The current failing effort to make Iran out to be a major threat to world peace starts the clock at 1979 in its propaganda effort to justify U.S. aggression against Tehran, which deliberately overlooks the events of 1953, when a joint U.S.-British effort overthrew the then secular Iranian government in order to take over the country’s oil industry.
Much like John Foster Dulles and his brother Allen, who successfully plotted the U.S. coup against him, Mohammad Mossadegh (Time’s Man-of-the-Year in 1952) came from an affluent background, welcomed the principles of capitalist democracy, and loathed Marxism. What set the three men on …
The large-scale US airstrike on Venezuela was unprecedented in modern history. The surprise attack forcibly kidnapped President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, First Combatant Cilia Flores, from Fort Tiuna on the outskirts of Caracas. The US killed over 100 people in the early morning hours of January 3, 2026, including reportedly some civilians in the neighboring Ciudad Tiuna social housing complex.
We visited Ciudad Tiuna 50 days after the US bombing to hear the resident’s accounts. We were the second “solidarity brigade” to visit …
They have kept their strategy of cultural and institutional vandalism generously broad in recent campaigns against their adversaries. It therefore came as something of a surprise that much febrile fuss was made about this month’s antics of an IDF soldier photographed attacking a statue of Jesus in southern Lebanon on the edge of Debel with a sledgehammer. Instead of its usual qualifications, haughty denials and coarse justifications, the Israel military accepted the veracity of the image and viewed the act “with great severity and emphasises that the soldier’s conduct is wholly inconsistent with the values expected of its …
Every so often, a paper comes along that does more than add another data point. It forces you to reconsider the assumptions sitting quietly underneath modern medical practice. This newly published study in Molecular Psychiatry is one of those papers.
This large U.S. study of over 6 million pregnancies found that commonly prescribed medications that interfere with cholesterol synthesis during pregnancy were associated with a roughly 47 percent increased risk of autism in offspring.
Roughly 11 percent of pregnant women were prescribed at least one of …
It may be impossible for a functioning mind, a rationally thinking person to understand how the world, the entire planet of 195 countries allowed Israel’s brutal genocide against Palestinian children and its families to occur on a daily basis, consistently for more than two years.
Specifically, equally puzzling to grasp how the American public returned to its shallow material world, to avoid the painful reality that it was a US President, the one who campaigned and was elected as a Peace President who created an appalling dilemma. That same President supplied Israel …
A coalition of veterans groups gathered in the nation’s capitol on Monday to express their deep opposition to the U.S. war on Iran. One hundred and thirty (130) veterans and military family members held a solemn, disciplined protest in the Capitol rotunda demanding that the Trump administration end its illegal war on Iran and that Congress stop funding the war.
The veterans, many of whom served in Iraq and Afghanistan, conducted a flag folding ceremony and played Taps on a bugle in honor of the 13 service members who have already …
I’m not sharing knowledge. I’m sharing encounters with absences of knowledge. It starts with the recognition of the categorical illusion of positive or conclusive knowledge — not the illusion of all knowledge, but the illusion of ever being able to know anything in a final form.
Science itself was built on this categorical realization that its theories do not lead to conclusive knowledge. However, even science seems to have lost sight of this initiating insight.
Or, as I said in an earlier essay:”This is what bothers me about the debate between evolution and creationism. Creationists criticize science as ‘mere theory.’ And science …
The purpose of HR 2289, currently being considered in the U.S. Congress, is to remove all local control over the rollout of 5G cell towers. There are many reasons that unregulated 5G (which stands for 5th generation) will bring devastation. It will greatly increase the risk of out of control fires, and cause very adverse health impacts, for which there is extensive documentation,
Overloading Utility Poles Causes High Risk of Wildfires
Unless you have been paying very close attention to the rollout of these small cells (short for cell towers), you may not be aware that they can allow for small-refrigerator-size cabinets of …
The inter-webs are abuzz with what Julian Casablancas and the Strokes did at the end of their final performance at Coachella a couple days ago. In the moment, in front of a bleary-eyed crowd of mostly 23-year-olds experimenting with unnamed drugs, it’s possible it felt like trying to educate a family of potato bugs on the theoretical quantum vacuum fluctuations near the event horizon of a black hole. But then the performance went viral.
