Note to our readers: These are letters from a comrade of ours who currently lives in Russia. English is not the first language of HCE so please be understanding. In order to preserve the integrity of these letters, we kept the original phrasing as best we could.
March 11th
Hello Barbara,
Thank you for your message and concern. My wife and I are passing through a difficult phase in our lives. After our second vaccination in December, we, for some reason or other, went through a period of being sick, myself in a light …
by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead / March 27th, 2022
The Internet is watching us now. If they want to. They can see what sites you visit. In the future, television will be watching us, and customizing itself to what it knows about us. The thrilling thing is, that will make us feel we’re part of the medium. The scary thing is, we’ll lose our right to privacy. An ad will appear in the air around us, talking directly to us.”
— Director Steven Spielberg, Minority Report
We have arrived, way ahead of schedule, into the dystopian future dreamed up by such …
How a Clash song was remade as a pro-war anthem by a band with fascist links
by Tom Wheeler / March 27th, 2022
The Ukrainian hardcore band Beton recently released “Kyiv Calling,” a reworked version of the Clash classic “London Calling” as a call to resist the Russian invasion, apparently with the blessing of the former living Clash members. However, one wonders if the approval was granted before or after reading the lyrics.
Left-wing musician Billy Bragg initially signaled his support for the remake on his Facebook page. Did he also ignore the lyrics? Then Bragg was made aware of their fascist links. A photo from Beton’s Facebook page made the social media rounds showing …
In November 1784, Berlinischer Monatsschrift published an article titled “An answer to the question: what is enlightenment?” The article’s author was Immanuel Kant. “Enlightenment is man’s emergence from self-inflicted immaturity (Unmündigkeit),” he famously replied. And Kant’s stance on the question has yet to lose its charm. Nearly two hundred years later, Michel Foucault still asserts the question of “what is the Enlightenment?” and claims that modernity finds itself in a constant desire to know where we are right now. This long standing question is a historical staple that continues to preoccupy the present.
On January 10th 2022, an anti-tank mine killed three deminers affiliated with the NGO Cambodian Self-Help Demining in northern Cambodia. This tragic incident is a reminder that despite considerable progress, deminers have yet to clear 2,034 kilometres strewn with landmines and cluster bombs, according to the Phnom Penh Post. The Cambodian Mine Action and Victim Assistance Authority (CMAA) issued a report last year stating that between 1979 and 2021, landmines and other ERW (Explosive Remnants of War) claimed 19,805 lives. Cambodia is also home to the world’s largest amputee population.
In a highly symbolic move expressing solidarity with Ukraine, the prime ministers of Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovenia traveled together to the embattled Ukrainian capital of Kyiv and met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on March 15.
The three leaders took hours-long train trip on their journey from the west Ukrainian city of Lviv to the capital Kyiv, allegedly “endangering their lives” due to security risks involved in traveling within a war zone, though there was no risk to their lives as such because they had requested prior permission for the official visit from the Kremlin, which was graciously granted …
According to a 2019 Rand report titled “Overextending and Unbalancing Russia,” the US goal is to undermine Russia just as it did the Soviet Union in the cold war. Rather than “trying to stay ahead” or trying to improve the US domestically or in international relations, the emphasis is on efforts and actions to undermine the designated adversary Russia. Rand is a quasi-US governmental think tank that receives three-quarters of its funding from the US military.
The report lists anti-Russia measures divided into the following areas: economic, geopolitical, ideological/informational, and military. They are assessed according to the perceived risks, benefits and …
Canada’s “Freedom Convoy” began with protesting rules implemented in January by the Canadian and later the US governments requiring truck drivers to be fully vaccinated to enter their country. It snowballed into a demonstration against dysfunctional coronavirus restrictions. The Ottawa trucker protesters demanded: No Lockdowns, No Mandates, No Vaccine Passports, and if not, that Trudeau resign.
Working people are increasingly angry at the failures of the neoliberal regimes in Canada and the US to meet our needs. Unfortunately, we on the left are not positioned to effectively utilize this sentiment and grow our forces, leaving an open field for leaders with …
In over twenty hours of grueling confirmation hearings for Judge Ketanji Jackson’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court, Republican Senators (Cruz, Cotton, Hawley, Blackburn, and Graham) found much time to disgrace themselves, using the Judge as a prop for their despicable political ambitions. Meanwhile the Democratic (and Republican) Senators found no time to tap into Judge Jackson’s knowledge and analysis of the grave issues regarding the nexus of the power of giant corporations and the Constitution.
