I often don’t write about the things that make me angry. Mostly that’s because I’ve written previously on something similar, and I don’t like repeating myself. Sometimes it’s because it’s very draining to spend time and energy trying to write relatively lucidly and without hysteria on something that almost no one will read and because I know it won’t make any difference what I think and say. So I think why bother?
The appalling genocide being perpetrated in Gaza at the moment is one such subject. The obscenity of it is so extreme, and writing about it so enrages me and …
The extension of the Iran nuclear negotiations for another four months surprised many in the political elite and the news media. The consensus was that the talks were failing, because as U.S. officials had said repeatedly, Iran was refusing to agree to reduce its enrichment capabilities radically to assure the P5+1 that the nuclear program was solely for peaceful purposes.
That U.S. official line has shaped media coverage of the talks for months. But that picture of the state of the negotiations assumed that public statements about the positions of the two sides reflected the whole reality of the negotiations. …
by The Real News Network (TRNN) / August 5th, 2014
This is an excellent news piece from the The Real News examining something marginalized by mass media: hatred — mass hatred. [DV ed.] The Real News looks into who are the groups chanting “death to Arabs” throughout Israel and attacking anti-war demonstrators.
What is the nation? Should we be asking what, or perhaps who? Is it the land? The odd space shown within some contours drawn on a map by dead white men centuries ago?
Are they the people born on a particular side of the border? A gender? A race? An ancient tribe? A conquering army in the Eleventh Century? A raging Parisian mob in the Eighteenth? The government and the local authorities? Is he the taxman? Is she the Queen?
This week a look into Israel’s racism, riots in Paris in solidarity with Gaza, resistance to oil and gas infrastructure in Turtle Island, including actions in Utah, Vermont, Washington, 6 Nations and Unist’ot’en, the defense of Pizzeria Anarchia in Austria, PETA’s latest asshole move, new music by Rob Hustle, and an interview with Doug Gilbert on his book the I saw fire.
Israeli deceptions revealed in story of ‘kidnapped’ soldier
by Jonathan Cook / August 4th, 2014
A single incident at the weekend – the reported capture by Hamas on Friday of an Israeli soldier through a tunnel – illustrated in stark fashion the layers of deception Israel has successfully cast over its attack on Gaza.
On Sunday, as the army indicated it would start limited withdrawals, Israel claimed Hadar Goldin was dead, possibly buried in a collapsed tunnel as Israel bombarded the area in which he was seized. His family said he was being left behind.
Israeli officials or media did not view Hamas’ operation dispassionately. Goldin was not “captured” but “kidnapped” – as though he was …
Oh the horror of it, the Tony Blair-Clinton Bear-Obama Osama-Kissigner-Pelosi-Feinstein of it all!
Interesting, the stuff Felicity Arbuthnot (August 2nd, 2014) wrote about Tony Blair and the Mafia Middle Easterners known in some circles as Stockholm Syndrome Nazis – can you imagine Jews in Israel taking their marching orders from the Third Reich, from the Final Solution pharmacists, from the entire project on usury, militarism, and atrophied hearts and sociopathic economics, cultural crassness and genocide that define what it is to be a Zionist there, here, anywhere?
Tony Blair? What is it about language? What is it about this neutering of heart, …
“Protection Standards for Nuclear Power Operations” means what?
by William Boardman / August 3rd, 2014
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) of the United States is a full blown oxymoron when it comes to protecting U.S. residents from the danger of increased exposure to ionizing radiation. That’s the kind of radiation that comes from natural sources like Uranium and the sun, as well as unnatural sources like Uranium mines, nuclear weapons, and nuclear power plants (even when they haven’t melted down like Fukushima). The EPA is presently considering allowing everyone in the U.S. to be exposed to higher levels of ionizing radiation.
In 1977, the EPA established levels of radiation exposure “considered safe” for people …
“In the period between the end of World War Two and Marshall’s meeting with Truman [May 12, 1948], the Joint Chiefs of Staff had issued no less than sixteen (by my count) papers on the Palestine issue. The most important of these was issued on March 31, 1948 and entitled “Force Requirements for Palestine.” In that paper, the JCS predicted that “the Zionist strategy will seek to involve [the United States] in a continuously widening and deepening series of operations intended to secure maximum Jewish objectives.” The JCS speculated that these objectives included: initial Jewish sovereignty over a portion of …
Researchers at Temple University in Philadelphia may have found an entry-way to the cure for AIDS.
Once the HIV virus enters the body it can lie dormant for years. It can also evolve into AIDS. But, until now, it could never be removed.
It’s far too early to claim an AIDS cure—there still has to be several years of clinical trials— but this may be as close to a solution as scientists have come.
Friday July 25th was the eighteenth day of Israel’s onslaught on Gaza. 1.7 million people, walled in, embargoed, with no place to hide, squeezed now into just 66% of the forty mile long strip of land on orders from the Tel Aviv Reich. Six Palestinians were killed, the death toll in all on the day rose above eight hundred and fifty. The hospital in Beit Hanoun was bombed, part of an ongoing attack until minutes before midnight, injuring a number of people.
