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(and yeah, that includes Bill)
by Mickey Z. / December 17th, 2021
Truth comes to all of us at different degrees and levels.
— Lenny Bruce
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.”
Of course, …
by Robert Hunziker / December 17th, 2021
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.
Meanwhile, and of special interest …
by Kim Petersen / December 17th, 2021
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 …
by Binoy Kampmark / December 16th, 2021
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 …
by William Manson / December 16th, 2021
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 …
by Colin Todhunter / December 15th, 2021
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 …
by Robert Jensen / December 15th, 2021
[A version of this essay was presented to the UK Engage Conference: Masculinity, Patriarchy, Feminism on November 19, 2021.]
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, …
by Ramzy Baroud / December 15th, 2021
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, …
by Yves Engler / December 15th, 2021
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 …
by Matthew J.L. Ehret / December 14th, 2021
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.
Despite a rich history and over …
by Binoy Kampmark / December 14th, 2021
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 …
by William Manson / December 14th, 2021
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.
There …
by E.R. Bills / December 14th, 2021
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 …
by William Boardman / December 13th, 2021
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 …
by John Pilger / December 12th, 2021
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 …
by Binoy Kampmark / December 12th, 2021
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 …
Remember: No one here gets out alive
by Mickey Z. / December 11th, 2021
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, …
by William Manson / December 11th, 2021
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 …
by Binoy Kampmark / December 10th, 2021
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 …
by Shawgi Tell / December 10th, 2021
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.))
Predictably, the OECD claimed that “a swifter …
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 …
by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies / December 9th, 2021
Protest by students in Thailand. AP
President Biden’s virtual Summit for Democracy on December 9-10 is part of a campaign to restore the United States’ standing in the world, which took such a beating under President Trump’s erratic foreign policies. Biden hopes to secure his place at the head of the “Free World” table by coming out as a champion for human rights and democratic practices worldwide.
The greater possible value of this gathering of 111 countries is that it could instead serve as an “intervention,” or an …
Actually “Who is Boycotting Whom?”
by Peter Koenig / December 9th, 2021
President Biden, in full mood of marking “red lines” against Russia and Ukraine in a virtual meeting with Vladimir Putin, does not forget the importance of boycotting China’s Winter Olympic Games. It’s a diplomatic boycott only, so says Madame Jen Psaki, White House press secretary. Nevertheless, she and Biden are wishing the US sport-participants best of luck and they will support them throughout. So, they say. US athletes are allowed to part-take in the games. It’s the US diplomacy that is held back. It’s a hypocrisy that only Washington – and perhaps Brussels as EU and NATO headquarters – …
by Edward Curtin / December 8th, 2021
A Meditation
With his extraordinary new book, The Real Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health, RFK, Jr. has made it very clear that he will not allow Orwell’s 1984 totalitarian boot to stamp on his face. His is a very rare moral courage, and he is asking us to join him, before it is too late and we enter into a new dark age, in recognizing and resisting the evil forces intent on stamping out democracy around the world. He is not pulling …
by Finian Cunningham / December 8th, 2021
© Sputnik / Sergey Guneev
As we enter the Christmas season that’s just pantomime on Pennsylvania Avenue.
The private video call which lasted two hours on Tuesday was eagerly anticipated around the world amid mounting tensions and fears of a military confrontation over Ukraine.
The next day headlines in Western media outlets were laden with dramatic “warnings” reportedly given by Biden to Putin, telling the Russian leader to abandon nefarious plans for a military invasion of Ukraine.
America’s NPR reported: “In a two-hour-long call with Putin, President Biden warned that the U.S. …
by Ramzy Baroud / December 8th, 2021
For whatever reason, some mistakenly perceive the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, as liberal, progressive and even ‘pro-Palestinian’. Of course, none of this is true. This misconstrued depiction of an essentially Zionist and anti-Palestinian newspaper tells of a much bigger story of how confusing Israeli politics is, and how equally confused many of us are in understanding the Israeli political discourse.
On November 28, newly-elected Israeli President, Isaac Herzog, stormed the Ibrahimi Mosque in the Palestinian city of Al-Khalil (Hebron) with hundreds of soldiers and many illegal Jewish settlers, including the who’s who of Israel’s extremists.
The scene was reminiscent of a similar occurrence …
by Binoy Kampmark / December 8th, 2021
Making moral statements in the blood and gristle of international relations can often come across as feeble. In doing so, the maker serves the worst of all worlds: to reveal a false sense of assurance that something was done while serving no actual purpose other than to provoke. Anger, and impotence, follow.
The Biden administration is proving to be particularly good on that score. Since taking office US President Joe Biden has nipped at the heels of China’s Xi Jinping with moral urgency. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan has lectured Beijing on human rights abuses with mistaken clarity. The Pentagon …
