The Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC) sought to use podcaster Daniel Dumbrill, a long-time Canadian resident in China, for propagandistic purposes. The media savvy Dumbrill was prepared for this.
Said Dumbrill, “Today, I’m going to indisputably and unmistakably demonstrate how mainstream media shapes your views and opinions through manipulation, dishonesty, and outright lies.”
Influenced by the late journalist Robert Fisk, I avoid the term “mainstream media” for the simple reason that state/corporate media is not my mainstream. So I call such media what it is “state/corporate media” or “monopoly media” à la Ben Bagdikian or “mass media.” I prefer independent media or independent …
War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.
? Smedley Butler, War is a Racket: The Antiwar Classic by America’s Most Decorated Soldier
There are thousands of examples daily in the mainstream and left-stream and right-stream media showing how broken and corrupt this system — capitalism — is.
As soon as Moscow received an American response to its security demands in Ukraine, it answered indirectly by announcing greater military integration between it and three South American countries, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Cuba.
Washington’s response, on January 26, to Russia’s demands of withdrawing NATO forces from Eastern Europe and ending talks about a possible Kyiv membership in the US-led alliance, was noncommittal.
For its part, the US spoke of ‘a diplomatic path’, which will address Russian demands through ‘confidence-building measures’. For Russia, such elusive language is clearly a non-starter.
On that same day, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov announced, in …
Canada’s prime minister Justin Trudeau has cornered himself. The right move for Trudeau to extract himself now is to end the useless jab everyone, shut down everything, everywhere prolonged mandates, for which he will inevitably lose some credibility and face. His other options seem to be to wait out the convoy, systematically disrupt the convoy (e.g., parking fines, confiscating jerry cans, continuing the demonization of the protestors), or call in police as he has already done or even the army. Those are all losing options because it signals that he has not read the pulse of the nation and became …
Canada, Nunavut Territory, Repulse Bay, Polar Bear (Ursus maritimus) stands on melting sea ice at sunset near Harbour Islands (Credit: Paul Souders / Getty Images)
The oceans of the world are undergoing a dangerous and damaging upheaval that manifests throughout scientific studies of late. Whether it’s the world’s fisheries of the Bering Strait or coral reefs of the Mediterranean Sea or emaciated Gray Whales along the Pacific coastline, study after study after study describes sudden, sharp downturns in all categories of marine life. What is going …
China and Argentina move closer together as Argentina joins the BRI and they reach agreements on investments. Russia and China signed a joint declaration opposing Taiwan independence and NATO expansion. Green China runs a low-Carbon Olympics. Gu Ailing wins a gold medal for China.
Do talking heads know the science, just talk as if they know the science, or even worse know the science and lie about it? When every randomized control trial, the gold standard of science, finds no statistically significant protection from mask wearing compared to no masking, one ought to ask why the mask mandates and why the compliance of so many people. See Dennis Rancourt’s “Masks Don’t Work: A review of science relevant to COVID-19 social policy.”
Looks like the man in the White House is inadvertently doing a bit of self-projection. It’s Biden who seems to want things that he can’t get.
Top of that wish-list is for Russia to invade Ukraine. If that sounds a bit illogical, then why is Biden so obsessed about predicting an imminent military move by Russia against …
During visits to Kabul, Afghanistan, over the past decade, I particularly relished lingering over breakfasts on chilly winter mornings with my young hosts who were on their winter break from school. Seated on the floor, wearing coats and hats and draped with blankets, we’d sip piping hot green tea as we shared fresh, warm wheels of bread purchased from the nearest baker.
But this winter, for desperate millions of Afghans, the bread isn’t there. The decades-long U.S. assault on Afghanistan’s people has now taken the vengeful form of freezing their shattered, starving country’s assets.
‘[T]here is great intellectual poverty on the part of the right wing’, Héctor Béjar says in our latest dossier, A Map of Latin America’s Present: An Interview with Héctor Béjar (February 2022). ‘There is a lack of right-wing intellectuals everywhere’.
Béjar speaks with a great deal of authority on these matters because, for the past sixty years, he has been intimately involved in the intellectual and political debates which have taken place in his native Peru …
A succession of events in recent weeks all point to the inescapable fact that nearly 75 years of Israel’s painstaking efforts aimed at hiding the truth about its origins and its current racially-driven apartheid regime are failing miserably. The world is finally waking up, and Israel is losing ground quicker than its ability to gain new supporters, or to whitewash its past or ongoing crimes.
