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Permafrost covers 25% of the Northern Hemisphere. It is the world’s largest icebox, and its landmass is 4.5xs larger than Antarctica, 6.5xs larger than the United States.  It is stuffed full of carbon locked in frozen ground accumulated over eons, which, by way of contrast, makes coal power plant emissions look bush-league.

Most notably, permafrost has an image of permanence and slow/gradual change, “the sloth of the north.” But, that slothful image is now out-of-date. Global warming has changed the equation. Nowadays, permafrost disintegration is officially hot news.

Scientists that have long studied the gradual thawing of permafrost are now experiencing a …

While billionaires Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos can take some of the “blame” for an uptick in broad opposition to the nation’s 7,000 non-profit and for-profit charter schools, resistance to privately-operated charter schools has been building for nearly three decades.

Opposition to segregated, test-obsessed, and unaccountable charter schools that fleece the public treasury is not new. Many defenders of public education and the public interest have been consistently exposing and criticizing charter schools for a long time.

If anything, billionaires Trump and DeVos have served mainly as catalysts for simmering resistance to deregulated charter schools that transfer public wealth to private interests. …

Foreign Affairs, a staunch brick in the establishment media edifice, just resurrected the events of Tiananmen Square from 30 years ago in “The New Tiananmen papers.”

… the number of demonstrators increased to perhaps as many as a million, including citizens from many walks of life. The students occupying the square declared a hunger strike, their demands grew more radical, and demonstrations spread to hundreds of other cities around the country. Deng decided to declare martial law, to take effect on May 20.

But the demonstrators dug in, and Deng ordered the use of force to commence on the …

(Full article …)

While the continued mental assault on what is left of public consciousness still features the idiot fiction of Russiagate, or how the evil Putin arranged to trash our great American democracy and defeat holy mother Hillary on behalf of cursed father Donald, the month of June offered not one but two major fictional treatments of historic reality to further reduce innocent minds to enslaved mentalities. The fables of D-Day, celebrated every year in glorification of a war actually won by the Soviet Union but taught as America’s gift to the global marketplace, and the unholy terror alleged by evil China …

There is no such thing as “my body.”  I am a human organism (Homo sapiens), synergistically comprised of organs, tissues, and fluids.  Reciprocally interacting, deviation-reducing processes maintain an essentially balanced “steady-state.” Biologist Walter Cannon, referring figuratively to this “wisdom of the body,” coined the term “homeostasis.”  Thus, when any disruption occurs, the organism makes the necessary corrections: up-to-99% of bodily “ailments” are eventually self-correcting and self-repairing.  The very word “dis-ease” still suggests such overwhelmingly temporary disruptions of the norm (the steady-state).  (The cybernetic metaphor, terribly over-extrapolated these days, is somewhat applicable: deviation-reducing, “negative-feedback.”)

Yet the dominant “medical model” remains, even today, …

“Narcotic: drug that produces analgesia (pain relief), narcosis (state of stupor or sleep), and addiction (physical dependence on the drug). In some people narcotics also produce euphoria (a feeling of great elation).”

Introduction

Romanticism is a philosophical movement of the nineteenth century which had a profound influence on music which can still be seen right up to today. Its main characteristics in music are the emphasis on the personal, dramatic contrasts, emotional excess, a focus on the nocturnal, the ghostly and the frightful, spontaneity, and extreme subjectivism. Romanticism in culture implied a turning inward and encouraged introspection. As Hegel wrote: …

When categorizing my class background I’ve invariably replied “working class” but in truth that was more aspirational than factual. My father was either unemployed or underemployed and died of a heart attack at age 46 while working as a night shift orderly at a veteran’s hospital in Fargo, ND. I was 12-years-old, with a 7-year-old brother, and thereafter our family income consisted of whatever my mother earned from doing infrequent odd jobs and the social security checks she received for her two boys. Thanks to the G.I. Bill, we had a small house.

