Eons before our forefathers climbed down from trees, shed vestigial tails, discovered their thumbs, and began walking upright, the fire goddess Pele was hard at work on the bottom of earth’s mightiest ocean. There, four miles beneath the turbulent salty surface, she toiled. Building Islands of white-hot, molten basalt, pushing them far into the sky, then watching as rock, buffeted by wind and rain, wore down to soil, as birds dropped seeds from faraway lands, as lush forests grew, as the ancestors of parrot-fish gobbled coral and crapped golden sand beaches which, in turn, became home to ancient species of crabs, turtles, and seals, then smiling knowingly …
Last month Cuban baseball stars and brothers Lourdes and Yulieski Gourriel left the national team in the Dominican Republic in order to pursue careers in Major League Baseball. It was reported widely from the official Communist Party newspaper Granma to regional and national news outlets. The coverage certainly represents a change from some years ago, when the issue would have been considered taboo, but was unremarkable considering the progression of Cuban society and media since then. But for New York Times editorial writer Ernesto Londoño the incident represented a dramatic emergence of free …
Donald Trump is occurring. He’s no longer merely a punchline. Only a fool can say that his antics are not worth talking about (my line during the first few months of his campaign). Despite the GOP establishment’s best efforts, which were necessarily lame (we’re talking about the GOP here), Trump is the probable Republican nominee. Unless the “true” conservatives like Mitt Romney can manage to swing a brokered convention, The Donald’s got this in the bag. His opposition tells us a lot about how this happened.
There are two principal forces working against Trump. First is the Republican establishment—the Bush’s and …
Subservience is a terrible state, not merely because of its indignities, but its distortions. Speech from the main political centre is garbled and marred, ever mediated by the higher power. Media releases from departments from the vassal or satrap state tend to be coloured by the broader interests of the larger power. For years, that has been characteristic of US-Australian relations.
The Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull was again sallying forth with a whitewashing measure, hoping that no one would notice that Australia was again offering itself up for conspicuous targeting in the event of any future conflict. In February, the …
Chicago is the Circus. TPP steals the bread. America, TV’s not showing you all the pictures again. As a bonus Trump-Sanders give you a pass on WW3. Make FDR proud!
I’m not here to announce my candidacy for office…. America will remain, as it is today, the envy of the world….
If we Republicans choose Donald Trump as our nominee, the prospects for a safe and prosperous future are greatly diminished….
A person so untrustworthy and dishonest as Hillary Clinton must not become president….
I understand the anger Americans feel today…. Mr. Trump is directing our anger for less than noble purposes…. This is the very brand of anger that has led other nations into the abyss.
When it comes to The City of London, the term ‘tax haven’ is not describing all that it should. It doesn’t just shield the mega-wealthy from paying their fair dues it goes further and offers a departure from the rule of law as you would know it. Secrecy is its raison d’être. These secrecy laws do not benefit the local people living in its jurisdiction but only those individuals and corporations with enough money and with something to hide.
The reality is that the City of London caters for those above the law, it operates on the basis of bypassing democratic society as …
Today is a big media day in Venezuela. Today, Friday, March 11, 2016, the news is all about the news and it’s as if the Bolivarian government was taking a page out of President Obama’s playbook to make a whole movie. Yet while the U.S. president can only go after individual whistleblowers (and boy does he ever! with more whistleblowers serving more jail time under Obama than all previous presidents combined) in Venezuela the government shuts down whole newspapers.
There are, of course, other differences between a capitalist national security state like the U.S. where some checks and balances remain …
One of the stupidest schemes on the planet has just hit a snag.
The plan is for natural-gas giant, Spectra Energy, to construct a new high-pressure, 42-inch gas pipeline in the immediate vicinity of the Indian Point nuclear power plants. The pipeline would carry fracked-gas from Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale wells up into New England and then to LNG terminals in Canada. From there the gas would be exported to India, Japan and elsewhere around the planet.
The proposed new pipeline has been bitterly opposed for over two years.
The Spectra project, known as the Alconquin Market (AIM) project, has been opposed by local …
American exceptionalism presents an election made in hell
If the American presidential election winds up with Hillary Clinton vs. Donald Trump, and my passport is confiscated, and I’m somehow FORCED to choose one or the other, or I’m PAID to do so, paid well … I would vote for Trump.
My main concern is foreign policy. American foreign policy is the greatest threat to world peace, prosperity, and the environment. And when it comes to foreign policy, Hillary Clinton is an unholy disaster. From Iraq and Syria to Libya and Honduras the world is a much worse place because of her; so …
That’s a question currently being asked by legislators in the halls of Congress. Without a muscular pushback from the public, the big airlines could claim the American airspace as their own to tax and regulate, without any significant compensation to the American taxpayer and no oversight from elected officials. Talk about getting skyjacked!
