Latest articles
by Ramzy Baroud / August 1st, 2020
As illegal Jewish settlers increase their attacks on Palestinian civilians in the occupied city of Al Khalil (Hebron), the people of the Palestinian city continue to mount a campaign of popular resistance.
One of the channels of resistance is Human Rights Defenders, “a grass-roots, non-partisan Palestinian organization, working to support nonviolent popular resistance through popular direct action and documentation of human rights violations committed by the Occupation.”
To understand the situation in Hebron better, I spoke to Badee Dwaik, head of ‘Human Rights Defenders’, Raghad Neiroukh, a journalist, and Flora Thomas, a British solidarity activist.
The conversation included another member of …
by Bill Willers / August 1st, 2020
This respirator does not protect against the risk of contracting disease or infection.
—Warning with a box of N-95 respirators.
You have no right not to be vaccinated. You have no right not to wear a mask. You have no right to open up your business …. If you refuse to be vaccinated, the state has the power to literally take you to a doctor’s office and plunge a needle into your arm.
— Alan Dershowitz
The lockdown, along with the fear campaign with its daily doses of death statistics and warnings of impending spikes, is a full assault being advanced stepwise …
by Terry Everton / August 1st, 2020
Racism is not an exclusive Republican Party embodiment. Joe Biden represents the segregationist faction of the Democratic Party.
Re-Examining Emotion and Justice in Enlightenment Ideals
by Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin / July 31st, 2020
Satire on Romantic Suicide (1839) by Leonardo Alenza y Nieto (1807–1845)
Introduction
Why do we need to talk about Romanticism? What is Romanticism? And how does it affect us in the 21st century? The fact is that we are so immersed in Romanticism now that we cannot see the proverbial wood for the haunted-looking trees. Romanticism has so saturated our culture that we need to stand back and remind ourselves what it is, and examine how it has seeped into our thinking processes to …
by Terry Everton / July 31st, 2020
Another head scratcher. Arkansas Republican senator, Tom Cotton defended the institution of slavery by quoting the slave-owning so-called founding fathers who opined that slavery “was the necessary evil upon which the union was built…”
by Paul Haeder / July 31st, 2020
JT loves drawing sandhill cranes. Extruded from memory, JT sits on the sagging bumper of the Ford RV as he pushes capillaries of charcoal into the sky he delivers on the sketch pad paper.
Unending fire sky, he tells himself. He wants to imagine the sky this way, Turneresque, electric, something like all those village buildings he left behind in Huehuetenango what seems like a life time ago.
He steadies his hand and fingers, pushing and pulling, like an archaeologist digging through strata for evidence of life. He has no need to jump up and start over with colored pencils, Prismacolor pens, …
The Perils of Digitalized Progress in Education
by Katarzyna Gajewska / July 31st, 2020
Beware of digital education! COVID-19 may be used as a ruse to centralize power and control minds by technological elites.
Schools were created when books were not available, at least not at the mass scale as it is now. Nevertheless, they are still organized as if they responded to the conditions and circumstances from 200 years ago. The recent advancements in education seem to update the learning process to the technological capabilities of our times. However, they may bring a flattening of the old model using computers to enhance the …
by John Hawkins / July 31st, 2020
Chief of Police: One man cannot move a mountain.
Charlie Chan: No, but two men can start digging.
— Charlie Chan in Shanghai (1935) calling a spade a spade
Fifty years ago, Capitalists Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger initiated their rapprochement with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) after 25 years of total silence between the world’s two leading economic ideologies. America was in a Cold War with the ‘SPECTRE’ Soviets, but it was a Cold Shoulder they shared with the Chinese. A wall had come up between them. Through backchannels and diplomatic alleyways, the Commie-hating Nixon was invited to come play some ping-pong …
by Press TV / July 31st, 2020
Top Syrian diplomats slam harassment of Iranian plane as a double threat.
https://youtu.be/yFCMUX8g3ks
by Media Lens / July 31st, 2020
What does it mean when journalists who spent the last two decades promoting wars of aggression on brown- and black-skinned people in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen take a knee?
The Observer commented:
‘There is a dreadful familiarity about the killing of an unarmed black man, George Floyd, by white police officers in Minneapolis last Monday….
‘The fact that the US has been here before, countless times, does not lessen the horror of this crime nor mitigate brutal police actions.’
There was a dreadful familiarity about the West’s toppling of Gaddafi in 2011, but the Observer didn’t notice. …
Part VII: A Manifesto for the United States of America
by Paul Larudee / July 30th, 2020
Read Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, and Part VI.
It is bad enough that the U.S. makes vacuous claims to a democratic form of government, as described in Part IV. But even a democratic form of government does not equate to a democratic society, and most Americans participate in democratic decision making only once every 2-4 years, at most, i.e. during elections. Compare that with their daily interaction with corporations, businesses and …
Greens, Greenbacks, and Green Energy
by John Hawkins / July 30th, 2020
There is but one freedom, to put oneself right with death. After that, everything is possible.