The Strokes showed us how a pop culture platform can be used …
Sheelasha Rajbhandari (Nepal), Agony of the New Bed, 2023.
In the first general elections held since the Gen Z protests rocked Nepali society, the four-year-old Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP), led by rapper-turned-politician Balendra Shah, won a two-thirds majority. The left parties, on the other hand, suffered a major defeat, with the former ruling Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist–Leninist) or – CPN-UML – winning only 9 out of 165 seats in the House of Representatives. The Nepal Communist Party – a newly formed merger of over …
The Earth is in a fine mess, but human beings sealed in laboratories full of energy and vigour, attached to screens, and running tests about conditions in space, have another reason to cheer. Between April 1 and April 11, the Artemis II undertook a flyby of the Moon and returned safely. News bulletins, life stream feeds and podcasts afforded it saturating room and coverage. This was the first Moon mission with a crew in over five decades. Cue, then, for the grand claims, the exaggerated hopes, the silliness of it all.
Absurdly, the effort is being heralded as a collective …
[Source: fakty.com.ua]
Fedor Shandor, Ukraine’s ambassador to Hungary, sparked an international scandal in March 2026 by posting a photo featuring a Hungarian flag riddled with bullet holes. In the photo, the diplomat poses in camouflage alongside the controversial Ukrainian Armed Forces commander Robert Brovdi (call sign: Magyar).
In modern Hungary, displaying the Hungarian flag with a hole in the center is associated with the memory of the suppression of the uprising and is unequivocally interpreted as a sign of …
I was born in the south-east of England 17 years after the end of the Second World War, the most destructive conflict in human history. As a child, the 17-year gap seemed a lifetime; as a 64-year-old, it seems like the immediate aftermath. Everyone had fought in the war: your teacher, newsagent, headmaster, dentist, doctor. I met stereotypically mustachioed friends of my dad who had fought in Spitfires in the skies directly overhead. Or they had flown …
Depending on which historical sources you care to consult, the Pope has been a figure of obloquy, ridicule, and abomination. This mediator between the terrestrial and the divine was always set for the battering. Martin Luther’s violent Protestant split from the body of the Catholic Church was merely one aspect of attacking the occupants of that office. Acrimonious disputes between the secular arm of the State and Church power have also figured. In the 11th century, Pope Gregory VII famously battled the Holy Roman Emperor, King Henry IV, in the Investiture Controversy over who had the power to appoint bishops.
Nothing about this dystopia feels natural. We all sense it deep in our marrow. We all know something has gone terribly wrong.
If you lived in an alternate reality without wars or poverty, where everyone had enough, and governments did what was in the interests of the people and the ecosystem, it would never occur to you that there was anything odd about it. It would feel completely normal. Things would be more or less how you’d expect them to be.
You can’t say the same about the present status quo. The whole thing instinctively scans as weird and counterintuitive. The more …
I am not a believer in spiritual prophecy, but prediction is no more than deduction from facts, and more accurate, in my opinion. In our current global circumstances, the facts support some pretty nasty consequences that can be the subject of prophecy as well. Israel’s April 8, 2026, massive bombing of Beirut and other parts of Lebanon by an estimated 50 aircraft in the space of less than 20 minutes is the most obvious recent example, costing hundreds of civilian deaths and thousands of injuries, many of them permanent. It must have seemed like an apocalypse to those affected, as …
“Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. It’s very simple.”
— Donald Trump, 17 April 2026
The Second Biggest Mistake
The second biggest mistake connected to the United States-Israel war of choice against Iran occurred much before the current warring. The mistake was Ayatollah Khamenei issuing and steadfastly adhering to his fatwa against Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon.
It raises a what if question. What if there had been no fatwa against Iran developing a nuclear weapon and that Iran had developed a nuclear weapon?
Peculiarly, if Iran had developed a nuclear weapon, it is highly …
For the past few weeks the news has been filled with articles about the replacement of public control of Indianapolis Public Schools (IPS) with a top-down “board” comprised of unelected pro-privatization forces that will oversee both public schools and privately-operated charter schools in the city.
