No matter what high-blown claims the politicians make each year on Remembrance Day, The Great War was essentially a fight between two branches of a single royal family over the balance of power on the continent of Europe, British foreign policy holding to a longstanding principle that no one nation should ever be permitted to dominate the continent.
It was also a war between the world’s greatest existing imperial power, Britain, and another state, Germany, which aspired to become a greater imperial power than it was.
To a considerable extent, it was a war resulting from large standing armies and …
by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers / November 13th, 2014
After getting clobbered on November 4, the Democratic Party needs to ask itself some tough questions and come up with honest answers. If it doesn’t, it’s going to continue to lose elections because it lacks credibility with its own voter base.
The 2014 election was a disaster for Democrats. Any Democratic partisan who tries to explain it away is doing a disservice to their party. When the Maryland’s Lt. Gov. Anthony Brown loses to an unknown Republican in a state where the Democrats have a 2-to-1 registration advantage, the Democratic Party better look in the mirror and ask: Why didn’t people …
Laura Poitras Omits Corporate Spies and State Capture
by William A. Blunden / November 13th, 2014
A couple of days ago Laura Poitras, the filmmaker who directed the movie Citizenfour, gave an interview to the Dutch news outlet NRC Handelsblad. For those in the audience who don’t speak Dutch there’s a rough English translation available at Cryptome.
Readers following the Snowden affair won’t encounter much in terms of new material but there are certain statements that Poitras makes near the end of her interview that are astonishing. For example, Poitras comments that both Google and Apple have made great strides towards protecting users:
I think certainly a change in consciousness has come after Snowden. Google’s servers …
“The Berlin Wall, this symbol of state abuse cast in concrete, took millions of people to the limits of what is tolerable, and all too many beyond it.”
On the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, German Chancellor Angela Merkel delivered a speech of sublime hypocrisy when juxtaposed beside the illegal Apartheid/Annexation Wall and beside the blockade ‘wall’ constricting Gaza constructed by Israel, which she once vowed, “Germany will never abandon Israel but will remain a true friend and partner.”
Merkel rhapsodised,
The fall of the Berlin Wall showed us that dreams can come true — and that nothing …
by Dissident Voice Communications / November 13th, 2014
Word: writers reading from their work to the accompaniment of imagery to set the mood.
Or perhaps it’s something else entirely. Why these images, for ‘audio A’ and those other images for ‘audio B?’ The image sequences don’t seem to be ‘literal’ interpretations of the spoken text.
But, as Yogi Berra said, “It ain’t over till be be finale of seem; then we can all go out for ice-cream, my treat…’
That is, it ain’t like this stuff is set to ‘program music.’
Unless, possibly, it is, or something along those lines. Perhaps the images are hieroglphs, a new ‘lingo’ to emerge from the …
As I was finalizing my research for this article, I found myself browsing through a heap of hilarious videos by mostly Egyptian TV show hosts Tawfiq Okasha and Amr Adeeb.
In one of his numerous videos on Youtube, Okasha, the star and host of the Cairo-based privately funded al-Faraeen channel, tries to explain the differences between the brains of humans and water buffalos. Along with Adeeb, they occupy a large space of Egyptian media discourse, wreaking so much havoc with their mostly unsubstantiated claims, frequent incite and outrageous claims.
Their demagogic discourse presented through daily campaigns of misinformation and vilification of …
The Australian delegation has provided the comic relief in diplomatic circles for some time now. Its pugilist humanoid of a prime minister, Tony Abbott, has made inane remarks about “shirt fronting” Vladimir Putin, something which distinctly did not happen at the APEC summit in Beijing. Photos were taken showing a disinterested Putin feigning interest in some zygotic life form. And Canberra’s toadies have been doing their utmost best to keep climate change off any meaningful agenda ahead of the G20 gathering in Brisbane. Why discuss something that, in the shallow minds of most of Tony Abbott’s front bunch, doesn’t exist?
by Dissident Voice Communications / November 12th, 2014
Real interviews with Real People who know stuff…
People Who Know Stuff: Eric Larsen: Inside Existence
People Who Know Stuff: Eric Larsen: Subversion
Eric Larsen, Publisher and Founder of Oliver Arts and Open Press, is a native of Minnesota who has lived in New York City since 1971. He taught writing and literature for thirty-five years at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY. He is now retired and devoting himself full time to writing and to The Oliver Arts & Open Press. Up through the 1980s he published fiction, essays, and reviews in numerous magazines, from quarterlies like The …
This is the shits of America, the more and more irrelevant prattlers of Democracy Now as we see this pig of a human, three-star general, retired, now getting his triple dipping blood money for a book full of fluff, lies, in this shit story of his shit life as a Murder Incorporated General — Why We Lost: A General’s Inside Account Of The Iraq And Afghanistan Wars by Three-star Criminal General, Daniel Bolger, worth 502 pages of forest-killing propaganda, a faux memoir. This general who’s been to war college after war college on how to bomb, destroy, drone, blast humanity. So Amy …
Twenty-five years ago this week, six Jesuit scholars at the Universidad Centroamericana (UCA) in El Salvador opened the doors of their residence to members of a government death squad, who had been armed and trained by the United States. The soldiers marched the priests to the back garden. They were ordered to lie face down. They were shot and killed like dogs along with their housekeeper and her teenage daughter.
