It is entirely unsurprising that Israel has yet again been caught out in a lie – a lie that the BBC once again spread far and wide on its news services.
Israel claimed that it had not fired at starving Palestinians queuing on Sunday morning to get food from one of its highly militarised “aid distribution hubs” – a system Israel imposed on Gaza in place of a long-established and successful aid network run …
Not so much criminals as the foundations of the rule of law — that is what has infiltrated the United States from Latin America. That seems to be a major thread running through Greg Grandin’s wonderful new history of the hemisphere, America, América: A New History of the New World. It’s a book you can dive back into repeatedly, not to mention fantasize about someone compacting it into a short slideshow for the benefit of the President of the United States.
British settler colonists in North America had their preachers and writers, but those individuals had a tendency to pretend Native Americans were …
A previous article, “Challenging China,” described the mixed and managed economy that enables China (PRC) to overcome the economic pressures posed by an overly contentious America. More to it.
China’s mixed and managed economy is designed to match its stage of development and is well managed. The U.S. non-managed economy has no design and does not match its advanced stage of economic development. China uses exports to grow its economy and limit debt. The U.S. runs severe deficits in its trade balance and needs a growing debt to finance the trade deficit and to increase the GDP. …
A new book by Will Potter, author of Green is the New Red ('11), and then newsfeeds just keep dinging me on my computer as I read his Little Red Barns: Hiding the Truth from Farm to Fable
by Paul Haeder / June 2nd, 2025
I’ll be interviewing Will this Tuesday, for my radio show, Finding Fringe: Voices from the Edge, and it will air in July.
Here’s a blub — a promotional positive statement about the book:
“We are in a fight for our lives against a rising authoritarian tide, and this clear-eyed, compelling, clarion call of a book has a message everyone needs to hear. We will not save ourselves if we do not also fight for the lives of others–including non-human animals. No one is better positioned than Will Potter to connect the dots …
Tory leader says the quiet part out loud, admitting that both Israel and Ukraine are fighting for the West
If you have spent the past 20 months wondering why British leaders on both sides of the aisle have barely criticised Israel, even as it slaughtered and starved Gaza’s population of more than two million people, you finally got an answer last week.
Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch said the quiet part out loud. She told Sky: “Israel is fighting a proxy war [in Gaza] on behalf of the UK.”
To boil it all down (and the speakers here have never yet been found to be wrong about this war, which they have been analyzing ever since 2016): the only way that America and its allied countries can now avoid a total defeat in this war is by directly going to war themselves against Russia. Though that would not start out as being a nuclear war, what would the loser in the conventional war then do? Would it surrender? Or would it instead initiate nuclear war against the side that has won the conventional war (which would then become World …
Our apologies, good friends, for the fracture of good order, the burning of paper instead of children, the angering of the orderlies in the front parlor of the charnel house. We could not, so help us God, do otherwise.
