Climate change is not hot weather, and it is not cold weather. Those conditions have been around for eons.
Climate change is extreme anomalous weather conditions, like 100-year floods every few years rather than once every 100 years; e.g., Eastern Europe in 2013, or torrential downpours equivalent to annual rainfall levels but within one week, like Colorado in 2013, or embedded droughts that last for months, like Russia in 2010 when grain exports were halted, or subzero temperatures throughout North America in January 2014 because of anomalous jet streams; i.e., climate change conditions.
All of these extreme weather conditions that in years …
At last the world knows America as the savior of the world!
– President Woodrow Wilson, Paris Peace Conference, 1919
The horrors reported each day from Syria and Iraq are enough to make one cry; in particular, the atrocities carried out by the al-Qaeda types: floggings; beheadings; playing soccer with the heads; cutting open dead bodies to remove organs just for mockery; suicide bombers, car bombs, the ground littered with human body parts; countless young children traumatized for life; the imposition of sharia law, including bans on music … What century are we living in? What millennium? What world?
When will there be justice in Athens? There will be justice in Athens when those who are not injured are as outraged as those who are.
— Thucydides (460 BC – 395 BC)
In December 2007, Major General Graham Binns, Commander of British Forces in Basra, handed illegally occupied Basra Province back to the Iraqis, with Basra city centre “festooned with flags, lights and banners to mark the occasion.”
In fact, the whole nonsense was window dressing. British soldiers had been under siege in their bases between February and September that year and had withdrawn to Basra Airport on the city’s outskirts, leaving …
We had to sound civilized in public, he told us; we had to speak English.
— Adichie, Purple Hibiscus
I was the third seed planted that sprouted one February Sunday evening in a giant hospital at the heart of Ibadan, the largest city in Old Oyo, a restless and unplanned place where life is rushed, growing up is fast and easy, and wounds are unmasked; everything is in the open–from the street-side, open-roof stores that sell your groceries, to the hustlers hawking burnt tapes, CDs and knock-off brands, to the black markets that hide in the day and shine at night, to …
In a small park next to the National Security Agency in Fort Meade, Md., signs explain rules about photographs one can take — and illustrate the kind of photo one isn’t allowed to take.
Mass surveillance has an image problem. The visual references commonly used to portray intelligence agencies — screens, servers and sleek glass buildings — don’t suggest an ethics or a rationale to their operations. They don’t suggest that there are even humans involved in collecting information about millions of other humans. In order to understand a world in which mass surveillance is increasingly deemed an unexceptional fact, it …
Crushed for years in the framing/messaging wars, Democrats are finally joining the fray with populist, though cautious, election-year banners. Right, let’s defeat the take-no-prisoners, right wing war cries — dripping with life and death dramas — with safe, feel-good, happy faces. Appealingly, this modest strategy doesn’t depend on the besieged Obama, slow-footed on gay marriage, legal marijuana, upping the minimum wage, or reversing income inequality via serious tax reform.
Excluding a few soaring campaign slogans, this chief executive is a monumental sound-bite flop. What, besides those early come-ons, will go down in history — other than perhaps Obama’s grand gaffe this …
A worst case scenario is unfolding in Syria, and Palestinian refugees, particularly in the Yarmouk refugee camp, are paying a heavy price for Syria’s cruelest war. They are starving, although there can be no justification, nor logistical explanation for why they are dying from hunger.
Spokesman for the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), Chris Gunness, told AFP that “at least five Palestinian refugees in the besieged refugee camp of Yarmouk have died because of malnutrition, bringing the total number of reported cases to 15,” since September 2013. Other estimates, especially those reported by local residents, say the number is significantly …
Obsessed with the “Iran threat,” which leads to its warmongering in Syria, Saudi Arabia is acting like a bull in a china shop, wreaking regional havoc in an already Arab fragile political environment and creating what George Joffe’ of Cambridge University’s Centre of International Studies, on December 30, called the “second Arab cold war,” the first being the Saudi-led cold war with the Pan-Arab Egypt of Gamal Abdul Nasser since the 1960s.
The kingdom stands now almost isolated politically. Its “going it alone” in the Syrian conflict has cornered Saudi Arabia into a self-inflicted foreign policy no-win deadlock, to be at …
We certainly hope that the MLA does not consider a one-sided punitive resolution against Israel like the one adopted by the American Studies Association [ASA]. The “blowback” against the ASA has been significant.
— Roz Rothstein, co-founder and CEO of StandWithUs
It is still too early to assess, but I would nevertheless venture to predict that next year will not be an easy one for Israel’s enemies on campus.
— Judea Pearl, father of Daniel Pearl
Debates about the Israel-Palestine conflict frequently slide into a familiar pattern of assertion and counter-assertion: if one asserts that Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians in the occupied territories deserves formal …
The Conservatives are trying to rally Canadian Jews to their right wing imperialistic world view.
At the start of last month Stephen Harper spoke to the annual Toronto gala of the Jewish National Fund, which has a long history of dispossessing Palestinians and discriminating against non-Jews. Alluding to Arab/Persian/Muslim barbarians at the gate, Harper told the 4,000 attendees that Israel is a “light of freedom and democracy in what is otherwise a region of darkness.”
A few days before this event Minister for Employment and Social Development Jason Kenney spoke at the launch of the Canadian chapter of the Middle East Media …
On December 20, both chambers of the U.S. Congress passed a little-noticed bill to expedite permitting for hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) on public lands in the Bakken Shale basin, located predominantly in North Dakota. And on December 26, President Obama signed the bill into law.
