Latest articles

George Orwell (Eric Blair) was not the first or only person to write that empire needs euphemism as well as control over language and not just the people who use it. ((George Orwell, Politics in the English Language, 1946.)) Mark Twain and even Ernest Hemingway also captured this quality although they were usually less explicit in their illustrations. In contemporary memory George Carlin gave what was probably the best classic rendition of the pathology.

RT reported that Texas estate agents have decided that residential property descriptions should no longer use the term “master bedroom”. Instead the term “primary bedroom” is …

On June 2, 2020, Jan Dehn of Ashmore Investment Management Limited remarked:

If central banks were to allow asset prices to reflect the actual underlying fundamentals – record levels of debt, record low productivity growth, record unemployment, record populism – the resulting crashes in financial markets would be so large that most Western economies would be plunged into deep and lasting depressions. ((Jan Dehn. June 2, 2020. “When market valuations become too high to fall“, June 2, 2020.))

Putting aside the fact that many countries and regions are already in a deep and lasting economic depression that started long …

Denis RancourtDenis Rancourt is a person who is unafraid to challenge conventional wisdom. For example, he is skeptical about the scientific consensus around climate change, and recently, he looked at the meta-analyses of using masks and questions their effectiveness against viral respiratory infections. Whether Rancourt is right or not in his conclusions is consequential, but more important is that he raises arguments and interpretations of the data that should set in process debate to help steer toward a …

California Democrats want John Wayne’s name removed from Orange County airport. This is why.

In 2016, Tomi Lahren, right-wing talk show host on Fox Nation, opened up during an emotional interview on The Daily Show With Trevor Noah and revealed a rare condition she’s lived with her entire life. “I don’t see color,” she told Noah, holding back tears during a poignant discussion about the Ferguson protests. Despite her impairment, Lahren has since courageously continued her work, delivering sharp opinions on American politics and inspiring her fellow visually-impaired fans to not let their conditions define them. We sat down with Lahren for an inside look into how she copes with her condition …

If you’re like most 16 year old males, there’s a better than average chance that the suit inventory in your wardrobe consists of a total of one. And by suit I mean the matching sport coat and pants that was purchased on clearance from a discount warehouse that has as much chance of staying in business as a groundhog attempting to take up tenure on the 18th hole of Torrey Pines. It’s the periodic skeleton in the closet that rears its head primarily during weddings you don’t care about, shows its face annually to celebrate the birth of Jesus at …

The not-so-subtle purpose of compulsory schooling is to ensure a populace subservient to the status quo which primarily serves the ruling class. What we call education is derived from a Prussian model designed to reward individuals based on how well they stay in line and do as they’re told through the process of grading. It’s no mystery that those who conform the most by repeating verbatim the state-controlled curriculum they’re force fed receive the highest marks and are thus given the greatest opportunities for societal advancement. By discouraging individual …

The deregulation of international capital flows (financial liberalisation) has effectively turned the planet into a free-for-all bonanza for the world’s richest capitalists. Under the post-World-War Two Bretton Woods monetary regime, nations put restrictions on the flow of capital. Domestic firms and banks could not freely borrow from banks elsewhere or from international capital markets, without seeking permission, and they could not simply take their money in and out of other countries.

Domestic financial markets were segmented from international ones elsewhere. Governments could to a large extent run their own macroeconomic policy without being restrained by monetary or fiscal policies devised by …

Trauma creates change you don’t choose. Healing is about creating change you do choose.
— Michelle Rosenthall

A feature on a local person usually doesn’t go down the rabbit hole of a person’s trauma and her battles scraping to get out of darkness.

A few artists I’ve interviewed  unleashed catharses into their personal journeys, including personal hells; however, after reading my drafts, many have declined to “expose” so much of their lives for public consumption. The exposing of one’s trials and tribulations is powerful to readers, but many times opening up in person is easy; seeing it in print is devastating.

“Out of sight, …

Over the past 20 years, like clockwork, severe droughts have hit the Amazon every five years with regularity 2005, 2010, 2015. Of course, droughts have hit the Amazon rainforest throughout paleoclimate history, but this time it’s different. The frequency and severity is off the charts.

Recent data is starting to show 2020 as another dire year. “The old paradigm was that whatever carbon dioxide we put up in [human-caused] emissions, the Amazon would help absorb a major part of it,” according to Sassan Saatchi of NASA’s JPL. ((“NASA Finds Amazon Drought Leaves Long Legacy of Damage”, NASA Earth Science, August 9, …

The unexamined life is not worth living.

— Socrates

From our earliest years, we are over-socialized.  An organized regimen of daily activity, we are taught, is the basis for a “productive” life.  Such “productivity” — unlike immeasurables such as deepening self-awareness — is later concretely identifiable in such acquisitions as university degrees, “positions,” “achievements,” and so on.  Of course, Calvinist-Puritan Europeans feared that “idle hands did the devil’s work” (sensuality, adultery, drunkenness, etc.).  To “keep busy,” by contrast, was to produce tangible results often beneficial both to self and community.

But what of our highly active, even frenetic, daily lives in the early 21st …

The chasm between what is often uttered on a corporate level and what is actually meant is as cavernous as the stale air which has moved in and taken up permanent residence between the ears of most District Managers. The words you actually hear pursing your employer’s chapped lips are little more than the white noise acting as a Klingon cloaking device camouflaging the between-the-lines code you’re assumed to be too daft to crack. But not unlike most mediocrity masquerading as authenticity, what isn’t said is usually louder than …

It is one of the oldest professions, stacked with rules, conventions and protocols.  It is also tribal and hierarchical.  The law, presided over its executors, the judges, do not do transparency well.  It stands to reason: according to Charles Dickens, the business of the law is to make business for itself, creating its own impenetrable labyrinths and traps while insisting on its own policing.  Now, the high priests in Australia are asking searching questions about the case of former High Court justice Dyson Heydon.

On Monday, the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age revealed the existence, and the findings of an …

Question: Should people from the oppressor group tell the oppressed people how to conduct their resistance?

Should Jews tell Palestinians what form their resistance to Israeli oppression should take? During World War II should Germans have directed Jewish, Roma, Slavic resistance in the concentration camps?

Nowadays, should whites be telling Blacks how to resist systemic racism — a racism entrenched by segments (and maintained by a plurality) of White society?

I think not. That is why I have a problem, with a likeliest well-intentioned essay, “Racism: Another Crossroads.”

The writer identifies himself as a White male. He then …

The film Wasp Network, based on the book The Last Soldiers of the Cold War, The Story of the Cuban Five by Fernando Morais, is a co-production between France, Spain, Belgium and Brazil. It was shown in Cuba last December, soon after it came out. You can now watch it on Netflix.

It is not a film on the Cuban Five, and not a Cuban film. It is a story about three of the Cubans who infiltrated the Miami network of terrorist groups dedicated to destroying the Cuban socialist system. The story focuses on Rene Gonzalez, with Geraldo Hernandez receiving …