Guns don’t kill people; people kill people. Guns don’t kill people; crazy people kill people. Guns don’t kill people; transsexual leftist illegal aliens kill people. Guns don’t kill people; not enough guns kill people. Guns don’t kill people; too many doors kill people.
Or maybe try this one for a while: The only thing that stops a crazy guy with a gun is a less crazy guy with a gun.
“We need to drastically change our approach to mental health. There are always so many warning signs. Almost all of these disfigured minds share the same profile,” said Trump to the …
For a country experiencing its worst economic crisis since gaining independence in 1948, the picture of a touring team pampered and fussed over might cause consternation. But the Australian cricket tour to Sri Lanka has only been met by praise from the country’s cricket officials, where logic is inverted, and the gaze of responsibility averted. Not even a shortage of foreign currency, precipitating a dramatic fall in medicines and fuel, along with demonstrations that have left nine dead and 300 injured, prompted second thoughts.
A good deal of this crisis was helped by the coming to power of former defence minister …
In the Paradigm for Peace model, the Roots of Violence are divided into seven categories. While a few of the categories aren’t as easily divided into defensive and aggressive motivations, for the most part, we examine how each party to the conflict may be defensively motivated or aggressively motivated to inflict violence with regard to each category. For example, with regard to the category Wealth, Land, and Possessions, a person using violence to protect his home from attack has a defensive motivation to use violence. A person using violence to attack another person’s home to …
Below is part seven of the series called “Booming” Economy Leaves Millions Behind. Forty facts on U.S. and international conditions, some updated and some new, are provided below. Once again, many economic records are being broken by a crisis-prone economy dominated by big business.
Links to the first six parts of this series, which collectively contain 150 facts from the U.S. and abroad, can be found at the end of this article. ***** U.S. Conditions
Recently, as I neared my local C-Town supermarket, I saw a middle-aged man standing near a recycling redemption machine. In front of him were several massive clear garbage bags teeming full of the cans and bottles he had collected.
The man looked bloated, exhausted, defeated — his skin grayish as he went through the motions of securing a few bucks. He reached into one of the bags and pulled out an empty, crumpled liter-sized bottle of Coca-Cola.
My eyes happened to meet the man’s eyes just as he lifted the dirty bottle to …
Despite mandates dropping around the world (Canada a notable exception) many people, as is their right, continue to don masks whose prophylactic effective is dubious.
The award-winning Director’s Cut of The Ghosts of Jeju lays bare what Pax Americana is all about, focusing on the exceedingly cruel debasement of the democratic will of Koreans.
Begin then with a fracture, a cesura, a rent; opening a crack in this fallen world, a shaft of light.
— Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body
Being sick for the past few weeks has had its advantages. It has forced me to take a break from writing since I could not concentrate enough to do so. It has gifted me with a deeper sympathy for the vast numbers of the seriously ill around the world, those suffering souls without succor except for desperate prayers for relief. And it has allowed thoughts to think me as I relinquished all …
The platinum jubilee will bore and cause some to yawn. It might certainly agitate the republican spleen in the fourteen countries where Queen Elizabeth II remains a constitutional head of state. But the question remains: How does the institution this figure represents endure, if it should at all?
A rash of countries have expressed an interest in severing ties with the monarchy. In November last year, Barbados did so with some pomp, swearing in its first president, Sandra Mason, a former governor general. “Today,” Mason proclaimed, “debate and discourse have become action.”
Through 2022, the royals made visits to the Caribbean …
The distance between Ukraine and Mali is measured in thousands of kilometers. But the geopolitical distance is much closer to the point that it appears as if the ongoing conflicts in both countries are the direct outcomes of the same geopolitical currents and transformation underway around the world.
The Malian government is now accusing French troops of perpetuating a massacre in the West African country. Consequently, on April 23, the Russian Foreign Ministry declared its support for Malian efforts, pushing for an international investigation into French abuses and massacres in Mali. “We hope that those responsible will be identified and …
Shanghai COVID lockdown ends; Pacific diplomacy and talks on cooperation; China discovers a uranium bounty in the deep sea; and Chinese sporting culture.
