When the tears dry, it is worth considering why there is so much upset about the fall of Kabul (or reconquest) by the Taliban and the messy withdrawal of US-led forces. A large shield is employed: women, rights of the subject, education. Remove the shield, and we are left with a simple equation of power gone wrong in the name of paternalistic warmongering.
The noisiest group of Afghanistan stayers are the neoconservatives resentful because their bit of political real estate is getting away. In being defeated, they are left with the task of explaining to the soldiery that blood was not …
From Marxism to de Chardin, General Systems Theory to Buckminster Fuller
Around 1975, it dawned on me that the revolutionary times of the 1960s were not coming back. I still considered myself a council communist but I felt something was missing. I thought Marxism needed to be seen within a larger framework. I began to look for a perspective that located societies as part of cosmic evolution. My first stop was Teilhard de Chardin. I was swept away by The Phenomenon of Manand continued with a few of his other …
The killing of four young Palestinians by Israeli occupation soldiers in the Jenin refugee camp in the northern West Bank, on August 16, is a consequential event, the repercussions of which are sure to be felt in the coming weeks and months.
The four Palestinians — Saleh Mohammed Ammar, 19, Raed Ziad Abu Seif, 21, Nour Jarrar, 19, and Amjad Hussainiya, 20 — were either newly born or mere toddlers when the Israeli army invaded Jenin in April 2002. The objective, then, based on statements by Israeli officials and army generals, …
Take up the White Man’s Burden, send for the best ye breed,
Go bind your sons to exile, to serve your captives need – new-caught, sullen peoples, Half-devil and half-child…
Take up the White Man’s burden, the savage wars of peace.
— Rudyard Kipling (1899)
The 2011 UK census recorded that Asian groups together numbered roughly 7% of Britain’s population, Black people 3% and mixed-race 2%, making a BAME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic) total of 12%. In various combinations they are the decedents of people who’ve once been owned, colonised, lost their lands, original …
How should we think about “socialist revolution” in the twenty-first century? I put the term in scare-quotes because it can be hard to believe anymore that a socialist, or economically democratic, civilization is even possible—much less inevitable, as Marx and Engels seem to have believed. Far from being on the verge of achieving something like socialism, humanity appears to be on the verge of consuming itself in the dual conflagrations of environmental collapse and, someday perhaps, nuclear war. The collective task of survival seems challenging enough; the task of overcoming capitalist …
These days there is no shortage of hype surrounding the “Green New Deal” (GND). The “Green New Deal” has become a major buzz-phrase that has ensnared many along the way.
Like so many top-down schemes, the GND is being promoted by many world leaders in unison. This alone should be worrisome. History shows that this is usually a red flag. Few pro-social things come out of movements that are not real grass-roots movements. These world leaders are the main representatives of the international financial oligarchy—a tiny ruling elite obsessed with …
Indigenous peoples from all over Brazil are protesting in a week-long action in Brasilia against the “Marco Temporal” (or “Time Limit Trick”), draft bill 490 known as the “Bill of Death”, and a series of other genocidal plans and actions by the Bolsonaro government.The “Struggle for Life” (“Luta pela Vida”) global action is led by APIB – the Association of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil….
Since 2004, Amazon has been building a foothold on the African continent. In Cape Town, it already employs thousands in a global call centre and a range of data hubs. Its South African career portal is a busy place, with the vast majority of advertised jobs located in Cape Town. In April, as part of its aggrandising drive into the continent, the company announced that it would be opening its African headquarters as part of a new, multipurpose development.
The Cape Town development, worth R4 billion (US$284 million), is part of a broader enterprise spanning 15 hectares along a riverside …
The decision by the African Union Commission, on July 22, to grant Israel observer status membership in the AU was the culmination of years of relentless Israeli efforts aimed at co-opting Africa’s largest political institution. Why is Israel so keen on penetrating Africa? What made African countries finally succumb to Israeli pressure and lobbying?
To answer the above questions, one has to appreciate the new Great Game under way in many parts of the world, especially in Africa, which has always been significant to Israel’s geopolitical designs. Starting in the early …
As you can probably tell by now, I’m big on digging up the obscure context (read: facts) to find the angles that others ignore or don’t even see. However, that tendency does NOT preclude me from entertaining a wide range of speculation in the more esoteric realms. Case in point: My article from February 2021, called “The Hidden & Mystical Power of Cats.”
