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Washington’s partial rapprochement with Havana, symbolized by President Barack Obama’s recent visit to Cuba, is more advantageous to the United States than the neighboring country it has ostracized, sanctioned and subverted for over five decades.

This is not to say that the small island nation of 11.3 million people has gained nothing from President Obama’s efforts to mitigate over 56 years of Yankee hostility, beginning overtly a year after the 1959 armed revolution that freed Cuba not only from a vicious dictatorship but 467 years of foreign domination — by Spain from 1492, replaced by the U.S. from 1899. It ended …

We have to create culture, don’t watch TV, don’t read magazines, don’t even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow. The nexus of space and time where you are now is the most immediate sector of your universe, and if you’re worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, then you are disempowered, you’re giving it all away to icons, icons which are maintained by an electronic media so that you want to dress like X or have lips like Y. This is shit-brained, this kind of thinking. That is all cultural diversion, and what is real is …

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Has the British political establishment had an atrophying episode on the science front? Suggestions that this might be the case came last week when there were suggestions that a gag of Britain’s scientists might be in the works. The Cabinet Office had busied itself with proposals in February that, if implemented, would prevent organisations from using tax-payer funds to lobby parliamentarians.

Initially, the ban would have covered academics, effectively eliminating them from the public debates on such matters as transport, genetic modification, stem-cell research, climate change and energy.  It would also effectively siphon and control the award of grant money …

I became interested in the question of how an organization whose business plan is theft can go bankrupt during the Enron debacle. I was well aware that many companies are forced into bankruptcy so that the executives can loot the pension plan and that this has been an accepted business practice for many decades; out of fashion now that there are no pension plans to loot. However, the thefts were made possible by junk bonds that destroyed companies that otherwise were going concerns providing real products and services that had a genuine customer base.  In other words, the executives looted …

The National is an English language publication owned and operated by Abu Dhabi Media, the government-run media organization of Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates (UAE). There is no press freedom in the UAE. Government media report the government point of view, which rarely includes criticism of the government.
On March 26, the first anniversary of the UAE’s unprovoked attack on Yemen as part of the Saudi-led coalition of mostly Arab states, the UAE’s official media published a document about the carnage in Yemen illustrative of George Orwell’s observation: …

“We won’t act like them, we will not use violence or force, we are peaceful, we believe in peace, in peaceful popular resistance.” This was part of a message issued by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abba in October, only days after a few incidents took place in which Palestinian youth were accused of attacking Israeli soldiers and settlers with knives.

The message would have carried some weight were it not laden with contradictions. On one hand, Abbas’ supposed ‘peace’ quest has only entrenched the Israeli Occupation of the West Bank, and all but completely isolated illegally occupied and annexed East …

One concrete outcome that President Obama could pursue on his visit to Saudi Arabia is saving the lives of three Shia youth sentenced to be executed, most likely by beheading, for participating in nonviolent protests. Sparing their lives could also help ease the Shia/Sunni tensions that have engulfed the region.

Ali al-Nimr, Dawood al-Marhoon, and Abdullah al-Zaher are members of the minority Shia community that has, for decades, been demanding equality and full civil rights. The Shia represent 10-15 percent of the Saudi population and live mainly in the oil-rich Eastern province. Ever since the Saudi state was founded in 1932 …

Climate change is on a fast track, a surprisingly fast, very fast track. As such, it’s entirely possible that humanity may be facing the shock of a lifetime, caught off-guard, blindsided by a crumbling ecosystem, spawning tens of thousands of ISIS-like fighters formed into competing gangs struggling for survival.

Furthermore, what if the biosphere is already under stress by “planetary boundary” or the capacity of the planet to support life? Then what?

As for global warming, a non-consensus school of scientific thought, consisting of a small minority of scientists, believes the ecosystem is at risk of collapse within current lifetime. These scientists …

As the 2016 US presidential election approaches, the whole country has once again been transformed into a football stadium, with waves of media frenzy and people cheering for their favorite quarterback. The electoral arena in the US is infested with big money by lobbyists like Big Pharma, Monsanto and the Weapons Industry, to name a few. With the unlimited corporate financing of candidates, US politics has degraded into a charade of what amounts to a two-party duopoly, where most candidates from left to right cannot even run a campaign without in some way becoming puppets on a string for these …

Throughout 27 years of teaching classes in Cross-cultural Psychology, Critical Thinking, Brainwashing, Propaganda and Rhetoric and Social Psychology at universities and community colleges, I’ve been only dimly aware of how the decline of capitalism and its increasing instability has affected my teaching experience. Contrary to the way college teaching is often presented in liberal la la land – as being a special field in which teachers and students care about each other – these “gigs” are, in most ways, no different than other kinds of alienated work. I write this in the hopes of clarifying my own experience, as well …

In 2006, Israel’s largest news site Ynet published a courageous article by nationalist Israeli writer Sever Plocker who admitted that  “some of greatest murderers of modern times were Jewish.”
Like Yuri Slezkine, Plocker admits that the Stalin death machine was operated by Jews such as Genrikh Yagoda and Lazar Kaganovich. In 1934, at the peak of Stalin’s purge: “38.5 percent of those holding the most senior posts in the Soviet security apparatuses were of Jewish origin.”

In recent years we have learned that a quarter of the International Brigade that fought Franco in Spain was Jewish, and the Lingua Franca …

Believe-you-me. Excess manure needs to be cleared out of the way before we can go any further.

I’m in police custody, detained as a result of investigators uncovering a stash of thirty hot laptops at my residence. I demand that I be allowed to interrogate myself. After all, it wasn’t my hands that pilfered those computers. They’d been jacked over a decade ago by a distant relative who lived with my uncle. All I was doing was typing this article on one of the laptops. It just so happened to be your laptop that was stolen back in the day. Now …

Have we learned nothing from history? Have the scores of people crippled, nay, murdered by discrimination, bigotry, hatred, etc. been for nothing? History is cyclical, yet some things bear no repeating. But we stand on the cusp of returning to some of the darkest  times in our history.  The precipice of destruction, we have precariously perched ourselves. Do we dare to climb back down? Or have we danced too close to the edge, falling our only recourse? If to err is human, we have personified our nature to perfection.

It is baffling to witness our inability and/or flat out refusal to …

The United Nations is becoming all too familiar with Michigan.  First, they learned of rampant water shut-offs affecting 40% of Detroit’s residents last year.  They will soon be informed of the plight of Flint, Michigan.  For nearly two years, Flint residents were forced to drink, cook and bathe in putrid, toxic water.

The dismissive and unresponsive attitudes at the state level have given way to congressional hearings as well as appeals to the world court, whereby international human rights accords deem access to water a fundamental right.  Why would a local issue, in a first world country, potentially find its way …

They met in Hiroshima, Japan, in the first city on Earth that had been subjected to nuclear genocide. They were representing some of the mightiest nations on Earth: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States – the so-called Group of Seven (G7). And at the end of their encounter, they called for “a world without nuclear weapons”.

I am talking about the foreign ministers of seven countries with the largest economies on Earth.

Read carefully the names of these countries, one by one! For decades and centuries, the world has been trembling imagining their armed forces and …