“In the period from July 14th to 19th, 2014 we witness a catastrophic increase (of 3473 people, or 47%) in the number of deserters in the units of the Army and the National Guard – in comparison with last week’s numbers (1847 people, 25%).? Apart from that, during the stated period the number of missing in action had increased as well (1344 people, 47%, last week – 344 people, 10%).
This phenomenon is connected to increased activity of the enemy in the Donetsk and the Lugansk regions as well as to the increase in the number of casualties in the ranks …
A recent essay by Harvey E. Whitney, Jr., titled “The ‘People’s Thesis’ in Environmental History,” opens by saying that it’s “chic” to analyse “history and/or ideas” with a “prominent platform” to something called the “people’s thesis”.
It’s a bit difficult to comment accurately on the piece because the expression “people’s thesis”, which the writer suggests is his own construct rather than some commonly understood expression, isn’t clearly defined. Therefore, given the absence of this fundamental piece of information, making sense of his argument is problematic. So ordinarily I wouldn’t bother to try. However, reading the article gave me a …
The media emphasizes the emotional aspect of tragedy, and the public responds with tears and regrets, rarely giving attention to the illogic that caused the tragedy. When illogic is a governing factor in the violence against people, it elevates the calamity to a criminal action. Feeling sorrow for the victim is warranted but insufficient; thought must complement emotion and enforce justice against the perpetrator.
In the war on Gaza, commentary has evaded logical analysis and presented causes and actions as gut reactions to unforeseen events. Logic, the opposite of emotion, may seem cold and indifferent, but syllogism, “a formal argument in …
One thing to be said for the women now heading the Federal Reserve and the IMF: compared to some of their predecessors, they are refreshingly honest. The Wall Street Journal reported on July 2nd:
Two of the world’s most powerful women of finance sat down for a lengthy discussion Wednesday on the future of monetary policy in a post-crisis world: U.S. Federal Reserve Chairwoman Janet Yellen and International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde. Before a veritable who’s-who in international economics packing the IMF’s largest conference hall, the two covered all the hottest topics in debate among the world’s central bankers, financiers and economists.
BERLIN – Following German media’s recent campaigning against massive USA/CIA/NSA spy activities in Berlin (and the Pentagon’s prosaic indifference) evokes what the Germans call ‘Fremdschämen’ –the feeling of shame for the embarrassment of others: What were the Germans thinking, anyway? That they were special? Equal? Bosom buddies, perhaps, on a par with the world’s sole superpower?
The Emperor Is Naked
The background story is swiftly told: After Edward Snowden, the US dissident, revealed secret documents in June 2013 about the greatest surveillance scheme in the history of mankind, it is now certain that the US National Security Agency (NSA) had …
Despite the conclusion by US intelligence that there is no evidence of Russian involvement in the destruction of the Malaysian airliner and all lives onboard, Washington is escalating the crisis and shepherding it toward war.
Twenty-two US senators have introduced into the 113th Congress, Second Session, a bill, S.2277, “To prevent further Russian aggression toward Ukraine and other sovereign states in Europe and Eurasia, and for other purposes.” The bill is before the Committee on Foreign Relations.
Note that prior to any evidence of any Russian aggression, there are already 22 senators lined up in behalf of preventing further Russian …
The Sunday, July 20 FREE PALESTINE rally gathered at the Justin Herman Plaza, near the Ferry Building in San Francisco. I got there as it was beginning, shortly after 3 p.m. The crowd already appeared to number a thousand, and more were arriving. People kept streaming in. By 4:15 p.m. when the march began, the plaza was brim full. So how many people does it take to fill that plaza? I wondered. Thousands, obviously — but how many thousands?
After the march I looked online for estimates from various other events at the plaza and found an article about the …
You know, they’re schemers: Schemers trying to control their worlds. I’m not a schemer. I try to show the schemers how pathetic their attempts to control things really are…You know what, you know what I noticed? Nobody panics when things go according to plan: Even if the plan is horrifying. If tomorrow I tell the press that like a gang banger will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up, nobody panics, because it’s all part of the plan.
— Heath Ledger’s Joker, The Dark Knight, 2008
They did not repent of their murders, their sorcery, their immorality, or …
Here is what the DNA of many Jewish Israelis is all entwined with, whether academic (sic), politician (sic), businessman/woman (sic), with or without dual USA-Tel Aviv citizenship (sic) – bombing clinics, women, children, developmental disabled, quadriplegics, the blind, wheelchair bound, tinker-tailor-hummus salesman, student, granny, the blind, deaf, bedridden, journalist. That is the legacy of syphilis, the seeders of Native American blankets, the gas chamber designers.
Palestinian homes are imploded hourly, with drone-guided illegality, help from USA military and academic institutions, the rotten smell of the devil coming in to view, oh how we are waiting for Hugo Chavez’s ghost to admonish …
I just read a piece by the antiwar activist and writer David Swanson who I usually find to be quite right-on. But his recent piece left me scratching my head. What was Swanson smoking when he wrote “The Palestinian Right and the American Left”?
