COVID-19 cases in Palestine, especially in Gaza, have reached record highs, largely due to the arrival of a greatly contagious coronavirus variant which was first identified in Britain.
Gaza has always been vulnerable to the deadly pandemic. Under a hermetic Israeli blockade since 2006, the densely populated Gaza Strip lacks basic services like clean water, electricity, or minimally-equipped hospitals. Therefore, long before COVID-19 ravaged many parts of the world, Palestinians in Gaza were dying as a result of easily treatable diseases such as diarrhea, salmonella and typhoid …
Back in October of 2020, I wrote an essay called The Covidian Cult, in which I described the so-called “New Normal” as a global totalitarian ideological movement. Developments over the last six months have borne out the accuracy of that analogy.
We are currently seeing an acceleration of the corporate consolidation of the entire global agrifood chain. The high-tech/data conglomerates, including Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and Google, have joined traditional agribusiness giants, such as Corteva, Bayer, Cargill and Syngenta, in a quest to impose a certain type of agriculture and food production on the world.
AK-47: Kalashnikov (2020) is a biographical film about Mikhail Timofeyevich Kalashnikov (1919–2013), the inventor and designer of the AK-47 automatic rifle. This Russian film, released in February of last year, follows the young Kalashnikov as he is bombarded by Germans during WWII and is interspersed with flashbacks of his childhood. Disturbed by the failure of a newly designed gun that nearly gets a comrade killed when it jams, he examines the parts and lists out various problems with the new design. An amateur inventor who had been playing around with various types of primitive gun designs since he was child, …
Earth.com
The 21st century serves as an inflection point of acceleration of climate instability caused by human-generated greenhouse gases, as CO2 emissions increase well beyond the rate of the prior century. It’s also a defining timeline of an astonishing ice mass loss rate of 500% more than the last decade of the previous century. Throughout human history, this has never happened with such far-reaching extent so rapidly.
The proof is found in the numbers. For example, Greenland and Antarctica combined ice mass loss is truly an eye-opener:
“For progressives and anti-imperialists all over the world, the mention of the Bay of Pigs—known in the Spanish-speaking world as Playa Girón—evokes joy and celebration,” wrote Carmelo Ruiz. “The United States, an empire accustomed to imposing itself even in the farthest corners of the world, could not prevail and enforce its will on an island country 90 miles away from its shores. The empire could be defeated after all.” ((Carmelo Ruiz, “Bay of Pigs, the CIA’s Biggest Fiasco, 55 Years Later,” Telesur English, 16 April 2015.))
In mid-April, 1961, the island nation of Cuba repelled a US military invasion at …
Discussion about sexual assault (including against minors), torture; scenes of police brutality, murder.
In this episode, Dee Dos takes a look at recent developments in the social war in Greece, including the COVID-19 lockdown, the #MeToo movement and the hunger strike waged by 17th of November member Dimitris Koufontinas. We also include an interview with Athens-based anarchist, co-editor of We Are An Image From the Future: The Greek Revolt of December 2008 and member of the Void Network, Tasos Sagris.
While a new American administration presides over what many believe is a return to normal after the more openly blatant worship of wealth and Israel of the Trump regime, what’s missed is that what passes for normal is what needs radical change. As long as market normalcy in the USA means hundreds of thousands of people are homeless, millions more live in poverty and millions more than that are so much deeper in personal debt than ever before in our history that the World Bank warns of the possibility of social collapse, what passes for normal is not just highly …
In March of last year as the coronavirus panic was starting, I wrote a somewhat flippant article saying that the obsession with buying and hoarding toilet paper was the people’s vaccine. My point was simple: excrement and death have long been associated in cultural history and in the Western imagination with the evil devil, Satan, the Lord of the underworld, the Trickster, the Grand Master who rules the pit of smelly death, the place below where bodies go.
The psychoanalytic literature is full of examples of death anxiety revealed in …
Suffocating the grassroots. Mocking the working class origins of the game. World football, and primarily European club football, has long done away with loyalties in favour of cash and contract. The professionalization of the game has seen a difficult relationship between fan, spectator and sporting management, none better exemplified than the price of tickets, the role of branding and sponsorship.
The apotheosis of this has arrived in the form of a proposed breakaway European Super League. Like a mafia-styled cartel, twelve of Europe’s elite football clubs have banded together to create their own, sealed competition. The English contribution will be Liverpool, …
Back in the 1880s, the mathematician and theologian Edwin Abbott tried to help us better understand our world by describing a very different one he called Flatland.
