The political division in Palestinian society is deep-rooted, and must not be reduced to convenient claims about the ‘Hamas-Fatah split’, elections, the Oslo accords and subsequent disagreements. The division is linked to events that preceded all of these, and not even the death or incapacitation of the octogenarian, Mahmoud Abbas, will advance Palestinian unity by an iota.
Palestinian political disunity is tied to the fact that the issue of representation in Palestinian society has always been an outcome of one party trying to dominate all others. This dates back to Palestinian …
Internet pioneer Jaron Lanier explains social media this way: “People are clustered into paranoia peer groups because then, they can be more easily and predictably swayed.” As a result, extremists have taken over such platforms — and virtually all of the internet. They dominate conversations and overwhelm useful posts that are based on evidence and research. These dangerous groups can be grouped into the following six belief patterns:
Conspiracy Theory #1: Big Pharma Can Be Trusted
All across the Home of the Brave™, there are tinfoil hat lunatics who openly believe that pharmaceutical …
It was startling and even shocking. Away from the thrust and cut of domestic politics, not to mention noisy discord within his government’s ranks, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison could breathe a sign of relief. Perhaps no one would notice in Washington that Australia remains prehistoric in approaching climate change relative to its counterparts. Being known in his own country as “Scotty from Marketing”, he just might pull it off.
Besides, a security compact with the United States and the United Kingdom had just been cemented, one promising Canberra eight submarines with nuclear propulsion. That these promised to be eye-wateringly expensive …
NOTE: In April of this year, my family had a medical emergency that required most of my time and attention. The result is that I am now the sole legal and physical guardian of two young children with significant needs. I hope to return to writing a regular newsletter now that they are in school. There is a lot going on and a lot to do. Solidarity, Margaret Flowers
This month, the Sanctions Kill coalition (Popular Resistance is a member) released its report: “The Impact and Consequences of US Sanctions.” The 35-page report was written in response …
China deals with housing crisis caused by the real-estate developers, particularly, Evergrande. China punishes mining companies for criminal practices in the Democratic Republic of Congo and orders them back home. China also remembers the Mukden Incident, a Japanese pretext to invade and occupy Chinese territory.
Homes are flooded in the aftermath of Hurricane Ida in LaPlace, La., on Tuesday. (Gerald Herbert/The Associated Press)Most of us fall into our daily routines fairly easily with little thought. We rise in the morning drink our coffee eat a little breakfast and head off to work. Pulling out of our particular driveways we navigate well-lit and organized streets that efficiently (for the most part) take us to our destination and return us home in the evening. After work we engage in a multitude of various events, hobbies, …
These days, things appear to be happening at an accelerated pace. It can be challenging to keep up as a writer. Meanwhile, some events are interesting but may not warrant a full article of their own. Therefore, I will occasionally compile a few stories into one piece… starting with these three right here:
If you’ve watched any television or YouTube videos over the past decade or so, you’ve likely seen ads for Chantix featuring Ray Liotta. Chantix is a Food & Drug Administration (FDA)-approved prescription pill designed to help users …
Sept. 26 - Oct. 2, National Banned Books Awareness at your local (Zoom-brary) Library!
by Paul Haeder / September 26th, 2021
Note: I try and keep the plates spinning in Newport-Lincoln County, where I live, write and work. So, this piece came out in the rag, The Newport News Times, a Wednesday and Friday newspaper sucking wind for sure, but still, a newspaper. This is what the community standards can take, so after this piece, I’ll comment, take out the machetes, and blaze through what it really means, Banning Books (ideas/curricula/discussion/debate/protest/public displays/thinking) .
