Latest articles
Like a viper coming at me: age, obsolescence and drudgery
by Paul Haeder / January 27th, 2018
The autumn of the patriarch, man, thinking hard about Marquez’s book, thinking back in lamentation bursts, going back in time when I met him at the University of Texas at Austin, and how he spoke to me as a young person, hopeful that I would be something as unique as he was, using what I told him was my West Texas/Chihuahua “magic realism,” founded on what I learned from his One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Those were the days, man — Kurt Vonnegut and Denis Levertov, Annie Dillard and Tim O’Brien, Robert Bly and …
When it comes to Palestinians, liberal Israelis sound little different from Netanyahu’s supporters. Both are concerned about maintaining Israel as a fortress Jewish state
by Jonathan Cook / January 27th, 2018
Human rights abuses by their government have so outraged prominent liberal Israelis that, in an unprecedented move, they have launched a campaign of civil disobedience.
Many hundreds have responded to a call by rabbis, pledging to hide victims in their own homes to protect them from Israel’s security services.
With the mood rapidly turning sour, academics and professionals, including doctors, pilots, school principals and lawyers have refused to collude in Israel’s policy of oppression.
This month a raft of respected literary figures, including Amos Oz and David Grossman, reminded Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that it was imperative to “act morally, …
by Nozomi Hayase / January 27th, 2018
Bitcoin’s price explosion made news headlines this last year. Topics of digital assets entered onto dinner tables and friendly chats at work places. Fever of the digital gold rush that has swept mainstream finance became contagious. Institutional funds are now entering into cryptos, seemingly hedging their bets with their “sugar high” bubble economy. Jamie Dimon, the JPMorgan CEO who previously slammed Bitcoin as a fraud is said to be regretting his claim. He now praises the blockchain, the underlying technology of Bitcoin. Goldman Sachs recently acknowledged Bitcoin as money, comparable to gold. The firm is already …
by Nayvin Gordon / January 27th, 2018
For thousands of years physicians took oaths to always act in the patient’s best interest when providing care. At the heart of medical ethics, this moral code was passed down through the centuries and reaffirmed by The World Medical Association (WMA) in 1949 and again in 2006. Additionally the WMA specified: “A physician shall not allow his/her judgment to be influenced by personal profit or unfair discrimination,” and “shall not receive any financial benefits or other incentives solely for referring patients or prescribing specific products”.
Medical ethics ran head long into The HMO (Health Maintenance Organization) Act of 1973. The passage of …
by Othello / January 27th, 2018
Recently, a Tesla on autopilot slammed into a parked fire engine at 65 mph. It turns out that there was no malfunction. According to Tesla’s manual:
Traffic-Aware Cruise Control cannot detect all objects and may not brake/decelerate for stationary vehicles, especially in situations when you are driving over 50 mph (80 km/h) and a vehicle you are following moves out of your driving path and a stationary vehicle or object is in front of you instead.
So whereas any half way decent human driver would have braked and/or swerved to avoid the collision, Tesla’s “smart” car proceeded full-speed ahead.
Even if you …
by Daniel Borgström / January 26th, 2018
The Pacifica Radio Network nearly went into bankruptcy this month. The immediate cause was a court order to pay the Empire State Building $1,800,000, more cash than Pacifica had. As bad as that may be, it’s really a symptom of deeper problems in the network. It goes back a long way.
I attended a KPFA ((KPFA 94.1 FM is one of five stations of the Pacifica radio network which are located in major cities across the country. The other stations are WBAI 99.5 in New York, WPFW 89.3 in Washington DC, KPFT 90.1 in Houston, and KPFK 90.7 in Los Angeles. …
by Brett Redmayne-Titley / January 26th, 2018
We have seen war… too much war. We desire peace. To have peace we must live together as one people. The new government says so. We support our government.
— Taxi driver on the streets of Beirut
Author’s Note: This is Part Two in a multi-part series direct and on-scene from the Mid-East. For background information not repeated here, please see Part One.