First, there was Tantura, a peaceful Palestinian village whose inhabitants were mostly exterminated by Israel’s Alexandroni Brigade on May 23, 1948. Like many other massacres committed against unarmed Palestinians throughout the years, the massacre of Tantura …
They found it. Or so we can surmise from the confident words of the Australian National Maritime Museum. The Endeavour is a ship that will be considered alongside other vessels as monumental in its achievement and cursed in its contributions. Britain’s brilliant James Cook was its competent pilot, though it eventually ended up at the bottom of the sea after British forces scuttled it during the American War of Independence in 1778.
According to the ANMM, a wreck in Newport Harbour, off Rhode Island, could be confirmed as the Endeavour. “I am satisfied,” stated the organisation’s director and CEO Kevin …
Amnesty International’s 2022 report “Israel’s apartheid against Palestinians” that exposes and condemns Israeli apartheid has provoked false allegations of lying and anti-Semitism from the mendacious and genocidally racist Zionists and their US Alliance supporters. In actuality, denial of Israeli apartheid is a lie, and the Zionists and their supporters are manifestly mendacious, racist, and both anti-Arab anti-Semitic and anti-Jewish anti-Semitic by falsely defaming anti-racist Jewish, Arab, Palestinian and Muslim critics of Apartheid Israel.
Israeli apartheid by the numbers. 1.9 million Indigenous Palestinian Israelis (up to 50% impoverished) live as Third Class citizens under 65 Nazi-style, …
Charles Dickens (7 February 1812 – 9 June 1870) in New York, c.?1867–1868
Between 1935 and 1952 seven films were made based on the novels of Charles Dickens (7 February 1812 – 9 June 1870). ((Silent films were made too but I will just discuss the talkies.)) They were filmed in the social realist style, a style that was popular after the Great Crash and reflected the hardships facing people at the time. Social realism is a style often used by directors, artists, composers and writers to …
by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead / February 8th, 2022
The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.
— Frank Zappa, Interview with Jim Ladd, “Zappa On Air,” April 1977.
We are no longer free.
We are living in a world carefully crafted to resemble a representative democracy, but it’s an illusion.
The media outrage at Johnson linking the Labour leader to Jimmy Savile is because his comments inadvertently exposed the dark underbelly of the British establishment
by Jonathan Cook / February 8th, 2022
“Why is Boris Johnson making false claims about Starmer and Savile?” runs a headline in the news pages of the Guardian. It is just one of a barrage of indignant recent stories in the British media, rushing to the defence of the opposition leader, Sir Keir Starmer.
The reason? Last week the British prime minister, Boris Johnson, blamed Starmer, now the Labour party leader, for failing to prosecute Jimmy Savile, a TV presenter and serial child abuser, when his case came under police review in 2009. Between 2008 and 2013, Starmer was head of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS). Savile …
by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies / February 8th, 2022
Peace protest at the White House – Photo credit: iacenter.org
While the Biden administration is sending more troops and weapons to inflame the Ukraine conflict and Congress is pouring more fuel on the fire, the American people are on a totally different track.
A December 2021 poll found that a plurality of Americans in both political parties prefer to resolve differences over Ukraine through diplomacy. Another December poll found that a plurality of Americans (48 percent) would oppose going to war with Russia …
Xiomara Castro of the Liberty and Refoundation party (Libre) is Honduras’ first president in 40 years who is not a member of either the Liberal Party or the National Party.
Piloting a series of substantial policy changes a little more than one week into her mandate, Honduras’ President Xiomara Castro has already established herself as a firm Latin American leader. In the process, she has brought hope and happiness to the Honduran people, living under the pall of an oppressive regime since the 2009 military coup that removed Manuel Zelaya …
Martin Schotz, a respected Massachusetts-based author on the assassination of President Kennedy, explores the systematic basis for Cold War logic.
by Finian Cunningham / February 7th, 2022
The Cold War is back with a vengeance. The current impasse between the United States and Russia over the Ukraine crisis is running the risk of an all-out war in Europe, a war that could escalate into nuclear Armageddon. The crisis is wholly manufactured by Washington’s geopolitical power calculations – claims made against Russia about planning to invade Ukraine are baseless if not absurd. The impasse reflects an impoverishment of diplomacy and respect for international law, and a reckless tendency to militarize bilateral relations. This is the manifestation of Cold War thinking, primarily on the U.S. side.