Welcome to another Episode of System Fail. In this episode we will be covering the trend of rising state repression around the globe.
We start in so-called Chile where the newly elected ostensibly left-libertarian president Gabriel Boric has failed to deliver on his promise to free political prisoners.
Meanwhile in Munich, police have raided a number of apartments, an anarchist library, and a print shop.
Then in Greece, long term anarchist prisoner Giannis Michaildis has announced a hunger strike demanding his release.
Finally, a run down of the recent events at the Defend the Forest Atlanta encampment.
“I’m absolutely convinced we will get a low-carbon, no-carbon economy at some point in time. The challenge is will we get there in time to heed the warnings of the scientists and avoid the worst consequences of the crisis?” ((John Kerry, Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, May 2022.))
In a soft pitch interview by Andy Serwer of Yahoo Finance on Saturday, May 28th at Davos World Economic Forum the Climate Czar expressed optimism about handling the climate change crisis, in part, based upon the fact that several of the world’s leading corporations are dead set on stopping the multitude of dangers …
The author Steven Pinker’s blinkered perspective in Enlightenment Now is limited to critiquing what remains of an academic leftism often accused of a reflexive anti-Western bias. Pinker’s advocacy of rationality and science in itself adds little to the mainstream recognition of human intellectual advancement since the 18th century Enlightenment. Over the centuries, the main opponent of free inquiry, it should be recalled, was organized religion–the ideological dogmas of which sanctified State despotism and discouraged independent learning (and even literacy).
Yes, “wealth is created.” But how? Pinker blithely ignores …
After having a few lunches with Australia’s then opposition leader, Anthony Albanese, John Shipton felt reason to be confident. Albanese had promised Assange’s father that he would do whatever he could, should he win office, to bring the matter to a close.
In December 2019, before a gathering at the Chifley Research Centre, Albanese also referred to Assange. “You don’t prosecute journalists for doing their job.” In December 2021, he also expressed the view that the “ongoing pursuit of Mr Assange” served no evident “purpose” – “enough is enough”.
That said, prior to winning office, the Labor opposition was hardly …
Since the purchase of Alstom Energy in 2015, the US multinational could have put in place a vast system of tax evasion involving France, Switzerland and Delaware. With the blessing of the French Finance Ministry.
It is an industrial fiasco which has no end. Seven years after the sale of Alstom Energy to General Electric, (([Translator’s note] The complex saga of the corrupt takeover of Alstom Energy by General Electric is told in Jones, ‘Behind GE’s Takeover of Alstom Energy, Counterpunch,2 December 2016; and Jones, ‘The Coalition of the US Justice Department and GE against Alstom’, Dissident …
by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead / June 2nd, 2022
America, meet your new dictator-in-chief.
As the New York Times reports, “Newly disclosed documents have shed a crack of light on secret executive branch plans for apocalyptic scenarios—like the aftermath of a nuclear attack—when the president may activate wartime powers for national security emergencies.”<
The problem, of course, is that we have become a nation in a permanent state of emergency.
Power-hungry and lawless, the government has weaponized one national crisis after another in order to expand its powers and justify all manner of government tyranny in the so-called name of national security. ...
To Bigger and his kind, white people were not really people; they were a sort of great natural force, like a stormy sky looming overhead or like a deep swirling river stretching suddenly at one’s feet in the dark.
— Richard Wright, Native Son (1940)
The memoir, N, by James Henry Harris, Distinguished Professor of Pastoral Theology & Homiletics at Virginia Union University, is confrontational, even fiery from the get-go. Wonderfully in-your-face, no-holds-barred prose that gets right to the heart of the matter about CRT and the controversy over banning books — and …
Amadou Sanogo (Mali), You Can Hide Your Gaze, but You Cannot Hide That of Others, 2019.