*****
Indeed the people of Lebanon have seen too much war. Though their military has not in its history set foot on foreign soil, remaining in the minds of the Lebanese are one bloody civil war and three …
by Ellen Brown / January 25th, 2018
In a blatant example of “do as I say, not as I do,” the US government is profiting handsomely by accepting marijuana cash in the payment of taxes while imposing huge penalties on banks for accepting it as deposits. Onerous reporting requirements are driving small local banks to sell out to Wall Street. Congress needs to harmonize federal with state law.
Thirty states and the District of Columbia currently have laws broadly legalizing marijuana in some form. The herb has been shown to have significant therapeutic value for a wide range of medical conditions, including cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, …
by Alex Anfruns / January 25th, 2018
For over two months, the Opposition Alliance has claimed that their candidate, Salvador Nasralla, was the winner of the presidential elections of November 26. Gilberto Ríos Grillo is a national leader from the LIBRE party, one of the parties that makes up the Alliance, whose secretary-general is Manuel Zelaya, the former Honduran president who was deposed in a coup in July 2009. After the announcement of further mobilisations from the Honduran society to protest against the government, Ríos Grillo tells us about the recent developments in this social and …
by Patrick Bobilin / January 25th, 2018
As cities become increasingly difficult to afford for middle-income Americans, how do we reframe the concept of ethical consumption to fit the requirement for creative people to move to a major cultural center to succeed?
Banksy, Follow your Dreams
The idea of moving to New York to pursue your dreams or a better life has a history dating back centuries. There are chefs from around the world who wanted to open a restaurant sharing their hometown cuisine with American audiences. There are artists, writers, and musicians from the Midwest …
by Jason Holland / January 25th, 2018
The 2018 government shutdown is now over but I’m thankful Democrats like Chuck Schumer got the chance to make announcements that expose just what the Democrats presently are and what they actually stand for. The party that is currently referring to themselves as the “Resistance” is, in reality, closer to being a movement of submissive obsequious corporatists. What Democrats are to the actual left is the same as what Nickelback is to Rock n’ Roll, nothing but a bland facsimile of something genuine with the primary purpose of selling something.
Democrats talk about compromise and bipartisanship while having no fundamental …
by Ramzy Baroud / January 24th, 2018
On January 15, millions of Americans commemorated Martin Luther King’s Day. His famous speech, ‘I Have a Dream’ was repeated numerous times in media outlets as a reminder of the evil of racism, which is being resurrected in a most pronounced way in American society.
But that is only one version of Dr. King that is allowed to be broadcast, at least in polite company. The other, more revolutionary, radical and global King is to remain hidden from view.
Exactly one year before he was assassinated, on April 4, 1968, Dr. King delivered a truly scathing speech that challenged not only the …
by Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich / January 24th, 2018
This week marks the 37th anniversary of a pledge made by the United States in 1981:
The United States pledges that it is and from now on will be the policy of the United States not to intervene, directly or indirectly, politically or militarily, in Iran’s internal affairs.
This week also marks 37 continuous years of the United States failing to uphold its pledge: the 1981 Algiers Accords.
Just how many people have heard of the 1981 Algiers Accords, a bilateral treaty signed on January 19, 1981 between the United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran? Chances are, not …
by Peter Koenig / January 24th, 2018
Why this title? Because Greece doesn’t have to continue playing the card of the victim, nor being masochist. Greece seems to suffer under the Stockholm Syndrome — she is in love with her hangman. Greece could change this. Exit the prison, exit the EU and exit the euro. Greece could return to her sovereign national currency, her own sovereign central bank, make her own monetary policy and implement it with a sovereign public banking system that works solely for the Greek economy. Within less than 10 years Greece would have recovered and would even be able to pay back some …
by Binoy Kampmark / January 23rd, 2018
It seemed so much busier, much more manic and crowded than the one year that had passed. Since his inauguration, President Donald Trump continues to excite the same headlines and explosions that began even before he made it to the White House.
By the time he got there, there were protests galore at agendas yet to be implemented, decrees yet to form. There were women’s marches, contradictory in their message (former flower power advocates joining hands with traditional military alliances, greying peaceniks wishing for a stable man, or woman, behind the nuclear option) while the President had yet to implement a …
by Ali Mohsin / January 23rd, 2018
The murder of a Pashtun man in Karachi by the Sindh police last week has brought renewed attention to the brutal practices of Pakistan’s police and security forces.