There are some things that strain credulity. There are the dubious accounts of virgin births. There are the resolute flat earth theorists and denialists of the moon landing. To this can be added the environmental stance of Australia’s Scott Morrison and his ministers, one resolutely opposed to the empirical world. We are now at the phoney stage of an electoral war, and, with the government in more than a spot of bother, you can start expecting some rather extravagant promises of public spending.
The Great Barrier Reef, one of the single most remarkable natural structures on Planet Earth, home to …
Capital-centered economics is unscientific and irrational. It does not provide people with a coherent, integrated, and cogent understanding of the economy. Instead it increases confusion every day, leaving people rudderless and disoriented about what is really happening.
The capitalist economic system is always chaotic, anarchic, and violent, but the last two years have been more volatile and disordered than usual. Stability and security remain elusive. Uncertainty and anxiety are ever-present. Sustained healthy economic growth is largely absent.
In the most schizophrenic way, one week the monopoly-controlled media claims that the economy is doing extremely well while the following week we are told …
Former Newfoundland premier Brian Peckford has sued Canada’s federal government. Peckford maintains that the COVID-19 vaccine requirement for air travel is unconstitutional and infringes on all Canadians’ charter rights.
It all seems worn, part of an aspic approach to foreign policy. But US President Joe Biden is keen to ensure that old and lingering mistakes retain their flavour. Towards Cuba, it is now 60 years since President John F. Kennedy’s Presidential Proclamation 3447 imposed an embargo on all trade with the island state.
The proclamation was packed with Cold War righteousness and much sanctimony. Cuba, under the revolutionary Fidel Castro, fresh from overthrowing a Washington favourite and blood-smeared thug, Fulgencio Batista, was “incompatible with the principles and objectives of the Inter-American system”. The US was “prepared to take all …
As you know, I have other gigs, other ways to express ideas, and construct my own analysis in my own life. Experiences turned into philosophy. Or, anti-philosophy to invent self.
This piece is in the local rag, again, Newport, Lincoln County, Oregon. On the coast. (see story/Op-ed below — Newport News Times.)
Yes, the world is a microcosm in places wherever you find yourself, if you are willing to explore how universality is a common thread for most people, excluding the elites and rich and super-rich and sociopaths in those classes as well as down and dirty people born from a …
by Bruce and Barbara MacLean-Lerro / February 5th, 2022
Why Sylvia Matters
How many of you about to read this have heard of Sylvia Pankhurst? Our guess is, not many. She seems to have fallen through the cracks of socialist and suffragette movement literature. Her mother, Emmeline Pankhurst and sister, Christabel Pankhurst are still looked up to as leaders in the suffragette movement. What is overlooked is the fact that they only supported suffrage for women who had property. This, of course, completely eliminates women in the working class and women who are poor. Sylvia, on the other hand, devoted her …
The Russians are coming! So says the Australian mainstream media.
To be honest, I don’t know what the Murdoch press is saying as my equilibrium depends on my not reading it. The other major media chain, Nine Entertainment, is in full neo-Cold War mode.
Nine Entertainment, as its name implies, has been best known for televising sport. In 2018 it took over Fairfax Media. A family media dynasty was established when John Fairfax bought the Sydney Herald in 1841. When Nine bought Fairfax it acquired the sole ‘serious’ papers of …
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau speaking against protesting truckers and their supporters: “We won’t give in to those who fly racist flags. We won’t cave to those who engage in vandalism or dishonor the memory of our veterans.”
War is big, loud, significant and attracts an audience; media likes it. Foreign wars (commonly Middle Eastern or African) distract from domestic chaos and reinforce a long-held prejudice of savagery and race, and the opposite, equally false notion of western superiority.
In all conflicts mainstream media plays a crucial role, often inflammatory, feeding the discord through a particular narrative. Western media claims it is independent, but this is fallacious; corporate owned or State sponsored, it is conditioned by a particular world-view, ideologically/politically, nationalistically, historically.
After war erupted in Ethiopia in November 2020 western media have played a major role in spreading mis-/disinformation …
