20 years with Oregon Coast Aquarium gives CEO deep blue view of world
by Paul Haeder / July 7th, 2020
While in her office overlooking the entrance to Lincoln County’s most popular attraction, she’s like a child in a candy store — she watches trees and shrubbery get yanked out to make way for a new admissions and ticketing station. “Wow, what a change.”
Then a nuthatch alights on the feeder suction cupped to her office window. “Spring’s coming early.”
Now the show really gets going — Carrie E. Lewis lugs into her second-floor office 10 large architectural design images for the aquarium’s five new capital improvement …
Let’s imagine there’s a fictitious country on our border, the government of which is committing unspeakable atrocities against its own people. And let us further imagine there is a steady stream of refugees attempting to cross over our border and into our country, so as to escape the horrors that await them, should they be unsuccessful in seeking asylum from our government. Is it not likely that the decent and fair-minded citizens of this country would demand that their leaders at least make a good-faith effort to rectify the situation in this living hell on our border? And is it …
Media Lens (ML) provides a first-rate critical eye on the media, especially the British mediascape, as well as sundry events in the world. In a recent piece, ML pointed to the science as supporting the effectiveness of wearing face masks against respiratory viral infections. In addition to citing science to buttress their support of mask wearing, ML attempted to dismiss those with opposing views as conspiracy theorists. ((I was very disappointed by ML, who have always seemed a cut above, in resorting to ad hominem.)) If that and the science was not persuasive, the fallback …
It all looked like it was going so well for Australia and Victoria, in particular. They could point to the mishandling of the Ruby Princess, a cruise ship that docked in Sydney and whose passengers disembarked chocked with coronavirus, precipitating 700 cases and some 21 deaths across the country. It had, till now, been the single most contagious incident in the COVID-19 annals of the antipodes. Victorians could hold their heads hubristically high.
Then, the dreaded spike returned. Before journalists had time to file, or arm chair warriors time to muster their thoughts, the coronavirus beast had gotten away from an …
In recent weeks movements in different countries have toppled statues and put the police and other institutions upholding systemic racism on the defensive. But, amidst unprecedented protests against racism, there has been remarkably little interest in the white supremacist foreign policy alliance currently driving conflict with China. The “Five Eyes” intelligence arrangement has faced almost no criticism for propelling the Canada-China hostage standoff.
The seven-decade old Five Eyes — Canada, Britain, New Zealand, Australia and US — alliance has been central to Washington’s anti-China push. To counter China the component countries recently announced plans to coordinate the production of strategic …
When President Clinton dropped 23,000 bombs on what was left of Yugoslavia in 1999 and NATO invaded and occupied the Yugoslav province of Kosovo, U.S. officials presented the war to the American public as a “humanitarian intervention” to protect Kosovo’s majority ethnic Albanian population from genocide at the hands of Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic. That narrative has been unraveling piece by piece ever since.
In 2008 an international prosecutor, Carla Del Ponte, accused U.S.-backed Prime Minister Hashim Thaci of Kosovo of using the U.S. bombing campaign as cover to murder hundreds of people to sell their internal organs on …
Let us start with the punchline: “Mass media in the United States, Europe, Canada, and Australia is depicting the People’s Republic of China as ‘capitalist’ because ‘capitalist’ is now a dirty word. Even people in the West see ‘market economy’ as some sort of filth.”
To call China ‘capitalist’ is to smear China. It is as if to say: “Chinese people are precisely like us. China is doing to the world the same injustice, committing the same crimes as we have been doing for 500+ years.”
Annexation by Israel of occupied Palestinian territory in the West Bank was never likely to happen on July 1, as many observers assumed. The date was not a deadline; it was a window opened by the Israeli government to carry out annexation before US President Donald Trump leaves office.
Unhappily for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, that window could slam shut in a matter of months, if current polling trends continue and Trump loses the presidential election in November.
Certainly, the fact that no dramatic move took place last week does not indicate that annexation is off the table. Indeed, following meetings …
The secret of freedom lies in educating people, whereas the secret of tyranny is in keeping them ignorant. — Maximilien Robespierre
The ongoing series of protests, riots and unrest following the death of George Floyd culminated in the establishment of a self-declared “autonomous zone” by activists in Seattle, Washington, after police abandoned a local precinct in the city’s Capitol Hill district. Lasting just three weeks until law enforcement retook the six block territory from occupants on July 1st, the Capitol Hill Organized Protest (CHOP) — initially called …
By most accounts, the response of UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson to the coronavirus pandemic has been abysmal. When the architect of the response himself catches the virus, he is either a more informed person for his sin or a buffoon in need of serious chastising.