— Albert Camus, Notebooks, 1942-51
For those of us who grew up watching Charlton Heston films, we can recall enactments of heroic courage, both in the early development and later downward decline of human civilization. Heston gave us a magnificent Moses in The Ten Commandments (1956), returning all scraggly from the wilderness, like some people I knew in the Sixties returning from poetry communes, holding up that Decalogue in revolutionary resistance to the gold lust of Baal. He refused to be a slave in Ben Hur …
by Kathy Kelly / July 30th, 2020
When evil-doing comes like falling rain, nobody calls out “stop!” When crimes begin to pile up they become invisible. When sufferings become unendurable, the cries are no longer heard. The cries, too, fall like rain in summer.
— Bertolt Brecht, “When evil-doing comes like falling rain” [Wenn die Untat kommt, wie der Regen fällt] (1935), trans. John Willett in Poems, 1913-1956, p. 247
In war-torn Yemen, the crimes pile up. Children who bear no responsibility for governance or warfare endure the punishment. In 2018, UNICEF said the war made Yemen a living hell for children. By the year’s end, Save the …
by Ramzy Baroud / July 29th, 2020
When International Court of Justice (ICC) Prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, confirmed last December that the Court has ample evidence to pursue a war crimes investigation in occupied Palestine, the Israeli government responded with the usual rhetoric, accusing the international community of bias and insisting on Israel’s ‘right to defend itself.’
Beneath the platitudes and typical Israeli discourse, the Israeli government knew too well that an ICC investigation into war crimes in Palestine could be quite costly. An investigation, in itself, represents an indictment of sorts. If Israeli individuals were to be indicted for war crimes, that is a different story, as …
New leader Keir Starmer spurns two chances to clear Jeremy Corbyn’s name, preferring instead to pay damages to former staff
by Jonathan Cook / July 29th, 2020
Jeremy Corbyn, the former left-wing leader of Britain’s Labour party, is once again making headlines over an “antisemitism problem” he supposedly oversaw during his five years at the head of the party.
This time, however, the assault on his reputation is being led not by the usual suspects – pro-Israel lobbyists and a billionaire-owned media – but by Keir Starmer, the man who succeeded him.
Since becoming Labour leader in April, Starmer has helped to bolster the evidence-free narrative of a party plagued by antisemitism under Corbyn. That has included Starmer’s refusal to exploit two major opportunities to challenge that narrative.
Had those …
by Binoy Kampmark / July 29th, 2020
The book of hours on Julian Assange is now being written. But the scribes are far from original. Repeated rituals of administrative hearings that have no common purpose other than to string things out before the axe are being enacted. Of late, the man most commonly associated with WikiLeaks’ publication project cannot participate in any meaningful way, largely because of his frail health and the dangers posed to him by the coronavirus. Having already made an effort to attend court proceedings in person, Assange has come across as judicial exotica, freak show fodder for Judge Vanessa Baraitser’s harsh version of …
by C.J. Hopkins / July 29th, 2020
So, the White Black Nationalist Color Revolution (“made possible in part by GloboCap”) appears to be going extremely well. According to Foreign Policy magazine, the Trump regime is clinging to power, but it’s only a matter of time until the identitarian moderate rebels drive the Putin-backed fascists out of office and restore democracy to the Western world.
Yes, that’s right, just when it looked like the corporate-sponsored, totally organic, peaceful uprising against racism was over, and the Russo-fascist Trump regime had survived, the Global Capitalist Anarchists of Portland and other militant “Resistance” cells have launched a …
by Yves Engler / July 28th, 2020
Contrasting the Jewish establishment’s reaction to alleged bigotry from a left-wing Toronto restaurant and unambiguous hatred from a far-right politician is a sad comment on their political priorities.
As I detailed here and here, the anti-Palestinian lobby went into overdrive after Foodbendors owner Kimberly Hawkins posted to Instagram at the start of the month: “Open Now – 8 PM for non-racist shoppers #Bloordale #Bloorstreet, #Toronto, #Open, #ftp [fuck the police] #FreePalestine and #ZionistsNotWelcome.”
The Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA) and others claimed the #ZionistsNotWelcome hashtag discriminated against Jews. CIJA tweeted no less than 25 times about …
by David Penner / July 28th, 2020
The right to have a slave implies the right in some one to make the slave; that right must be equal and mutual, and this would resolve society into a state of perpetual war.