Fred Ekblad, a Swedish activist who was part of an international group staying in solidarity with the hospital staff …
The Zionist Project is to eradicate all Palestinians who make claim to a home in Palestine. The Zionist Project is exactly what Israel has been doing since its artificial creation.
The Zionist Project is planned incremental dispossession and an on-going attempted genocide, and this has been repeatedly and explicitly expressed by its architects and executioners. The Zionist Project as attempted genocide is also expressly cheered-on by many Israeli citizens and by members of the Zionist diaspora of all religions.
The Israeli apartheid is not meant as a sustained apartheid. It is an increment in an attempted genocide that accompanies a vast racist …
Tom Keough: The big Climate march is next month in NYC. I’ve learned about climate problems in several big ways that most Americans would never imagine…. [T]his comic … has some lessons based on real life , as opposed to learning about climate problems from the NY Times, Time Warner, or the Post.
“Black Boxes Show Shrapnel Destroyed Malaysia Airlines Plane, Ukraine Says”
by William Boardman / August 2nd, 2014
That headline in the Wall Street Journal of July 28 creates the immediate false impression that there is new information: shrapnel destroyed plane! Before the headline is over, the WSJ begins backtracking – “Ukraine Says” – a reference that yellow-flags a less than credible source. As the story continues, it reveals that there’s no actual news here, starting with the sub-head: “Older Flight Recorders on Plane Likely to Provide Limited Data” – so is there reliable data or not? Then the story reverses direction again, with this riddle-filled lede:
MOSCOW—Ukrainian authorities said Monday that data retrieved from the black …
Fifty years ago in August, the US contrived an incident that led to the escalation of the US war on Vietnam. That incident, known historically as the Gulf of Tonkin incident, was said to involve an unprovoked attack by northern Vietnamese forces on two US Navy boats. As it turned out, the Vietnamese were repeatedly provoked before the incident and the US had fired first. Nonetheless, Lyndon Johnson and the US Congress used the events as a reason to intensify the war on the Vietnamese. Like so many times since, the rush to war swept all dissent aside. Only two …
The moral duplicity in the U.S. political class is breathtaking. Squeezed in between news stories of the ongoing slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza, U.S. President Barak Obama announced expanded economic sanctions against Russia for its’ alleged support for what the media calls “pro-Russian separatist forces” in Eastern Ukraine. The U.S. action could not have been a more dramatic illustration of the cognitive dissonance and ethical double standards of the Obama administration and the U.S political class.
This action comes on the heels of unanimous resolutions from the U.S. Congress that placed the blame for the Israeli attack on …
Contemporary baptized, corporatized and sanitized man rarely has the occasion to question his identity, and when he does a typical response might be, “I am product manager for a large retail chain, married to Betty, father of Johnny, a Democrat, Steelers fan and a Lutheran.”
His answers imply not only his beliefs but the many responsibilities, rules and restrictions he is subjected to. Few if any of these were ever negotiated- …
By providing a comprehensive history of African American resistance to white supremacy, This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get you Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible (Basic Books 2014) makes a major contribution to black history. Author Charles E Cobb offers one of the few accounts of the 1960s Freedom Movement written from an African American perspective, often in the words of actual movement participants.
The main purpose of this book is threefold:
1. To emphasize that the success of the 1960s Freedom Movement was based on systematic and sustained grassroots organizing – and not charismatic black leadership as portrayed in …
Abraham Lincoln once said that “With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it, nothing can succeed.” Presumably, he meant Presidential action on popular issues can and should overcome influential interests.
At long last, the “public sentiment” seems to be aligning with some causes you are advancing.
First, support is increasing for restoring the federal minimum wage to account for the inflation that, since 1968, has greatly diminished its purchasing power. The federal minimum wage is presently stagnant at $7.25 per hour. You are supporting the Harkin-Miller bill (H.R.1010 and S.2223), which would raise it to $10.10 per hour over three …
While the Deep State and Its Lies Unwind Democracy
by William A. Blunden / August 1st, 2014
One evening over drinks in Ethiopia, during his tour as a CIA officer back in the 1960s, John Stockwell expressed reservations about covert operations to a senior fellow officer named Larry Devlin. Stockwell worried that the CIA was infiltrating governments and corrupting leaders to no useful end. Devlin, well-known in spy circles for his work in the Congo, berated Stockwell: ((John Stockwell, THE SECRET WARS OF THE CIA: part I, lecture given in October, 1987))
You’re trying to think like the people in the NSC back in Washington who have the big picture, who know what’s going on in the …
The researcher Alice Miller became worldwide known because of her investigations of childhood traumas. A dozen of her books is translated into thirty languages. Miller shows the mechanisms, with which victims can turn to perpetrators, and she shows the ubiquity, even the inevitability of this danger. The big hits the small who in turn will transmit it to their own children if the circle does not get interrupted. Miller (a Jewish victim herself) also examined the Nazi generation in Germany in order to understand how Germany could develop such a genocidal racism. Today, Miller’s findings are standard knowledge, and nobody …
Imagine owning warehouses full of second rate bootleg hooch at the very moment Prohibition is repealed.
