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“Nope, nope, nope,” was Australia’s Prime Minister, Tony Abbott’s answer to the question whether his country will take in any of the nearly 8,000 Rohingya refugees stranded at sea.

Abbott’s logic is as pitiless as his decision to abandon the world’s most persecuted minority in their darkest hour. “Don’t think that getting on a leaky boat at the behest of a people smuggler is going to do you or your family any good,” he said.

But Abbott is hardly the main party in the ongoing suffering of Rohingyas, a Muslim ethnic group living in Myanmar, or Burma. The whole Southeast Asian …

They have deranged smiles, hefty laughs, sometimes, like John McCain, seven homes, a cool twenty million in the bank, and that syphilitic grin.

I was in Vietnam, 1994, talking with people in Hanoi. Saw the photos of children all lined up in the courtyard of an orphanage. Oh, maybe 20 in one shot, 10 in another, and the story was repeated through narratives, both visual and oral.

These are corpses I am talking about, friends. Made in the USA, Murder, Inc., War Profiteering, Zionist and Gentile bombs and telemetry, napalm a la Dow, and that yellow-blue-titanium rain of paraquat, dioxins, Agent Orange.

McCain …

A struggle of some consequence is now being waged in Congress to keep on life support the NSA’s massive spying on the American people. And in this struggle the so-called progressives (more accurately referred to as liberals) are engaged in a massive betrayal of all they profess to believe in. Instead too many of them are scurrying about attacking Rand Paul, the libertarian, anti-interventionist, Republican Senator who is leading the charge against the Bush/Obama spying program. Among other things Senator Paul has engaged in a filibuster to stop this nefarious program. So far he has been successful.

Let us try …

Maybe best characterizing the extreme in unmitigated industrial fossil frenzy is Texas (TX). North Dakota (ND) is the newcomer, but Texas is much larger and has for years been a boisterous, sometimes toxic free-for-all.

Texas prides itself in its largeness, its freedom from regulation, its low taxes, its independence, and its individualism. Outsiders see it differently. Perhaps the more simplistic see Texans in the caricature of cowboy boots and ten gallon hats, while many of the progressive-minded see Texas governors as outer-fringe and/or slow-witted, often citing governors like George W. Bush and Rick Perry for the latter.

Being spacious enough that most …

Let’s be honest. The activities of our economic and social system are killing the planet. Even if we confine ourselves merely to humans, these activities are causing an unprecedented privation, as hundreds of millions of people-and today more than yesterday, with probably more tomorrow-go their entire lives with never enough to eat. Yet curiously, none of this seems to stir us to significant action. And when someone does too stridently point out these obvious injustices, the response by the mass of the people seems so often to be … a figurative if not physical blow to the gut, leading inevitably …

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It is Memorial Day again. Some will celebrate. Some will drink too much. Some will march in parades. Some will rally around the flag. Some will go shopping. Some will mourn. I am among the mourners.

I mourn mostly for those we have killed — and I mourn for those we haven’t killed yet, but will in the days ahead. I mourn for all of the mothers and fathers who put their children to bed at night and wonder if this will be the night that they are killed by a drone attack.

I mourn for the 500,000 Iraqi children – dead …

Here in the US, we have been led to believe that we are an exceptional people and the indispensable nation. During our lifetime we have been exposed to lots of myths about the US, particularly about how we are always on the side of good. Below are insider comments challenging this key myth.

Before presenting the quotes, note that US crimes of stealing lands and resources and killing and exploiting people are, disturbingly, nothing new. Many other nations/empires have committed similar crimes throughout history. Morality, legality or altruism are not considerations that apply to the acts of powerful nations. The US …

Their precious young minds and our precious young minds

She was a redheaded rebel, the singer in the family, a trash-talking, tattooed 21-year-old wrapped up in a hip-hop dream of becoming Holland’s Eminem. Then Betsy found Allah. After her sudden conversion to Islam last summer, Betsy began dressing in full Muslim robes. By January, the once-agnostic Dutch woman, raised in a home where the only sign of religion was a dusty Bible on a shelf, began defending homegrown terrorists. … Denis Cuspert, a German hip-hop artist known as Deso Dogg who converted in 2010 and later joined The Islamic State [ISIS], …

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There is something grimly appropriate about the capture of the ancient Syrian town of Palmyra by a supposedly weakened ISIS. Accounts of history are being settled, unmade and reconstituted. The fundamentalist warriors have never made any secret of their hatred of idolatry – at least of the sort condemned by Quranic edict. Religions of the book have tended to fight wars over that very fact and craven worship of images was always deemed to be a vital point of difference.

What then, of Palmyra, that pearl and bride of the desert supposedly fortified by Solomon? It may …

As a high school student, I came across an observation by Abraham Lincoln who said that “With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed.” Today “public sentiment” would be called “public opinion.”

Over the years, I have been astonished at how less than one percent of the citizenry, backed by the “public sentiment,” have changed our country for the better by enacting reforms to protect the people from abuses of power, discrimination and deep neglect.

Specifically, if – one percent or less – were to dedicate a modest amount of their time and money working together for much-needed changes …

It was eighteen years ago this month that I first handed to a Vancouver Sun newspaper editor a list of possible mass grave sites of Indian residential school children on Canada’s west coast, based on government documents and statements from eyewitnesses who buried children there. I and these witnesses were flatly ignored: not only then, but every other time over the subsequent years that we presented such evidence to the same newspaper.

Bone sample found at Brantford residential …

Northern California’s Sonoma County has been known historically as part of the natural Redwood Empire. Wine industry lobbyists re-branded it as the commercial “Wine Country.” Its economy has been so colonized by outside investors, who extract water and resources from the environment and export them, that re-branding would be appropriate. A more accurate description would be that Sonoma County is now part of the multi-national Wine Empire.

Locals and nature have been dominated by these outside investors; they reap the benefits, while the environment and the residents pay the costs. They have de-localized, industrialized, commercialized, urbanized and commodified a once …

The rapid growth of knowledge

Cultural evolution depends on the non-genetic storage, transmission, diffusion and utilization of information. The development of human speech, the invention of writing, the development of paper and printing, and finally, in modern times, mass media, computers and the Internet: all these have been crucial steps in society’s explosive accumulation of information and knowledge. Human cultural evolution proceeds at a constantly-accelerating speed, so great in fact that it threatens to shake society to pieces.

In many respects, our cultural evolution can be regarded as an enormous success. However, at the start of the 21st century, most thoughtful observers …

In Parts One and Two of this series, we argued that to prevent oligarchic rule, democratic and economic institutions need to be salvaged, ironically, through anarchist political activism and Marxist capital analysis, specifically Marx’s labor theory of value, which identifies the systemic and structural nature of exploitation. The point is that workers are “entitled” to the surplus value they create. We also argued that globalization as manifested in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), amounts to imperialism. In this particular case, we utilize the economic analysis provided by British economist John Hobson. In his great work Imperialism, Hobson, an anti-imperialist …

For the first quarter of my life, I didn’t think much about sex offenders. Call it thoughtlessness or a naïve little bubble; it was probably both. This thoughtlessness might not be unique. But I began thinking about sex offenders when, at age 25, I was charged with a sex crime.

I had had sexual contact with my 17-year-old neighbor. I’m not proud of this and, if given the chance, would absolutely reverse that decision. But I slept with him once and joined the burgeoning ranks of women charged with sex offenses.

I think of these ranks both as a demographic and a …