According to his relatives, Naqeebullah Mehsud, a 27-year-old from the war-torn region of South Waziristan, was kidnapped by plainclothes police officers in Karachi earlier this month. On January 16, Mehsud’s family was told that he’d been killed in a shootout with police along with 4 other alleged terrorists a few days earlier. Mehsud was buried in his hometown of Makin in South Waziristan on Friday. On the same day, a large demonstration in …
by Jonathan Cook / January 23rd, 2018
Barely a day passes without a new development in the war on social media – that is, the war on us. Today, it is a report that Twitter has emailed hundreds of thousands of its users, warning them that they shared “Russian propaganda”.
As WSWS notes:
Twitter is warning its users that it knows exactly what they are viewing and sharing on social media, implying that if they post something that falls afoul of the US government, they may be subject to investigation or prosecution.
And, we should add, they will almost certainly be subject to online “disappearance” – the …
Round Ups, Checkpoints and National ID Cards
by John W. Whitehead / January 23rd, 2018
The roundups are getting worse. The checkpoints are getting worse. The harassment is getting worse. The things we were worried would happen are happening.
— Angus Johnston, professor at the City University of New York
No one is safe.
No one is immune.
No one gets spared the anguish, fear and heartache of living under the shadow of an authoritarian police state.
That’s the message being broadcast 24/7 to the citizens and residents of the American police state with every new piece of government propaganda, every new law that criminalizes otherwise lawful activity, every new policeman on the beat, every new surveillance camera casting …
by Edward Curtin / January 23rd, 2018
There are unconscious actors among them and involuntary actors; the genuine are always rare, especially genuine actors.
– Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Any artist [person] who goes in for being famous in our society must know that it is not he who will become famous, but someone else under his name, someone who will eventually escape him and perhaps someday will kill the true artist [person] in him.
– Albert Camus, “Create Dangerously”
It ain’t me you’re lookin for, babe.
– Bob Dylan, “It Ain’t Me, Babe:, Another Side of Bob Dylan, 1964
Enter
The set was real but illusionary: A legendary old New England hotel …
by Jason Holland / January 22nd, 2018
A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on.
— Not Mark Twain
Prevaricator: a person who speaks so as to avoid the precise truth; quibbler; equivocator.
Tersely; a skillful liar.
Most all lying has conscious and subconscious elements. When a lie dribbles out of your mouth a little ding goes off in the brain that you might not even be able to articulate, but it informs you that what you just said perhaps was not entirely true, or could be a best guess expressed as if it were fact. The half-truth irritatingly gnaws away back there. …
by Mathew Maavak / January 22nd, 2018
The ongoing India-US rapprochement has been couched in terms of a pact between the “two largest democracies in the world” and similar superlatives. While geographically-challenged Americans may be forgiven for not recognizing their immediate northern neighbour as both a larger nation and a better democracy, mnemonically-challenged Indian pundits should nonetheless subject India-US ties to trend-based reality checks.
Three recent notable sticking points below should deflate India’s pro-American media.
Why does the US continue to withhold David Headley aka Daood Syed Gilani – a key planner behind the 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks—from the Indian justice system? Headley, long fingered as …
by Jonathan Cook / January 21st, 2018
More than 10 years ago Israel tightened its grip on Gaza, enforcing a blockade on goods coming in and out of the tiny coastal enclave that left much of the two million-strong population there unemployed, impoverished and hopeless.
Since then, Israel has launched three separate major military assaults that have destroyed Gaza’s infrastructure, killed many thousands and left tens of thousands more homeless and traumatised.
Gaza is effectively an open-air prison, an extremely overcrowded one, with only a few hours of electricity a day and its ground water polluted by seawater and sewage.
Last week Israeli military officials for the first time echoed …
Charter School Supporters Versus Public School Supporters
by Shawgi Tell / January 21st, 2018
As evidence against charter schools increases, charter school supporters have started to assert more frequently that charter schools are not a panacea, they cannot fix everything. And even though they have many problems, they should always be supported nonetheless. Charter schools are said to be a “viable option” for some and people should have “choices.”
