An anti-Semite used to be a person who disliked Jews. Now it is a person who Jews dislike.
– Hajo Meyer, Jewish German-born Dutch physicist and Auschwitz survivor.
Antisemitism is a trick we always use.
– Shulamit Aloni, Jewish Israeli, former Israeli Minister of Education, longtime member of the Israeli parliament.
On Sunday, February 23 before a match at Yeshiva University, two brave young Muslim Brooklyn College volleyball players “took a knee” during the playing of Hatikvah, the Israeli national anthem. Omar Rezika (Soph.) and Hunnan Butt (Fr.) following the example of NFL football player, Colin Kaepernick, who protested the police brutality …
On Friday, three new patients in California, Oregon and Washington State who had not traveled outside of the US were diagnosed with COVID-19, suggesting community transmission in the US has begun. The first death …
Despite a widespread media narrative spreading incorrect information, NO agreements have been made on the Coastal Gas Link Pipeline, and the call for solidarity actions remains firmly in place!
“As Canada and BC have proposed an agreement to recognize Wet’suwet’en title on our unceded lands, Coastal Gaslink and the RCMP continue to violently trespass against our will.
A message to our supporters: This is not over. We want the RCMP and CGL off our lands.
This proposal from BC and Canada is long overdue, following decades of denial of Wet’suwet’en …
My father, a well-educated lawyer with a very sophisticated mind, used to advise me to “keep it simple.” By simple he didn’t mean simplistic. He meant fundamentally logical and to the point. So I will do that here and stick to some simple realities, now that understanding what is going on in the world has become an idiot’s game played by the corporate mass media to confuse people.
I have been writing about the dangers of technology for many years. Not all technology, of course, for the pencil I am writing this with is a technology, and an amazing and underappreciated …
More politically dependent than almost all other industries, arms manufacturers play for keeps in the nation’s capital. They target ads and events sponsorships at decision makers while hiring insiders and military stars to lobby on their behalf.
Activist Tamara Lorincz recently posted a photo of an F-35 ad in a bus shelter in front of Parliament Hill. US weapons giant Lockheed Martin is pushing hard to win a $19 billion contract to supply the Canadian air force with a fleet of new fighter jets.
To gain a share of the public funds on offer arms companies target ads at political and military …
The growing popularity of an American social democratic presidential candidate who calls himself a democratic socialist has revived every anti-humanity distortion of the past, emanating from the tiny minority ruling our country through its servant class of professionals in media and politics. Newer and more bloody mythologies about supposedly existing socialisms are expanding on the incredible death tolls supposedly inflicted by previous attempts at achieving the common good by confiscating the wealth of royalty and the rich in nations where free markets were supposedly destroyed by savages who felt that one thousand people and one thousand loaves of bread meant …
Even worse than the persistently high failure rate of brick-and-mortar charter schools is the extraordinary failure rate of cyber charter schools year after year. Even the nature and scope of corruption in these deregulated online schools is more troubling than the corruption that has long plagued brick-and-mortar charter schools nationwide.
The abysmal performance of cyber charter schools is so visible and chronic that many charter school advocates do not even bother trying to sugar-coat their chronically substandard performance.
Thus it was laughable to hear that owners-operators of cyber charter schools in Nevada celebrated “student achievement” and “public school options” during Public Schools …
The economic calculation argument (ECA) has to do with the claim that, in the absence of market prices, a socialist economy would be unable to make rational choices concerning the allocation of resources and that this would make socialism an impracticable proposition. Tracing the historical development of this argument, this article goes on to consider some of its basic assumptions about how the price mechanism actually works in practice; in so doing, it attempts to demonstrate that the argument is based upon fundamentally shaky foundations. A rational approach to the allocation of resources in a socialist economy is then sketched …
After 33 Turkish troops were killed in a Syrian army offensive on February 27 amidst the current Russia-backed campaign to liberate Idlib, Erdogan responded by laying the blame entirely on Russia and Syria – successfully avoiding all mention of the uncomfortable fact that Turkey has been protecting radical terror networks not only in Idlib but across Syria as a whole for years.
During this time, Islamist forces within Turkey favorable to Assad’s overthrow have been attempting to play a complex game of geopolitics for which they are totally unqualified.
Turkey in over its head
One of the most wild-card members of NATO, Turkey …
Few in Israel expect the country’s third general election in a year to end with a markedly different outcome from the previous two. Barring a last-minute upset, most of those turning out on Monday assume the political stalemate will continue. There are already rumblings from politicians of an imminent fourth round of voting.
Paradoxically, much of the Israeli electorate – at least the Jewish majority – agrees on political fundamentals. They believe it is time to permanently seize much of the territory that was one day meant to form the basis of a Palestinian state.