On 25 May 2022, Africa Day, Moussa Faki Mahamat – the chairperson of the African Union (AU) – commemorated the establishment of the Organisation for African Unity (OAU) in 1963, which was later reshaped as the AU in 2002, with a foreboding speech. Africa, he said, has become ‘the collateral victim of a distant conflict, that between Russia and Ukraine’. That conflict has upset ‘the fragile global geopolitical and …
Watching a buffoon commit suicide is never a pleasant thing.
— Scott Ritter on a Richard Medhurst podcast, May 19, 2022
“Putin is mad and losing his marbles all over Ukraine” goes a certain conventional AmericaNATOstani talking point bombastically broadcast over all mainstream media outlets in the Collective West these days. The idea that the Collective West’s own madness has been projected upon the figure of Vladimir Putin is considered anathema, a heresy promoted by none other than “Mad Vlad” himself, whose propaganda services, we are led to believe, have unusually penetrated our own sacrosanct Disinformation Systems.
Complacency has been the hallmark of NATO expansion. Over time, it has even become a form of derision, notably directed against Russia. As with many historical matters, records ignored can be records revisited, the second time around sometimes nastier than the first.
With the Ukraine conflict raging, a few of Russia’s neighbours have reconsidered their position of military non-alignment and neutrality. Last month, both Sweden and Finland submitted membership applications to formally join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
This reconsideration must be taken with the heaviest of qualifications. Sweden and Finland, while they have claimed neutrality and non-alignment status, have hardly been …
US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin stated that Western nations will continue “moving Heaven and Earth” to send weapons to Ukraine in its war against Russia. ((Jacob Knutson, “Austin: West Will ‘Keep Moving’ Heaven and Earth’ to Arm Ukraine,” April 27, 2022.)) While they may be moving Earth, it’s doubtful they’re moving Heaven, which could very well be enraged at US policymakers’ habit of seizing for itself divine powers to inflict massive amounts of death whenever conflict looms on the horizon. For good reason, so much power was never intended to be in the hands of mere mortals.
Is power something inside a person (an attribute) or a relationship between people? Is power a neutral concept, or does power have a positive or negative charge? Is power vertical or horizontal? Most of the time it seems that power is hierarchical and can be called power over people. But can there be horizontal power, that is power with people? What is the relationship between power and politics? Is politics a specific form of power or is power a particular form of politics? What …
The Israeli Supreme Court has decided that the Palestinian region of Masafer Yatta, located in the southern hills of Hebron, is to be entirely appropriated by the Israeli military and that a population of over 1,000 Palestinians is to be expelled.
The Israeli Court decision, on May 4, was hardly shocking. Israel’s military occupation does not only consist of soldiers with guns, but elaborate political, military, economic and legal structures, dedicated to the expansion of the illegal Jewish settlements and the slow – and sometimes not-so-slow – expulsion of the Palestinians.
When Palestinians state that the Nakba, or Catastrophe …
The forces that shaped 18-year old Payton Gendron to commit mass murder at the Tops Friendly Market in Buffalo, N.Y on May 14, 2022, are the same as the forces that shaped 38-year old Baruch Goldstein to kill 29 Muslim worshippers in the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron on Feb. 25, 1994. Ultra-nationalism, great replacement theory, hatred of the others, and belief in ethnic superiority drove both murderers to commit their homicidal acts.
This commentary has no intention of using the killings in Buffalo to reorient the focus to horrific injustices …
Four months ago, two days before the civilized world celebrated one year since the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons came into force on January 22, officials here at the Kansas City National Security Campus hosted a virtual celebration of a different milestone with partners from across the National Nuclear Security Administration and U.S. Air Force. “With great pride and excitement,” they recognized the completion of the B61-12 bomb’s Life Extension Program’s first production unit. This plant is responsible for producing 39 major non-nuclear component assemblies of the …
