Experienced foreign policy analysts such as Ray McGovern, Scott Ritter, and Pepe Escobar, while agreeing that the Biden administration is clearly guilty of provoking Russia over Ukraine, are divided over whether it will lead to war. All agree that Russia has no intention of invading Ukraine and that it is clearly justified in demanding safe borders by insisting U.S./NATO withdraw troops and missiles from the countries surrounding it, stop NATO’s “open door” policy, stop putting nuclear weapons in Europe, etc.
Clearly such demands are consonant with the U.S.’s own historical demands for safe …
On Valentines’ Day 2022, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau declared the 1988 Emergencies Act in response to the Trucker Freedom Convoy in Ottawa and US-Canada border protests in Windsor (ON), Emerson (MB), Coutts (AB), Osoyoos and Surrey (BC). This stunning political development ignored the House of Commons in favour of making the announcement at a press conference.
Prior to the September 2021 election, Trudeau spoke of “consequences” for the unvaccinated. He described vaccine passports as a reward for Canadians who “did the right thing,” and …
Diogenes, as you may know, was an ancient Greek philosopher “in search of an honest man.” He apparently never found one. Being a cynic and a moralist, he may never have expected to find one.
The Twist
In his book, Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us, Ralph Nader picked the wrong people. ((Nader, R. Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us, Seven Stories Press, 2011.)) People like Warren Buffett and Bill Gates. Naively, I wrote the two and included my most recent book at that time in which I cited their philanthropic organization, “The Giving Pledge” as a source of the super-rich who …
Canada will always stand up for the right of peaceful protest anywhere around the world and we are pleased to see moves to deescalation and dialogue.
— Justin Trudeau
So said Canada’s prime minister Trudeau about the farmer protests in India. One assumes that “anywhere” includes Canada. Nonetheless, Trudeau has rejected dialogue with the peaceful trucker convoy, and instead of deescalation he turned to his “final option,” the Emergencies Act that seemingly permits police violence against Canadians.
It is time for a renewed, nation-to-nation relationship with First Nations peoples, one that understands that the constitutionally guaranteed rights of First …
Anti-Covid, anti-parasites, anti-cancer — for humans
by Mickey Z. / February 19th, 2022
A very recent article on The Defender began: “A peer-reviewed study published last month found the prophylactic use of ivermectin reduced COVID mortality by 90 percent among more than 223,000 study participants in a town in Southern Brazil. The study, published in the Cureus Journal of Medical Science, also found a 44 percent reduction in COVID cases among those who took the re-purposed drug.”
If you’ve trained yourself to see past corporate media fake news, none of the above will come as a surprise. Despite the widespread demonization of ivermectin, “officials” are …
When in opposition, Alexander Downer, destined to become Australia’s longest serving foreign minister in the conservative government of John Howard, was easy to savage. The Australian Labor Prime Minister Paul Keating was particularly keen to skewer an establishment individual prone to donning fishnet stockings and affecting a plummy disposition. Never, he suggested, had there been a more conceited piece of fairy floss ever put on a stick.
During the Howard years, Downer served in the role of a position that has become all but irrelevant, outsourced as it is to the US State Department and the fossil fuel lobby. It …
How a COVID outbreak in Hong Kong is being managed; a shift in Germany’s position toward China, as it classifies China as a “systemic rival”; a look at relationships in China; Red Star over China author Edgar Snow passed away 50 years ago.
Man-made chemicals have exceeded the limits of safety for the planet. This statement comes from the first-ever major scientific warning based upon a study of the dangers posed by the flood of chemicals across the globe as three hundred fifty thousand (350,000) chemicals slosh throughout the planet.
“We have overwhelming evidence of negative impacts on Earth systems, including biodiversity and biogeochemical cycles,” according to Bethanie Carney Almroth, University of Gothenburg. ((Marc Préel, “Plastic, Chemical Pollution beyond Planet’s Safe Limit: Study”, Phys.org, February 15, 2022, Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University.))
According to Bethanie Carney Almroth: “The impacts that we’re starting to see today …
For the most part socialists and members of organized religion seem to be opposites. After all, didn’t Marx say religion was the opium of the people, the heart of a heartless world? But has it always been this way? Socialists in the 19th century had very different ideas about the importance of mythology, ritual, and art. But could19th century socialist engage in these activities without getting caught up in supernatural ideas and reified images? This article discusses the efforts of William Morris, Walter Crane, and the Knights of Labor to bring …
No, there is a limit to the tyrant’s power!
When the oppressed man finds no justice,
When the burden grows unbearable, he appeals
With fearless heart to Heaven,
And thence brings down his everlasting rights,
Which there abide, inalienably his,
And indestructible as stars themselves.
