually enjoy, disaster scenarios, but the great majority of people only get off on disasters in a movie theater, not in the wide open spaces at the top of the world. Even Hollywood itself could never possibly capture the moment, the drama, the heightened level of deep concern of flabbergasted scientists, as temperatures in the Arctic skyrocket.
What’s happening?
Indisputably, it’s all about cars, planes, trains, cows, heavy industry, and …
Since January 2021, the U.S. House of Representatives has passed 412 bills (See: Congress.gov) and sent them to the Senate. Unfortunately, the Senate hasn’t acted. “What?” you say, “don’t the Democrats control both Chambers of Congress?” Sure, by the barest of margins. Handcuffed by the filibuster, a Senate rule (not a federal law) requires 60 votes to pass legislation in what Senators of yore called the “world’s greatest deliberative body.”
“Nonsense,” says veteran Rep. John Larson (D-CT). The Democrats can hold public hearings, report bills to the Senate floor and then make the Republicans filibuster. Let the GOP …
As the long depression that started many years ago deepens, it can be seen that there is no letup in deteriorating economic and social conditions at home and abroad. The so-called “death spiral” continues worldwide. Many new records are being set, sometimes every week or every day. Instability, chaos, and anarchy are becoming more entrenched and everyone is being pressured to fend for themselves like animals. People feel like no one has their back.
It is no surprise that as multiple crises deepen simultaneously around the world, the ruling elite are increasingly viewed as utterly incompetent. There is no public authority …
Part 2B. The Violence of Ukrainian Ultranationalists
We’ve been examining how threats to life are driving much of the violence of the current crisis in Ukraine. In the last part, we discussed how threats to Russian lives posed by the US and NATO have in turn provoked Russia to take military action. In this part, we’ll look at some of the threats to life within Ukraine itself, threats that Ukrainians feel from other Ukrainians, particularly the violence of ultranationalists.
Some Ukrainians have feared for their lives and safety because of Ukrainian extreme right-wing violence, a form of violence that seems to be …
On 26 March 2018, Canada’s prime minister Justin Trudeau spoke of the six Tsilhqot’in chiefs who were arrested during a sacred peace-pipe ceremony and subsequently hanged for their part in a war to prevent the spread of smallpox by colonialists: “We recognize that these six chiefs were leaders of a nation, that they acted in accordance with their laws and traditions and that they are well regarded as heroes of their people.”
“They acted as leaders of a proud and independent nation facing the threat of another nation.”
What do mandates, artificial intelligence, bio-implants of RFID, etc augur for the future of humanity? What do the elitists who view themselves as human overlords have planned for the masses with their so-called Great Reset?
This past week, as part of its policy to dominate the American hemisphere, the United States government organised the 9th Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles. US President Joe Biden made it clear early on that three countries in the hemisphere (Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela) would not be invited to the event, claiming that they are not democracies. At the same time, Biden was reportedly planning an upcoming visit to Saudi Arabia – a self-described theocracy. Mexico’s …
Workers Summit
Valentín, the man next to us in line as we made our way across the international border, asked what we had been doing in Tijuana. We had been at the Workers Summit of the Americas, organized as an alternative to Biden’s Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles. Our summit was as a place where countries besieged by and barred from the US could participate and was held in cooperation with a kindred counter-summit in Los Angeles.
Valentín, who had been born in Mexico and spent most …
Apartheid Israel in its illegal, war criminal and 55-year occupation of the Occupied Palestinian Territory is among world leaders in “children killed per year per million of total territory population” with a value of 25.8 as compared to 75.7 (Honduras), 53.6 (Ituri Province, Democratic Republic of the Congo), 7.6 (the World), and 2.6 (Kashmir, India).
In censorship by killing journalists in the Occupied Palestinian Territory Apartheid Israel leads the World in terms of “average number of journalists killed per 10 million of population per year”: in Occupied Palestine, over 6.164; Syria, 4.733; Afghanistan, 2.563; Israel-Palestine, over 2.190; Somalia, 1.751; Yemen, 1.278; …
Lock yourselves down inside your homes! Break out the masks and prophylactic face-shields! Switch off what’s left of your critical faculties and prepare yourselves to “follow the Science!”
Yes, that’s right, just as the survivors of The Simulated Apocalyptic Plague of 2020-2021 were crawling up out of their Covid bunkers and starting to “build the world back better,” another biblical pestilence has apparently been unleashed …
Within the cacophony of the Middle East and war in Ukraine, Israel’s brutal occupation of the West Bank and Gaza had drifted into the shadows. But the assassination of Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh served as a vicious reminder of Israel’s criminality.
Abu Akleh was murdered on 11 May in Jenin on the West Bank, as she stood (wearing a Press vest) alongside colleagues, while covering Israeli army raids. Her funeral took place two days later in East Jerusalem and was attended by thousands of Palestinians. In chaotic unprovoked scenes, Israeli police, who said mourners were “disrupting …
While it is true that Zionism is a modern political ideology that has exploited religion to achieve specific colonial objectives in Palestine, prophecies continue to be a critical component of Israel’s perception of itself, and of the state’s relationship to other groups, especially Christian messianic groups in the United States and worldwide.
The subject of religious prophecies and their centrality to Israel’s political thought was once more highlighted following remarks by former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, in a recent interview with the Hebrew-language newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth. Barak, perceived to be a ‘progressive’ politician, who was once the leader …
Indeed, at a time when red flag gun laws (which authorize government officials to seize guns from individuals viewed as a danger to themselves or others) are gaining traction as a legislative means by which to allow police to remove guns from people suspected of being threats, it wouldn’t take much for police to be given the green light to enter a …
by Dissident Voice Communications / June 14th, 2022
WION — While speaking at an event, Former US President George W Bush condemned the full-scale invasion by Russia as “brutal” and “unjustified.” However, he mistakenly said “invasion of Iraq.” In no time, he corrected himself: “I mean, Ukraine.”