Senators, who should have known better, declined to raise the important questions about corporate personhood, or the provision of equal rights for corporations with human …
From the needy in Britain refusing potatoes because they don't have the pounds to pay for boiling them to ZioLensky wanting 1,000 missiles a day
by Paul Haeder / March 26th, 2022
I’m finishing up a “children’s book.” It’s longish. Kati the Coatimundi Finds Lorena. It’s about a precocious (actually, super smart) 12 year old, Lorena, who is in a wheelchair (paraplegic) who ends up finding out the family trip to Playa del Carmen back to San Antonio, Texas, brought with them a stowaway animal — a coati. Yep, the world of the 12 year old is full of reading, drawing, smarts. Yep, the girl and the animal can communicate with each other. Yep, lots of struggle with being “the other,” and, well, it’s a story that I hope even keeps grandma on the edge of …
“We are anonymous because we fear retaliation.” This text was part of a letter signed by 500 Google employees last October, in which they decried their company’s direct support for the Israeli government and military.
In their letter, the signatories protested a $1.2 billion contract between Google, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the Israeli government which provides cloud services for the Israeli military and government that “allows for further surveillance of and unlawful data collection on Palestinians, and facilitates expansion of Israel’s illegal settlements on Palestinian land”.
This is called Project Nimbus. The project was announced in 2018 and …
Negative characterizations of human beings abound. It is common to hear people assert that humans are naturally greedy. Or competitive. Or stupid. It should also be noted that the one making this declaration never includes himself or herself. The messenger is innocent. But the rest of us are judged as being wholly no good. Most of the apples are bad. This view is not new and has a rather rich history. Much of Christian dogma has cast a dim view of human nature. In the Christian interpretation of the Old Testament, the doctrine of original sin holds that, due to …
Retired nurse/nurse practitioner Arlys Herem knew she wanted to be a nurse since she was in the sixth grade. What she didn’t know was that she would spend most of her career in other countries caring for the disenfranchised, educating medical personnel, promoting peace and advocating for veteran care when she retired.
Arlys joined the service when she was 17 to “get out of Milwaukee” and take advantage of a scholarship offered by the Army Nurse Corp. She trained at Walter Reed National Army Medical Center in Washington DC and received a BSN from the University of Maryland.
When involved in war, those who feel like benefactors are bound to congratulate the gun toting initiators. If you so happen to be on the losing end, sentiments are rather different. Complicity and cause in murder come to mind.
The late US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright will always be tied with the appallingly named humanitarian war in Kosovo in 1999, one that saw NATO attacks on Serbian civilian targets while aiding the forces of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). It was a distinct backing of sides in a vicious, tribal conflict, where good might miraculously bubble up, winged by angels. …
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in many respects, is a Delphic institution whose reports are a function of political discretion as it provides justification for nation/state policies that are seldom fulfilled; e.g., only a handful of the 193 signatory nations to Paris 15 have met commitments. This scandalous outright failure at a dicey time for the climate system only serves to hasten loss of stability and integrity of the planet’s most important ecosystems.
That provocative depiction is examined in a recent Nick Breeze ClimateGenn podcast interview: Existential Risk Management with David Spratt, research director of the Breakthrough National Centre …
Among the topics in this episode are the crash of MU5735, new restrictions on tall buildings, China-Africa trade increasing, and coffee culture in China.
Why pack pistols and escape a gauntlet of police cars when you could just get elected to government and empty people’s bank accounts? No guns needed and no police to dodge.
Marcos, Hussein, Suharto — the list goes on and on. The U.S. props up a foreign leader until he is no longer useful. It’s the standard operating procedure for the Home of the Brave™ since, well… forever. To follow is yet another example.
On December 20, 1989 — just two weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall — President George H.W. Bush ushered in the post-Cold War era with a foray that would’ve been deemed a “sneak attack” and a “war crime” …
Images of burnt flesh from napalm bombs, wounded and dead soldiers, scenes of U.S. soldiers burning the simple huts of Vietnamese villages, eventually turned the public against the war in Vietnam and produced the dreaded affliction, from the ruling class point of view, known as the “Vietnam syndrome.” This collective Post Traumatic Stress Disorder made it impossible for the public to support any foreign military involvement for years.
