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Soon people will be coming here to make documentaries about how we’ve been forgotten, about how nothing has been done.

— survivor of the Brumadinho dam collapse

Some call them ‘mountains of doom.’ Dotting the landscape of once-green Wales to this day are the stygian slag heaps resulting from centuries-old collieries, mammoth piles of debris that tower above the mining towns. They are cheerless sights, which one writer likened to “spiritless cathedrals of the industrial age.” As was proven in horror at Aberfan on October 21, 1966, these looming giants are killers.

— from the entry on the …

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Americans were shocked to witness the assault on the capitol building on January 6, the day Congress was scheduled to ratify the presidential election.  Washington DC and the nation’s state capitals remained on high alert through the inauguration as right wing groups promised more violent attacks.

It’s easy to trace the proximate cause of this assault, a president who has long cultivated the lie that the 2020 election was somehow stolen.  Prior to the capitol assault, he exhorted his “Save America” rally on the Mall to “stop the steal” and “fight much harder,” asserting “You have to show strength, you have …

“A Regime of Jewish Supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is Apartheid,” was the title of a January 12 report by the Israeli rights group B’Tselem. No matter how one is to interpret B’Tselem’s findings, the report is earth-shattering. The official Israeli response merely confirmed what B’Tselem has stated in no uncertain terms.

Those of us who repeatedly claimed that Israel is not democratic, governed by an apartheid regime and systematically discriminates against its ethnic and racial minorities, in favor of the country’s Jewish majority, purportedly …

Joe Biden has been sworn in as the President of USA. For Venezuela, nothing has changed. The same belligerence, the same sanctions, and the same imperialism – the American empire continues to be cruelly hostile to the UN-recognized government of Nicolas Maduro.

Inviting an Anti-Chavista Criminal

Auguries of an ever-intensifying imperialist attack against Venezuela have arrived early. Carlos Vecchio, a former Exxon lawyer who currently serves as an envoy for former National Assembly (AN) deputy Juan Guaidó, was invited to Biden’s inauguration on January 20, 2021. When the Trump regime initiated a coup against Venezuela’s government in January 2019, Vecchio became …

At times I’ve wondered Faulkneresquely this plague-stricken year what Emile Durkheim would have thought of all this lockdowning, quarantining, and self-isolating?  To echo Benjy from The Sound and the Fury:  Does “Caddy” still “smell like trees”?

The Great Reset news is here, and all the headlines read:  “Science Walks on Water!”  The print’s in appropriately big and bold font, while the accompanying stories quite breathlessly tell of a miracle cure for the COVID-19 that has just arrived, like a Joe Christmas present — and, faster than a speeding Silver Bullet.  Civilization, and all of its Discontents, have been suddenly Saved!  This …

Arab normalization with Israel is expected to have serious consequences that go well beyond the limited and self-serving agendas of a few Arab countries. Thanks to the Arab normalizers, the doors are now flung wide open for new political actors to extend or cement ties with Israel at the expense of Palestine, without fearing any consequences to their actions.

African countries, especially those who worked diligently to integrate Israel into the continent’s mainstream body politic, are now seizing on the perfect opportunity to bring all African countries on board, including …

Recently Israel’s largest human rights organization concluded the country was run based on a regime of Jewish supremacy.  B’Tselem wasn’t only referring to the occupied West Bank but an “apartheid” system in place from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.

A week after B’Tselem’s report was released, one of Canada’s leading lobbyists for the “regime of Jewish supremacy” smeared maybe the country’s most effective activist in challenging Canadian complicity in that racism as, well surprise, surprise … racist. B’nai B’rith put out a press release attacking Karen Rodman …

Can you dig it?

— from the theme song to the 1971 feature film Shaft, written and performed by Isaac Hayes

We have more than enough of a Police State already…

— Krystal Ball from The Hill’s Rising show on January 20, 2021

The New Year has arrived, not with bells and whistles but vaccines and new strains of COVID-19 and a Flag-waving “Tourists Gone Wild!” episode at the U.S. Capitol — oh, and a technically “new” president, Joe Biden, who’s been running for president forever and finally been given the keys to the Oval Office as if this all’s a Lifetime Achievement Award.  Well, at …

One crackling theme streaking through the US elections of 2020 was the issue of mask wearing.  Critics initially felt that face masks were of the too important category in combating the novel coronavirus: purchasing and using them was tantamount to prizing valuable protective equipment from doctors and front-line workers.  But COVID-19 continued to rage, and various public health bodies including the World Health Organization revised their initially cautious approach.  Masks, manufactured in abundance, could be an affordable non-pharmacological method of halting the spread of the pandemic.

The face mask became the symbol of the now departed Donald Trump’s view of the …

Recent news articles claim that Arizona is a “leader in innovation” when it comes to private businesses like charter schools. Arizona is said to be amazing because it is ensuring “freedom” for parents to “choose” from an exciting array of charter schools to send their kids to, and this is all thanks to a legal environment that strongly supports deregulated charter schools. This is another way of saying that there is little accountability and oversight of charter schools in Arizona and that charter schools can generally operate with impunity. Charter school promoters call this “a friendly regulatory environment.”

It is worth …

History is being written in the United States today. Even the most pessimistic about the prospects of American democracy have rarely ventured out this far while offering a bleak analysis of America’s future, whether in terms of political polarization at home or global standing abroad.

As shocking and, certainly, telling as the images of thousands of American protesters taking over the symbols of America’s federal, representative democracy in Washington DC on January 6, it was only a facet in a far more complex and devastating political trajectory that has been …

As they used to say at the end of all those wacky Looney Tunes cartoons, that’s all, folks! The show is over. Literal Russian-Asset Hitler, the Latest Greatest Threat to Western Democracy, the Monster of Mar-a-Lago, Trumpzilla, Trumpenstein, the Ayatollah of Orange Shinola, has finally been humiliated and given the bum-rush out of Washington by the heroic forces of the GloboCap “Resistance,” with a little help from the US military. The whole thing went exactly to script.

Well … OK, not quite exactly to script. Despite four years of …

The Sydney Morning Herald has always been regarded as a reasonably responsible newspaper. Although editorially it was generally a supporter of the misnamed Liberal Party, its opinion pieces generally try to pursue an open mind. Its editorial commentary of course generally favoured one side of the political divide rather than the other. The writers were generally frank about their perspective, favouring one side or the other. Many of their writers strove for a fundamentally neutral stance, overtly favouring neither one side of politics nor the other.

One could always agree or disagree with a writer’s perspective. As the old adage had …

The instinct among parts of the left to cheer lead the right’s war crimes, so long as they are dressed up as liberal “humanitarianism”, is alive and kicking, as Owen Jones reveals in a column today on the plight of the Uighurs at China’s hands.

The “humanitarian war” instinct persists even after two decades of the horror shows that followed the invasion and occupation of Iraq by the US and UK; the western-sponsored butchering of Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi that unleashed a new regional trade in slaves and arms; and the west’s covert backing of Islamic jihadists who proceeded to tear Syria …

It was never meant to be like this.  After the Indian cricketing team met misery and disaster in the first test match at Adelaide, registering a paltry 36 in its second innings, little hope was had for the touring side.  Australia threatened rout and massacre.  The Border-Gavaskar trophy seemed within the home side’s grasp.

And the home side had every reason to feel insufferably confident.   India’s talismanic wonder and leader, not to mention most threatening batsman, Virat Kohli, was heading home to be with his heavily pregnant wife.  But his absence was the first in what would become a series of …