Following here is an assignment: Find some object you hold near and dear. Something that can leap you into a backward narrative. Something to hold you as a memoir writer, going back, reflecting back. That thing, you can hold or touch. You find meaning in it. And, that object holds stories. Try and do this under ten pages.
I plugged the community/continuing education class I designed for the local community college, Oregon Coast, CC, here, at the local twice-a-week rag: “The art of remaking-retelling a story” (Newport News Times)
Factory farms are the Grim Reapers of civilization, inhumanely penning up and slaughtering cows, pigs, and chickens by the tens of millions, as well as unintentionally, but effectively, poisoning, maiming and/or killing birds, insects, amphibians, mammals, and crucial life-supporting ecosystems that are key to human life. And, it’s legal.
Factory farms have suddenly arisen out of nowhere; e.g., in Iowa “the state’s number of concentrated animal feed operations, known as CAFOs, grew from 722 in 2001 to more than 10,000 in 2017, according to a study on the industry by two retired University of Iowa professors.” ((“Environmentalists Make Long-Shot Attempt to …
Comments of Principal Man Ian Zabarte of the Western Bands of the Shoshone Nation of Indians to the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council, January 27, 2022
by Ian Zabarte / February 25th, 2022
The comments of principal man Ian Zabarte of the Western Bands of the Shoshone Nation of Indians to the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council, characterize the ongoing abuse suffered by the Western Shoshone people as a result of US military and commercial nuclear development. There has been no explicit act of Congress to diminish or extinguish Indian title to 30 million acres of land owned by the Western Shoshone Nation defined by Article 5 of the Treaty of Ruby Valley. We seek creation of a reservation by the President …
Potential hotspots between Russia and Ukraine, 2021. Panther Media GmbH / Alamy Stock Vector There is an adage that the first casualty in a war is the truth. The US and NATO allege that Putin’s Russia is a malevolent aggressor against neighboring Ukraine. They assert that the US and NATO are simply defending the rights of an oppressed nation. Meanwhile, what the sycophantic legacy news media convey to the public is a gross distortion of the reality in this current Ukraine crisis. Some relevant facts which Western government spokespersons and …
This episode looks at the historic rapprochement between China and the United States when president Richard Nixon met Chairman Mao Zedong, the growing need for lithium, technological cooperation and competition between rural and urban China, the high cost of raising a child in China, and its declining birth rate.
by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead / February 24th, 2022
Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes… known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.… No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare,
— James Madison, Political Observations, 20 April 1795
War is the enemy of freedom.
As long as America’s politicians continue to involve us in wars that bankrupt the nation, jeopardize our servicemen and women, increase the chances of terrorism and blowback domestically, …
Events are unfolding at a quickening pace. Facing an alarming escalation in tensions around the world, we are looking to our most respected and renowned thought leaders for an honest assessment of both U.S. foreign and military policy to offer their most current thoughts and insights. We know they have some ideas for improving the prospects for peace.
Scott Ritter served as a former U.S. Marine Corps Intelligence officer (1984-1991), in the Soviet Union as an inspector implementing the INF Treaty, in General Norman Schwarzkopf’s staff during the Gulf War, and as a UN weapons inspector in Iraq (1991-1998). He is …
A frozen continent. Another potential frontier for conflict and competition. Antarctica is a part of the world were realpolitician meets scientist; the desire for finding exploitable resources meets environmental expectations and fears. Countries have vied for their little slice of ice, sometimes citing reasons of scientific collaboration, and often national self-interest. Much of this culminated in the establishment of the Antarctic Treaty System, comprising four major international agreements beginning with the 1959 Antarctic Treaty and ending with the 1991 Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty.
During the Cold War, it became an area of exceptional interest. The United …
When Nelson Mandela was freed from his Robben Island prison on February 11, 1991, my family, friends and neighbors followed the event with keen interest as they gathered in the living room of my old home in the Nuseirat Refugee Camp in the Gaza Strip.
This emotional event took place years before Mandela uttered his famous quote “our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians”. For us Palestinians Mandela did not need to reaffirm the South African people’s solidarity with Palestine by using these words or any other combination of words. We already knew. Emotions ran high on that …
Exploited and abused for generations by white colonial powers and manipulative economic structures, there is a growing feeling of solidarity within parts of the African continent, as exemplified by the #NoMore movement. Covid vaccine inequality and environmental injustice, together with recent events in Ethiopia, have galvanized people.