Imagine still owning a buggy whip factory.
Imagine possessing billions of gallons of oil, just as renewable energy sources begin chopping major chunks out of your market share. Watching as the worth of your reserves decreases day after day after day.
With every advance by alternative energy industries, the potential price of the world’s oil reserves decreases.
Today, 30% of Germany’s electric power is being produced by alternative sources. How do Germany’s new power producers effect the value of known oil reserves? Replacing …
Several misguided commentators have advanced that Canada’s unconditional support for Israel is the result of Christian Zionist ideology.
This is flat wrong, and inexcusably naive. Harper’s unconditional support for Israel is not from right-wing or religious ideology. Nor is this the case in the US itself.
Canada’s unconditional support for Israel started under former-Prime-Minister Paul Martin after he took over (and destroyed) the Liberal Party of Canada. And the take-over was one additional step from some degree of Canadian sovereignty to complete alignment with the US master.
That Canada has become a vassal to the US Empire — and subservient to the Empire’s …
Can’t be stopped. Won’t be stopped. Shall not be encumbered along the path toward transcendent evolutionary enlightenment.
Nothing can slow down the steamboat intensity of a reckless abandon once all the marbles have been intricately placed in the same basket alongside a nest full of painted eggs. Baker’s dozen. Scrambled to perfection. Who’s to say it’s reckless anyway? What judge would dare make such a presumptuously preposterous proclamation? There could be no worthier aspiration than to seek the most highly elevated levels …
Two short weeks ago, art students from an Offenbach university located in the heart of Germany occupied every floor of a closed-down, multi-tier soap factory building. They used the space to excitedly display their art to the public. Considered by a few of these students to be the ‘Detroit’ of Germany, Offenbach itself is situated on the outskirts of Frankfurt—the German banking city responsible for maintaining most of Germany’s wealth. Many of the young artists signaled nearby Frankfurt as the undeniable European economic hub, while at the same time poking fun at the poorer economic status of Offenbach in particular. …
Today’s Guardian includes an article that appears to be excusing Israel of responsibility for the massive death toll it has inflicted on Palestinian civilians. But, more significantly, it includes a lot of useful – and damning – information about just how “indiscriminate” Israel’s weapons really are.
This interests me a great deal because I have been warning about problems with the interpretation of international law used by leading human rights groups on this very point since the 2006 Lebanon War.
At that time I got into a dispute with Human Rights Watch’s Middle East policy director, Sarah Leah Whitson. Her organisation …
It is important to understand the genesis of the present round of violence between Israel and Hamas, really between Israel and the people of Gaza.
Both President Obama, Secretary Kerry, and the American news media have consistently described the conflict as Israel justifiably responding to the firing or rockets into Israel by Hamas and protecting their citizens, as if world history only began at this moment and that prior context did not exists.
More thoughtful and better informed observers than Obama and Kerry have more correctly noted that the present waves of Hamas rockets was preceded by a sequence of events which …
Differentiating between Zionism and Judaism requires recognition of certain basic facts. To begin with, Theodor Herzl (the founder of Zionism) was an atheist whose personal awareness of Jewishness appears to have been awakened during the 1894 trial, wrongful conviction, and imprisonment on Devil’s Island of Alfred Dreyfus, a French artillery officer of Alsatian Jewish descent accused of spying for Germany. In his diaries, Herzl makes no secret of his intention to use Jewish suffering as a means of furthering Zionist ideology. His vision for a Jewish state had nothing to do with “ … I will also bring them back …
With this order, the worst in living memory, the Australian government is not just gagging the Australian press, it is blindfolding the Australian public.
— Julian Assange, July 29, 2014
The Westminster system has always been seen, in some select circles, as a model for freedom and expression. It has been everything but. In Australia, whose institutions do still pride themselves on an antiquated obsession with aspects of English gagging, suppression orders do retain a certain mystique. They certainly do in the Australian state of Victoria, which is said to throw “suppression orders around like confetti”.
Ordinarily, I completely ignore contemporary U.S. movies—which manage, from year-to-year, to attain new lows of infantilism, incoherent nihilism, and sheer vapidity (cf. my previous article “Reviving Radical Populism in Films”). Yet lately, I found myself disturbed by the uniformly ecstatic reviews of Linklater’s latest film, Boyhood. The premise of the film seems boring enough, unexceptional, barely even a “concept”: every year the cast and director got together, made up a “script” as they went along, and traced a boy’s growing-up, from ages 6 to 18.
Morbidly curious, I forced myself to watch the usual clips available on Youtube, etc.; and …