Father Ignacio Ellacuría Bescoetxea, one of the six Jesuits executed that night, had been a vocal advocate for a negotiated political settlement to the war that had devastated the small Central …
by Dissident Voice Communications / November 12th, 2014
Roger Golden began studying Tai Chi and other martial arts forms after graduating from high school in the mid-1960s. A classic ‘clown,’ in the folk-lore sense of the cunning trickster who gets over on Power, as opposed to collaborating with, endorsing and representing it, he laughed his way from low-level street deals of the then ‘new thing,’ marijanna, to become one of the major ‘importer-exporters’ of this particular herb, in the United States (after the CIA, of course) until his incarceration for ten years in the early 1990s. With ‘Tai Chi, Thai Stick,’ the various lives …
by Dissident Voice Communications / November 12th, 2014
Presented by Douglas Valentine. Douglas Valentine is author of The Phoenix Program, a meticulously researched, ground-breaking history of the CIA’s complex ‘neutralization program’ used in Vietnam; the comprehensive, two-volume history of United States drug policy from 1900 through 2010, The Strength of the Wolf (1900-1968) , The Strength of the Pack (1968-2010) and The Hotel Tacloban. Valentine’s unique oeuvre of books and articles includes the widely acclaimed, With Our Eyes Wide Open, an anthology of international poets who ‘bore witness,’ translating personal accounts of war and related …
by Dissident Voice Communications / November 12th, 2014
Listed below are the ten quercks slated for this first dec of Leaving da Camera On. As-yet to be completed and uploaded quercks will be listed under ‘TBA’ until further notice (i.e. they’re completed — a relative term — and uploaded):
If Julian Assange was initially perceived by many as a controversial but respected, even heroic, figure challenging power, the corporate media worked hard to change that perception in the summer of 2012. After Assange requested political asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, the faux-feminists and corporate leftists of the ‘quality’ liberal press waged war on his reputation.
This comment from the Guardian’s Deborah Orr summed up the press zeitgeist:
It’s hard to believe that, until fairly recently, Julian Assange was hailed not just as a radical thinker, but as a radical achiever, too.
Contrarian values escalated to the highest peak. Uppercased and placed on a silver pedestal. Super human friction fundamentals scratch against the metal spike, working out all the rough edge elementals. Flashpoint of retardation as the species takes a high voltage dose of vaccine liquidation straight to the head. Recalcitrance flows through the muddy stream until reaching a waterfall of sludge and scrap iron plating. Pencil neck, bureaucratic, chicken hawk, fuck faces fudge numbers to get a bigger budget for their war profiteering schemes of madness. Evaluation ceremonies in the high loft take place on the backroom casting couch. Sell your …
For the past four years we have been visiting the Unist’ot’en camp and since then, we just can’t shut up about them. Why? Because their form of protest is beyond words and it’s manifested in direct action. They have created a real physical wall of opposition to all the proposed pipelines that could bring oil from the tar sands and fracked gas to world market in the Pacific ocean. We introduced them to the world with our “Oil Gateway” video back in 2011, and then with “The Action …
The meteoric rise to power of Barack Obama in 2008 was propelled by one of the greatest demagogic US Presidential campaigns of all time: To millions of young Americans, he promised to end the US wars in the Middle East. To millions of working and middle class voters, he promised to end the economic crisis by confronting Wall Street. To women, he promised to protect and expand their social rights and end the gender gap in wages and salaries. To human rights and civil liberties activists, he promised to end police state surveillance and torture, and to …
Israel’s economy minister Naftali Bennett, the leader of the right-wing party “The Jewish Home”, published an article in the New York Times in which he buried the concept of a “two-state solution” as a way out of the Israeli Palestinian conflict. Bennett does not belong to the radical Zionist fringe. Although he is an advocate of extremist colonial Zionist ideas, he is considered to be the successor of Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu. In his op-ed, Bennett has made a mockery of the policy of the last 20 years, which was connected to the Oslo Accords and the two-state …
Within twenty-four hours of protestors setting fire to the National Palace door in Mexico City, Mexico, I phoned a close friend. I cannot say much about him other than he is from Mexico City, lives there, and that he works with elected officials who respond directly to the head of state. I asked him what the back story was regarding recent polemics surrounding the protests and missing/murdered 43 students. He told me that nobody knows the official story, but that the popular perception of the tragedy undergirds the current commotion.
Everything allegedly started in Iguala, a town in the State of …
On October 23, 2013, Russell Brand appeared to crash through the filter system protecting the public from dissident opinion.