Ideas of African unity and rage against former imperial forces are nothing new; the chain of suppression and exploitation of African nations is long, running from slavery and colonialism (including colonial extraction) to wealth and climate inequality, racial capitalism and now Covid vaccine apartheid.
Despite the fact that many would say Africa was united …
One major nuclear war catastrophically interrupts the progress of human civilization and ushers in God only knows how many decades of dystopian madness. Pray that NATO’s march on Moscow doesn’t make Napoleon look like a genius and Hitler a brilliant military strategist. Bonaparte’s retreat during the winter of 1812? A walk in the park compared to a nuclear winter. The Battle of Stalingrad? A minor skirmish compared to the destruction attendant upon a major nuclear conflagration.
At a moment when wise leaders would spare no effort to move heaven …
Russia has sent troops into Ukraine and attacked Ukrainian military forces .
In a one hour address, President Putin said the goal was the “de-Nazification” of Ukraine.
It is now clear the Russian statements and proposed peace treaty in December 2021 were deadly serious. At that time the Russians said the US and NATO were crossing red lines, they felt threatened and would not abide this endlessly. Now they have taken action.
In his address yesterday, Russian President Putin gave a frank explanation which comes after years of complaints. The Russians have complained bitterly about the US-promoted 2014 coup in …
Ahmed Rabbani (Pakistan), Untitled (Grape Arbor), 2016. Rabbani endured 545 days of torture at the hands of the CIA before he was transferred to Guantánamo in 2004. He has been in the prison without charge since then.
Twenty years ago, on 11 January 2002, the United States government brought …
A few dragons have been breathing fire of late, and these need to be slayed. One is the notion that Australia has had some miraculous sense of bipartisan understanding about national security, its politicians well briefed, cooperative and objective on the subject. The second is that politicising intelligence and national security are aberrations.
The Morrison government has made its own modest contribution to sinking these assumptions. It is, after all, an election year. There is a schoolboy simplicity to the effort: scream various words such as “appeasement” often enough, and it will take hold. Reiterate the term “Manchurian Candidate”, and hope …
The education system claims its goal is to produce critical thinkers. Has anyone ever considered whether the educators themselves are critical thinkers?
“Minsk, Minsk, Minsk,” they cried after Russia recognized Donetsk and Luhansk. But those Western diplomats and pundits did not hear those of us in the Anti-war, pro-peace and anti-imperialist movements who insisted that Minsk II was the only conceivable way out of the crisis!
There will be reams of words attempting to provide a coherent analysis of the manufactured crisis dramatically unfolding in Ukraine, which took another unanticipated turn when Russia extended recognition to the Peoples’ Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk in the territory referred to as the Donbas in Eastern Ukraine.
Putin recognizes the independent republics of Donbass and puts the security of Russians back at the center of the Ukrainian game.
by Fabrizio Casari / February 23rd, 2022
Pending French mediation, Putin-Biden talks, German distancing, Italian fears, Spanish uncertainties and opposition from the former Eastern bloc, as well as the regularly discredited deadlines of the improbable Russian invasions, the war always announced but never started has had its first outcome.
In a decision that displaced the Western chancelleries, Vladimir Putin signed the diplomatic protocol recognizing the independent republics of Lugansk and Donetsk. The recognition was immediately followed by the signing of a cooperation and mutual assistance agreement, which will imply a Russian military presence in defense of the two republics and, at the same time, a clear warning to …
Today, a new coordinated psychological operation has been sprung to convince every living patriot across the Five Eyes sphere of influence that the enemy of the free world who lurks behind every conspiracy to overthrow governments, and western values are Russia and China.
Over the past months, slanderous, and often conjectural stories of Chinese and Russian subversion have repeatedly been fed to a gullible western audience desperate for an enemy image to attach to their realization that an obvious long-term conspiracy has been unleashed to destroy their lives. While the left has been fed with propaganda designed to convince them that …
Two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, a popular movement demanding an immediate end to vaccine mandates and other restrictions on daily life has shaken the Canadian state to its core. Its calls have deeply resonated with members of settler-colonial society in which public health measures and other forms of collective solidarity are seen by some as an affront to individual freedom and an undue hindrance on capitalist enterprise. While the movement is now facing the brunt of a massive wave of state repression, from which it is unlikely to recover, the contradictions it has exposed are only set to get …
Going to war and using expensive war machinery and missiles can be enticing and perversely exhilarating, but the lethality and devastation of war must not be downplayed as a game. The latest political maneuver by Russian president Vladimir Putin was a game-changing masterstroke to avoid the American war trap. At every step in the build-up of tensions surrounding Ukraine, Russia has foiled US enticements to attack. To understand it all, one needs to start further back in time.
