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When the Province of British Columbia recently issued the biggest salmon farm expansion in over a decade, they knew the public were not onboard with the decision.  A petition with over 110,000 signatures was recently delivered to the Premier.

However, the Norwegian-based companies each courted a First Nation chief and council and once they made their deals, the Province of BC felt it would be clear sailing to grant leases, despite the public demand that this industry get away from our wild fish.  Four more salmon farms were given tenures to release tons of waste daily.

We can’t know what kind of …

Socrates and Plato were not in a hurry. Neither was Aristotle nor Heraclitus. They took time to think deeply. As far back as twenty-four centuries ago, they offered insights and observations about the human condition, character, and personality that are as true today as they were then.

Fast forward to our fast-paced society. Many people think if they talk faster, people will think they’re smarter. Talking fast is not talking smart. Evening TV news interviews of individuals may average five or less seconds, called sound bites, while they averaged about eighteen seconds in the nineteen-seventies. Standardized tests put a premium on …

First he bombed mercilessly, cruelly grinning throughout. Costumed in a flight suit, he proclaimed a “Mission Accomplished” after he had, with what they call “bipartisan support” (as though this lends some sort of legitimacy), destroyed the modern country of Iraq.

George W. Bush destroyed Iraq’s infrastructure, its institutions, its ruling party and its army. Then he destroyed its social fabric, which had permitted widespread Sunni-Shiite intermarriage and religiously integrated neighborhoods.

Bush destroyed the law and order which had permitted girls to walk to school, heads uncovered, in modern western dress. He destroyed the freedom of physicians and other professionals to go about …

Millions of refugees from Washington’s wars are currently over-running Europe. Washington’s 14-year and ongoing slaughter of Muslims and destruction of their countries are war crimes for which the US government’s official 9/11 conspiracy theory was the catalyst. Factual evidence and science do not support Washington’s conspiracy theory. The 9/11 Commission did not conduct an investigation. It was not permitted to investigate. The Commission sat and listened to the government’s story and wrote it down. Afterwards, the chairman and co-chairman of the Commission said that the Commission “was set up to fail.” For a factual explanation of 9/11, watch …

We should go to the masses and learn from them, synthesize their experience into better, articulated principles and methods, then do propaganda among the masses, and call upon them to put these principles and methods into practice so as to solve their problems and help them achieve liberation and happiness.

— Mao Zedong ((Mao Tse-tung “Get Organized!” 29 November 1943. Selected Works, Vol III, p. 158 from marxists.org)) (p. 106)

According to the above translation, it appears as though Mao sees himself and his Chinese Communist Party (CCP) comrades as outside the masses. That, however, is inconsequential to the fact that …

From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.

– Andrew Card, White House Chief of Staff, 2002

The best time to introduce a new product, as Card well understood, comes just after Labor Day.  And when it comes to a new “product” to be marketed to the American public, there’s never been anything quite like a new war — that most prolific of American exports.
For the Bush neocons, the public campaign to sell the 2003 invasion of Iraq to the American public was thus strategically launched in September 2002; an astute adherence to the same schedule …

What does it mean to be a ‘liberal Arab’? Even in the West, definitions of the ‘liberal’ vary.

In the American context, the demarcation of the ‘liberal’ overlaps cultural and political lines. Republicans use the term in a derogatory way to describe their opponents. Watch Fox News to understand. (On second thought, please do not watch Fox News!). Europeans are hardly keen on the term altogether. Many often use the term ‘progressive’ to liberate the ‘liberal’ from its political baggage and imprecise cultural insinuations.

So when the newly-launched Huffington Post Arabi – the Arabic edition of …

The Democratic Party is showing some ugly faces these days, as entrenched party leaders find both their president and much of their constituency headed in directions that the “party” disapproves. From Sen. Chuck Schumer choosing to risk war to Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz stifling supporters of her party’s president and the peace deal with Iran, to the insurgent candidacies of Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley, party leaders find themselves leading toward goals widely rejected by others.
This is actually a hopeful sign – that there’s resistance. But the struggle to define …

It was amusing to see Peter Baker refer to the Democratic Party legislators’ threat to President Obama’s possible “legacy” of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), often described in the media as a “free trade” agreement, although Baker here makes it only a “trade: deal” (“A Trade Deal And a Legacy,” New York Times, June 15, 2015). “Legacy” is commonly (but not invariably) used as a purr word, that expresses approval of an act or action (in contrast with a snarl or growl word), something nice one has left to posterity like a gift of property or a beneficially transforming piece of …

The world has suddenly realised that there is a “refugee crisis”. There are more refugees now than at any time since World War II. The number has grown three-fold since the end of 2001. The problem is treated as if it arose just recently, but it has been a long time coming. The pressure has been building and building until it has burst the dams of wilful ignorance.

Death and despair has migrated to the doorsteps of Europe. But tens of millions of people do not simply abandon home and native land for an insecure dangerous future of desperate struggle. The …

On Freedom’s tree there rained a withering blight,
Glory to proud Palmyra sighed adieu,
And o’er her shrines Destruction’s angel flew.
— Nicholas Michell, 1807-1880, Ruins of Many Lands

At a meeting of Foreign Ministers in Cairo in September 2002 the then Secretary General of the Arab League, Amr Moussa warned US President George W. Bush that the proposed invasion of Iraq would “open the gates of Hell … in the region.” Iraq and Syria would be the first to be engulfed in the fire.

German’s Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder said it would be a “big mistake” for the United States to launch its …

Once upon a time, there was a boorish rattlesnake named Donald. He was notorious for flashing his fangs at the other desert creatures. But some were slightly demented; in fact, they were charmed by the toxicity of Donald’s hypodermic fangs. Others slowly gravitated toward Donald with the passage of time. The lore surrounding his dangerous potential drew them ever near—even to the point of mental constriction, or paralysis.

Donald hadn’t any compunction. He was highly inegalitarian by nature, and he frequently hissed about the “vermin” he viewed as lesser amongst the desert fauna. Donald was especially mercurial about lashing out at …

Right-wing politics now dominate the globe. Broadly speaking, the Right can be divided into a US-centered right-wing bloc and a variety of anti-US right-wing regimes and social forces.

The US-centered right-wing includes absolutist monarchies, like Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States and Jordan; neoliberal electoral regimes and opposition parties in the European Union and Latin America and the military dictatorships of North and Sub-Sahara Africa and Thailand. Finally, there are US-armed and trained terrorists operating in Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen – which make up a kind of extra-parliamentary …

Donald Trump is considered to be a plain-spoken, say-it-as-it-is, straight-talker, one who shoots from the hip. Media consistently describes him as a non-political candidate for president. Few mention that he is a celebrity who knows thoroughly the media ropes. And most evidence proves that he is anything but non-political, in fact, intelligent and quite media-savvy – always relentlessly on message, whatever he’s asked by reporters, never straying from his ascribed image nor from a pre-designated message.

Though more outspoken than conventional candidates, he is more attuned to the GOP-base, and appears unscripted. In effect, he is a more clever operator than …

Here’s an experiment to try this holiday weekend. Quiz your friends, family and acquaintances on the meaning of Labor Day. You might be surprised by the answers you hear. To many, the true meaning of Labor Day has been unfortunately lost?it’s merely a three-day vacation weekend, unless you work in retail, in which case it is, ironically, a day of work and “special” sales.

Commercialists have transformed Labor Day into a reason for shopping. The fact that Labor Day was conceived as an occasion dedicated to America’s workers and what they have endured is sadly under-acknowledged and unappreciated. (In many other …