In June, the prime minister claimed pride in announcing a new commitment for the majority – and a thumping one at that – of COVID-19 tests to be processed within 24 hours. Marvellous news to behold, except that Johnson had also revealed how he was getting a meaty grip on cabinet committees, thereby taking “control” …
It is many years ago that Jean-Paul Sartre wrote an essay, which was, in fact, the preface to his magnum opus, The Critique of Dialectical Reason, the title of which was “The Search for Method”.
A significant transformation from his critique of Heidegger, Being and Nothingness, Sartre attempted to liberate European Marxism from its captivity in Russian party ideology and restore its historicity. ((Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (1958), Critique of Dialectical Reason (1976), The Search for Method (1960).))
Contrary to liberal interpretations Sartre was not an advocate of either neo-Marxism or post-Marxism. If anything, and this can be …
As a restaurant manager, my lap is a proverbial dumping ground where servers regularly invite grumpy and entitled customers to sit. In the prevailing I don’t get paid enough to deal with this shit culture which permeates the service staffs in most eateries, the feces usually rises to the top – and most days I just happen to find myself occupying the highest rung on the crapometer ladder.
“What am I walking into,” I ask so I know which one of my standard I really don’t care about your petty bullshit but I’m …
As we celebrate the 244th anniversary of our nation’s Declaration of Independence, in the midst of demonstrations and protests against systemic racism and police brutality of African-Americans, it is time to consider replacing our national anthem with one more suitable to the values and priorities of the United States in 2020.
There are many important reasons to discard “The Star-Spangled Banner” as our national anthem right now. Not only is it nearly impossible to sing, but it was composed in 1814 by a slave-owning lawyer who prosecuted cases against abolitionists, and it only became our national anthem in 1931, when lynching of …
The US is ruled by a private club of a few hundred oligarchs and corporations. An uprising aimed at the police cannot succeed without taking economic and political power away from this club and redistributing it among the poor and disenfranchised, especially Blacks and Indigenous members of our society.
In Part I, we examined the creation of a Universal Basic Income (UBI) – an extension of the …
Barney came walking back into the living room from his kitchen holding a sandwich baggie and a bottle of cheap scotch. “I’m gonna teach that fuckin’ post office a thing or two about losin’ peoples unemployment checks,” he announced.
He took a pull off the bottle and his entire body trembled as he swallowed. I don’t think he’d been entirely sober since he’d been fired from the restaurant eight weeks ago. He handed the bottle to me and I had a tug off it as well. Nasty shit, but effective. Sometimes being a cheap drunk is the best you can …
A militant from the so-called Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) stands guard at the entrance of the eastern Syrian village of Baghouz, on March 13, 2020. (Photo by AFP) The United States has built a new military base, including an airport for military aircraft, for its occupying forces in Syria’s northeastern province of Hasakah.
Local sources told Syria’s state news agency SANA on Wednesday that the new base and its airport had been established in Jazira Region, located between Um Kahif Village and Tal Alu silos.
In reverential tones with ominous background music, director of Planet of the Humans Jeff Gibbs intones about “the most terrifying realization I ever had.” Gibbs instructs us, “Every expert I talked to wanted to bring my attention to the same underlying problem.” It is “not the elephant but the herd of elephants in the room,” Prof. Nina Jablonski warns. “The underlying problem,” the movie earnestly preaches is that “there are too many human beings.”
Planet of the Humans is produced and promoted by Michael Moore and is free online. The underlying message of the movie, critiquing the green energy …
Welcome to Kolektiva, an open-source platform for hosting anarchist videos from around the world. Our goal with Kolektiva is to help increase communication and material solidarity across borders and linguistic divides. If you are interested in getting involved — whether through hosting your content with us, or helping out with translation — please contact us at ten.puesirnull@aidemavitkelok.
There is a long history of human rights violations by Cameroon’s government against its Anglophone people. Brutalized by war with Boko Haram, the Cameroon military is now engaged in low intensity warfare against militant Anglophone separatists. On May 15, 2019 for instance, Cameroon’s military attacked Anglophone Separatist Bamenda, burning 70 dwellings and stores in retaliation for the killing of two government soldiers. ((“Cameroon: Bloodshed Escalates As World Turns Blind Eye,” Rosy Sadou, May 31, 2019, cajnews/AllAfrica.)) Under international pressure the Government is charging three of its military with the atrocity murder of 24 civilians in the Ngarbuh village massacre. ((“Cameroon: …
Chief HatueyIf you look at a US $20 bill, you might notice Andrew Jackson nervously watching statues of Columbus and Robert E. Lee coming down and wondering if his face is going to disappear from currency. As Democrats ponder which militarist they wish to glorify in the next round of monuments, it is critical to realize that statues which go up are at least as important as the ones that come down. Perhaps the best nominee for a new statue is Hatuey.
