President Obama’s oval office talk on terrorism promises more of the same failed strategy based on no serious reconsideration of changed reality. From the top, by focusing on 14 Americans killed in San Bernardino, the President plays into the terrorists’ hands. President Obama, like the rest of the US establishment, appears to have learned nothing since President Bush played the fear card after 9/11, then used it to terrorize the Muslim world with ever more disastrous results (carried on by President Obama).
It’s not as though the madness of the fear-based …
War Against the People: a timely jolt to spur civil society action
by Stuart Littlewood / December 11th, 2015
If you want something to scare the pants off you this Christmas ask Santa for this excellent book.
The author, Jeff Halper, is an American-Israeli Jew who trained as an anthropologist, joined the anti-Vietnam war movement and eventually moved to Israel. He is widely known to activists in the struggle for Palestinian freedom as the director of ICAHD (the Israeli Committee Against House Demolition). This is an extraordinary organisation that resists the illegal Israeli occupation by often standing in the way of the bulldozers sent to destroy Palestinian homes, then rebuilding them – as a political act. Halper has been arrested …
What is so special about “democracy” and “Western values” that it is worth committing such horrific atrocities and war crimes for these ideas? In the short time that they have dominated this century so far, the “democracies” have started more wars than anyone else.
They have kicked doors down, machine-gunned civilians and inflicted starvation on entire populations with economic sanctions. The “democracies” have ravaged and destroyed Libya in military aggression, and today wage new wars of occupation and regime change against a conspicuous number of different states. They cause so much suffering that anyone proud of “the West” and “democracy” today …
Scott Thomas Outlar’s first poetry submission to Dissident Voice was entitled “Three Part Harmony” which was published on June 8, 2014. Since that date he has become a regular contributor to DV’s Poetry on Sunday. Now with his book of poetry, Songs of a Dissident, published, I decided to send him a few questions via e-mail and find out his reaction to the news.
Angie Tibbs: Hey, Scott Thomas, first of all, congrats hugely on having your book of poetry published; in fact, having the publication date moved up a month! What was your reaction when you heard the …
Who's Afraid Of Laurence Fink and His Overpowering Institution?
by Andrew Gavin Marshall / December 10th, 2015
It’s not a bank, nor an insurance company, central bank, finance ministry or sovereign wealth fund. But it advises or owns such institutions. It operates virtually unregulated, often in the background, yet there is scarcely a company, country or region of the planet that this, the world’s largest asset management firm, does not touch or influence.
At a mere 27 years of age, BlackRock manages $4.5 trillion in assets, making it the single largest investor on Earth. It manages more wealth than Japan and Germany have in GDP. In fact, only China and the United States have a larger GDP than …
All proceeds of sales raise money for the victims of the war in Iraq
by Angie Tibbs / December 10th, 2015
Today, December 10, 2015, the pro-peace Christmas CD Not in our Name will have its limited edition release, and as it is not limited time wise, the CD will be available as a download on CD Baby. It can also be bought by going onto the website and clicking on the “Order CD” button.
And Caroline Kennedy, who came up with the idea a mere five months ago, is “euphoric!!” In an email on this momentus date, Caroline told me:
I had no idea when I threw out that germ of an idea almost 5 months ago that it would take …
I have long maintained that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank defies the moral principle behind the creation of the state. Contrary to Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s assertion, the occupation erodes rather than buttresses Israel’s national security and cannot be justified on either security or moral grounds. Unless Israel embraces a new moral path, no one can prevent it from unravelling from within only to become a pariah state that has lost its soul, wantonly abandoning the cherished dreams of its founding fathers.
There are four ethical theories—Kantian, utilitarian, virtue-based, and religious—that demonstrate the lack of moral foundation in the continuing …
LUND, SWEDEN — December 10, 2015, on the day of the Nobel Peace Prize Award Ceremony at Oslo City Hall
We know – and Alfred Nobel knew – how devastating war and arms races are, and how little security we get for all the money we spend on military forces.