Such boards, commissions, and entities are nothing new when it comes to education; they exist in many states. They are mainly mechanisms that override democratic arrangements in order to accelerate the privatization and corporatization of education under the veneer of high ideals. The public has no …
The US government under Donald Trump has twice used disingenuous negotiations with Iran to provide cover for attacking it, in June 2025 and again before launching the current war in February. Now it is trying to do so for a third time.
On April 8, the US and Iran began a two-week ceasefire, after Trump accepted a ten-point peace plan drawn up by Iran as “a workable basis on which to negotiate.” But Vice President Vance and US negotiators rejected Iran’s plan out of hand at talks in Pakistan …
China Military Bugle, an official media account under the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) News Media Center, posted a video on social media on Saturday, showing drone-captured footage of how the PLA Eastern Theater Command (ETC) deployed naval and air forces to monitor the movement of a Japanese destroyer transiting the Taiwan Straits a day prior.
On Friday, the Japanese destroyer JS Ikazuchi transited the Taiwan Straits, leading to denouncement and opposition from Chinese authorities.
According to Senior Colonel Xu Chenghua, spokesperson of the PLA Eastern Theater Command, the transition of the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force (SDF) vessel, which took place from …
The American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and its allies have long been considered one of the strongest lobbies in Washington, exercising outsized influence, especially on U.S. policies toward Israel and the Middle East. Recently, its purported muscle has come under question, and votes in Congress the last two days show why, or at least that there is a stark partisan divide.
For all the hundreds of millions of dollars AIPAC and its allies have given to Democrats, they got exactly fourteen votes from Democrats in the House of Representatives and Senate the last two days …
Women and men all over the world are, for the first time in such large numbers, frontally challenging the male-dominator/female-dominated human relations model that is the foundation of a dominator worldview. At the same time the idea. . . of seeing the ‘the other’ as ‘the enemy’ is also being challenged. There is, most significantly, a growing awareness that the emerging higher consciousness of our global ‘partnership’ is integrally related to a fundamental reexamination and transformation of the roles of both women and men.”
Small Is Beautiful’s seemingly boundless appeal lies in its central theme: self-determination for local communities facing external mandates.
— Nate Seltenrich, Sonoma Magazine
In the heart of Sonoma Valley, in a region repeatedly scarred by catastrophic wildfire, a small rural community finds itself on the front lines of a battle that echoes far beyond its borders. Small Is Beautiful: The Quest to Save the Valley of the Moon, produced and directed by Carolyn M. Scott, is a gripping short documentary that chronicles the fight to stop a massive luxury development planned for the former Sonoma Developmental Center (SDC) — a state-owned property — …
The Italian weekly L’Espresso titled its latest edition “L’Abuso” or “The Abuse,” illustrating the cover with a photo of an armed Israeli settler sneering at a Palestinian woman with a frightened expression and filming her with his cell phone camera. The photographer, Pietro Masturzo, said the photo captured the first day of the olive harvest season in Hebron in the West Bank. Thousands of Palestinians were prevented from accessing their land due to intensified settler violence. On the day this photo was taken, 20 …
A curing system that heals by name, but disseminates malice silent.
This does not mean failure, but a trend.
The country experienced one of the worst public health crises in Taunsa Sharif and Ratodera. Parents took them to get regularly treated, because of fever, because of weakness, because of the common ailment. And most went away with something much worse. The condition of HIV which was later diagnosed in hundreds of children was life altering as they did not choose the condition, nor did they understand it. Enquiries were made into dangerous injection, re-imbursement syringes, …
One of the hallmarks of the mature adult is her ability to delay gratification. Among other things, it signifies self-control, emotional maturity, and a willingness and ability to think about, and plan for, the long-term future. Qualities that are essential to good strategic planning.
To the extent that we can attribute such traits to national governments, even the casual empiricism afforded by a Western mainstream media that bends over backwards to glorify one side’s behaviour cannot gloss over the wide gulf in strategic management capability between the principal combatants in the Iran war.
The character and …