With this in mind, I point you to a July 16, 2021 article in Science News called, “…
Theatrical release poster
For apocalyptic disaster films, they don’t get much more up close and personal (and apocalyptic) than the film Greenland (2020). Set in contemporary times, the story revolves around the news that an interstellar comet named Clarke is heading for Earth, and that it was made up of fragments of rock and ice big enough to wipe out modern civilization.
John Garrity, a structural engineer, receives a message from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) notifying him that he and his family have been selected …
The column you are about to read is propaganda. Yes, that’s right … propaganda. It isn’t political satire or commentary, or objective news or information, or unbiased, verified scientific fact. It is propaganda, pure and simple.
That isn’t a confession, a disclaimer, or a warning. I am not ashamed of writing propaganda. Most everything you see and read on the Internet, and in newspapers, and on television, and in textbooks, and novels, and on advertising billboards, and everywhere else, is propaganda. There is nothing wrong with propaganda. The question is who is …
The collapse of Kabul was certainly inevitable but not because U.S.-trained Afghan forces woke up on the morning of August 15 and were suddenly struck with an overwhelming desire to surrender. In fact, a direct line can be drawn from the present moment back to the United States’ decision two decades ago to prevent the Afghans from deciding their own destiny after the Taliban were ousted.
The tragedy begins at the now infamous 2002 Emergency Loya Jirga in Kabul where three-fourths of delegates voted in favor of bringing King Zahir Shah back from exile to serve as Afghanistan’s interim head of …
The serial war criminality and immense cruelty of the US Alliance has been enabled by the extraordinary mendacity, genocidal racism and resolute exceptionalism of US Alliance governments and Western Mainstream media (MSM). Summarized below are the horrendous realities of the US Alliance-imposed Afghan Holocaust and Afghan Genocide that are ignored by deeply racist, genocide-complicit and genocide-ignoring Western leaders and MSM.
(1). Massive US lyingenabled the 9/11 false flag excusefor the invasion and devastation of Afghanistan, Iraq and other Muslim countries. I.F. Stone: “Governments lie” and …
by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead / August 23rd, 2021
Every day in communities across the United States, children and adolescents spend the majority of their waking hours in schools that have increasingly come to resemble places of detention more than places of learning.
— investigative journalist Annette Fuentes
Once upon a time in America, parents breathed a sigh of relief when their kids went back to school after a summer’s hiatus, content in the knowledge that for a good portion of the day their kids would be gainfully occupied, out of harm’s way and out of trouble.
Those were the good old days, before the COVID-19 pandemic introduced …
Even though they receive enormous sums of public money and are ostensibly “public” schools “open to all,” charter schools have a long track record of discriminatory enrollment practices. Selective enrollment practices are widespread in non-profit and for-profit charter schools. Few charter schools have a truly diverse student body.
In recent years more research has shown how charter schools intensify segregation (see here, here, and here.)
While public schools accept all students at all times, charter school owners and operators use many covert and overt strategies to cherry-pick students A …
When a society decays, it is language that is first to become gangrenous. As a result, social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings.
It’s become clear to me that almost anyone penning anything that gets stuffed into any number of hundreds of “news” or “opinion” digital dungeons believes that their take on the world, on global affairs, on the political nightmares, on the various financial and military and digital happenings and what have you is, well, somehow theirs is a uniquely formed commentary to add something new and …
A new American president is presenting a program for renewal of human values in the marketplace unheard of since the 1930s but still projecting American military domination and environmental destruction far beyond the awareness of most Americans. Continued insistence that Russia and China are major global threats to everyone and not just American monopoly capitalists resonate not only in the cosmic void between the ears of our mentally disabled foreign policy experts but echo in the minds of innocent Americans since that’s all they get from major, and all too often minor media.
The question does not bear asking, but in a global economy greased by what has been termed disposable people, the past’s previous examples of the same may be a country worth visiting. The prod along for such a journey came with the discovery of yet another gem from the ruins of Pompeii. The news headlines were ravenous in consuming the details about the history of an individual who, having been a slave, obviously went on to do rather well for himself. It read like a tale of social mobility, and would have sent the likes of those who spoke …
Israel again illegally bombed Syria last week, violating Lebanese airspace to do so and putting at risk the lives of untold numbers of civilians. And following this, crickets in the media, again.