For we are sick at heart, our hearts give us no rest for thinking of the Land of Burning Children. And for thinking of that other Child, of …
Recipe author Nagi Maehashi, unmoved by her own numbing banality, is peeved. Her target: Penguin books and author Brooke Bellamy. Her accusation: the apparent copying of recipes for caramel slice and baklava from Maehashi’s RecipeTin Eats website, released in Bellamy’s Bake with Brooki, published in October last year. “Profiting from plagiarised recipes is unethical,” she huffed, “even if it is not copyright infringement – and undermines the integrity of the entire book.” Rather indulgently, Maehashi goes on to decry this as a “slap in the face to every author who puts in the hard work to …
On 23 May 2020, I headlined “Israel — an enemy of America” and documented that though U.S. taxpayers donate to Israel each year $3.8 billion, of which 3.3 billion goes to pay American weapons-producers such as Lockheed Martin to supply Israel with weaponry, Israel’s record has been as an enemy of the U.S. (or at least of the American people), NOT as a friend, and also not merely neutral. That article got me to thinking about whether the U.S. Government controls Israel’s Government, or instead vice-versa; and, now, I shall present my conclusion about this (that …
And we thought the Borscht Belt had died out. We have it in the corridors of power, in the White Man’s House, in every corner of media and the law. To take this to its silliness level: The name comes from borscht, a soup of Ukrainian origin (made with beets as the main ingredient, giving it a deep reddish-purple color) that is popular in many Central and Eastern European countries and brought by Ashkenazi Jewish and Slavic immigrants to the United States. The alliterative name was coined by Abel …
In 1973, I was still a somewhat naive college senior ready to face the business world. My major had been in Speech and Theater, with a minor in Sociology. As the year was ending and the new one upon us, I was engaged to be married and needed to find secure employment. Graduation was really just a formality… I needed a steady income. My then job was as a commissioned telephone salesman working in what had been labeled a “boiler room operation.” We sold office supplies over the phone, using the infamous “going out of business, 40% off” pitch. I …
Ronald Johnson’s Appointment Sparks Outcry Over U.S. Interference
by Robert Hunziker / May 31st, 2025
“But truth’s a menace. Science is a public danger.” (Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, 1932). Huxley’s “World State” promotes stability and social harmony over scientific progress. According to the dystopian World State, science is a threat that challenges existing beliefs, which leads to “questioning the established order.”
2025 – America Decommissions Science
The decommissioning of government-funded science appears to be a directive calling for: “Decommission but leave just enough of a shell to make it appear to be operational.”
In reaction to deep budget cuts, America’s most respected science journal, Nature, reports, “Trump Proposes Unprecedented Budget Cuts to US Science,” May 2, 2025: …
Meet Joe Black (1998) is basically a 2 1/2 hr anecdote, where an angelic Brad Pitt, the angel of death, comes and saves the day by impersonating an IRS agent investigating and exposing the vile young suitor Drew, as Brad takes fiancee Allison’s father (Anthony Hopkins) to heaven. Brad quotes money-grubbing Drew: You can’t avoid ‘death and taxes’.
Yes, Death gets us all in the end, smokers and nonsmokers, smokers statistically earlier but not nearly everyone, and not all that much sooner in any case. And there are lots more causes of lung …
What a nasty thing it has turned out to be. It involved subversion – Israel’s desire to ignore international tenets of humanitarian aid in favour of expediency and security – and the naked show of violent desperation. Via the shoddy US- and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation company, distribution of necessaries in the Gaza Strip through the organisation’s delivery arm, Safe Reach Solutions (SRS), has been inadequate and selective.
SRS is a disreputable outfit, one lacking a résumé in humanitarian aid. Its prowess, rather, lies in the realm of military intelligence. A report from Ynet News describes …
Our society doesn’t always stand out for its values, but damn well does for its production values. There may be nothing more powerful in the world than a film — or even a commercial — with high production values. So I’m deeply appreciative when a well-made movie actually says something that needed saying, when you can watch the closing credits feeling wiser, rather than dirtier, more aware of what’s worst in the world and yet inspired to change it, rather than outraged at the normalization of violence or stupidity.
In the early 1970s I joined a community organization called Radical Psychiatry in Berkeley, California. The purpose of the group was to help people in the community who were suffering with moderate to severe mental problems so they did not have to go to a traditional psychiatrist or use drugs. As I recall, these community meetings were once or twice a week for a couple of hours for each meeting. The staff was organized as a collective and this collective had its own weekly meetings to discuss how …
As summer approaches, the French government and its media echo chambers are once again launching an Islamophobic offensive. By seizing on a newly released report about the so-called ‘influence’ of the Muslim Brotherhood, they are using a crude pretext to target and suppress any visible expression of Islam in society. This comes in the wake of the brutal murder of 22-year-old Aboubakar Cissé, a Malian-born carpenter who was stabbed 57 times while praying in a mosque — a horrific hate crime. We are republishing this article from last summer as a stark testament to the …
A public opinion poll in 2023 found that 64% of likely United States voters thought that our government should officially recognize the Island of Taiwan as an independent nation, while a poll this year found that 82% of them believe that Taiwan “is” independent. A few months ago the U.S. State Department removed a line from their website stating that the US does not support Taiwan independence, triggering a rebuke from Beijing that this “sends a seriously erroneous message to the separatist forces” in Taiwan. Consistent with such views among U.S. citizens and State Department officials, the …
The ghosts of Paul Weyrich, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, the OG’s (Old Guard) of the religious right are dancing these days. Since his inauguration, Trump has rewarded his religious right allies with executive orders creating a “Religious Liberty Commission” and a “Task Force to Eliminate Anti-Christian Bias.”
