“With 63% of the world’s population online, the internet is a mirror of society: it speaks all languages, contains every opinion, and hosts a wide range of (sometimes unsavory) individuals.”
“Hosts a wide range of (sometimes unsavory) individuals”?
Why the sharp intake of breath, the tingling shock? In one of the world’s most secretive liberal democracies, the revelation that the previous Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison ran a shadow government overseen by personal quasi-despotic whim spanning several ministerial positions has caused chill and consternation. That’s not the way we do things – except when we do.
Such consternation, in a country that tolerates secret trials only revealed by accident, raids upon journalists and the headquarters of the national broadcaster, full-throated prosecutions of whistleblowers, the torture-tinged indefinite detention of refugees, and brazen immunities for intelligence officers engaged in …
Medicare has been a highly successful, popular and treasured government program that provides health care for seniors, for those with disabilities and for those with end-stage renal disease. The Traditional Medicare (TM) approach spends 98% of its funds on health care and only 2% on administration. A key part of TM is that beneficiaries don’t have to jump through all the hoops that the private health insurance industry often requires of its enrollees who are trying to obtain care.
Private health care insurance has already made inroads into the Medicare program through the Medicare Advantage (MA) approach. MA is primarily implemented …
Complacent Beverly Hills housewife Mae Brussell had quite an awakening in 1963 when President Kennedy was assassinated, and again when she read and cross-indexed the massive 26-volume Warren Commission Hearings…. Mae’s friend Henry Miller of Big Sur, California told her that people can do anything they want if they apply themselves; live anywhere, learn anything…. With that advice Mae moved herself and the kids to Carmel, California and began the selfless, nonstop journey of political and history research that would soon rock the radio airwaves of Monterey and Santa Cruz counties from 1971 through 1988.
It took a few years of tolerable incompetence, caused fears about security, and was meant to be the great surveillance salvation to reassure us all. Instead, Australia’s COVIDSafe App only identified two positive cases of infection during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, and failed, in every sense of the term, to work.
Launched in April 2020, this AU$21 million platform was heralded as a great tool for pandemic surveillance. It was one of many such digital responses used by countries to combat viral transmission. China adopted the Alipay Health Code app, which shares location data with police authorities. Users receive various codes …
Scenes and pictures have been circulating of broken earth, lacking moisture, cracked and yearning. But these are not from traditional drought-stricken parts of the planet, where the animal carcass assumes near totemic power amidst dry riverbeds or desert expanses. Neither Australia nor Africa feature on these occasions – at least in a prominent way. Europe, continent of historical arable sustainability, is drying up.
This is not to say that the continent is immune to drought. The International Commission for the Protection of the Danube River notes the impacts of a number of dry and severe summers from the 1990s till …
One of the main reasons many charter school applications are rejected repeatedly by public school boards across the country is because they are poorly-written and low quality in many ways.
Such applications are often full of spelling mistakes, overly-ambitious claims, vague details, incomplete responses, many blank boxes, incorrect information, and more. The application is supposed to be a serious, rigorous, and thorough business and education plan to educate hundreds of youth for years in a stable, safe, and clean environment with highly qualified professionals and excellent programs.
What makes all this bizarre is that charter school promoters and operators are either rich …
Much is to be learned from the political correspondence of such Roman luminaries as Julius Caesar, Cicero, Seneca, among many others. Here I am restricting myself to a Gestapo-like bureaucrat, Pliny the Younger (61-113 C.E.), imperial governor of Bithynia province (now part of Turkey) under the divinely mandated autocracy of the Emperor Trajan (53-117 C.E.).
In his numerous letters seeking orders from the emperor, Pliny repeatedly pledges his obeisant loyalty. But his tone, which seems curiously modern to me, is that of a pragmatic administrator merely seeking clarification of official policy regarding treatment of a small but possibly disloyal, subversive cult. …
• Reducing import tariffs for 16 poorest countries
• Global leader in scientific papers
• China surpasses US in Fortune Global 500
• China’s temperatures are rising faster than the global average
On Sunday, August 7th — the day that Jews around the world celebrated Tisha bAv, the traditional day of mourning for the disasters that have occurred throughout Jewish history—the state of Israel brutally slaughtered at least 44 people, including 15 children in the besieged Gaza Strip. Beyond the horrible irony of this massacre, it is difficult for me not to see it as part of a much larger global Holy War.
Not in the sense of the Crusades of history or American and European fears of Islamic Jihad. We don’t have a name yet for this Holy War but its …
Events continue to unfold at a quickening pace. Facing an alarming escalation in tensions around the world, we asked Joe Lombardo for his most current thoughts.
Joe Lombardo is the co-coordinator of the United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC) and has been an organizer in the anti-war movement and a labor activist for decades. He is a cofounder and lead organizer for Bethlehem Neighbors for Peace, a local anti-war group based near Albany, New York, a member of the Troy Area Labor Council, and former staff person of the Vietnam era National Peace …
Could somebody please get an extension ladder to help Senator Schumer down from the ceiling? He’s stuck in the rafters in a high-pitched note of self-congratulation whilst spraining his elbow as he awkwardly and repeatedly tries to pat his own back, screaming over and over again “the greatest climate legislation of all time!”
Compared to what?
Still, one signal that something really good must be in the nonsensically titled Inflation Reduction Act is the fact that no Republican senators voted for it. Nowadays, the extreme right has the entire Republican edifice on its hands and knees, almost in a fetal position in …
Contemporary Russian politics are too often analysed without sufficient knowledge of Russian history.
— Orlando Figes, The Story of Russia, p 268
The conflict among nations in Ukraine and the breakaway Donbass oblasts/republics has been magnified in western monopoly media since Russia backed up its security demands. To the extent that people want to ascertain the verisimilitude of media information, people ought to become familiar with the region, its peoples, and the history. With this intention and with an open mind to a viewpoint counter to my orientation (I am decidedly of a …
Wang Bingxiu of the Shuanglang Farmer Painting Club (Dali Bai Autonomous Prefecture, China), Untitled, 2018.
As the US legislative leader Nancy Pelosi swept into Taipei, people around the world held their breath. Her visit was an act of provocation. In December 1978, the US government – following a United Nations General Assembly decision in 1971 – recognised the People’s Republic of China, setting aside its previous treaty obligations to Taiwan. Despite this, US President Jimmy Carter …
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 …