A review essay of James and Whitehead on Life after Death by David Ray Griffin
by Edward Curtin / June 14th, 2022
Life is entwined with death from the start, for death is the price we must pay for being born, even though we don’t choose it, which may be why some people who are very angry at the deal, decide to choose how and when they will die, as if they are getting revenge on someone who dealt them a rotten hand, even if they don’t believe in the someone.
The meaning of death, and whether humans do or do not survive it in some form, has always obsessed people, from the average …
In the wake of Queen Elizabeth’s Platinum Jubilee celebrations, we take a look at some of the recent resistance waged by two nations rendered stateless by British cartographers.
First we visit Palestine where tensions have flared into several violent confrontations between Israeli settlers and the Palestinian intifada. Then we go to Kurdistan where neighboring Turkey has renewed it’s expansionist dreams putting Kurdish occupied areas under threat.
Finally a rather troubling weather report investigates the latest effects of climate change around the globe.
Climate change and global warming, which is the largest part of the ‘change’ aspect, is suddenly getting the kind of special treatment that’s reserved for national tragedies. A special commission has been established to investigate a way out of the biggest human-caused failure of all time.
It wouldn’t be quite so disturbing if it were not for the fact that the truth about the widespread danger from fossil fuels has been in the public domain for decades now.
People in the highest positions academically, politically, and the business community have known for decades that CO2 emissions will eventually overheat the planet. But, …
In 1984 at the age of 36, I decided to return to school with the intention of becoming an art therapist. I attended Antioch University in San Francisco for my undergraduate degree and then went to a New Age spirituality school the following year for my master’s degree (California Institute of Integral Studies). At the time, Carl Jung, Mircea Eliade, and Joseph Campbell were treated as if they were gods. On the surface, it seemed like a good fit for me. …
Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is where you’re destined for. — C.P. Cavafy: Collected Poems (Princeton University Press, 1975), trans. Edmund Keeley
John Shipton, despite his size, glides with insect-like grace across surfaces. He moves with a hovering sense, a holy man with message and meaning. As Julian Assange’s father, he has found himself a bearer of messages and meaning, attempting to convince those in power that good sense and justice should prevail over brute stupidity and callousness. His one object: release Julian.
At the now defunct Druids Café on Swanston Street in Melbourne, he materialised out of …
From an article written by psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, MD titled “Some Mechanisms of the Emotional Plague”: “The term ’emotional plague’ has no defamatory connotation. It does not refer to conscious malice, moral or biological degeneration, immorality, etc…
Where the healthy individual advises and helps, where he, with his experiences, simply lives ahead of others and leaves it to them whether they want to follow his example or not, the plague individual imposes his way of living on others by force. Plague individuals do not tolerate views which threaten their armorings or which disclose their irrational motives. The healthy individual experiences …
Do you remember the iconic Union Carbide image from the 1950s or early 1960s? The one with the giant hand coming from the sky, pouring pesticides onto Indian soil.
The blurb below the image includes the following:
Science helps build a new India – India has developed bold new plans to build its economy and bring the promise of a bright future to its more than 400 million people. But India needs the technical knowledge of the western world. For example working with Indian engineers and technicians, Union Carbide recently made available its fast scientific resource to help build a chemicals and …
Economic and social disasters continue to increase worldwide. There is no “healthy recovery” from the pandemic.
The level of irreparable harm being caused by the inability and unwillingness of the ruling elite to solve any problems, even small problems, is glaring. With no sense of shame or irony, the chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, recently went so far as to publicly state that to improve the economy his goal is “to get wages down,” which means that workers, the producers of all wealth in society, will take an even bigger hit—just as inflation, inequality, debt, under-employment, poverty, …
Thousands of Maasai people have fled their homes and escaped into the bush following a brutal police crackdown on protests against government attempts to evict them to make way for trophy hunters and conservation.
On June 8 dozens of police vehicles and an estimated 700 officers arrived in Loliondo, N. Tanzania, near the world-famous Serengeti National Park, to demarcate a 1,500 km2 area of Maasai land as a Game Reserve. On June 10 they fired on Maasai protesting at efforts to evict them: …
The United States remains a country of tenacious faith. The nature of that faith stretches from the digital pulpits of Silicon Valley, where cool technology occupies the seat of majesty, to the hot Bible Belt of spiritual endurance and suffering, where the good Lord holds sway in stern disapproval. In between, market fundamentalists take time to worship the invisible hand of business and capitalism.
The symptoms of that faith can be extraordinary, almost to the point of caustic neuroses. Faith in the sanctity of guns permits a form of tolerable urban warfare, a type of assimilated frontier violence characterised by high …
So, good friend, Madu, who I met decades ago, at UT-El Paso. He was coming through buildings where part-time English faculty had offices. That big smile, that large voice, and an open hand. He was working the used/discount book gig: going to colleges to get books from faculty and bookstores that might have been extra copies from the respective publishers called review copies.
So, part-time faculty like myself, in the 1980s, would order tons of these reviewer’s copies of grammar, lit, and survey collections. Then fellows like Madu might come by with hard …
Millions of Britons are suffering from stress-related mental disorders. The number of people with anxiety has been steadily rising for years. According to NHS statistics, more than six million people in the UK are taking antidepressants.
There is an acceptance that wide-scale mental distress is an unavoidable part of modern life. The general response to the crisis by government bodies and the media is to call for more treatment. While increased support is necessary, the focus on treatment hides the extent to which society is often responsible for personal distress.