Given our socioeconomic status, I had virtually no …

It truly looked grand, impressive – the fourth most populous country on earth voted in general elections, which were held on 17 April 2019. Hundreds of positions were for grab: that of the president, the vice president, members of the People’s Consultative Assembly (MPR), and members of local legislative bodies. There were 190 million eligible voters in the country, and sixteen parties, including four new ones.

The only “tiny” spoiler of this magnificence was that, as always in post-1965 Indonesia, not one single political party was really representing the people. All of them were pro-business, all controlled by the oligarchy. Almost all the candidates were ‘competing’ …

The Chief Military Advocate General of the Israeli army, Sharon Afek, and the US Department of Defense General Counsel, Paul Ney, shared a platform at the ‘International Conference on the Law of Armed Conflict’, which took place in Herzliya, Israel between May 28-30.

Their panel witnessed some of the most misconstrued interpretations of international law ever recorded. It was as if Afek and Ney were literally making up their own law on warfare and armed conflict, with no regard to what international law actually stipulates.

Unsurprisingly, both Afek and Ney agreed on many things, including that Israel and the US are …

There once was a world where state actors operated in an anarchic international environment, where maximizing their overall power was their goal, and war was their means of achieving it. That world is now dead.
In its place we have the current spectacle of what were known as the “great powers” who are now, at least, formally if by no means fully, democratic and economically interdependent on one another and informally, if firmly, coordinated by transnational elites.
However, lest we be confused by their seeming historical similarities, this situation is very different than the one the world found itself in …

What’s gone on this morning sends clear and dangerous signals to journalists and newsrooms across Australia.  This will chill public interest reporting.

— News Corp Australia spokesperson, The West Australian, June 4, 2019

These are dark times for journalists and publishers.  It did not seem coincidental that Annika Smethurst, a News Corp journalist and political affairs editor, would be a target of an Australian Federal Police warrant.  Chelsea Manning, courtesy of a ruling by Judge Anthony Trenga, remains in federal custody in the United States.  Julian Assange is facing decline in the maximum security abode that is Belmarsh prison …

America… just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.

— Hunter S. Thompson

Now I think poetry will save nothing from oblivion, but I keep writing about the ordinary because for me it’s the home of the extraordinary, the only home.

— Phillip Levine

I’m digging the DV piece, “The Idiot” by Jason Holland, since in a critical mass sort of black hole kind of way, his main thesis is reflective of the experiences many …

I have been pondering lately the significance of two elder visionaries who have exerted a lasting influence on me – Noam Chomsky (90) and Bob Dylan (77) – the former because he is an intellectual ‘rock of Gibraltar’ now in his ninth decade, and the latter because I recently saw the Nobel Laureate perform in concert more than half a century after the lyrics of his timeless classics became etched in my youthful brain.

Interestingly, both men were (are) word geniuses – one being the heralded poet- musician ‘voice of a generation’ and the other the ‘father of modern linguistics’ – who have radically …

Joe Biden is one of about two dozen 2020 democratic candidates running for President of the United States. This is not his first presidential campaign.

Biden served under President Barack Obama as Vice President for eight years. Obama became well-known for many antisocial policies in many spheres, especially education, including the aggressive promotion of privately-operated charter schools that siphon enormous sums of money from over-tested, under-funded, and constantly-demonized public schools. Obama also supported the widely-rejected Race to the Top law, the much-hated Common Core, and the heavily-loathed No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). In 2015, Obama replaced NCLB with a worse …

Mumia Abu Jamal just turned 65. Known as “The Voice of the Voiceless”, he has spent most of his life in prison – 37 years now – after his death sentence in 1982. “A vindictive trial” as denounced by his supporters around the world. The evolution of this court case seems to show that, despite everything, they are right. After the commutation of the death penalty to life imprisonment in 2011, a landmark decision has just been made: the Pennsylvania court finally accepted for the first time that Mumia’s …