Author and civil rights attorney John Whitehead of the Rutherford Institute joins Rick Sanchez to discuss the enduring effects of the PATRIOT Act and erosion of civil liberties in the US. He also explains “Operation Vigilant Eagle,” a surveillance program to keep tabs on US veterans and track what they say online.
Attorneys for WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange are citing a 20-year-old extradition treaty between the US and UK at day four of the embattled journalist’s extradition hearing. The treaty prohibits extradition for political offenses. Former UK MP and friend of Julian Assange George Galloway discusses the implications.
With Monday’s 1000 point stock market plunge the internet has been set ablaze with discussion of a new crash looming on the horizon. The fact that such a chain reaction collapse was only kept at bay due to massive liquidity injections by the Federal Reserve’s overnight repo loans should not be ignored. These injections which began in September 2019, have grown to over $100 billion per night… all that to support the largest financial bubble in human history with global derivatives estimated at $1.2 quadrillion (20 times the global GDP!).
Sadly economic illiteracy is so pervasive among today’s modern economists that …
Judicial proceedings are taking place in DC federal court where the judge has ruled inadmissible the question whether the democratically elected Nicolás Maduro or the Trump-chosen Juan Guaidó is the legitimate president of Venezuela.
Like an emperor of yore appointing regents of vassal states, US President Trump tapped then recently seated head of the suspended Venezuelan National Assembly Juan Guaidó as president of Venezuela on January 22, 2019. The US has viewed the dominions south of the Rio Grande as the empire’s “backyard” since the 1823 Monroe Doctrine.
The 35-year-old Guaidó thus became one of the world’s youngest chiefs-of-state …
Throughout the history of Western Civilization there are times, but only on rare occasions, when people en masse feel compelled to run into the streets, similar to the storming of the Bastille 1789, screaming at the top of their lungs: “Stop the Madness!”
Now is one of those times, as only recently Feb 2020 the Trump administration signed a regulation to remove America’s water resources from federal protection. This is the largest rollback of the Clean Water Act since passage into law in 1972. No other administration over the past 50 years has removed federal control over certain key aspects of …
You can imagine how I felt when I was informed, and when the doctor told me I only had a 97% chance of living, I admit it, I’m a strong supple male, but I broke down in tears for a while upon hearing the news.
But actually the odds of living are usually much better. Based on age and other factors the risk is probably way less than 1%, and I might even return to normal next week, but still, a whole week of being sick? I was horrified.
Four ethical theories — Kantian, utilitarian, virtue-based, and religious — demonstrate the lack of moral foundation in the continuing Israeli occupation of the West Bank and especially in Trump’s “deal of the century”. In my previous article I discussed Kantian and utilitarian moral theories, and in the following I cover the virtue-based and religious theories as they apply to the occupation.
The theory of virtue ethics, whose greatest advocate is still Aristotle, says that an act is moral if it is performed as a result of having a virtuous character. Virtue ethics is not primarily about codifying and applying moral principles, …
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was launched in 2000 and has $46.8 billion in assets (December 2018). It is the largest charitable foundation in the world and distributes more aid for global health than any government. One of the foundation’s stated goals is to globally enhance healthcare and reduce extreme poverty.
The Gates Foundation is a major funder of the CGIAR system (formerly the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research) — a global partnership whose stated aim is to strive for a food-secured future. Its research is aimed at reducing rural poverty, increasing food security, improving human health and nutrition …
Thursday, February 27, Woolwich Crown Court. The first round of extradition hearings regarding Julian Assange’s case concluded a day early, to recommence on May 18th. It ended on an insensible note very much in keeping with the woolly-headed reasoning of Judge Vanessa Baraitser, who is of the view that a WikiLeaks publisher in a cage does not put all heaven in a rage. On Wednesday, Assange’s defence had requested whether he would be able to leave the confines of his glass cage and join his legal team. As Assange had explained in response to his nodding off during proceedings, “I …
Nearly a thousand of us were gathered in Chicago beneath the alarming edifice of Chicago’s “Trump Tower.” Iran’s General Qassem Soleimani had been brutally murdered the day before in Iraq, with several of his associates; and the welcome surprise of Iran’s relatively measured response was yet a few days off. A region-wide conflagration seemed just on the verge of engulfing perhaps millions of lives, and consuming, as well, much of the species’ remaining time and attention needed to face our direst threats: with the new war we could fear continued paralysis in the face of an unfolding climate collapse, a …
The New York Times is one of the most prominent mediums for the Democratic Party establishment’s talking points. On Sunday, after Bernie Sanders’ landslide victory in the Nevada caucus, here is what twofront page articles on the subject are saying. It amounts to a case study of the paper’s and the Democratic establishment’s fear of Bernie winning the party nomination.