He begins: “Chris Hedges says that Palestinians have the right to self-defense in the form of rockets, without including any consideration of whether the rockets make the Palestinians more or less defended. There is, after all, a reasonable argument that the rockets are counter-productive and endangering, rather than protecting, Palestine.”
I’ve been applying a new strategy in my life. Quite successfully, as a matter of fact. I wanted to share it with you. I call it WWID, or “What Would Israel Do?” This question has a way of crystalizing all of my actions through a white-hot lens of fanaticism. Choices become simpler. Life becomes easier. I brim with purpose. Let me explain.
Yesterday, I was in line at McDonald’s. There was some confusion, as always, as to whether there was one line or three. So a guy walks in, proceeds right to the counter and is served. I had already been …
The History of Ideas, and its Relevance to Cultural Studies
by Harvey E. Whitney, Jr. / July 23rd, 2014
In the humanistic studies, the chic approach today in analyzing history and/or ideas involves giving a prominent platform to what I refer to as the “people’s thesis”.
For a discipline such as history, the people’s thesis has emerged as social history, which involves narrating history from the perspective of “ordinary” peoples: people who are not in a position of political or economic power. Source documents used for constructing or communicating that narrative might consist of personal letters between friends and family, receipts recording everyday business transactions, newspapers (e.g., readers letters to the editor, crime reports, obituaries, want ads, etc.), popular magazines, …
Natural gas is falsely promoted by the Obama Administration and energy corporations as a “bridge fuel” that will allow American society to continue to use fossil energy over the coming decades while emitting fewer greenhouse gases than from using other fossil fuels such as coal and oil.
On this basis, President Obama is providing total support to a massive expansion of hydraulic fracturing (fracking) for natural gas within the U.S. He seeks sufficient quantities to last for many decades, allowing the U.S. to export liquefied natural gas and oil throughout the world.
Counting on lower greenhouse pollution from the use of natural …
Everybody loves a good story and, as Aristotle taught, nothing drives impact like a beginning, middle and end. Start off with fetching characters and compelling themes, a plotline awash with suspense, then cap it off with a wow ending. Genesis oozes mythic ingredients as pre-science scribes, with nary a clue about impenetrable mysteries, fashioned a poetic rendition in part to discourage nitpicking. The stage set, we shift to high drama of the Fall, then the dysfunctional, disaster-prone first family that marches into the real world of earthly time. The loss of Paradise — by which godlike figures trade Eden for …
Hamas has hit Palestine’s bloodthirsty occupier where it could hurt real bad — in the soft under-belly that is Ben Gurion airport. The Resistance has achieved this by lobbing a rocket too close for comfort and causing air carriers in the United States and Europe to halt flights to Tel Aviv after warnings from governmental agencies concerned about passenger safety.
“The carriers are making the right call,” said Robert Mann, an airline consultant in Port Washington, New York. “They are ultimately legally responsible for their operations and thus, they have to be at least as cautious and in many cases more …
You take my water
Burn my olive trees
Destroy my house
Take my job
Steal my land
Imprison my father
Kill my mother
Bomb my country
Starve us all
Humiliate us all
But … I am to blame: I shot a rocket back.
— Placard first seen in Gaza, 2012
The “most moral army in the world” from “the only democracy in the Middle East” has attacked hospitals, a home for the disabled, a geriatric hospice, demolished five mosques, razed entire neighbourhoods, erased entire families – the youngest – so far – just three days old if you do not count the unborn, as in the case of twenty nine year old …
Two reporters for major US TV channels were summarily “removed” last week from covering Israel’s attack on Gaza, moments before Israel launched a ground invasion.
NBC pulled out Ayman Mohyeldin, who has been widely praised for the even-handedness of his reporting from Gaza, just as he landed a harrowing scoop. He had kicked a football with four boys who were killed moments later by an Israeli missile.
Mohyeldin managed a few tweets before being removed, allegedly on “security” grounds. But why then did NBC immediately send in a replacement? After a public outcry, Mohyeldin was reinstated, but no proper explanation of the …
In the wake of a recent article on Tor ((Bill Blunden, “The NSA Wants You to Trust Tor, Should You?” Counterpunch, Weekend Edition July 18-20, 2014)) your author received an e-mail from Shava Nerad, the founding executive director of the Tor Project. Putting aside certain rhetorical devices that have cropped up in this debate, like name-calling or guilt-by-association, let’s examine some of Shava’s points to see if we can take the conversation in a constructive direction.
Choosing Sides
For example, Nerad asks me which side I’m on, commenting that my article “seems more aimed to throw fear and darkness” in a …
Israeli propaganda has hit a new low. While the world was still trying to come to terms with the mass deaths in Shuja’iyeh, Benjamin Netanyahu went on CNN to state that Hamas uses the “telegenically dead” to further “their cause.” He added that for Hamas: “The more the dead, the better.” Even while Netanyahu followed the propaganda script, which is to first show sympathy and express remorse, by reducing dead Palestinians to a photo-op he showed how his own mind works.
