I have to share with you good news. In his video speech to the United Nations Climate Summit 2025 held in New York on Wednesday, Chinese President Xi Jinping announced China’s 2035 Nationally Determined Contributions. He said that China will, by 2035, reduce economy-wide net greenhouse gas emissions by 7 percent to 10 percent from peak levels, and will strive to do better.
He also announced that China will increase the share of non-fossil fuels in total energy consumption to over 30 percent, and expand the installed capacity of wind and solar power to over six times the 2020 levels, striving …
Elder abuse in the frothy swirl of debates regarding the role of the United Nations is currently modish. The body has, after all, reached the age of 80 years. It has been a life ramshackle, rickety and marked with failure. But it has also been one of audacity, experimentation and industry. The occasion of the UN General Assembly was, however, a chance to cast blame.
The blame for the body’s failings is characteristic. It’s elder abuse writ large. Too many instances of constipated failure. Too few cases of efficacy over aspiration. Bed-ridden, permanently in need of treatment, constantly offering the excreta …
Kidnapped words are the Janissaries of campaigns to promote an invented reality. Their original identities are obliterated. Worse, unlike the Ottoman Janissaries, figments of the past identity can be retained when its resonance is considered helpful. Words are kidnapped for two reasons. One is to slay them; the other is to exploit them. American politics offers rich examples of both variants.
The radical right in the United States effectively took control of the term liberaland all its variants so as to infuse it with strongly negative connotations. They succeeded so completely in transforming it into a political ‘dirty word’ that …
"The net worth of median households is basically nothing. We have major problems in our economy." – Carl Icahn, American businessman and investor
by Godfree Roberts / September 29th, 2025
Four years after defeating the US in battle, in 1955, Mao told colleagues, “If we can’t overtake America in 100 years we don’t deserve to exist. We should be wiped off the face of the earth”. Less than seventy years later, China overtook America.
Today, Chinese are much richer than their American and European counterparts, they live longer, healthier lives and their children graduate from high school three years ahead in STEM subjects. …
Activists and human rights defenders ride aboard a vessel departing from Tunisia’s northern port of Bizerte on September 14, 2025 to join the last boats taking part in the Global Sumud Flotilla, bound for the Gaza Strip to break Israel’s blockade on the Palestinian territory. Sumud means “resilience” in Arabic, and the flotilla describes itself as an independent group not linked to any government or political party. (Photo by Mohamed FLISS / AFP)Catholic theologian and author James W. Douglass, a co-founder of Mary’s House Catholic Worker house of …
It is a continuing source of frustration that an important segment of the Left holds the view that weakening the United States’ long-established grip on the top rungs of the hierarchical system of imperialism is — in itself — an attack on imperialism.
Many of our friends, including those who claim to aim at a socialist future, mistakenly see an erosion in the US position as the imperialist system’s hegemon as necessarily a step guaranteeing a just future, lasting peace, or a step towards socialism.
While it is true that those fighting the most powerful nation-state in the imperialist system for sovereignty, …
Why did humans, who lived for 40,000 years as egalitarian hunter-gatherers, become farmers and abandon equality for a dominance hierarchy permeated with all kinds of nastiness, including war, slavery, and exploitation? It has remained a mystery why, ten thousand years ago, as farmers, most of humanity moved to social structures dominated by a tiny minority, and proceeded to commit heinous crimes against their fellow human beings.
If humans treated each other equally as hunter-gatherers, why not equally share the bounty as farmers? How did they allow their fellow human beings, whom they had always considered as their equals, to become enslaved, killed …
On the radio, Oct. 1, as a way to remember the evil of the Jewish State of Israel
by Paul Haeder / September 29th, 2025
Kelly’s on house arrest, essentially, for another three years of a sentence that did not meet the supposed level of his “crime.”
And not too many Substackers even can grasp how the “otherside” of the railroad tracks lives, though Kelly, from Wisconsin, is smart, a musician and got that sheepskin in accounting, too.
He’s got the Palestine flag in his backyard in River Falls, Wisconsin, and he has his heart at the heart of their liberation, in a time of amnesia-lobotomy and absolute consumer euphoria.
Here’s the KYAQ interview, talking about Oct. 7 then and now and beyond: …
Billionaires, beware: Thousands of your countrymen are focusing hard on reining in your riches. All of them, including large numbers of millionaires, want you to pay higher taxes. They want a twenty-first century America with less income inequality and more tax fairness.
Something like the America of decades ago, before the laws started leaning toward high-income taxpayers. (And they’re still leaning that way: see the gifts handed out to the rich in the Big Unbeautiful Bill rammed through by the GOP earlier this year.)
The posse that’s pursuing billionaires includes tax experts, scholars, investigative journalists, Democratic lawmakers, and two groups …
Trump’s Trade War has officially backfired on US Farmers and the entire US agricultural sector. 40% of crops farmed in the US is sent abroad but after Trump attacked China, China began sourcing soybeans, corn and other products from countries like Brazil. In today’s video we break down why the Trump Trade War is hurting the US and why it has little to no effect on China.