The campaign to reclaim the Nobel Peace Prize is first and foremost a campaign to revive the idea that global peace requires global cooperation on disarmament and replacing the law of force with the force of law. Every day more and more …
On May 19, 1916, representatives of Great Britain and France secretly reached an accord, known as the Sykes-Picot agreement, by which most of the Arab lands under the rule of the Ottoman Empire were to be divided into British and French spheres of influence upon the conclusion of World War 1. That this agreement was conducted in secrecy, reveals to what extent the voices of the inhabitants of this region were absent from negotiations. It was as if the voices of the ruling Colonial elites were the only ones that had credibility. The Sykes-Picot agreement went ahead with little concern …
Cancer arises from stress-induced breakdown of tissue homeostasis: Part 4
by Denis Rancourt / December 9th, 2015
This is Part 4 of a four-part article. Part 1 provides a general introduction for the whole article. Part 2 is a critical review of the randomized trials of cancer treatments and screening. Part 3 is a critical review of the dominant paradigm of cancer as mutation-centric “metastasis”. The whole article is available as a single PDF file on ResearchGate. The article was presented at the University of Ottawa on November 21, 2015, and is available in video as parts One and Two.
Part 4: Cancer as age-dependent stress-induced breakdown of tissue homeostasis
by The Real News Network (TRNN) / December 9th, 2015
Vijay Prashad, author of sixteen books, the latest book Letters to Palestine, says that ISIS oil is smuggled through Turkey to Israel and is a major source of ISIS funding.
On December 7 the Cyber-Berkut made public another set of evidence exposing preparations for false flag attacks in Syria by the Ministry of Defense of Qatar. According to a hacked mail by Anton Pashynskyi, a SpetsTechnoExport (official Ukrainian arms trader) functionary, on October 21, 2015 he wrote to his Polish partner Level 11 the following:
Good afternoon! There is a new proposal. The Qatari military want to buy 2 thousand High Explosive Fragmentation bombs OFAB 250-270. The issue is urgent, they are ready to pay US$2100 per item. Consider how to deliver ASAP. The …
First of all I know many of you must be doing some soul searching right now. I’ve spent the past two years retracing my steps and trying to understand the nature of the Bolivarian project I once supported and why I supported it.
The latter question I can easily answer: President Hugo Chávez proposed a “Twenty-First Century Socialism” that would be different from the nightmare socialism of the twentieth century, the “real socialism.” He proposed an anti-imperialist bloc of Latin American countries that would unite in solidarity against international capitalism in the construction of a definitive economic, political and …
When Egypt decided to open the Rafah border crossing which separates it from Gaza for two days, December 3 and 4, a sense of guarded relief was felt in the impoverished Strip. True, 48 hours were hardly enough for the tens of thousands of patients, students and other travelers to leave or return to Gaza, but the idea that a respite was on its way helped to break, albeit slightly, the sense of collective captivity felt by entrapped Palestinians.
Of course, the Rafah border crisis will hardly be resolved by a single transitory decision, mainly …
For more than a decade, advertising, circulation, and news quality in both print and electronic media have been in a downward spiral. That spiral has twin intertwining roots.
The first root is the rise of social media. The complacent and stodgy print media were slow to catch onto the concept and rise of social media and its influence upon a generation that conducts its life by a fusion of smart phones to ears. When owners figured out they needed to have a digital presence, they first gave away content in a desperate bid to keep readers, and …
Pundits and commentators on the Left and Right are pronouncing ‘the end of the progressive cycle in Latin America’. They cite the recent presidential elections:
1. Argentina, where hard-right Mauricio Macri was elected;
2. Brazil, where President Dilma Rousseff has appointed a neo-liberal ‘Chicago Boy’ economist, Joaquin Levy, as Finance Minister and launched an IMF-style regressive structural adjustment policy designed to reduce social expenditures and attract financial speculators; and
3. Venezuela, where Washington channeled millions of dollars to far-right parties, as well as violent extra-parliamentary and paramilitary …
Cancer arises from stress-induced breakdown of tissue homeostasis: Part 3
by Denis Rancourt / December 8th, 2015
This is Part 3 of a four-part article. Part 1 provides a general introduction for the whole article. Part 2 is a critical review of the randomized trials of cancer treatments and screening. The whole article is available as a single PDF file on ResearchGate. The article was presented at the University of Ottawa on November 21, 2015, and is available in video as parts One and Two.