His 10-minute interview with Jeremy Paxman on the BBC’s Newsnight programme not only attracted millions of viewers – the YouTube hit-counter stands at 10.6 million – it won considerable praise and support from corporate journalists on Twitter. Brand was arguing for ‘revolution’ and yet was flavour of the month, cool to like. Something didn’t add up.
The hook for the interview was Brand’s guest-editing of New Statesman magazine, promoted by him in a video that featured editor Jason Cowley giggling excitedly …
The major adversaries of the U.S. Empire are China, Russia and Iran; and this will not change for reasons explained here. Of the three, China is the greatest threat to U.S. hegemony since its economy has already surpassed that of the U.S. in terms of purchasing power parity (PPP) according to the IMF. And military power in the end is a function of economic power, as we have known at least since Thucydides.
The Empire’s answer to China’s rise is the “pivot” to East Asia, the grand design of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, with the assistance of their eager …
Veterans Day is a holiday whose current meaning is somewhat different than its creators’ original intentions. Originally known as Armistice Day and designed to mark the end of the bloodbath known as First World War, Armistice Day became a national holiday in the United States “dedicated to the cause of world peace and to be hereafter celebrated and known as ‘Armistice Day.’” Nowadays, when veterans groups like Veterans for Peace are denied permission to participate in many ceremonies around the United States because of their antiwar philosophy, the day looks much more like a celebration of war. In addition, many …
Evidently the established media is unaware that American democracy is as dead as the proverbial dodo. Political commentators like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly, and the rest of the gaggle representing values dear to the beltway, come across (ever more) as mere salespeople…of mighty mouth… purveying myths of American supremacy to a vast public mesmerised-by-their-own-status and faux notion of democracy. Not surprisingly, those dead-wood-people, possessed of the idea that democracy is about organising the world in an American way, show little sympathy for those who resist the imperial behemoth. This unhealthy process is supported by the media in order to reassure us that the phenomenon known as militarism has still got ‘balls’ and America’s alpha-male-style-patriotism is …
We would do well to pause, and ponder both the data and implications presented in the Post Carbon Institute’s latest report, released a few days before Halloween, “Drilling Deeper: A Reality Check On U.S. Government Forecasts for a Lasting Tight Oil & Shale Gas Boom”.
The PCI’s new report exposes current oil industry & Energy Department oil production forecasts as wildly exaggerated. Further, it makes a compelling case that production of “U.S. shale gas and tight oil reserves will peak and drop off swiftly, long before officially predicted by the U.S. Energy Information Administration.”
“You didn’t know about the decision of the Singapore government to join the fight against ISIS?” she asked.
I was catching up with another Singaporean, Lynette (a pseudonym to respect her privacy), who had previously worked in Kabul and who was back in Afghanistan to do a month-long community-based survey with a U.S. university, looking at the impact of disability on Afghan communities.
“Military force is necessary to blunt IS on the ground but missiles and rockets alone cannot and will not bring peace,” said Singapore Foreign Affairs Minister Kasiviswanathan Shanmugam at a recent Singapore Parliamentary session. “…the true fight has to …
For those who are not familiar, Bunraku is an old form of Japanese puppet theater, its distinctive characteristic being that the puppeteers are on the stage with their puppets, dressed in black so that the audience can pretend not to see them.
While many old art forms have conventions that are unrealistic by modern standards, there is something particularly unsatisfying about bunraku: you can pretend not to see the puppeteers but you cannot fail to see them.
Bunraku, as it happens, offers a remarkable metaphor for some contemporary operations of American foreign policy. So many times – in Syria, Ukraine, Libya, Venezuela, …
Maintenance workers at the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton, Pa., airport shot and killed a bear and her three cubs.
The bears had crawled under a perimeter fence and were just lying around, several hundred yards from a runway. The airport director claimed the bears might have posed a risk to flights. The mother bear weighed less than most pro football linemen. While the airport officials were worrying about what a bear and her cubs might do, they probably should have been worrying why that fence wasn’t secure. If bears could crawl under it, couldn’t drunks or terrorists also get into unauthorized areas of the …
The progress has been conspicuous, and while it would be foolish to deem the Australian state a democratic one, its rudimentary Westminster form, as it is, finds itself being whittled away by attempts to hollow out protest – or at the very least the means of protest.
The international law canon on this is clear enough, but in a global system still policed by states suspicious of how far such laws go, they sound like noble words across empty spaces. Article 20 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1948 makes the point that people do have a right to freedom …
When news broke of Silk Road 2.0’s seizure by law enforcement a lot of people probably wrote it off as an isolated incident. Silk Road 2.0 was the successor to the original Silk Road web site and like its predecessor it was an underground bazaar for narcotics, fueled by more than $8 million in Bitcoin transactions and operated as a hidden service on the Tor anonymity network.
According to the criminal complaint filed against Blake Benthall, the alleged 26-year-old operator of Silk Road 2.0, law enforcement officers caught their suspect using old fashioned police work. Specifically they sent …
