The reason Yankee fans and Red Sox fans hate each other goes a lot deeper than sports. In his book American Nations, Colin Woodard identifies eleven regional cultures in the United States. He compares the conditions of the home country, settler conditions, climate, geography, religious history, population density and international loyalties. He points out the parallels between how settlers’ regional locations in England impacted the type of regional culture they developed in the United States. My purpose in this article is to:
They keep insisting they don’t do it. But companies such as the Israeli NSO Group are global vendors for regimes, whatever stripe or colour, for surveillance tools to spy on those they deem of interest. The 2013 revelations by Edward Snowden that exposed the warrantless world of mass surveillance by entities such as the US National Security Agency and Britain’s GCHQ caused a global rush towards encryption. Governments, left groping in the dark, sought out private providers of surveillance devices in an unregulated market. Not only could they get effective spyware; they could do so at very affordable prices.
Photo credit from the archives of Newsonline Exits of Netanyahu and Trump: chance to dial down Mideast tensions
The Iraqi geopolitical analyst, Ali Fahim, recently said in an interview with The Tehran Times: “The arrival of [newly elected Iranian President] Ebrahim Raisi at the helm of power gives a great moral impetus to the resistance axis.” Further, with new administrations in the United States, Israel, and Iran, another opportunity presents itself to reinstate fully the 2015 multilateral nuclear agreement, as well as completely …
Cape Cod
Sixty years ago this summer, on August 7, 1961, President John Kennedy signed the bill creating The Cape Cod National Seashore in Massachusetts. It consists of forty miles of immaculate sandy beach, marshes, ponds, and upland along the Atlantic Ocean, with some portions stretching across the land to Cape Cod Bay in the west. Henry Thoreau walked this wild Outer Atlantic Beach in 1849. He said you can stand there and look out to sea and “put all America behind” you.
He can scant resist a slogan, but UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s insistence on describing Britain’s exit from lockdown as Freedom Day came with its usual kitschy quality. All would be splendid as COVID-19 restrictions were lifted in the “move to step 4.” Social contact rules would be scrapped, along with mask mandates in various public spaces. Nightclubs could reopen; capacity limits for events and venues would be removed. There would be a return to social responsibility or what Johnson calls protection through informed choice.
According to the government, the decision to lift most restrictions on July 19 was …
Let me be clear: capitalism without competition isn’t capitalism. It’s exploitation—tweet from President Joe Biden, July 9, 2021
Capitalism is exploitation, period. Lol—a twitter response to Biden’s tweet, July 9, 2021
Not a day goes by in which major owners of capital and their political representatives do not promote illusions and disinformation about the obsolete capitalist economic system. The ruling elite and their entourage rejected economic science and embraced irrationalism, incoherence, and dogmatism more than a century ago. They are unable and unwilling to offer any useful …
The latest Corbett Report podcast ((Episode 405 Designing Humans for Fun and Profit (9 July 2021) at Corbettreport.com)) is essentially an update on the developments in genetic engineering, especially in combination with neurological research.
When genetic engineering was first introduced to the public I recall my abhorrence. Unlike many people I do not believe in “neutral” technology. For me a techne is always motivated and developed to transport interests. There are developments by humans that derive from general human needs and those which arise from specific activities. Moreover I believe knowledge and technology are principally derived from organisation …
Just before leaving the socialist U.S. to settle in a “truly freedom-loving” country (Brazil), Patrick R. Henry, formerly of Las Vegas, Nevada, posted this final message on his blog:
I’ve had it — as you already know. For — how long has it been? — decades, I’ve been trying to alert folks to the ever-tightening grip of that multi-tentacled Octopus otherwise known as Big Government. Bureaucracy upon bureaucracy: the Social Security behemoth, “Affordable Care,” and even, get this, a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (as in “bureau-cracy”!). Talk about epidemics! — a spreading cancer of Government, swallowing and absorbing all our precious …
The need to possess Cuba is the oldest issue in U.S. foreign policy.
— Noam Chomsky, Excerpted from Rogue States, 2000
When you watch the latest news stories about unrest in Cuba, are you relying on critical thought to process them, or are you lazily falling back on decades of deeply embedded propaganda about Castro, communism, etc.? Are you familiar with your country’s history with Cuba? Are you open to accepting that God’s Country™ may have committed atrocities far worse than anything you’ve been told about the Cuban regime?