PART 3: What is cancer?
Dominant paradigm “metastasis”
Part III should make it clear that one reason that treatments are so “off” is that the medical profession has an incorrect …
Fires – almost certainly started by logging gangs – are raging across large areas of Maranhão state in Brazil. Despite global calls for action to protect the rare pre-Amazon forest and local uncontacted Awá tribespeople from being wiped out, so far the authorities have done very little to contain the blaze.
The fires were started approximately two weeks ago. Local Awá have made repeated efforts to extinguish them, only to find more fires starting nearby. This pattern indicates conscious human efforts to set the forest alight, rather than natural dry season wildfires. Elsewhere in Brazil, …
Hello, is anybody in there?
Just nod if you can hear me
Is there anyone home?
— Roger Waters and David Jon Gilmour, “Comfortably Numb,” from Pink Floyd’s 1979 album The Wall
Hillary Clinton will be a worse president than would a Republican. For years corporate media have pounded the line that her election is inevitable, and that has millions of voters convinced. Unfortunately, many of them also believe in the “lesser evil” straw man which is also pushed by corporate media– if you don’t vote for your party’s candidate (Democrat or Republican) even though you don’t like that candidate, a more evil candidate …
by Hakim and the Afghan Peace Volunteers / December 8th, 2015
Former MSF Kunduz Hospital pharmacist, Khalid Ahmad, recuperating at Emergency Hospital in Kabul: “I feel very angry, but I don’t want anything from the U.S. military,” said Khalid Ahmad, a 20 year old pharmacist who survived the U.S. bombing of the Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) / Doctors Without Borders Hospital in Kunduz on the 3rd of October, “God will hold them accountable.”
The actions of the U.S. military elicit the same contempt from Khalid and many ordinary Afghans as the actions of the Taliban or the ISIS.
Forbidding of the killing of innocents is not set in stone
by Gary Leupp / December 8th, 2015
News anchors scratch their heads. How could they have done this? How could a happily married young couple, with a good income, a six-month-old baby, and no apparent history of “radicalization,” execute this military-style massacre of 14 people in San Bernardino? Gosh, how to understand these people?
Actually, I think it’s not so difficult to grasp. One just has to examine the question seriously and not begin with the assumption that such massacres are incomprehensible–the products of minds so alien to our own that comprehending itself isn’t possible.
It seems to me that the basic components of ISIL-type ideology are …
On Monday, November 2, every National Geographic staffer was told to report to the magazine’s Washington, D.C., headquarters the next day to await a phone call or e-mail from Human Resources.
Ever since Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox corporation bought the magazine in September, there were rumors the new owner would maximize profits by terminating employees. Those predictions came through when Management fired 180 people, and told dozens of others they were being offered “voluntary buy-outs.”
The corporation also announced it was eliminating health coverage for future retirees and was freezing all pensions. Management told the public there would be …
In March, after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made denying a Palestinian state a pillar of his winning re-election campaign, officials in the Obama administration signaled to the media that they would reconsider the U.S. government’s staunch diplomatic support for Israel in the United Nations. The U.S. government feigned “very substantive concerns” and declared the administration may “reassess (its) options going forward” in response to Netanyahu’s explicit rejection of a two-state solution.