“Together they will put the force of the federal government behind the conspiracy theories, false persecution claims, and reactionary policy proposals of the Christian nationalist movement, including its efforts to …
by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead / May 29th, 2025
If one company or small group of people manages to develop godlike digital superintelligence, they could take over the world. At least when there’s an evil dictator, that human is going to die. But for an AI, there would be no death. It would live forever. And then you’d have an immortal dictator from which we can never escape.
—Elon Musk
The Deep State is not going away. It’s just being replaced.
Replaced not by a charismatic autocrat or even a shadowy bureaucracy, but by artificial intelligence (AI)—unfeeling, unaccountable, and immortal.
As we stand on the brink of a new technological order, the …
A short guide on how to engineer a genocide by starvation and ethnic cleansing:
1. Choose your moment. Ok, you’ve been ethnically cleansing, occupying, oppressing, and killing your neighbours for decades. The international courts have ruled your actions illegal. But none of that will matter the moment your neighbours retaliate by attacking you. Don’t worry. The Western media can be relied on to help out here. They will be only too ready to pretend that history began on the day you were attacked.
Fragmented by nationalism and distracted by power games, humanity stands at a turning point. We face global crises that threaten our survival, yet we remain without a common purpose rooted in solidarity and mutual care. This—our failure to recognize our shared fate—is the true crisis of our time.
Every nation clings to its sovereign right to act in its interest: to strike deals, close borders, and extract value from the global system. This is not new, but it is increasingly dangerous. The Global South strives to reclaim agency from …
As the world was readying for the Second World War, the insightful humane Austrian author Stefan Zweig made the following glum observation: “Openly and flagrantly, certain countries express their will to expand and make preparations for war. The politics of rearmament is pursued in broad daylight and at breakneck speed; every day you read in the papers arguments in favour of armaments expansion, the idea that it reduces unemployment and provides a boost to the stock exchange.”
This is not so different from the approval by European Union countries on May 27 of a €150 billion loan program known …
The pro-government alliance achieved a sweeping victory in Venezuela’s May 25 elections, while a fractured opposition suffered losses. Western media distorted the results – spinning low turnout claims, ignoring the role of illegal US sanctions, and offering selective sympathy to elite opposition figures.
Opposition fractures, pro-government consolidates
At stake for the 54 contesting Venezuelan political parties were seats for 285 National Assembly deputies, 24 state governors, and 260 regional legislators.
The pro-government coalition won all but one of the governorships, taking three of the four states previously held by the opposition. The loss of the state of Barinas was particularly symbolic, for this …
Last Thursday, May 22, a coalition named Veterans and Allies Fast for Gaza kicked off a 40-day fast outside the United Nations in Manhattan in protest against the U.S.-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza. Military veterans and allies pledged to fast for 40 days on only 250 calories per day, the amount recently reported as what the residents of Gaza are enduring.
The fasters are demanding:
1) Full humanitarian aid to Gaza under UN authority, and
2) No more U.S. weapons to Israel.
Seven people are fasting from May 22 to June 30 outside the U.S. Mission to the United Nations, where they are …
The collective “The West” is now not ONLY supporting (and the U.S. Government itself is supplying virtually all of the bombs, ammunition, weapons, and satellite intelligence to) Israel’s (and America’s) genocide against the formerly 2.2 million Gazans, but also is making life hell for journalists who honestly report this and other ugly realities that The West is perpetrating, such as in order to achieve its dream ever since 25 July 1945 to capture Russia (add it to their empire). Furthermore, it started supplying weapons and training to …