Review of Gender Dysphoria: A Therapeutic Model for Working with Children, Adolescents, and Young Adults
by Donovan Cleckley / September 25th, 2021
Psychology, what the analyst makes of the mind, by necessity, must see toward the complex, above the ideologically convenient and beyond the simple. “Our psychology,” William James writes, “must therefore take account not only of the conditions antecedent to mental states, but of their resultant consequences as well.” Approaching the psyche, then, it is not only that which comes before that matters, all that has been, but that which comes after, one’s development onward—all that could be. On the relation between the mind and the body, the self in one’s state of being, this observation appears at the beginning …
There’s a phrase in Oswald Spengler’s Man and Technics: A Contribution to a Philosophy of Life (1931) that strikes me as of particular relevance for today’s world: ((Not that I have any admiration of the man! This about him: “Spengler is regarded as a nationalist and an anti-democrat, and he was a prominent member of the Conservative Revolution. However, he criticised Nazism due to its excessive racism. Instead, he saw Benito Mussolini, and entrepreneurial types, like the imperialist mining magnate Cecil Rhodes,[3] as embryonic examples of the impending Caesars of Western culture ….”)) …
Webinar update with UMWA District Vice President Larry Spencer
by Stansfield Smith / September 25th, 2021
Striking miners (Source: UMWA)Larry Spencer, UMWA District 20 Vice President, represents the 1,100 coal miners in three UMWA locals which on strike against Warrior Met in Alabama since April 1, 2021. He will give an update on the strike in a September 28 webinar. The strikers are fighting to reverse concessions that were foisted on them in 2016 when BlackRock and other billionaire creditors set up Warrior Met Coal and took over mine operations with the aid of a bankruptcy court.
I watched Jordan Peele’s Candyman last Thursday night, and it freaked me out.
Especially as a Texan.
Can acts of injustice curse a place? Can acts of monstrosity—as Peele et al. suggest—stain a community? A quasi-sequel to the 1992 film of the same name, Candyman explores the affirmative answer to these questions. And that’s what scares me.
Over the last several years I’ve researched and written about numerous acts of injustice and monstrosity in Texas. And, no, monstrosity is not too strong a word. In 2014, The History …
The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the hunting of black skins, signaled the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation. On their heels tread the commercial wars of the European nations, with the globe for a theatre.
— Karl Marx ((Capital 1: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production, ed. …
Milwa Mnyaluza ‘George’ Pemba (South Africa), New Brighton, Port Elizabeth, 1977.
On 13 July 2021, the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) adopted a landmark resolution on the prevalence of racism and for the creation of an independent mechanism made up of three experts to investigate the root cause of deeply embedded racism and intolerance. The Group of African States pushed for this resolution, which had emerged out of global anger over the murder of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police on 25 May 2020. The …
September 28 webinar update with UMWA District 20 Vice President Larry Spencer
by Stansfield Smith / September 24th, 2021
Larry Spencer, UMWA District 20 Vice President, represents the 1,100 coal miners in three UMWA locals which are on strike against Warrior Met in Alabama since April 1, 2021. He will give an update on the strike in a September 28 webinar. The strikers are fighting to reverse concessions that were foisted on them in 2016 when BlackRock and other billionaire creditors set up Warrior Met Coal and took over mine operations with the aid of a bankruptcy court. …
If you think elementary, middle, and high school students know too little history, geography, and government, try asking them about the corporations that command so many hours of their day, their attention, what they consume, and their personal horizons.
Howard Zinn published A Young People’s History of the United States (2009), to go with his best-selling pioneering work, A People’s History of the United States (1980), but he didn’t do justice to all the modern corporate controls of just about every facet of American life, including educational institutions.
Today, school children are engulfed by corporate apps and …
Which is the Canadian political party most likely to stand up to the world’s rich and powerful? Which is willing to help the poorest of the poor gain a semblance of dignity and respect? Which can proudly proclaim, we stand for what is right, not just what is easy and expedient?
Unfortunately, the answer is not the Conservatives, Liberals or the NDP.
When it comes to Canada’s most flagrantly racist and colonial alliance NDP truly does stand for No Difference Party.
In response to a Canadian Foreign Policy Institute election questionnaire asking, “Does …
Transcript of a presentation at a Webinar sponsored by the Chongyang Institute of Renmin University, Beijing, 23 September 2021.
*****
An early priority for China – at least two to three decades back – was to reduce Carbon Dioxide (CO2) output, as well as that of other greenhouse gases, such as methane, nitrous oxide, ozone and some artificial chemicals such as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), to eventually reach carbon neutrality, meaning, eliminating as much CO2 as is produced, by 2050.
With industrialization and excessive consumption, the output of CO2 and other greenhouse gases has increased rapidly and especially in later years. And this …
Amidst all of the sensible and sane cries to eliminate nuclear weapons, we are caught in a self-sustaining, self-reinforcing feedback loop. Call it the Death Spiral of Human Annihilation.