There is a standard script for how to deal with Palestinian casualties. After Israel killed four boys …
Q: Why is Egypt preventing medical aid to Gaza?
A: So that Israel can use it as a weapon, that’s why.
This explains why dozens of volunteer medical personnel cannot reach the desperately understaffed hospitals in Gaza. It explains why Egypt turned away a convoy of desperately needed medical supplies.
In this time of crisis, Egypt has sealed the border with Gaza, except occasionally to Palestinians who are registered with Israel as residents of Gaza. For anything else, please apply to Israel.
That’s fine for UNRWA, ANERA, UPA and other groups Israel has approved as relief agencies and …
On the 13th day of Israel’s so-called Operation Protective Edge, stories of entire families collectively pulverized, women and children keenly targeted by Israeli soldiers, saturate the media. Until now, 430 Palestinians have been killed, mostly women and children, and 18 Israel soldiers been killed at the hands of the Resistance. In Shejaiya, elders, mothers and children scrambled for cover as shells mercilessly rained down, stealing the souls of countless innocents.
The destruction is overwhelming, and everywhere, Palestinians lament there is nowhere that is safe. Regardless, resolve is strong and the people of Gaza will not resign themselves to surrender.
On 26 November 1947, when it became apparent to Zionists and their supporters that the UN vote on the Partition of Palestine would be short of the required two thirds majority in the General Assembly, they filibustered for a postponement until after Thanksgiving thereby gaining time to threaten the loss of aid to nations such as Greece — which planned on voting against — into changing their votes. U.S. President Truman — also threatened with loss of Jewish support in the upcoming Presidential election — later noted that:
The facts were that not only were there pressure movements around the United …
Israel’s current attack on a basically defenseless population in Gaza is a repeat of its massacres of Palestinians in November 2012, December 2008-January 2009 and June-July 2006. This time Israeli forces have already slaughtered over 500 Palestinians, overwhelmingly civilians, while about 20 Israelis, almost all soldiers, have been killed. The imbalance of these death tolls is staggering but not surprising. I say not surprising because Israel has one of the strongest militaries in the world, supplied with the latest US weapons and technology, whereas Palestinians have no real army nor any defense against Israeli plane or
missile attacks.
Britain’s newly-minted foreign secretary Philip Hammond has lost his shine already. A few days ago he warmly welcomed Egypt’s bogus ceasefire proposal which hadn’t even been shown to Hamas.
Yesterday he was asked three times on the the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show whether Israel’s military operations in Gaza were a proportionate response and he ducked the question every time.
However he did say: “We will be looking very carefully at what is happening on the ground to make sure that it is proportionate, that civilian lives are being protected in a proper way.”
The continuing carnage suggests otherwise. Would Mr Hammond care …
Part 5: IMF, World Bank, Giant Consultants Admit The Storm Is Coming
by Andrew Gavin Marshall / July 21st, 2014
Following Parts 1, 2, 3 and 4 of the World of Resistance Report, in this fifth installment I examine the warnings of social unrest and revolution emanating from the world’s major international financial institutions like the IMF and World Bank, as well as the world’s major consulting firms that provide strategic and investment advice to corporations, banks and investors around the world.
These two groups – financial institutions and the consultants that advise them – play key roles in the spread of institutionalized corporate and financial power, and as such, warnings from these groups about the threat posed by “social unrest” carry particular …
Empires are not easy to sustain given the multiple enemies that they provoke: at the international level (imperial rivals and emerging new powers), at the national level (national resistance movements, unreliable clients and untrustworthy ‘Sepoy’ armies) and at the local level (boycotts, sabotage and strikes). Imperial difficulties are multiplied when an empire is in economic decline, (loss of market shares with growing debt), facing domestic unrest as the economic costs to the taxpayers exceed the returns by a substantial margin; and when the political elite is internally divided between ‘militarists’ and ‘free market’ advocates.
How can we bring about an awareness that sharing is the solution to a planetary crisis, and our last remaining hope for rehabilitating a divided world? Central to this question is the problem of ‘isms’, in which our complacency has intellectualised itself in order to justify its existence as being normal.
The problems of humanity have reached such an apex that it is now critical for governments to implement the principle of sharing within and between every single country. It is critical on several counts: firstly, to release the joy and creativity that is inherent in every human being but widely …
In his speech to the nation Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu acknowledged yesterday that the war on Gaza is a battle for the existence of the Jewish State. Netanyahu is correct. And Israel cannot win this battle; it cannot even define what a victory might entail. Surely the battle is not about the tunnels or the militants’ underground operation, the tunnels are just weapons of resistance rather than the resistance itself. The Hamas and Gaza militants lured Israel into a battle zone in which it could never succeed and Hamas set the conditions, chose the ground and has written the terms …