— William Seward, from the “Freedom in the New Territories” speech, March 11, 1850
Long after they have set fire to the values of the New Deal and the civil rights movement, neoliberals continue to regard themselves as a bulwark protecting civilization from barbarism. In reality, they have betrayed all the values that the New Dealers and the civil rights leaders courageously and nobly fought for. Indeed, a …
by Visualizing Palestine / July 28th, 2020
A member of Tohono O’odham Nation, a migrant in the Sonoran desert, a Palestinian at an Israeli checkpoint, or a resident of a segregated and over-policed U.S. neighborhood — all are increasingly subject to the same technologies of repression.
— Gabe Schivone, journalist, co-author of Facing Down Settler Colonialism
In 2014, Elbit Systems of America (a subsidiary of Israel’s Elbit Systems) won a $145 million U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) contract to construct a network of 53 camera and radar-equipped Integrated Fixed Towers (IFTs) …
by Ramzy Baroud / July 27th, 2020
On July 11, a video footage which showed a popular Israeli TV celebrity demeaning Palestinian children from the Bedouin community in the Naqab area, went viral on social media.
“Let’s feed a Bedouin. Don’t you want to feed a Bedouin?” Israeli Children TV host, Roy Oz, repeatedly asks his children, who were seated in the back seat of his car. Outside the vehicle, two Palestinian children were filmed as they stood waiting eagerly for the cookies promised to them by the Israeli driver.
Palestinian Bedouins are treated like “monkeys”, said Atia al-Asem, head of the Regional Council of Palestinian Villages …
by Aidan Jonah / July 27th, 2020
by David S. Pena / July 27th, 2020
by Colin Todhunter / July 27th, 2020
The British government, regulators and global agrochemical corporations are colluding with each other and are thus engaging in criminal behaviour. That’s the message put forward in a new report written by environmentalist Dr Rosemary Mason and sent to the UK Environment Agency. It follows her January 2019 open letter to Werner Baumann, CEO of Bayer CropScience, where she made it clear to him that she considers Bayer CropScience and Monsanto criminal corporations.
Her letter to Baumann outlined a cocktail of corporate duplicity, cover-ups and criminality which the public and the environment are paying the price for, not least in terms of the …
by Terry Everton / July 27th, 2020
US president Donald Trump has expressed pride about a cognitive test he “aced.” The Montreal Cognitive Assessment, or MOCA, has been used to screen for signs of dementia.
by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers / July 27th, 2020
Portland protests say Go Home Feds as protests grow (by Noah Berger, AP)
Today is the 60th day of protests since the murder of George Floyd. This weekend, people marched in cities across the country in solidarity with Portland and in opposition to the US becoming a police state.
President Trump sending troops to cities added fuel to the nationwide uprising against racist police violence. Protests have grown not only in Portland but in Seattle, Chicago, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Omaha, Austin, Oakland, San Francisco, …
by Dean Baker and Gerald E. Scorse / July 27th, 2020
Prescription drugs have long provided two bad examples of American exceptionalism. They cost three-to-four times more than anywhere else, and we’re one of only two countries in the world that allows prescription drug advertising to consumers.
Far better to be like everybody else. Americans deserve drug prices in line with those in other countries. They don’t deserve a constant barrage of confusing and misleading ads.
Advertising is the lesser of two evils and the simplest to counter: just stop it already. Important voices have already made that recommendation.
TV commercials for prescription drugs always tell consumers to …
by Alicia Jrapko / July 26th, 2020
Santiago de Cuba. Photo: Bill Hackwell
Today Cuba celebrates the 67th anniversary of the assault on the Moncada and Carlos Manuel de Céspedes barracks that mark the beginning of the Cuban Revolution. From this beginning, Cuba’s altruistic view of making the world safer and healthier began.
It has developed into a society that gives everything it has without expecting credit. There are hundreds of examples of this; for instance, what took place in 1986, after the nuclear catastrophe of Chernobyl, when blockaded Cuba took in over 20,000 young cancer …
by Shawgi Tell / July 25th, 2020
In 2015 the Washington Post shared this observation of privately-operated charter schools by a veteran public school official:
David Hornbeck was the Maryland State Superintendent of Schools from 1976 to 1988 and the superintendent of the Philadelphia school district from 1994 to 2000. For years he was a supporter of charter schools, seeing them as an important tool in the school reform arsenal, and as Philadelphia’s superintendent, he recommended that more than 30 charter schools be allowed to open. Now, in a reversal that is rare in education, he said this: “The last 20 years make it clear I was wrong.” …
by James O'Neill / July 25th, 2020
Well over a century ago the German statesman Otto von Bismarck remarked that countries have neither friends nor enemies only interests. History since then has done nothing to dispel the wisdom of his observation. There are many people still alive today who were alive when this country fought for its very existence against the two mortal enemies of the day: Germany and Japan.
What is the status of those two countries today? Germany is the most economically powerful nation in Europe, a vital member of the European Union and finally after decades in which its economic power was vastly greater than …