Review of Andrei Martyanov, Disintegration: Indicators of the Coming American Collapse, 2021.
by Eric Walberg / July 17th, 2021
Lenin dismantled in Berdiansk, Ukraine. Confederacy President Jefferson Davis in Richmond. Lieutenant-general Cornwallis in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Empires rise and fall. And usually burn themselves out rather quickly. What else is new? ‘American decline’ is a Wikipedia page. You can feel it in the air. One greets it with dread or hope, or better dread-hope. America’s sins are adding up, yet the US is a behemoth for well over two centuries and will not go in …
In episode No. 59, China promotes competition and consumer rights, is developing the world’s largest wind power project in Gansu province, has removed the giant panda from endangered status, and more.
Yours truly, at maybe age 6, in Long Island City High School schoolyard Growing up in a working-class, blue-collar neighborhood — long before there was an internet — often left kids like me to our own devices. We found myriad ways to amuse ourselves and also, to play sports. We were troublemakers, sure, but athletes above all. One time, however, it was my uncle who made the whole sports thing possible. That said, the story you’re about to read would be impossible in today’s world.…
Director Werner Herzog’s documentary Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World (2016) begins with “Internet pioneer” Leonard Kleinrock, who welcomes us into the, yes, actual laboratory where it was “born”! To Wagnerian strains in the soundtrack, Kleinrock complacently calls the place “a holy shrine”– quite a revealing phrase for this acolyte of possibly the last of the false religions. We then hear another “pioneer,” Bob Kahn, who matter-of-factly notes his early involvement in the Pentagon development of Arpanet (DARPA).
Is Herzog’s primary intention satirical? I fear not. As in his other recent documentaries, he seems to wander about, credulously interviewing …
I can’t think of anything that harms nature more than cutting down trees and burning them, said William Moomaw, professor emeritus of international environmental policy at Tufts University
Oh, the number of top 10 or top 20 stories flooding the cloud servers delivered to us promptly, nanosecond speed, over the fuck-you Three-Face-Book, or on your email server, on the Dumber Dumbed Down Smart (sic) Phone, and, of course, on the telly. Imagine, instantaneous fake news, falsified un-News, the entire suite of topics New York Times covers, LA Times feeds, and on and on.
Kicking life-saving solutions endlessly down the road is the mark of the brutish power of the corporations over the innocents.
Fifty years ago, medical research warned about the overuse of antibiotics creating mutations of resistant bacterium, making these drugs less effective. Dr. Sidney Wolfe warned about this criminal negligence again and again, along with other colleagues. But the drug companies kept over-promoting to get physicians to over-prescribe. Today, antibiotic resistance takes over 100,000 lives a year just in the U.S. Some bacterium are mutating beyond the ability of medical science to catch up with new more powerful antibiotics to curb new …
Quod deus vult perdere prius dementat. (Whom the Gods wish to destroy they first make mad).
One of the more enduring mysteries of Australian foreign policy is its continued adherence to the American way of war. One has only to look at the history of the post-World War II period to be presented with a host of examples of where Australia has followed the United States into one war after another where a compelling Australian national interest is impossible to identify.
This history of adherence began in Korea in the war that raged in that country between 1950 and 1953. It will …
More than 100 million Amazon Echoes have already been sold across the globe. Researchers believe many consumers purchase the artificial intelligence device as a “companion.” A 2019 study, led by the University of Strathclyde’s Dr. Graeme McLean, found that:
Voice assistants may serve as a means of overcoming loneliness in a household with fewer occupants. Individuals converse with voice assistants in the same way as they do with other humans, developing a rapport with the artificial intelligent assistant. Robots can provide a sense of companionship while assisting their users … The additional social presence offered by …
Interview With Canadian physicist and interdisciplinary scientist, Denis Rancourt
by Eva Bartlett / July 16th, 2021
Very insightful words from Ottawa-based physicist and interdisciplinary scientist, Denis Rancourt, a former tenured professor of physics at U of Ottawa (20+ years) and currently a researcher with the Ontario Civil Liberties Association. He has written over 100 papers in leading scientific journals.
Denis speaks about a variety of issues pertaining to COVID-19, the faulty science around all things COVID-19, Ontario’s incompetent chief medical officers, the brutality of lockdowns—especially on the disadvantaged of society, and more.
Profligate, vain and utterly pleased with himself, British billionaire Sir Richard Branson could boast about his latest adventure of megalomania. Unlike others of the stinking rich set, he is incapable of keeping quiet. He pretends to be the people’s tycoon. His wealthy adventurism is as much for himself as it is for us. “The pitch,” wrote the late Jenny Diski of this type, “is to demand to be seen as ordinary, just like you and me, only richer and more glamorous, of course, because it does the populace a power of good to see heightened images of what they …
Girls and mothers, waiting for donations of heavy blankets, Kabul, 2018 (Photo Credit: Dr. Hakim)
Earlier this week, 100 Afghan families from Bamiyan, a rural province of central Afghanistan mainly populated by the Hazara ethnic minority, fled to Kabul. They feared Taliban militants would attack them in Bamiyan.