Imagine a world that is not a sphere moving through space like our own planet, but more like a vast sheet of paper inhabited by conscious, flat geometric shapes. These shape-people can move forwards and backwards, and they can turn left and right. But they have no sense of up or down. The very idea of a tree, or a well, or a …
Long before ‘the propaganda model’ flew off Edward Herman’s keyboard and into Manufacturing Consent, the book he co-authored with Noam Chomsky, Leo Tolstoy had captured the essence of non-conspiratorial conformity:
One man does not assert the truth which he knows, because he feels himself bound to the people with whom he is engaged; another, because the truth might deprive him of the profitable position by which he maintains his family; a third, because he desires to attain reputation and authority, and then use them in the service of mankind; a …
On Thursday, April 15, the New York Times posted an article headed, “How the U.S. Plans to Fight From Afar After Troops Exit Afghanistan,” just in case anyone misunderstood the previous day’s headline, “Biden, Setting Afghanistan Withdrawal, Says ‘It Is Time to End the Forever War’” as indicating the U.S. war in Afghanistan might actually come to an end on September 11, 2021, almost 20 years after it started.
We saw this bait and switch tactic before in President Biden’s earlier announcement about ending U.S support for the long, miserable war in Yemen. In his first major foreign policy …
. . . err, Well, call it the Capitalists' Fun House, AKA, House of Horrors!
by Paul Haeder / April 19th, 2021
The fully developed bureaucratic apparatus compares with other organizations exactly as does the machine with the non-mechanical modes of production.
The organization of offices follows the principle of hierarchy … each lower office is under the control and supervision of a higher one.
— Max Weber, Economy and Society, 1922
This doesn’t infer private companies, organizations, trade groups, corporations, lobbies are any better than the bureaucracies of government. In fact, the bureaucratic hell we all have been put through — those of us who do not go quietly into the night or roll …
The US – with the help of Israel – has been repeatedly waging attacks on the high seas against oil tankers bound for Syria. In recent statements to parliament, Syria’s Prime Minister Hussein Arnous revealed that oil tankers loaded with crude allocated for Syria are being attacked or intercepted on the high seas. The goal is to aggravate the hydrocarbon crisis generated by the economic sanctions and the occupation of over 90% of the territory where Syrian oil wells are located, he detailed.
Over and over, countless projects and utopias have been made and are still thought out of cities where people would reach out to anything within some minutes of walking distance. Here some thoughts on why this is not a goal and why such dreams will always surface in the news.
Urban migration, the largest ever migration in history, is an ongoing process of people moving from the countryside, rural areas, into cities, seeking out for better lives or so we think. Better lives are promised by both larger amounts of …
There was a time when it seemed Papua New Guinea had managed to dodge a bullet. Instances of SARS-CoV-2 were minimal, along with its disease, COVID-19. Through 2020, the country of eight million people recorded a mere 900 cases. The World Health Organization praised the PNG government in a September 2020 news release in “taking the threat of the pandemic seriously with an all-of-government approach in strengthening the country’s health system and engaging communities to keep them safe from the virus.”
Officials acknowledged that a spike in cases could impair the medical system, despite the fact that three-quarters of …
With great frequency, promoters of privately-operated non-profit and for-profit charter schools like to claim that charter schools are so great that they have very long lists of students waiting to get into them. They use such claims and “data” to argue that more charter schools are needed and that more public money should be spent on creating and multiplying more privately-operated charter schools.
However, many reports show that such waitlist numbers need to be taken with a grain of salt because they are usually inaccurate and misleading for various reasons. For example, a recent report from the North Carolina State Board …
In the autumn of 1862, the governments of France and Great Britain proposed to Russia, in a formal but not in an official way, the joint recognition by European powers of the independence of the Confederate States of America. My immediate answer was: `I will not cooperate in such action; and I will not acquiesce. On the contrary, I shall accept the recognition of the independence of the Confederate States by France and Great Britain as a casus belli for Russia. And …
Are we under Martial Law?…Nobody knows what’s going on!…It’s madness unleashed by human error!
— Quotes taken from the trailer to George Romero’s 1973 film Code Name Trixie, better known by its re-branded title The Crazies
It’s sure been a crazy last year, with more “crazy” in the forecast. We’ve got lots of novelty vaccines now, but we’ve also got vicious new COVID “variants” that are keeping things tense and lockdowned — except where things are “opening up,” of course. The mainstream Media, certainly, has caught a case of the SARS-CoV-2 that just won’t go away…
Years ago, I was sitting in a café with my rabble-rousing friend James, both of us gnawing our teeth over the myriad difficulties facing the peace and social justice movement in the United States. We cited the usual suspects that stood in the way of progress: the entrenched corporate and financial elite; the embedded Pentagon machine; too much TV.