— Friedrich Schiller, Wilhelm Tell’s Rutli Oath, from Schiller’s play Wilhelm Tell, 1804
Who would have thought that Canada would ever be a spark plug for a freedom movement against tyranny?
On 16 February 2015, Govind and Uma Pansare went for a morning walk near their home in Kolhapur, in the western state of Maharashtra, India. Two men on a motorcycle stopped them and asked for directions, but the Pansares could not help them. One of the men laughed, pulled out a gun, and shot the two Pansares. Uma Pansare was hit but survived the attack. Her husband, Govind Pansare, died in a hospital shortly thereafter on 20 February at age 82.
Raised in poverty, Govind Pansare was fortunate to …
by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies / February 17th, 2022
People gather in Rome to call for peace, February 15, 2022 | Photo Credit: Reuters
Every day brings new noise and fury in the crisis over Ukraine, mostly from Washington. But what is really likely to happen?
There are three possible scenarios:
The first is that Russia will suddenly launch an unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.
The second is that the Ukrainian government in Kyiv will launch an escalation of its civil war against the self-declared People’s Republics of Donetsk (DPR) and Luhansk (LPR), provoking various possible reactions from other …
by Dissident Voice Communications / February 17th, 2022
The Ontario Civil Liberties Association (OCLA) condemns the federal government’s use of the Emergencies Act (formerly the War Measures Act) to dispel peaceful protests in Canada.
Peaceful protest and civil disobedience are essential in a democratic society – without these mechanisms of peaceful expression, demonstration, and opposition there can be no democracy.
There is no national emergency caused by the Freedom Convoy protesters. Therefore, the government’s use of the Emergencies Act can only be understood as an opportunistic political act intended to eliminate protest that opposes the policies of the sitting government, to manipulate public opinion by further demonizing “the unvaccinated”, and …
I’ve written dozens and dozens of articles and recorded several podcasts informing readers and listeners that they have been duped for nearly two years. The lockdowns, the masks, the social distancing, the PCR test, the jabs, and more — all of them are nothing more than manipulations and deceptions. Now comes some “official” news on a related topic.
Jonas Herby is a special advisor at the Center for Political Studies in Copenhagen, Denmark. He and two other economists recently completed a meta-analysis (a survey of previous studies) for Johns Hopkins University. They were looking …
Even though they make up less than 7% of all schools in the U.S., every year hundreds of news articles highlight the persistent lack of transparency and accountability in the crisis-prone charter school sector.
Even worse, everyone is under pressure to stand passively on the sidelines and watch as these outsourced privatized schools, which siphon billions of dollars a year from public schools, operate with impunity.
Nearly 31 years after they first appeared in the U.S., privately-operated charter schools remain immune to pro-social reform and are plagued by endless problems. Ceaseless reports from the mainstream press and the alternative press on the …
The current split in the African Union (AU) over Israel’s Observer membership status is emblematic of a larger conflict that could potentially split the African continent’s largest political institutions.
Africa is currently facing one of its most crucial decisions regarding Palestine and Israel. The repercussions of this decision could be as significant as the 1975 Resolution 77 (XII) by the Organization of African Unity – the precursor to the African Union – which recognized Zionism, Israel’s founding ideology, as a form of racism. This time around, however, it is Palestine, not Israel, that stands to lose.
Incompetent politicians and diplomats are on the level with ill-prepared generals fighting current wars with dated methods. They err, they stumble, and they may well be responsible for the next idiotic slander, misfire or misunderstanding. UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss is synonymous with Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s idea of groping diplomacy. Graceless, all confusion, and much ignorance besides, she has been given the task of howling in the Kremlin’s direction, warning that no invasion of Ukraine will be tolerated by Global Britain.
Truss, former international trade secretary known for her “goofy public persona”, took over from the less goofy and …
Even if you still somehow believe the pandemic narrative, you surely recognize that the virus does not exactly threaten children. For example, in England, the child mortality rate from Covid-19 is 2 per million (0.0002%) across the whole population (assuming you also still somehow trust the insanely flawed PCR test).
So… why the frenetic campaign to jab younger and younger humans with an untested experimental gene therapy meant for a disease that does not target them?
As an Ottawa resident and an anarchist, it seems to me that an ultra-leftist analysis at ground zero of this thing is fundamentally necessary, specifically concerning the Canadian Government’s draconian get vaxxed or get fired policy. Having walked the congested downtown of Ottawa, it’s clear that this is an issue that transcends the political spectrum between the left and the right, since all walks of life and political stripes can be found in the downtown these days, contra the mainstream media’s coverage. And the exact point where the left and right of the political spectrum meet is upon the Government’s …
Funeral Procession in Nablus for assassinated resistance fighters.
