Sixty years ago in the late fall and early winter, a seventeen-year-old blue-eyed Bronx boy went by himself to see an afternoon showing of West Side Story on Fordham Road in the north Bronx. He took the bus to the theater but walked the few miles home in a romantic daze, in love with Maria and yearning for a girl like that for himself. The movie had mesmerized him, and though he knew about gang fights and the enmity between different ethnic groups, especially white prejudice against Puerto Ricans and blacks, he had never been involved in such violence. It …
It was meant to be time to reflect. The eager arms of a new pandemic were enfolding a society with asphyxiating, lethal effect. Public health authorities advocated various measures: social distancing, limited contact between family and friends, limited mobility. No grand booze-ups. No large parties. No bonking, except within dispensations of intimacy and various “bubble” arrangements. Certainly, no orgies.
This was what Britain was told by the government of Boris Johnson, a man famed for his rutting proclivities, to behave, huddle and battle SARS-Cov-2, and its disease, COVID-19. But the manner he, and his officials, have done so have shown the …
by John Perry and Rick Sterling / December 18th, 2021
On November 7, Nicaragua held elections in which current president Daniel Ortega received 75% support and, as a result, begins a new term of office in January. Not surprisingly, the US government described the election as a “sham.” Of more concern is that many on the left seem to agree. William Robinson’s NACLA article, “Nicaragua: Chronicle of an Election Foretold,” is a scathing critique, repeated in an interview with The Real News.
In Robinson’s article, we will show that his claims are based on falsehoods and elite bias. He appears …
Nicaragua switches allegiance from Taiwan to China; free online tutoring for students; China observes the National Memorial Day for the victims of the Nanjing massacre.
This is the most opportune time for millions of workers in Big Box retail stores and fast-food outlets to form unions. McDonald’s, Walmart, Amazon, Starbucks, Dunkin Donuts, Burger King, and other giant chains are having trouble finding enough workers. Some of these companies are even paying signing bonuses and upping low pay.
No one who frequents the dark auditorium is really an atheist
— Edgar Morin, Marxist Movie Critic
Orientation
Cross-cultural uniqueness of celebrity culture
If members of a tribal society during Paleolithic or Neolithic times, or even members of Bronze Age Egypt or Mesopotamia had heard about the United States population’s devotion to celebrities, they wouldn’t believe it. How could you become attached to a person you will never meet, whose shelf life might be five to 10 years and who doesn’t know or care about your life? How can it be that during a period …
I was working in a gym — teaching someone how to torque her hips into a left hook — when I heard loud griping about health care… a subject worthy of complaint, for sure, but here’s the punch line:
“I’d get better treatment if I wasn’t an American,” the griper declared. “The illegal aliens (sic) come here, don’t pay taxes, and exploit the system. Me? I’m screwed because I was born here and actually pay my taxes.”
Rolling Stone
The Thwaites “Doomsday Glacier” in West Antarctica is spooking scientists. Satellite images shown at a recent meeting December 13th of the American Geophysical Union showed numerous large, diagonal cracks extending across the Thwaites’ floating ice wedge.
This is new information, and it’s a real shocker if only because it’s happening so quickly, much sooner than expectations. It could collapse. And, it’s big, 80 miles across with up to 4,000 feet depth with a 28-mile-wide cracking ice shelf that extends over the Amundsen Sea.
Settlers enjoyed a seeming free permission: to dispossess natives at will of all the best land, turn them out of traditional fishing locations, disrespect elders, women, children and religion, leave whole communities without political representation and punish men for breaking laws which they could have no means of knowing existed. It was inconceivable that all this change could happen overnight without violence. Instead, there was the greatest imaginable violence: genocide.
— Tom Swanky, The Great Darkening, 2012
Somehow, even “genocide” seems an inadequate description for what happened, yet rather than viewing it with …
The young boy of seven or so was kissing a toy doll affixed with an alarmed face. The doll, no doubt of full Chinese make, was fully tarted up, lips glossy, eyes wide, a blonde with curls. “Stop making out with her,” cried his mother, sitting in the seat beside him with concern. “It’s creepy.”
The passengers on this Melbourne to Brisbane flight were taking a moment to compose themselves. The customary hard cushion seating, cool, slightly refrigerated, touched the skin, imposing itself upon the visitor. The cafeteria, plastic tray tables that must be put up prior to lift-off and descent. …
by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead / December 16th, 2021
When the song of the angels is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flock,
The work of Christmas begins:
To find the lost,
To heal the broken,
To feed the hungry,
To release the prisoner,
To rebuild the nations,
To bring peace among others,
To make music in the heart.
? Howard Thurman, “The Work of Christmas” from his book The Mood of Christmas and Other Celebrations, October 1, 1985
The Christmas story of a baby born in a manger is a familiar one.
