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Let’s get some terms straightened out. If you’re a misanthrope, you pretty much hate humanity in general. Women, children, men, you despise them all. You can still hate everyone and have exceptions for your own family and puppy dog, but you’re probably more than willing to press the button and vaporize millions. Frankly, you don’t give a shit about anyone other than you and your own.

What’s a misogynist? Misogyny is a sub-category of misanthropy but focuses its hatred on women. In other words, if you’re a misanthrope, you’re pretty much a misogynist as well. But if you’re a misogynist, you …

The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants.
— Albert Camus, 1913-1960

On May 1st, 2003, George W. Bush stood in a dinky little flying suit on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln and in a super stage managed appearance told the lie of the century:

Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the Battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed. And now our coalition is engaged in securing and reconstructing that country.

The illegal occupation and decimation of Iraq continued until December 2011. In June 2014 they returned to bomb …

Most books about economics are turgid and abstruse, so most people are intimidated and mystified by this crucial topic. Now sociologist Dr. Michael Sosteric (pen name Michael Sharp) has written a helpful guide to it. He has a gift for explaining complex, abstract concepts in simple, easy-to-understand language, and his clear prose is a refreshing antidote to the murk of much economic writing.

Entitled The Rocket Scientists’ Guide to Money and the Economy, the book explains the fundamentals of economics and gives us an historical overview of their development. With the help of a fable and graphics it shows how …

On April 16, Ecuador suffered an earthquake registering 7.8 on the Richter scale. One week later, the death toll stood at 656, with more than twelve thousand injuries reported and more than fifty people still missing. Hundreds of aftershocks, some very powerful, continue to shake the country’s northwest coast and cause more damage.

The day after the disaster, aid began arriving from Ecuador’s Latin American neighbors, including Colombia, Peru, Venezuela and Bolivia. Quick responses were crucial, as hundreds of people were still missing, many trapped in crumbling rubble.

Cuba sent 53 medical personnel to help, in addition to the more than two …

Several hundred thousand American citizens won’t be voting in presidential primary elections—and it’s not their fault.

In Pennsylvania, for example, a registered voter who needed an absentee ballot had to submit the request at least one full week before the election, and then return the ballot no less than four days before the election.

But, what if circumstances changed? What if that person became injured or had to leave the state after April 19, but before the election, Tuesday? If it was April 20, you could not receive an absentee ballot. You could still vote in person, but if you couldn’t …

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 …