Israel Defence Forces (IDF) assassinated three resistance fighters in the Occupied West Bank on February 8. The targeted military operation took place in the heart of Nablus in broad daylight.
Israeli soldiers used two private vehicles with Palestinian plates to enter the al-Makhfiya neighbourhood of the northern West Bank city to reach their target. They then got out and surrounded the vehicle carrying the Palestinian men, and opened fire on it from point-blank range. A fourth …
Let me start out by openly and unequivocally stating that most of the individuals who are in the decision-making and decision-influencing positions which determine U.S. foreign policy and drive its recklessness are a truly shameful bunch. They are morally bankrupt, ignorant, myopic, barbaric, drunk on power, and as far as I can tell, without any redeeming merit.
There are too many examples to cite here. But there’s one who comes to mind because of rumors which recently started circulating.
Hillary Clinton is one of the most vile, disgusting, inhumane, homicidal, hypocritical, sociopathic persons …
I want to address the prime minister: No matter what you do, we will hold the line. There are no threats which will frighten us. We will hold the line.
— Tamara Lich, convoy organizer, 14 February 2022
Canada’s Charter of RightsJustin Trudeau had cornered himself by grotesquely smearing the trucker convoy and its supporters as racist, misogynist, fringe, anti-science, vandals, and otherwise holding unacceptable views. He is unable to negotiate a peaceful outcome because he has refused to speak to the pro-freedom/anti-mandate protest movement.
Many of the truckers have insisted they aren’t leaving …
Women, particularly those in the Third World, often find themselves with limited ability to participate in community organizations and political life because of the bondage poverty and their traditional sex role imposes on them. On them falls sole responsibility to care for their children and other family members, especially when sick; they maintain the home, cook the meals, wash the dishes, the clothes, bathe the children, clean the house, mend the clothes. This labor becomes unending manual labor when households have no electricity (consequently, no lights, no refrigerator, no labor-saving electrical devices), and no running water. The burden of this …
With Its Doomsday Clock at 100 Seconds to Midnight,
by Roger D. Harris / February 14th, 2022
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists emerged after World War II as a voice for peace by some of the scientists who developed the then ultimate weapon of mass destruction. Now, its mission has drifted into being an echo chamber for the US imperial project urging President Biden to take even more destabilizing actions against Russia.
Dropping the A-bombs
By the time that the scientists at the top-secret Manhattan Project had developed the atomic bomb and the US military had worked out the logistics for deploying it, World War II was for all intents and purposes over. By early May 1945, …
Time and time again, we are told that making people vote improves representation and representativeness. Herding them on pain of penalty will somehow keep politics honest, and ensure that those in Parliament, or whatever chamber it may be, will be kept accountable. Imagine how awful it is to have a President voted in on a mere third of the vote, or political representatives who only ever speak on behalf of a small portion of their electorate?
The argument is only superficially appealing. A look at the ABC’s Four Corners episodes, featuring picked electors by the national broadcaster, did little to …
by Cheryl Benard and Medea Benjamin and Masuda Sultan / February 14th, 2022
With his Executive Order redefining Afghanistan’s Fiscal Reserve as a slush fund to be disbursed on his whim and with the stroke of his pen, President Biden has taken what may well be the final step in an experiment gone amok. The U.S. first attempted to make Afghanistan into a Western democracy, instead installed a kleptocracy, made Afghans endure 20 years of violence and then left in a whirlwind of chaos. With Biden’s latest move to deprive Afghanistan of its monetary reserves, the nation is likely to come full circle, turning once again into a failed state that, in …
This year marks the seventieth anniversary of the theologian Paul Tillich’s famous book, The Courage to Be. Widely read in the days when an educated public read books, it is long forgotten. In it, Tillich surveys the history of anxiety and fear and their relation to courage, religious faith, and the meaning of life. His closing sentence – “The courage to be is rooted in the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt” – became acclaimed as an astute description of the existential need to find a foundation for faith and courage when their foundations …
When it comes to the ever ascending techno-economic colossus of China, it is year-round open season in the West for monopoly media and government officials to invoke whatever opprobrium, throw it against the wall and hope it sticks, if not repeat the defamation. Evidence does not matter. It can be cooked up. And the same story can be repeated ad nauseam because if someone hears it often enough, it must be true, … right?
The Beijing-hosted Winter Olympics are happening, and this provided an opportunity for Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai to meet with gathered western media and clarify misconceptions or …