9 February 1990 — US secretary-of-state James Baker promised USSR president Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would “not [move] one inch eastward” in exchange …
The question of Reparations for the historical crime of slavery is not primarily about money. Rather it is about spiritual cleansing and healing. It is about recognizing the fact that systemic physical and mental torture have long hands that stretch out across time and space. It is about acknowledging the attempted physical and spiritual destruction of a people and the prolonged pain and suffering that followed in its wake. It is time that the question of Reparations be put in its proper light; the light of recognition, forgiveness, and making whole.
When my grandmother received “compensation” from …
US President Theodore Roosevelt never had much time for peace, seeing its returns as distinctly less than those of war. Despite his love of military conflict and its touted benefits, he was rewarded with the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in brokering peace in the Russo-Japanese War. But for old Teddy peaceniks were sissies, degenerates, and probably sexually dubious.
The intoxicant that is war tends to besot its promoters, however balanced they might claim to be. On February 21, the Australian public broadcaster, the ABC, seemed to embrace a subliminal message in its programming, notably on the issue of war. …
China has long been the home of a dynamic and multi-varied culture. Ancient Han Chinese built up an agrarian civilization centered on the Yellow River Basin and called their country the “Middle Kingdom,” with varying relations of conflict and cooperation with the nomadic and pastoral cultures surrounding them. Ancient Chinese pioneered a tolerant, inclusive, multi-faith, culturally diverse society. Muslim and Jewish communities have existed there for over one thousand years, for example. People of any ethnicity were allowed to serve as government officials by passing exams, under a meritocratic civil service exam system that continued for over a millennium, up …
This is a little soft-shoe pissed off blathering from me, so apologies up front. No big news on the Ukraine Invasion front, or the Gates Owning All the Farms front, or the Climate-Wall Street-Chronic Illness front. Nothing related to the MICIMATT (Military-Industrial-Congressional-MEDIA-Academia-Think-Tank) front. Just plain old burnt toast and spilled milk from a radical who has to still be in the job market at the tender age of 65.
Never in my imagination, just five years ago even, would I have figured I’d be here, that is, stuck in the USA, blessed …
This article didn’t just arise from nowhere. It is preceded by decades of my researching and writing about America’s “corpocracy,” or what I call the “Devil’s Marriage” between the superior power elite of corporate America, particularly throughout eleven sectors of organized endeavor, and the subordinate power elite of government America in firstly its shadow government and secondarily in the Oval Office and in the other branches of the government. The corporate elite tell the government elite what to spend from the taxpayers’ pockets, what do with the money, and what to say.
I told you this part wasn’t going to be pretty. The collapse of fascist ideological movements and fanatical death cults never is. The New Normal is proving to be no exception.
After three weeks of non-violent civil disobedience outside the Canadian parliament in Ottawa by truckers and other Canadian citizens struggling to uphold their right to not be subjected to forced “vaccination,” Justin Trudeau unleashed the goon squads. Thousands of militarized riot police (and other unidentified heavily-armed operatives) swarmed the area, surrounded the protesters, started breaking into trucks and arresting people, and …
Nation states are habitually doomed to defeat their best interests. Conditions of mad instability are fostered. Arms sales take place, regimes get propped up or abandoned, and the people under them endure and suffer, awaiting the next criminal regime change.
Nothing is more counter-intuitive than the effort to isolate, cripple and strangulate the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. For all the talk about terrorism and concerns about failing regimes, the Biden Administration is doing every bit to make this regime fail and encourage the outcome it decries. Along the way, a humanitarian catastrophe is in the making.
The Threatened Peoples of East Asia and Europe Can Stop the U.S. Drive to Restore its Global Domination.
by John V. Walsh / February 20th, 2022
“This is not going to be a war of Ukraine and Russia. This is going to be a European war, a full-fledged war.” So spoke Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky just days after berating the U.S. for beating the drums of war.
It is not hard to imagine how Zelensky’s words must have fallen on those European ears that were attentive. His warning surely conjured up images of World War II when tens of millions of Europeans and Russians perished.
Zelensky’s words echoed those of Philippine’s President Rodrigo Duterte on the other side of the world at the Eastern edge of …