In the past, there have been many attempts at holding accused Israeli war criminals accountable. Particularly memorable is the case of the late Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, (known, among other nicknames, as the ‘Butcher of Sabra and Shatila’) whose victims attempted to try him in a Belgian Court in 2002.
Like all other efforts, the Belgian case was dropped under American pressure. History seems to be repeating itself.
On December 20, the International Court of Justice (ICC) Chief Prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, resolved that she had sufficient evidence to investigate …
A view of deserted Ranganathan Street in Chennai on June 23, 2020. Hindu TimesAt times, states compete to showcase merchandise and relative productive capacities. Other times, many of these states sell misery to gain access to economic packages, charities and loans. Today is the time when they compete to show off their capacity to impose the most efficient lockdown on their citizenry. Of course, the priority is to make this imposition consensual, because that would showcase the self-discipline of the national workforce. …
We know that wearing a mask outside health care facilities offers little, if any, protection from infection.
— The New England Journal of Medicine, May 21, 2020
(T)hey told us exactly what was coming, and advised us to shut up and follow orders. Tragically, most people have done just that.
— CJ Hopkins, 2020
Image: Anadolu AgencyIt’s difficult to imagine a crueler attack on the human family than the insidious prevention of person-to-person contact. What amounts to house arrest, plus enforced …
NATO and its supporters and member-nations are hiding the fact that the predominant belief in many of these nations is that they’re dictatorships that merely pontificate ‘democracy’ to other nations.
NATO, which is America’s propagandistically ‘pro-democracy’ military alliance against Russia and against China, polled the people in 53 countries — some of which are in NATO and some of which aren’t — and asked them whether they believe “My country is democratic,” and found that NATO’s own core country, U.S., was, itself, #38 down from …
As tribal governments call on President Trump to cancel his Mount Rushmore Independence Day celebration, we look at why Native Americans have long pushed for the removal of the monument carved into the sacred Black Hills and designed by a sculptor with ties to the Ku Klux Klan. “This place is very, very sacred to our people,” says Nick Tilsen, president and CEO of the NDN Collective. “Stealing our land and then carving the faces of four white men who were colonizers, who committed genocide against Indigenous people, is an egregious act of violence.”
Arctic temperatures are soaring to new records… and staying there, ever since May of this year. Truth be known, the Arctic’s been heating up for years. Siberia recently hit 105°F. That’s not normal. It’s 30°F hotter than normal.
Farther south, the Amazon rainforest is hit with a drought every 5 years like clockwork, not regular run of the mill droughts but massive excessive devastating droughts. NASA’s GRACE satellite, measuring water levels stored deep beneath Earth’s surface showed Deep Red Zones beneath the Amazon rainforest, not watery blue.
Climate activists have been warning about overheating of the planet for decades, ever since Dr. …
It is impossible to be calm about the fate of the Palestinian people. Since 1948, they have been denied their country and denied their right to exist. One United Nations resolution upon another has said that their exile must end, that they must be allowed to build lives of dignity. Between …
According to an iconoclastic article in the latest issue of “Science Weakly” (an online publication aimed at highly motivated [but poorly educated] science buffs), part-time honorary particle physicist Dr. D.J. Trump has finally uncovered the illusive corollary to Niels Bohr’s Quantum Theory, upon which modern subatomic physics is founded. Dr. Trump is believed to have stumbled upon the discovery of “Want’em Mechanics” (his term) while descending the stairway of Airforce One.
“As I carefully watched my fantastically beautiful and tremendously expensive black Oxfords take a series of steps toward the ground,” recounted Trump, “it suddenly occurred to me that the very …
Somewhere along the way I became an associate. Before that I was a waiter who became a server. Hell, I’ve even been periodically transformed from a barkeep into a mixologist.
The dishwashers are now sanitation engineers. The door person has become the valet. The people who used to be housekeepers are now room attendants. By the way, those individuals we refer to as guests used to be customers. It just sort of happened. One day the bosses started calling all of us associates; not just our managers, either – who are now job facilitators – but the hotel general manager, …