An amendment in the 273-page FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) reauthorization bill? H.R. 4441 ?currently moving through Congress means to remove air traffic control from the authority of the FAA and hand it over to a private, not-for-profit corporation. This new corporate-controlled body would be responsible for the over …
The Gates Foundation, Arnie Duncan, and Bruce Rauner
by John Klyczek / March 11th, 2016
For over twenty years, former Senior Policy Advisor in the Office of Educational Research and Improvement for the US Department of Education, Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt, has been warning us about the coming corporatization of education through fascistic charter school privatization that will be subsidized by public finances. Iserbyt, author of The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America, has described the charter school takeover, otherwise known as the “school choice” movement, as “[c]ollusion between neoconservatives, corporations, and leftists in education, including former ‘conservative’ Secretaries of Education and the NEA, [which] enabled corporations to take control of American education.”
What was happening inside Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant?
It is nearly impossible to think about the disaster of Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant without wondering what it must have been like inside the control center. The first 88 hours after the reactors went out of control were the most critical. It’s when the workers of Fukushima Daiichi met the devil of cataclysm face-to-face.
Now for the first time ever, the public will be able to go inside the control room of Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in a documentary drama, Meltdown – The Fateful 88 Hours (“Meltdown”), a NHK Documentary premiering …
Inland Northwest's tree experts rate the state of the region's urban forests
by Paul Haeder / March 10th, 2016
The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.
? John Muir
Tree Dialogues
Talking trees with the typical Spokane (Washington) “tree surgeon/arboriculturalist” is like speaking to a philosopher/doctor/medicine man/geek all in one breath. These men and women have a passion for trees because they see each community’s health, resilience and psychological well being tied to robust and plentiful trees.
Emblematic of how a community or even family should thrive, a city’s vast mosaic of trees and runs of forests turns our ecosystem into a fully connected biological living history – past, present and future.
On February 28, Hillary Clinton told an audience from the pulpit of a Memphis church: ‘we need more love and kindness in America’. This was something she felt ‘from the bottom of my heart’.
These benevolent sentiments recalled the national ‘purpose’ identified by President George H.W. Bush in 1989, shortly before he flattened Iraq. It was, he said, ‘to make kinder the face of the nation and gentler the face of the world’.
Clinton, of course, meant North America, specifically the United States. But other places in America are short on love and kindness, too. Consider Honduras, for example.
by Roger D. Harris and Allan Miller / March 10th, 2016
Where to Invade Next riffs off of the idea of critiquing the US war without end. Despite the title, documentarian Michael Moore is not going there in his first film in six years. Rather, Moore adroitly shows positive examples from abroad of what he believes might be done at home if there were the political will this election year.
With Old Glory in tow, Moore’s “one-man army…invades” Western Europe, plus stops in Slovenia and Tunisia, to “steal” good eye-opening ideas to take home:
Gourmet public school lunches in France
Free higher education for citizens and foreigners alike in Slovenia
Decriminalization of drugs and attendant …
That, of course, is not true. The Crazies are here and have been in power since Ronald Reagan was elected President of the USA. Their craziness became obvious when Reagan ignored his personal beliefs and the beliefs of all conservatives and began spending federal money like there was no tomorrow. Fiscal prudence was totally ignored because the USA and the Western World were in the severest economic downturn since the Great Depression and things were getting worse by the day. Workers were getting angry, very, very angry, they wanted jobs and would not stand in soup lines, sell apples on …
The 2016 presidential elections are proving pivotal in U.S. history, although not just for the self-proclaimed socialist-democrat Bernie Sanders, the feminist squabble unfolding around Hillary Clinton, or the larger-than-life wild card Donald Trump.
The elections are revealing more dramatically than ever the corrosive effect of big money on the U.S.’s decayed democracy. In a country founded on the principle that every citizen has an equal voice and an equal vote, how is money stealing center stage in U.S. elections?
Following Citizens United v. FEC, SpeechNow.org vs. FEC, and McCutcheson v. FEC, corporations and the wealthiest in society have been granted the legal right to …
What Happens When You Merge a Psychopath with a Killer?
by Kim Petersen / March 9th, 2016
The United States is, indisputably, the world’s foremost killing entity, and it has been since its genocidal inception.1Writes Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, “Somehow, even ‘genocide’ seems an inadequate description for what happened, yet rather than viewing it with horror, most Americans have conceived of it as their country’s manifest destiny.” An Indigenous People’s History of the United States, Beacon Press, 2014, p. 78. See review.,2See Kieran Kelly, “The United States of Genocide,” Dissident Voice, 30 September 2013. The killing is relentless — in more recent times wreaking destruction in Iraq,3Abdul Haq al-Ani and Tarik al-Ani, Genocide …
Writes Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, “Somehow, even ‘genocide’ seems an inadequate description for what happened, yet rather than viewing it with horror, most Americans have conceived of it as their country’s manifest destiny.” An Indigenous People’s History of the United States, Beacon Press, 2014, p. 78. See review.
Canadian Defamation Law is Noncompliant with International Law (Part Two of a Two Part Series)
by Denis Rancourt / March 9th, 2016
This article was prepared for the Ontario Civil Liberties Association (OCLA). It is also posted on ocla.ca.