Over the past decade, I’ve gotten to know a grandmother who recalls fleeing Talib fighters in the 1990s, just after learning that her husband had been killed. Then, she was a young widow with five children, and for several agonizing months …
In today’s world, the principal contradiction is between imperialism and humanity. Giant multinational corporations are fleecing the globe for their own interests, forming international networks of monopoly capital through the geographic expansion of corporate power. This has involved transferring parts of production, commercial, and financial service to peripheral countries in search of cheap labor. Super-profits are being reaped through a production system based on the enormous wage differentials that persist between the Global North and the Global South. If these rules of exploitation are broken by any country, imperialist powers use a discourse of humanitarianism to justify: military buildups and …
Social media is biased, not to the Left or the Right, but downward.
— Jaron Lanier
Critical race theory, according to Wikipedia, is “a body of legal scholarship and an academic movement of civil-rights scholars and activists in the United States that seeks to critically examine U.S. law as it intersects with issues of race in the U.S. and to challenge mainstream American liberal approaches to racial justice.”
Critical race theory (CRT), according to the Republican House Freedom Caucus, is “teaching American students to hate each other,” “tears people apart,” is “teaching our children that …
In early June 2021, the United States military led a major military exercise on the African continent: the African Lion 21. Major General Andrew Rohling of the US Army’s Southern European Task Force said it was the ‘largest US military exercise ever conducted on this continent’. The African Lion military exercise, which was first held with the Kingdom of Morocco in 2002, is – in the words of US Africa Command – an annual ‘joint, all-domain, multi-national exercise … to counter malign activity in North …
Before Henry Kissinger became a Clinton pal, liberals condemned him for saying: “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.” The 1973 US-backed coup and bloodbath in Chile followed. Now Uncle Sam has a problem in Nicaragua, where independent polls predict a landslide victory for Daniel Ortega’s leftist Sandinista slate in the November 7th presidential elections.
The US government and its sycophantic media are working to prevent …
So, it looks like GloboCap isn’t going to be happy until they have fomented the widespread social unrest — or de facto global civil war — that they need as a pretext to lock in the new pathologized totalitarianism and remake whatever remains of society into a global pseudo-medicalized police state, or that appears to be where we’re headed currently. We appear to be heading there at breakneck speed. I don’t have a crystal ball or anything, but I’m expecting things to get rather ugly this Autumn, and probably …
They were in with a shot. The English team, deliriously floating on chants of Football’s Coming Home, had made it to their first major Ttournament final since 1966. The UEFA European Football Championship would be decided at Wembley against an Italian side unblemished by defeat since September 2018. But the English, coached by the much admired Gareth Southgate, succumbed in that most cruel of deciders: the penalty shootout.
In English footballing history, the penalty shootout has been responsible for a string of famous defeats. In 1990, the national side lost to the West German juggernaut in the semi-final of the …
When the Israeli Knesset (parliament) failed to renew what is commonly referred to as the Family Reunification Law, news reports and analyses misrepresented the story altogether. The even split of 59 MKs voting in favor of the law and 59 against it gave the erroneous impression that Israeli lawmakers are equally divided over the right of Palestinians to obtain permanent residency status or citizenship in Israel through marriage. Nothing could be further away from the truth.
Originally passed in 2003, the Citizenship and Entry Law was effectively a ban …
Hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths, an economic crisis, broken supply chains, killer cops, mass incarceration, government surveillance, nuclear weapons, irrational anti-social mass shootings, normalized racism, homelessness, crumbling schools, depression, fear, suicides, and obscene disparities in incomes and wealth—all the features of a moribund, brutal, anti-human global colonial-capitalist system in the United States—and we are supposed to be defensive about socialism! Give me a break.
Yet, the propagandists of death never sleep. Even as their system is being exposed as the generator of global warming (climate change), nuclear madness, cultural degeneration, and strange, violent societies and people, the ideological dirty workers …
Facing Future.TV founder and executive producer Stuart Scott and co-host Dale Walkonen recently broadcast a wide-ranging interview with Noam Chomsky about the state of human existence in the face of universal decadence.
They started by referencing the Doomsday Clock (Science and Security Board Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists), which has pegged humanity’s risk of annihilation at an all-time high of only 100 seconds to midnight. Chomsky feels we’re actuality closer to midnight than that. For example, his opinion is influenced by information in a leaked draft of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) upcoming report, “which is much more …
