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.
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 …