Yes, the U.S. throughout its history, despite official denials even among historians who should know better — maybe they do but prefer being manufacturers of myth rather than chroniclers of history — has been territorial, possessive and aggressive. The Monroe Doctrine declared the entire Western hemisphere as America’s backyard. The U.S. was hardly shy about grabbing as much as it could …
Zakaria Zubeidi is one of six Palestinian prisoners who, on September 6, tunneled their way out of Gilboa, a notorious, high-security Israeli prison. Zubeidi was recaptured a few days later. The large bruises on Zubeidi’s face told a harrowing story, that of a daring escape and of a violent arrest. However, the story does not begin, nor end, there.
Twenty years ago, following what has been etched in the collective Palestinian memory as the ‘Jenin Massacre’, I was introduced to the Zubeidi family in the Jenin refugee camp, …
With that orange haired brute of a president supposedly ushered out of the White House with moralising delight, the Biden administration was all keen to turn over a new leaf. There would be more diplomacy, and still more diplomacy. There would be a more humanitarian approach to refugees and asylum seekers – forget, he claimed, the Border Wall. Kindness would come over border officials and guards of the imperium.
Instead, we have had secret diplomacy culminating in the trilateral security pact of AUKUS, one reached unbeknownst to allies in Europe, Asia and the Indo-Pacific. And we have had a particularly ugly …
by Stansfield Smith and Roger D. Harris / September 23rd, 2021
It is almost taken for granted, if not an article of faith, in the progressive milieu (e.g., here) that the US empire is declining. Does this hold up, or is it comfort food for the frustrated hoping for the revolution?
First, it is essential not to confuse the ongoing decline of the living conditions of US working people with a decline in the power of the US corporate empire. The decline of one often means the strengthening of the other.
In the aftermath of World War II, the US was the world manufacturing center, with the middle class rapidly expanding, and …
The baby-boom generation is ending its lap in the human race, and the Fridays-for-future generation is beginning its run. Generational shifts of power are symbolized by the image of passing the torch, but now what the older has to pass on to the younger seems not a torch but a time bomb, a legacy of crises.
To find a way out of the disaster, we need to look at how we got into it, the historical context. The economic and social system of capitalism shapes our times and shapes us. It is …
No job interview, no job offer, targeting by city, county, state honchos, watched by the pigs, shadowed by all the sub humans
by Paul Haeder / September 22nd, 2021
No no no, that is not too harsh. Sub-humans? Really, that’s wrong, off the mark or just plain mean?
One of a thousand examples pulled from my file cabinet — I was substitute teaching in the Lincoln County School District. At the High School in Waldport. You know, short notice, no notes from the teacher of record. And English class. He calls me on the phone while I am taking roll for first period. Juniors and seniors. I have written about this before, and that fact comes into play soon, just wait.
Scenes of thousands of Afghans flooding the Kabul International Airport to flee the country as Taliban fighters were quickly consolidating their control over the capital, raised many questions, leading amongst them: who are these people and why are they running away?
In the US and other Western media, answers were readily available: they were mostly ‘translators’, Afghans who ‘collaborated’ with the US and other NATO countries; ‘activists’ who were escaping from the brutality awaiting them once the Americans and their allies left the country, and so on.
The roots of the Great Reset agenda can very clearly be traced back to 80 years ago, when James Burnham, wrote a book on his vision for “The Managerial Revolution,” Cynthia Chung writes.
Klaus Schwab, the architect of the World Economic Forum (f. 1971), a leading, if not the leading, influencer and funder for what will set the course for world economic policy outside of government, has been the cause of much concern and suspicion since his announcement of “The Great Reset” agenda at the 50th annual meeting of the WEF in June 2020.
America is in the midst of an epidemic of historic proportions.
The contagion being spread like wildfire is turning communities into battlegrounds and setting Americans one against the other.
Normally mild-mannered individuals caught up in the throes of this disease have been transformed into belligerent zealots, while others inclined to pacifism have taken to stockpiling weapons and practicing defensive drills.
This plague on our nation—one that has been spreading like wildfire—is a potent mix of fear …
by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies / September 22nd, 2021
LONDON, ENGLAND: Protesters hold signs at the YouthStrike4Climate student march on April 12, 2019 in London, United Kingdom. Students are protesting across the UK due to the lack of government action to combat climate change. (Photo by Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)
President Biden addressed the UN General Assembly on September 21 with a warning that the climate crisis is fast approaching a “point of no return,” and a promise that the United States would rally the world to action. “We will lead not just with the example of our power …