It takes a lot to make UN delegates walk out from an address to the General Assembly. But this was precisely what Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, managed to achieve in his September 26 speech. His address began by attempting to show his country as a guardian of law and civilisation, fighting a lonely, unsupported war against fiendish barbarians. “Last year I stood at this podium and I showed this map. It shows the curse of Iran’s terror axis.” Such an axis threatened “the peace of the entire world. It threatened the stability of our region and the …
How many of you have met socialists who look like the one at the top of the article? I have and there are plenty like this. It was in the Fall of 2017 that my life-partner, Bruce Lerro and I travelled from Oakland to Berkeley to hear Suzie Weissman, biographer of the Russian Revolutionary Victor Serge, give a talk about the Russian Revolution on its 100 year anniversary. As we made our way in towards the building we saw a man selling newspapers. As it was …
After the smoke cleared, most of the subversives lay dead on the battlefield.
Later the afternoon I offered my army ration to one of the survivors who seemed somewhat cultivated.
He waved it away. “Thanks, I’m not hungry, only thirsty.”
I handed him my canteen bottle. “Let me ask you, was it worth it, this great rebellion of yours? Pain and suffering, people dying, including innocent civilians in crossfire, horrendous destruction all over the land.”
“Eleven,” he said.
I shook my head. “Eleven! What about eleven?”
“Eleven of us have made it through,” he explained.
Pakistan: TLP blockade causes disruptions. Image credit: ANI.
The assassination of Punjab Governor Salman Taseer by his own bodyguard, Mumtaz Qadri, in January 2011, marked a turning point in Pakistan’s politics. This act of violence opened up a new chapter in Pakistan’s politics, wherein blasphemy laws and religious emotions serve as the foundation of a fully organised political movement, which terrorises the state.
Qadri, a supposed member of the elite police, shot Taseer for having publicly mocked Section 295-C of the Penal Code, a notorious …
“Tradwives” are having a moment. Amidst the rejection of “lean-in” culture and “girl boss” backlash, a host of popular social media accounts created by and geared toward young women promote the role of traditional wives, or “tradwives.” Now, a proliferation of so-called “aspirational” lifestyle posts romanticize conventional gender roles, marriage, motherhood, domesticity, and financial dependence on men. The “tradwife” hashtag has become so widely used on TikTok and Instagram that the term was added to the Cambridge dictionary last August.
Although framed as a feminine ideal, the tradwife movement …
“Motherhood can be deeply fulfilling, and few would argue that family life is unimportant. Yet authoritarian movements have long politicized it, reframing it as women’s sole purpose and a substitute for autonomy and rights,” Adrienne Matei observes in the Guardian. Welcome to the “womanosphere” — also called the “femosphere.”
According to Matei, “the womanosphere is an informal web of online creators who rally around normative femininity. Its idea of womanhood is informed by anti-queerness, white supremacy, fundamentalist Christianity and traditional maternalism. It also maps on to the extreme, discriminatory …
by Black Alliance for Peace / September 27th, 2025
Since August, federal mandates carried out against Washington D.C. and intensified policing have been escalating with both the federal and local governments making it clear that they are waging a domestic war on African (Black) working class and migrant diaspora people. This imposition is not only in the form of increased National Guard troops. Arrests, deportations, and raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) surged in Washington, D.C. as part of the federal crackdown, leading to high levels of fear in immigrant communities and has emboldened the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) to harass and make more arrests, especially …
The designation of the amorphous group antifa as a terrorist organization allows the state to brand all dissidents as supporters of antifa and prosecute them as terrorists.
by Chris Hedges / September 27th, 2025
Boom – by Mr. Fish
Trump’s designation of the amorphous group antifa, which has no formal organization or structure, as a terrorist organization permits the state to charge us all as terrorists. The point is not to go after members of antifa, short for anti-fascist. It is to go after the last vestiges of dissent. When Barack Obama oversaw the coordinated national campaign to shut down the Occupy encampments, antifa — so named because they dress in black, obscure their faces, move as a unified …
For the last 77 years the West has watched Israel devour Palestine, plunder its resources and mercilessly kill and maim its citizens. They finally say ‘we recognise Palestine’ when it’s far too late to be of real use. I have no words to express my contempt for the United Nations.
Where are the hard-biting sanctions?
Where is the total worldwide boycott?
Where is the UN’s armed protection force to push Israel’s genocidal maniacs back to the Green Line?
Where are the naval escorts to ensure aid is safely landed on Gaza’s beaches?
When will Israel’s embassies around the world be shut down and their staff …
by Bill Scheuerman and Sid Plotkin / September 26th, 2025
Donald Trump is creating a new form of capitalism. His economic policy is driven by his personal whims rather than the needs of capital, the results of which are likely to bring disaster to our economy and extreme hardship to American workers and the American people.