Once again, the Russians are coming. This time, like the last, we are reminded, they want Bernie Sanders to win the Democratic Party nomination.
With Bernie Sanders’ powerful Nevada victory, the moderates are in danger of losing. The …
Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, must be channeling the spirit of Houdini as he continues to plot his escape from one of the most convoluted political dilemmas in Israel’s history.
It is no secret that Netanyahu’s political behavior is almost entirely shaped by his desire to survive in office for as long as possible in order to avoid possible jail time. But how long will the Israeli escape artist manage to survive, now that a date for his trial has already been set?
After months of bargaining with the country’s political elite on one hand, and pleading to his own right-wing constituency …
Wednesday, February 26, Woolwich Crown Court. Today, the focus shifted to the protagonist himself and the nature of the US-UK Extradition Treaty of 2003, a contentious document that shines all too favourably for US citizens.
Julian Assange, whose deteriorating condition has been noted for months by psychologists, doctors and UN Special Rapporteur on torture, Nils Melzer, has been making a fist of it in the dock, despite being in Kafkaesque isolation. Exhaustion, however, is manifest. Judge Vanessa Baraitser has been keeping an eye on Assange’s demeanour, prodding his lawyers at one point to inspect him. His eyes had closed, …
Robert Peston is one of the UK’s most high-profile broadcast journalists, renowned for his theatricality and… curious… halting… delivery. As political editor of ITV News he has enormous influence, including 1 million followers on Twitter, just behind the BBC’s political editor, Laura Kuenssberg, with 1.1 million. He also hosts a weekly ITV political discussion show, ‘Peston’. From 2006-2014, Peston was the business editor for BBC News and from 2014-2015 economics editor. Before that, he worked at the Financial Times 1991-2000, becoming the financial editor in charge of business and financial coverage. He then became a contributing editor of the hard-right …
The second day of extradition hearings against Julian Assange and by virtue of that, WikiLeaks, saw Mark Summers QC deliver a formidable serve for the defence at Woolwich Crown Court. “It’s difficult to conceive of a clearer example of an extradition request that boldly and blatantly misstates the facts as they are known to be to the US government.” The targets were, respectively, allegations by the US Department of Justice that Assange attempted to conceal Chelsea Manning’s identity for nefarious purposes and, second, that WikiLeaks was reckless as to the potential consequences of harm in releasing unredacted State Department cables …
The Philippines President Duterte’s recent announcement that the 1998 U.S.-Philippines Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA) would be cancelled has renewed hope that not only would this former U.S. colony finally attain freedom from imperial manipulation, but also that a new emerging age of infrastructure development can usher in an end of poverty and war in the Pacific.
On February 7, the Philippine president notified the USA that a 180 day period has begun in which time American military personal will have to evacuate the territory with Foreign Secretary Teodoro Locsin stating “the deputy chief of mission of the embassy of the united …
Last year was the thirtieth anniversary of the annexation of the German Democratic Republic. It was the seventieth anniversary of the establishment of the People’s Republic of China.
Shortly after that annexation in 1989 began and was consummated in 1990, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was dissolved and the core of that union, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) was invaded by the United States of America in the form of its “economic advisors” and with the covert support to Mikhail Gorbachev and then Boris Yeltsin. The overall result of which was an attempt– almost successful — to return …
A Review of David Ray Griffin’s The Christian Gospel for Americans: A Systematic Theology
by Edward Curtin / February 25th, 2020
There are very few writers who have done more to try to open the public’s mind to the evil nature of the American empire than David Ray Griffin. His series of books on the false flag attacks of September 11, 2001 will endure for a long time, and they will one day, when it is safe to do so, be recognized as seminal texts exposing the traitorous conspiracy of elements within the Unites States’ government to launch the endless so-called war on terror. That many now know, and many more will, that those so-called “terrorist” attacks were carried out by …
If one thing drives me to write, especially these blog posts, it is the urgent need for us to start understanding power. Power is the force that shapes almost everything about our lives and our deaths. There is no more important issue. Understanding power and overcoming it through that understanding is the only path to liberation we can take as individuals, as societies, and as a species.
Which is why it should be simply astonishing that no one in the media, supposedly a free marketplace of ideas, ever directly addresses matters of power – beyond the shadow play of party politics …
On Monday, WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange’s one-week extradition hearing began at Woolwich Crown Court in South East London. The judge heard the opening arguments for the prosecution and defense. The prosecution began, accusing the journalist, who exposed the US government’s war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, of espionage charges that would carry 175 years in jail.
The US-based investigative journalist Kevin Gosztola, who was at the media annex during the proceeding, reported that U.S. Government barrister, James Lewis QC, said that prosecutors “are not criminalizing the publication of classified materials but rather the publication of names of informants or dissidents …