“But you know what our biggest problem is?” James said, growing animated. “It’s our low expectations! Think about it, man. Folks in this country will always fight back when pushed hard enough, yet we always seem to settle for crumbs, grateful to …
Former leader’s disciplinary code, which was criticised by pro-Israel groups, is still being used under Starmer, party officials admit after court hearing
by Jonathan Cook / April 16th, 2021
A group of Labour activists fighting through the courts to discover why they and others were investigated or expelled from the UK’s Labour Party for antisemitism say they have flushed out proof of bad faith from their accusers.
The group, who call themselves Labour Activists for Justice (LA4J), say the new disclosure confirms their claim that leading Jewish organisations intentionally politicised the meaning of antisemitism to entrap left-wing critics of Israel and undermine Labour’s former leader, Jeremy Corbyn.
As a result, the number of cases of antisemitism in Labour was inflated, falsely feeding the public impression that the political party under Corbyn had …
by Medea Benjamin and Leonardo Flores / April 16th, 2021
A spoiled ballot in Ecuador’s elections. Photo by @AlinaDuarte
Ecuador’s April 11 election that led to a 5-point victory by conservative banker Guillermo Lasso over progressive candidate Andrés Arauz was not what it appeared to be. On the surface, it was a surprisingly clean and professional election, as our CODEPINK official observer delegation witnessed. But a fraud-free process for casting and counting ballots does not mean that the election was free and fair. Behind the scenes was a monumentally unequal playing field and …
Nearly 10,000 residents dance in local Dolan Maxrap folk style in Awat county in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region on 9 October 2018. Photo: China News Service
In February, I asked, “Does the West Repeating Claims of China Committing Genocide in Xinjiang Reify It?” China is continually being raked over the coals by western governments and state/corporate media on whatever charge or pretext can be thrown in the hopes that something sticks to incriminate China. China’s economic ascendancy, socialism with Chinese …
Australia’s Labor Party’s recognition of Palestine as a State on March 30 is a welcomed position, though it comes with many caveats.
Pro-Palestinian activists are justified to question the sincerity of the ALP’s stance and whether Australia’s Labor is genuinely prepared to fully adopt this position should they form a government following the 2022 elections.
The language of the amendment regarding the recognition of Palestine is quite indecisive. While it commits the ALP to recognize Palestine as a State, it “expects that this issue will be an important priority for the …
The San Francisco Giants Opening Day was Friday, April 9. The Giants had been doing a full court press (sorry to mix in basketball metaphors) for days on end about how safe the stadium would be for the fans’ first game back to the stadium since the COVID-19 pandemic began.
But, on Wednesday evening, the Giants’ food service subcontractor Bon Appetit emailed food service concession workers a directive to “Please be sure that you complete this 2021 Release of Liability before arriving at Oracle Park.”
It had to be symbolic, and was represented as such. Forces of the United States will be leaving Afghanistan on September 11 after two decades of violent occupation, though for a good deal of this stretch, US forces were, at best, failed democracy builders, at worst, violent tenants.
In his April 14 speech, President Joe Biden made the point that should have long been evident: that Washington could not “continue the cycle of extending or expanding our military presence in Afghanistan hoping to create the ideal conditions for our withdrawal, expecting a different result.” As if to concede to the …
On a Sunday night on 21 March 2021, gunmen stopped Juan Carlos Cerros Escalante (age 41) as he walked from this mother’s home to his own in the village of Nueva Granada near San Antonio de Cortés (Honduras). The gunmen opened fire in front of a catholic church, killing this leader of United Communities in front of his children. Forty bullets were found at the scene.
The continual expanse of western enslavement culture has never been directly about race, class, or any other perceived external divisions, rather it’s an ego sickness at its root. When the ego drive is running the show we are slaves to its impulses, subsequently the external world we’ve constructed expresses that which is within: a slavish and reactive social milieu. We are trapped in an ego-centered state of confusion believing in false identities of who we are within this contrived social strata dictated by centralized authorities, which today are namely nation states, banking systems, and corporate conglomerates. Together these authorities conjure …
The Yemeni city of Marib is in the thick of fighting between Houthi rebels and loyalists of Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi’s government. Marib is the capital of Marib Governorate, lying roughly 100 miles northeast of the country’s capital in Sana’a. It was established after the 1984 discovery of oil deposits in the region and contains much of Yemen’s oil, gas, and electric resources. Marib is the last governorate under the control of the Hadi government, but it has been under increasing attack by the Houthis since early 2020. If seized …