After all, at the end of the day, “we” are all supposedly working for the same thing, “we” all want what is best “for the kids.” That is what is important according to charter school advocates, not all the serious problems plaguing charter schools and the …
by Jonathan Cook / January 20th, 2018
This report on Apple CEO Tim Cook’s visit to a UK school to promote the company’s new coding curriculum for schoolchildren could hardly be a better illustration of the way the Guardian newspaper serves as a key propagandist for aggressive global corporate capitalism, helping to create for it a façade of humanitarianism.
The Guardian presents Cook (no relation) as a concerned global citizen, a gay man who fights for LGBT rights and might have been Hillary Clinton’s running mate if things had turned out differently. The article could just as easily have been a press release straight out …
by Binoy Kampmark / January 20th, 2018
The more overtures, sudden but entirely appropriate, being made by North Korea to their South Korean counterparts, the more concern seems to emanate from quarters in Washington and Tokyo. A recurring streak in these engagements is the fear that Pyongyang is simply prevaricating, distracting and diverting: they are having us all for fools.
This betrays the whole premise of how US policy, and to a good degree that of Japan, has been linked to an obsession to place nuclear weapons dismantling and removal as a first step of talks rather than a final outcome with an enduring peace settlement.
Such a …
An interview with Law Professor Angela A. Allen-Bell
by Angola 3 News / January 20th, 2018
John Clutchette
On January 12, 2018, the California Board of Parole Hearings granted parole to an elderly inmate named John Clutchette. However, supporters of parole for Clutchette are concerned that California Governor Jerry Brown will reverse the Board’s decision, and Clutchette will not be released.
Supporters have a reason to be concerned. After all, this is exactly what happened in 2016 when Clutchette was similarly granted parole by the Board but Governor Brown chose to reverse the Board’s ruling.
Legal scholar Angela A. Allen-Bell, a professor at Southern University …
by Ken Hannaford-Ricardo / January 20th, 2018
I spent much of yesterday with some kids the world forgot. Young, remarkably sturdy and resilient, they can often be naïve and almost willfully gullible. They inhabit a world that delights in tripping them up and watching them fall. They are Kabul’s Street Kids.
Every Friday morning, roughly 100 of these forgotten children sit in noisy – sometimes raucous – groups of seven to ten in a large, unheated classroom, discussing and brainstorming human rights – rights few in the international community seem to acknowledge they enjoy. On this thirty degree Kabul morning, some are in shirtsleeves; few have coats adequate …
by Robert Hunziker / January 19th, 2018
It was July 1st, 1952 when Look magazine carried this story: “Flying Saucers— The Hunt Goes On” with the byline: “Fearful of danger from the skies, the United States Air Force is launching a secret search to discover once-and-for-all what is the mysterious, unbelievable thing Americans keep sighting overhead.”
At the time, the Air Force confirmed more than 800 sightings of flying saucers with reports from outposts all across the country, including “our vital atomic installation sites.” Atomic sites were specific areas of intense interests for the odd fast-moving saucers.
Flash forward 65 years: Interviews with U.S. military personnel validate the presence …
by Andre Vltchek / January 19th, 2018
Here it goes again! Several countries of Oceania (also known as South Pacific Nations), or however you want to call that vast, beautiful but thoroughly devastated part of the world, have voted “for Israel”, “for the United States’ proposed resolution at the United Nations”, and therefore, “against Palestine”.
As reported on December 22, 2017 by Al Jazeera:
The United Nations General Assembly has voted by a huge majority to declare a unilateral US recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital “null and void”.
At an emergency session of the General Assembly on Thursday, 128 countries voted in favour of a resolution rejecting US President Donald Trump’s …
"New Look" Guardian, Old-Style Orthodoxy
by Media Lens / January 18th, 2018
As Noam Chomsky has often remarked: ‘liberal bias is extremely important in a sophisticated system of propaganda.’ One major news outlet that Chomsky had in mind was the New York Times, but the same applies in the UK. As a senior British intelligence official noted of the 2001 US-led invasion of Afghanistan:
It is always helpful for governments who want to get the Guardian readers of the world on board to have a humanitarian logic.
This suggests that respected liberal media like the New York Times and Guardian are key battlegrounds in the relentless elite efforts to control public opinion.
On …