The Roman Empire, a police state in its own right, had ordered that …
As history repeatedly shows, it is under deteriorating social and economic conditions that the most unscrupulous, the most opportunistic–i.e., the very worst people–end up on top. And because they are the worst, they demand even more, take even more, and abuse and intimidate and/or bribe anyone who stands in their way. Such persons, clearly sociopathic (and in other ways perverted), keep trashing laws and institutions, and re-designing the remnants of a half-shattered society into a criminal enterprise serving their insatiable, people-destroying appetites. They are clearly supremely motivated by limitless narcissism (with its usual contempt for everyone who doesn’t satisfy their …
In October 2020, Pesticide Action Network India and PAN Asia Pacific released the report ‘State of Glyphosate Use in India’. It concluded that the use of the world’s most widely used herbicide is rampant. Despite this, it noted that its disturbing effects on the environment and the health of farmworkers and the public are not being addressed (see: State of Glyphosate Use in India).
Although Punjab, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and several other states have moved towards banning glyphosate due to their concerns for consumers, farmers and environment, the report – based on a field survey in seven states (300 respondents …
Before talking about pornography and men, I should say a few words about pornography and me.
I have spent my adult life working as a journalist or a professor, acquiring information that has helped me understand pornography and the other sexual-exploitation industries, including prostitution and stripping. This presentation is rooted in more than three decades of this research and writing.
But I am not a detached observer. Like virtually all men of the post-Playboy generation (the first issue came out in 1953, …
The decision by several governments across the globe to institute travel bans on seven African countries, starting on November 27, due to the discovery of a new Covid-19 variant, Omicron, was perceived to be hasty in the eyes of some and fully justifiable on medical grounds, in the view of others. However, the matter is hardly that of a difference of opinion.
The swiftness of choking off some of Africa’s poorest countries, including Botswana, Lesotho and Zimbabwe, is particularly disturbing if placed within a proper context concerning the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the Global South, generally, and Africa, …
This year marks the 75th anniversary of a little known but influential arm of Canada’s foreign policy apparatus. An entity called the Communications Security Establishment was established to spy internationally in 1946, operating secretly in its first four decades.
With an annual budget of $780 million and 3000 employees, the CSE has a variety of high-tech gadgets, including surveillance planes. In 2011 CSE moved into a new $1.2 billion home. The seven-building, 110,000 square metre complex is connected to the Canadian Security Intelligence Service’s (CSIS) headquarters in Ottawa.
Unlike CSIS, CSE is largely foreign focused. It seeks to “protect …
Many westerners trying to make sense of the events in the “dark continent” of Africa have many barriers standing in the way of their minds and reality. This must be the case, for without such filters of spin proclaiming Africa’s problems to be self-induced (or the consequence of Chinese debt slavery), we in the west, might actually feel horrified enough to demand systemic change. We might come to recognize that the plight of Africa has less to do with Africa and more to do with an intentional program of depopulation, and exploitation of vital resources.
It’s not the sort of thing you encounter regularly. A member of a government cabinet, responsible for arguably one of the country’s most important portfolios, found both wanting and culpable for their actions after leaving their post. But this is what former Danish immigration minister Inger Støjberg found when she was convicted for illegally separating asylum seeking couples arriving in the country.
A Danish court of impeachment, in finding the former minister guilty for intentionally neglecting her duties under the Ministerial Responsibility Act, sentenced her to 60 days in prison. Of the 26 members of the court, only one found …
The liberating power of irreverent “black comedy”: breaking false idols, mocking prevailing hypocrisies, and calling forth a massive revolt against mass delusion and folly–through laughter. It was, of course, in the Sixties, just when people were beginning to “raise their consciousness” — that various forms of spirited and subversive humor appeared on the scene. Things were a-changing: Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, “second wave” feminism, and a new (guiltless) candor about sex. But even more fundamentally, a new egalitarian ethos, poised to sweep away the entrenched authoritarian institutions still to be found in patriarchy at home and war-making abroad.
As a native Texan, I used to be fairly oblivious to outside perceptions of my home state.
I never watched a single episode of Dallas, for example; but when I visited Western Europe in the summer of 1984, I was surprised that practically everyone I met assumed I owned horses and oil wells. Then, the following summer, when some New York City girls saw me surfing in Hawaii, they were surprised to learn I hailed from the Lone Star State. They condescendingly remarked that they thought Texans were all farmers. Later, in college, one of my favorite professors (from the upper …
Ukrainian servicemen take part in a drill of the airborne troops taking place in Zhytomyr region on November 21, 2018. (photo: AFP)
Since the fall of the Soviet Union thirty years ago, US policy on Ukraine has been an ugly mix of inconsistency, quiet aggression, fear-mongering and stupidity. Now President Biden is recklessly intensifying the same failed tactics while expecting a different outcome and risking a confrontation of the world’s two major nuclear-armed states.