It took the rulers almost three decades to finally cure the public of this affliction. But the rulers were careful.
The brutal reality of what the U.S. was doing in Afghanistan and Iraq was …
Jaider Esbell (Brazil), The Intergalactic Entities Talk to Decide the Universal Future of Humanity, 2021.
On 31 March 1964, the Brazilian military initiated a coup d’état against the democratically-elected progressive government of President João Goulart. The next day, Goulart was deposed and, ten days later, the 295 members of the National Congress handed the state over to General Castello Branco and a military junta. The military ruled over Brazil for the next twenty-one years.
Book Review: Wild Green Oranges, by Bob Baldock. (Clapton Press, London, 2021, 238 pages)
by Roger D. Harris / March 23rd, 2022
Wild Green Oranges describes how author Bob Baldock dropped out of college and was at loose ends in 1958. Then he became inspired after a chance viewing of a newsreel. It was about a band of rebels in the remote eastern mountains of Cuba fighting a guerilla war against the US-backed Batista dictatorship. He had access to news about the little-known events in Cuba at his job as a copy boy at the (now defunct) New York Herald Tribune and became determined to interview the rebels.
Few would forget the antics of Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison who, as Treasurer, entered Parliament with a lump of coal and proceeded to praise it with the enthusiasm of a fetish worshipper. “Don’t be afraid,” he told fellow parliamentarians. “Don’t be scared.”
He has, with deep reluctance, conceded that climate change is taking place and, with even deeper reluctance, that human agency might be involved. But under his leadership, the fossil fuel lobby of Australia has no reason to fear. Denialism has simply become more covert.
This month, Industry Minister Angus Taylor, the government’s premier ignoramus on climate change, promised …
Rolling Stone
Extreme climate hits Antarctica, smashing records, shocking scientists as temperatures soar 50F to 90F degrees above normal. Welcome to climate change’s newest upheaval. But, don’t talk to the scientists about it. They’re speechless.
But, they do tweet: “Antarctic climatology has been rewritten,” tweeted Stefano Di Battista, Antarctic researcher ((“It’s 70 Degrees Warmer Than Normal in Eastern Antarctica. Scientists are Flabbergasted”, The Washington Post, March 18, 2022.))
“This event is completely unprecedented and upended our expectations about the Antarctic climate system,” said Jonathan Wille, a researcher studying polar meteorology at …
Why did the allegations of a genocide in Xinjiang disappear from the western media narrative? What happened to the media coverage of the court-ordered release of the Pfizer documents, those documents that the FDA said would take 75 years to redact? Down the media memory hole?
The cultural vandals and iconoclasts have been busy of late, removing Russians from the stables at short notice and demanding what might be called a necessary affirmation of disloyalty. It’s all good to talk about world peace and the resolution of disputes, but that will hardly do for the flag bearing choirs who have discovered their object of evil. Do you hate Vladimir Putin? If so, good. Do you love freedom? Well, of course, as everyone does with squeaking enthusiasm, even if they cannot define it.
The main interest is never in the second answer, but the first. Putin must be …
Privatization transfers public funds, assets, and authority from the public sector to the private sector. This typically erodes the voice of workers, increases corruption, lowers accountability, raises costs, fragments services, undermines flexibility, diminishes transparency, reduces efficiency, decreases the quality of services, and intensifies inequality.
By removing socially-produced value from the economy and further concentrating it in the hands of private competing interests, privatization ultimately harms the economy, undermines the national interest, and enriches a handful of people at the expense of the public. The public would benefit vastly more if the wealth produced by workers stayed in the hands of workers …
The incredible market for human slaughter called war existed thousands of years ago but it was a corner grocery store compared to the multi-trillion dollar moral sewer that represents modern mass murder. Part of what enables imperial and even lesser powers to slaughter at will is a rule book drawn up long ago when there might have been a possibility to just have military personnel chopping one another to bits while leaving the general populace out of the bloodletting. That certainly ended before the 20th century but what has transpired since then and up to the present is, to cite …