Overall Summary
Part 1: Defamation law in Canada is contrary to international law, in both design and practice. Under international law, the right to hold an opinion is absolute, and the right of freedom of expression can be restricted “for respect of the rights or reputations of others” solely using written laws that must conform to the “strict tests of necessity and proportionality”. With Canadian civil defamation law, the state has unfettered discretion from an unwritten common law that provides presumed falsity, presumed malice, …
With the TPP cell-door slamming shut, it’s curious how Fox and MSNBC take turns deriding the only two guys prepared to stand in its way.
by Norman Ball / March 9th, 2016
America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set.
— Allen Ginsberg, America
Critical thinking in America politics has been edged out by meme-factory conveyor belts and Facebook repeater towers eager to share the latest red-blue molehill with five hundred of their closest friends.
One bit of unexamined kookiness (a favored Fox News trope) is that there’s still such a thing as operative liberals in America. Another, emanating from both sides, is that the country will go down the tubes should Party X prevail against Party Y. Despite decades of tag-team, blue-red empire wars, many still swallow the channelized …
In April 2014 I first visited Syria, going to Homs and Latakia, in addition to Damascus. On each of my three subsequent trips to Syria, speaking moderate colloquial Arabic, I have been able to interact one-on-one with Syrians there, whether in markets, taxis, on the streets or in areas I visited.
In Latakia, many of the over 1 million Internally Displaced Persons from Idlib, Aleppo and surrounding areas who are being housed and supported by the Syrian government spoke of the same heinous kidnappings, beheadings, and other crimes that most media currently only associate with …
Nations Meet to Discuss International Treaty to Ban Nuclear Weapons
by Lesley Docksey / March 9th, 2016
With the debate going on about whether the UK should renew the Trident missile programme or get rid of it, hardly anything is said about what is happening internationally to rid the world of nuclear weapons – which shows how inward-looking Britain can be, despite claiming a prime position on the world stage.
While national media reported on the Stop Trident demonstration in London, it ignored the discussions taking place in Geneva, or their background including:
three international, government-level conferences, the last in Vienna, on the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons, which produced
the signing and endorsing of the Humanitarian …
Pluto-Zionism is the three-way marriage of plutocracy, right=wing Zionism and US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, a serial war criminal, racist and servant of Wall Street. How did this deadly ménage-a-trois come about? The answer is that a stratospherically wealthy donor group, dedicated to promoting Israel’s dominance in the Middle East and deepening US military intervention in the region, has secured Clinton’s unconditional support for Tel Aviv’s ambitions and, in exchange, Hilary receives scores of millions to finance her Democratic Party foot soldiers and voters for her campaign.
Regardless of the outcome of the American presidential primaries, or even the result of the general elections next November, a frightening phenomenon is under way. The US has decidedly moved to the Right, in fact the Ultra-Right; class differences are more pronounced than ever before, thanks to decades of neoliberal policies, the kind of capitalism that has concentrated the wealth in even fewer hands; racism is on the rise and the unmistakable signs of fascism are evident whenever Donald Trump holds a campaign rally.
Not that Trump’s opponents are any less frightening in their rhetoric, but …
Indigenous women and Treaty 8 First Nations are spearheading the fight against BC Hydro’s Site C mega-dam, which is being aggressively pushed by province.
Indian Point Nuclear Power Plant New York continually leaks radioactivity into the Hudson River. This has been going on for years. Seriously!
Meanwhile, New York’s Governor Andrew Cuomo agrees with advocacy groups such as Riverkeeper, Physicians for Social Responsibility, and The Sierra Club to close Indian Point. Why? Environmentalists claim the radioactive leaks are “just the tip of the iceberg.” ((Amy Kraft, “Indian Point Nuclear Plant Called “Disaster Waiting to Happen”, CBS News, February 26, 2016.))
According to CBS News, water at one of the monitoring wells for Indian Point showed a 65,000% increase in tritium, which, according to nuclear industry specialists, …
In the 21st century Americans have been distracted by the hyper-expensive “war on terror.” Trillions of dollars have been added to the taxpayers’ burden and many billions of dollars in profits to the military/security complex in order to combat insignificant foreign “threats,” such as the Taliban, that remain undefeated after 15 years. All this time the financial system, working hand-in-hand with policymakers, has done more damage to Americans than terrorists could possibly inflict.
The purpose of the Federal Reserve and US Treasury’s policy of zero interest rates is to support the prices of the over-leveraged and fraudalent financial instruments that unregulated …
[This is an edited version of a talk given to Common Ground for Texans in Austin, TX, March 5, 2016.]
To avoid being conned, politically and intellectually, it’s important to examine how a debate is framed and what ideology is advanced by that framing. What is the scope of the question? How was the direction of the inquiry decided? Who set the boundaries of the conversation?
Let’s ask those questions in regard to the contemporary conversation in the United States about allegedly dangerous trends on college campuses concerning “political correctness,” “microaggressions,” and “trigger warnings.”
A spirited public discussion of these issues was …