Mainstream media focused on the personal dynamics between the leaders of the two countries. CNN said the Obama administration felt “outright hostility” toward Netanyahu and the New York …
The best that the high level climate talks in Paris (COP21) can achieve is to agree measures and actions to limit the increase in global temperature of our planet to 2C. Scientists, however, believe that even our best efforts will see a rise of 3C. Leaders of the industrialized rich west believe that the consequences of such a rise can be mitigated in their own countries by their advanced technology and expertise. For some countries in the developing world, however, such a rise in temperature would be devastating.
The 50th anniversary of my book, Unsafe at Any Speed, which analysts associate with the launch of the modern consumer movement, prompts comparisons between 1965 and 2015.
The life-saving impact of the book through the highway and auto safety laws Congress passed in 1966, creating an auto safety enforcement agency to lift up safety standards for motor vehicles, has been historic. According to an analysis of deaths per mile driven by the Center for Auto Safety (CAS) “the 1966 federal laws, federal agency and general measures they created – have averted 3.5 million auto deaths over the past 50 years.”
Silicon Valley’s Infernal Landscape vs. the Barrio
by Christy Rodgers / December 7th, 2015
For most of my adult life I have lived in bohemia, that marginal filament of US culture wedged in the cracks between the sterile, necrotic suburbs, the bunkered mansions of the urban rich, and the trash-blown decay of the ghetto. It exists, as it ever has, only in our larger cities, and perhaps no longer all of those. It is at risk of extinction in San Francisco, once its Mecca. Its inhabitants in these times are not the sexual pioneers, eccentric artists, and non-conformists of yore, but a grimmer group: night-dwellers with bruised, dark-ringed eyes, crusty old radicals with rent …
Once it fell to politicians and diplomats to solve international conflicts. Now, according to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, responsibility lies with social media.
Tzipi Hotovely, Israel’s deputy foreign minister, headed off to Silicon Valley to meet senior executives at Google and its subsidiary YouTube late last month. Her task was to persuade them that, for the sake of peace, they must censor the growing number of Palestinian videos posted on YouTube.
Netanyahu claims these videos spur other Palestinians to carry out attacks, exemplified by the weeks of stabbings and car rammings against Israeli soldiers and civilians.
Were Diana Johnstone, author of Queen of Chaos, to bump into Samantha Power in a dark alley, both would be instantly annihilated in a blaze of energy. For Johnstone, is the anti-Samantha Power, best known for her book, Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Illusions, where she meticulously uncovers the truth about the war on Serbia, thereby dismantling the fairy tale constructed by Power to justify the NATO assault on the Balkans. That fairy tale has been a model for similar sagas rolled out to whiten the sepulchers of the many “humanitarian” wars since, every one of which bears some …
A recent Globe and Mail article (reprinted on Rabble.ca) by Gerald Caplan detailing Canadian relations with Uganda made me mad.
Why?
It was not so much for what’s in the article, but rather what it ignores, which is reality. Any progressive author writing about Canada’s foreign affairs betrays his readers if he ignores the bad this country has done and feeds the benevolent Canadian foreign-policy myth.
“Canadians have had ties to Uganda for many decades”, writes Caplan, a self-described “Africa scholar” citing the establishment of diplomatic relations soon after independence. He also mentions many Canadians who “found their way to the …
Finding truth in an endless parade of stories in the not-so-mainstream-press
by Paul Haeder / December 7th, 2015
Universe in the back seat of the station wagon
I do this quite a lot – looking at those American towns I call home or still have connections with and try to make universal tie-ins to the larger world, certainly connections that overlay here, say, Portland, to the universal Amerika, fed through the lens of American Capitalism Gone Hard Fascist Right.
Scouring newspapers – those that are left, still independent, or those part of monopolies like Gannett, Advance Publications, Hearst Corp., McClatchy Newspapers and Tribune Co. or otherwise – gives me a look into the madness of American planning, lack of it, and …