Trump voters have consistently overlooked or dismissed his glaring failures as a businessman who squandered his great family wealth. Born with a golden spoon in his mouth, this self-anointed Commander of Capitalism had an allowance of $200,000 annually as a toddler and became a millionaire at the age of eight. After he finished …
We are all obscurantists now, deep in crepuscular propaganda, looking for light. “It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there,” as Bob Dylan’s sings in “Not Dark Yet.” “Well, my sense of humanity has gone down the drain.”
It’s a sentiment more and more people can identify with as dark, dangerous, and duplicitous news reports loot the public’s mind of any sense of logical understanding by presenting stories that contradict …
The Propaganda Blitz Awaiting Green Party Leader Zack Polanski
by Media Lens / September 26th, 2025
On 2 September, Zack Polanski, a former Liberal Democrat who joined the Green Party in 2017, was elected leader of the party in a landslide, with 85% of the vote share. Polanski defeated Adrian Ramsay and Ellie Chowns, winning 20,411 votes against their 3,705 in a ballot of party members.
From May to July 2025, when Polanski launched his leadership bid, the Green Party saw its membership rise by at least 8%, described as the ‘Polanski surge’. The Green Party now has 79,000 members. The previous peak …
On August 6, The Guardianreported that “multiple individuals have asserted that the IDF [Israeli Defense Forces] is using Azure for the storage of files of phone calls obtained through broad or mass surveillance of civilians in Gaza and the West Bank.” The tale began in 2021, when Microsoft, the company responsible for the Azure cloud platform that promises endless wells of data storage, endorsed a plan that would enable Unit 8200, Israel’s famed cyberwarfare agency, customised access.
The agreement, reached between the unit’s commander Yossi Sariel and Microsoft’s chief executive, Satya Nadella, was a boon for mass surveillance …
We live in an age of satire – unintended self-satire. Events of profound consequence have a ridiculous quality to them that competes with our emotions of worry and dread. Trump’s America is not alone in this. Look across the Atlantic: a cosmopolitan all-star Vaudeville troupe struggling, as always, to keep up with its trans-Atlantic model and seigneur. The comedic effect is accentuated by the straightlaced mien that accompanies their most ludicrous behavior.
Satire marks other aspects of contemporary society, as well. A few years ago, we were treated to a nonpareil episode of humor when Saudi’s Prince Mohammed bin-Salman (MBS) and …
Following in the shameful footsteps of both Justin Trudeau and Chrystia Freeland, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney continues pledging support and money (which Canadians desperately need) to Ukraine, to prolong the proxy war against Russia.
Carney chose Ukrainian Independence Day to voice the Canadian government’s continued pledge to support Ukraine. As he landed in Kiev on August 24, Carney posted on X,
“On this Ukrainian Independence Day, and at this critical moment in …
The vessels were in waters off the Greek Island of Crete
by Ann Wright / September 25th, 2025
As the Israeli government continues unabated its horrific genocide of Palestinians and the destruction of housing and infrastructure in Gaza, in the third attack on the 42-ship Global Sumud flotilla, drones attacked multiple boats in international waters southwest of the Greek island of Crete, the morning of September 24, 2025.
In May 2025, another flotilla ship, the Conscience, was attacked in international waters off Malta. It was damaged by Israeli bombs that blew holes in the deck of the ship’s bow causing severe damage in the hold in the bow of the ship….
So many red lines. Putin, Macron, Hamas, Israel. Our Palestine-Environment demo Saturday September 20 drew humanity and Nature’s red lines, drenched as they are in the blood of martyrs and poisons sucked out of Earth – inflicted on us all.
I’m worn down by a half-century of calling for things that no one should deny. But joining the thousands (not nearly enough), walking among mostly teens and twenty-somethings was a shot in the arm. I can die happy. There will always be beautiful new humans to carry on the struggle. I …
And they are neither negotiable nor context dependent
by Robert Malone / September 24th, 2025
I admit it. I am pretty pissed off now.
I just had a chat conversation with a “colleague” who describes himself as “A physician and was a Uniformed Public Health Service Officer for thirty years”. He was criticizing the Surgeon General of Florida, Dr. Joe Ladapo MD, MPH, for his decision to rescind vaccine mandates for the State of Florida. The accusation being that Joe made this decision based on “Politics” rather than “Science”. Specifically, his comment that triggered me was “What I hear is vaccine recommendations becoming even more …
I had my share of political critics when I taught in Texas, back in what today seems like the quaint era of professor watchlists, but I never felt my job was in jeopardy. Things have changed. The firing of two professors at Texas universities, one for what was said in class and one for speech outside the university, is bad news for academic freedom and the independence of universities.
The first professor watchlist that included my name was produced in 2003 by the Young Conservatives of Texas chapter on the University of Texas at …
