Global warming is not waiting around for the signatories to the Paris climate accord ‘15 to go to net zero emissions 2030/50. Sorry, those bold plans are way too little way too late. Already, across the board, the planet is on a hot streak that defies all projections. It’s starting to look downright scary!
Listen… when Helsinki has no snow in January/February accompanied by inordinate heat, it’s a powerful signal that “something is not right.” According to the Finnish Meteorological Institute: “Monthly records were not just broken, they were shattered with large margins. ((“9 Freaky Phenomena Revealing How Warm This Winter …
My deceased mother-in-law, not a pious person but one of utterly conventional morals, used to say when someone over 70 — she died of heart failure somewhere in her mid-70s after our divorce — was diagnosed with some serious illness, “well, at least they can’t die young.” I say she was conventional because she certainly had all the usual ideas about what to do and say among polite people. Maybe having lived through the Second World War — on the losing side — and knowing enough people who did die young just gave her a certain sobriety in matters of …
“Sanders can’t win the presidency. He’s too far left.” Others opine, “He’ll never get anything through congress. He hasn’t ever accomplished anything.” What is this movement then? How did a ‘nobody’ build the greatest political movement and fundraising machine in the history of the United States? Because his ideas are popular. They have broad appeal. They are just unappealing to the very few who control what goes out on the airwaves and unfortunately influence a wide swath of voters.
How did the Republicans get to be so powerful? There are a few reasons. One of which was by not giving in. …
There are several versions of the old German folk tale of Rumpelstiltskin. The story begins with a greedy king who is told by a foolish old miller that a young girl (the miller’s daughter) had the ability to spin hay into gold. When the poor girl is locked into a tower with bales of straw, a loom and orders to transform it all into gold under threat of death, a magical imp appears out of thin air and they reach an agreement: He will use his magic to spin …
The Israeli prime minister has worn down voters by refusing to go, while his rival Benny Gantz has no visible path to power
by Jonathan Cook / March 5th, 2020
It may have taken him a year and three elections to achieve it, but on Tuesday, Benjamin Netanyahu started to look like the Great Houdini of Israeli politics – escape artist extraordinaire.
With almost all of the ballots counted, Netanyahu’s bloc of settler and extreme religious parties was set to win 58 seats in the 120-member parliament – three shy of an absolute majority.
But more importantly, his Likud party is expected to secure three more seats than his chief rival, Benny Gantz, a former army general who leads the secular right-wing Blue and White party.
What if the Coronavirus reaches the besieged Gaza Strip?
While the question carries great urgency for all Palestinians living under Israel’s military occupation, the Gaza situation is particularly complex and extremely worrying.
Nearly 50 countries have already reported cases of COVID-19 disease, one of several epidemics that are caused by the Coronavirus. If developed countries, such as Italy and South Korea, are struggling to contain the deadly virus, one can only imagine what occupied Palestinians would have to face should the virus strike.
In fact, according to official Palestinian reports, the Coronavirus has already reached Palestine following a visit by …
Discovery of fire. Development of language. Rise of civilizations. Acceleration of industrialization. Proliferation of the Internet. Invention of memes. The newest genus on our planet, commonly known as Gen Z, embodies the pinnacle of human evolution, according to a new study published in Nature.
“The Cognitive Trade-off Hypothesis postulates that Gen Zs’ constantly shrinking attention span is indicative of Gen Zs’ growing multitasking abilities from smartphone use,” said study author Ella Jarvis, Associate Director of the Mammalian Evolutionary Genetics Centre at the University of Chicago.
In the study, 230 high school students were covertly observed in naturalistic cinema environments.
As people march off to the polls today to pick their favorite political actor of the year, I hear precious few voices openly asking what seem to me to be obvious questions, like WHO produced the movie that is their candidacy? Who directed it? Who wrote the script? Who are the investors that will be expecting to see returns on their investment, if their movie and their best actor should somehow win? And how far do the networks of wealth, influence and control extend beyond those public faces inside the campaign? None of these questions strike me as tangential; rather …
Emboldened by the citizenry’s inattention and willingness to tolerate its abuses, the government has weaponized one national crisis after another in order to expands its powers.
The war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on illegal immigration, …
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 …