What could possibly go wrong?
What passes for conventional wisdom nowadays is expressed by …
The pursuit of Julian Assange for revealing secrets and lies of governments, especially the crimes of America, has entered its final stage as the British judiciary – upholders of ‘British justice’ – merge their deliberations with the undeterred power of Washington.
I sat in Court 4 in the Royal Courts of Justice in London with Stella Morris, Julian Assange’s partner. I have known Stella for as long as I have known Julian. She, too, is a voice of freedom, coming from a family that fought the fascism of Apartheid. Today, her name was uttered in court by a barrister and a …
The free speech argument in Australia has always been skewed. Lacking the confidence, courage and maturity to have a bill of rights that might protect it, Australia’s body politic has stammered its way to the frailest of protections. The Australian High Court has done its small bit to read an implied right into one of the world’s dreariest constitutions, though the judges have been at pains to point out that it can never be personally exercised. The wordy “implied right to protect freedom of communication on political subjects” can only ever act as a restraint on excessive legislative or …
In the Vietnam War protest song “Five to One,” Jim Morrison of The Doors sings:
The old get old/And the young get stronger
May take a week/And it may take longer
They got the guns/But we got the numbers
Gonna win, yeah/We’re takin’ over
In my youth, I took solace in the whole “we got the numbers” thing but it eventually became crystal clear that the ones with the guns have had it all figured out for a very, very long time. Philosopher David Hume, in 1758, …
I can still vividly recall, some thirty-plus years later, my days at Columbia University as a Teaching Assistant (TA) in Anthropology. As a part-time job, it paid little–but nonetheless provided complete tuition-exemption for those of us still registered as full-time grad students. The lecture-hall was more like an auditorium: maybe 200 students taking a survey course on “Human Origins” (a course which I was later to teach there). The professor would drone on-and-on, his pedantic style often inducing somnolence rather than fascination with the subject. Later in the day, we TAs would meet with our “discussion sections”; i.e., students who …
Turns out you can’t vaccinate your way out of highly-transmissible RNA viruses in crowded commercial settings, but it also turns out that humans have a little issue trying to play God, and as such so here we are.
by Paul Haeder / December 11th, 2021
They never call that Conflic$ of $ntere$t
Doctors are urging everyone to get vaccinated and boosted as cases of the Omicron coronavirus variant are popping up in more states, but the vaccine may also need to change to keep up with the mutations of the virus.
“It is, probably, one of our worst-case scenarios in terms of the combination of mutations that exist in one variant,” said Dr. Stephen Hoge, president of Cambridge-based Moderna. (source)
Again, this discussion around SARS-CoV2’s origins, and I mean, LAB origins, is so stunted that I have zero faith in the ability of people running …
British justice is advertised by its proponents as upright, historically different to the savages upon which it sought to civilise, and apparently fair. Such outrages as the unjust convictions of the Guilford Four and Maguire Seven, both having served time in prison for terrorist offences they did not commit, are treated as blemishes.
In recent memory, fewer blemishes can be more profound and disturbing to a legal system than the treatment of Australian citizen and WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange. The British legal system has been so conspicuously outsourced to the wishes of the US Department of Justice and the military-industrial complex …
Like the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and other imperialist organizations, the OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) recently announced that the forecast for global economic recovery will be revised downward in light of the Omicron virus variant that emerged a few weeks ago . ((Imperialist organizations like the OECD regularly over-project economic growth and thus they routinely revise their projections downwards several times a year, causing many to lose faith in their ability to accurately cognize economic realities and conditions.))
by Ariel Gold and Medea Benjamin / December 10th, 2021
After a 5-month hiatus, indirect negotiations between the U.S. and Iran resumed last week in Vienna in an attempt to revise the 2015 Iran nuclear deal (formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or JCPOA). The outlook isn’t good.
Less than a week into negotiations, Britain, France, and Germany accused Iran of “walking back almost all of the difficult compromises” achieved during the first round of negotiations before Iran’s new president, Ebrahim Raisi, was sworn into office. While such actions by Iran certainly aren’t helping the negotiations succeed, there is another country — one that is not even …
English High Court decision paving the way for extradition will make it even harder for journalists to hold the US to account
by Jonathan Cook / December 10th, 2021
On Friday, the English High Court paved the way for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to be extradited to the United States and tried over the publication of hundreds of thousands of documents, some of which contained evidence of US and British war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The decision reversed a ruling in January by a lower court that had blocked the extradition, but only on humanitarian grounds: that Assange would be put at severe risk of suicide by the oppressive conditions of his detention in the US.
The 50-year old Australian faces a sentence of up to 175 …