On Thursday, just after 11pm, Israeli missiles targeted the vicinities of Damascus and Homs, according to a statement from the Syrian army. Russia’s Reconciliation Center for Syria said Israel did so via …
Medical ethics in the West has long been predicated on informed consent, the oath to do no harm, the notion that good health care is a human right, and the search for scientific truth free from skullduggery and censorship. These tenets are not only integral to a sound health care system but are foundational to a civilized society. Lamentably, each of these sacrosanct principles is anathema to the medical industrial complex. For we have entered the Age of Faucism.
In “Why do patients hate going to the doctor?” by Maheswari Raja, MD, the …
Do not for a minute think that this is a kind, heart-felt thing in the aftermath of Kabul’s fall. True, a number of Afghans will find their way to Germany, to Canada, to the UK, US and a much smaller number to Australia. But this will be part of the curtain act that, in time, will pass into memory and enable countries to return to their harsh refugee policies.
Britain’s Home Secretary, Priti Patel, is none too enthused about welcoming high numbers of Afghan refugees. “We have to be realistic in terms of those that we can bring to the …
In episode 64: The United States disengages from Afghanistan, its image in tatters. China, on the other hand, stays engaged. The disinformation campaign in Xinjiang has negatively impacted western corporations who played along with the disinformation. Chinese technology continues to advance in AI. Chinese show a high regard for their cultural heritage.
Religious cults have always seemed weird to me. Political cults, equally bizarre. But I’ve never encountered anything quite as dangerous or strange as the current medical cult of eugenicists running wild upon the earth. A nihilistic death machine masquerading behind a mask of health care. But peel back the thin veil and it’s all really just a sick joke. Get it?
I always wondered how in the world people like Hitler, Stalin, and Mao could have ever risen to power and been provided with the opportunity to unleash their systems …
Why are numerous ‘independent alternative’ media outlets and writers not questioning the COVID-19 vaccine rollout? If anything, they are promoting it without even considering the serious concerns being voiced by top scientists.
When there are experts like cardiologist and epidemiologist Professor Peter McCullough, Dr Robert Malone (credited with inventing mRNA vaccine technology), former vice president of Pfizer Pharmaceuticals Dr Michael Yeadon, vaccine researcher and immunologist Dr Byram Bridle, world-renowned microbiologist Dr Sucharit Bhakti and hundreds of other respected scientists, immunologists and virologists expressing serious concerns or even calling for a halt to the rollout, surely their views must be given space.
by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies / August 20th, 2021
Protest in Westwood, California 2002. Photo: Carolyn Cole/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
America’s corporate media are ringing with recriminations over the humiliating U.S. military defeat in Afghanistan. But very little of the criticism goes to the root of the problem, which was the original decision to militarily invade and occupy Afghanistan in the first place.
That decision set in motion a cycle of violence and chaos that no subsequent U.S. policy or military strategy could resolve over the next 20 years, in Afghanistan, Iraq or any of the …
On May 26, these words should have poured forth from the White House Press Corps and the mainstream Commentariat when Joe Biden declared that he was placing the question of Covid-19’s origins securely in the hands of the “National Intel Agencies.” They were to report back in 90 days.
Have not the Intel Agencies been up to their eyeballs in deception about the “Global War on Terror” for the past 20 plus years? Must we really remind the press and commentariat of the scandal of the Weapons of Mass Destruction hyped by the Intel Agencies …
Dominic Raab, the British foreign secretary, gives new and shameful meaning to Winston Churchill’s rousing speech about fighting an enemy on the beaches.
The arrogant Raab – who is prone to lecture Russia and China over alleged misconduct – tried to make out he was being fully briefed by intelligence agencies on the unfolding chaos in Afghanistan, no doubt while he was topping up his piña coladas and sunscreen.
by Lawrence Wittner and Joseph Mangano / August 19th, 2021
Nuclear Weapon Test, Bikini Atoll, 1954
In 2020, Harvard University’s T. C. Chan School of Public Health began a five-year study, funded by the National Institutes of Health, that will examine the connection between early life exposure to toxic metals and later-life risk of neurological disease. A collaborator with Harvard, the Radiation and Public Health Project, will analyze the relationship of strontium-90 (a radioactive element in nuclear weapons explosions) and disease risk in later life.
The centerpiece of the study is a collection of nearly 100,000 …