Days later, on December 30, a Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF) freight train owned by Warren Buffett carrying Bakken fracked oil exploded in Casselton, North Dakota. Locals breathed a smoky sigh of relief that the disaster happened outside the town center. In July 2013, a “bomb …
John Kerry spent last week testing the waters with the Israelis and the Palestinians over his so-called framework agreement – designed to close the gaps between the two sides. But the issues he is trying to resolve appear more intractable by the day.
As he headed to the region, Israel’s hawkish cabinet ministers gave their blessing to legislation to annex the Jordan Valley, a large swathe of the West Bank that might otherwise be the Palestinian state’s economic backbone and its sole door to the outside world. On Sunday, as Mr Kerry left, the defence minister, Moshe Yaalon, argued that peace …
The government of Palestine presented Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa with the “Star of Palestine” the highest award of the State of Palestine, on January 6.
“The relations between Sri Lanka and the State of Palestine are exceptional and we remain committed to extending our fullest support to the State of Palestine and the friendly people of Palestine,” President Rajapaksa said during the conferment ceremony.
“President Rajapaksa, on behalf of the people of Sri Lanka, conferred the ‘Sri Lanka Mitra Vibhushana’ awards on former Palestinian President Yasser Arafat and current President Mahmoud Abbas,” during his current trip to Palestine, Israel and …
The Palestinians are sleep-walking to disaster, again
by Daud Abdullah / January 7th, 2014
If he succeeds with his current “peace” initiative, John Kerry would have killed three birds, not two, with one stone. With the stroke of a pen his “proposed framework” will not only dissolve the Palestinian refugee issue but also deactivate Israel’s so-called demographic bomb. And for good measure, Israel would be allowed to annex the settlements of the West Bank. That would give them a semblance of the legitimacy they lack.
The Palestine Liberation Organisation and Palestinian Authority position is ambivalent. Not for the first time, they appear to be sleep-walking into a diplomatic trap; an Oslo-type transitional agreement with no …
At the onset of 2014, many people are now anticipating the prospect of a ‘global revolution’. The intense revolutionary fervour of 2011 may have dissipated in North America and much of Western Europe in the past couple of years, but a new geography of protest continues to shift and transmute in different countries and world regions – the million people on the streets of Brazil in June last year; the earlier defence of the commons in Istanbul’s Taksim Gezi Park; the indigenous uprising and student protests across Canada; the Ukraine demonstrations that are still under way.
The Times of Israelreports that Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erekat, who recently resigned (again) but mysteriously remains in post, said in an interview that the Palestinians will not agree to extending latest talks with Israel one minute beyond the allotted nine months, ending in April.
“The objective is to reach an agreement on all issues pertaining to a final-status deal. And according to the wording of the agreement with [US Secretary of State] Kerry, there will be no transitional or interim agreement.” He said the US administration was trying to cut the talks short to preempt any …
As gold broke below the psychologically important level of $1,200 an ounce late in December of 2014, the mainstream financial media burst with headlines like this one from Marketwatch: “Gold’s Safe-Haven Role is Over.” The Nobel prize winning economist from the New York Times, Paul Krugman, penned a wicked missive on the ‘barbarous relic’ by invoking Keynes and the absurdity of miners going to “great lengths to dig cash out of the ground, even though unlimited amounts of cash could be created at essentially no cost with the printing press.”
1. Aldeia resiste the world cock
2. The War on Christmas Trees
3. NYE Noise Demos
4. Rote Flora Defense
5. 20 years of Zapatistas
6. RATM – People of the Sun
7. Anarchists come out of the closet
KABUL — The fire in the Chaman e Babrak camp began in Nadiai’s home shortly after noon. She had rushed her son, who had a severe chest infection, to the hospital. She did not know that a gas bottle, used for warmth, was leaking; when the gas connected with a wood burning stove, flames engulfed the mud hut in which they lived and extended to adjacent homes, swiftly rendering nine extended families homeless and destitute in the midst of already astounding poverty. By the time seven fire trucks had arrived in response to the fire at the refugee camp, …
It’s been about two weeks since the news media began smothering the nation with stories about UPS and FedEx delivering packages late during the holiday season.
A short shopping season of less than 30 days between Thanksgiving and Christmas, combined with extraordinary numbers of deliveries and extreme weather problems caused thousands of packages not to be delivered by Christmas. For some media, this was the top story.
FedEx says it delivered more than 275 million packages in that one month period. UPS doesn’t say how many it delivered or how many were late. But it does say that if customers sent their …
Cute, really, calling it, Surveillance Valley, that abomination of elitist, mostly Zionist, and certainly white male-dominated reverse Darwinism IT bootcamp, where the most hostile sub-species exists to shred all human agency. These are Ivy League/Stanford/Georgia Tech types, very strange, indeed, humans who are possessed of the most puerile of spirit, the most usury, psychologically defective, narcissistic, Oedipal hearts on earth, and they just keep that lie going. Silicon Valley my ass!
As if this drone-loving, Fidel-exploding cigar-loving, misfit, racist, bio-hazard, NSA, CIA, DARPA, DoD is somehow more dangerous than Google, Yahoo, Amazon, the entire Brave New World of Media. Really, we …
Build Broad National Consensus for Paradigm Shifting Change
by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers / January 5th, 2014
In our last article, “Major Social Transformation Is a Lot Closer than You May Realize,” we defined where today’s social-political movement is within the eight stages of successful movements. We have passed the “Take-Off Stage” (Stage 4), gotten through the “Perception of Failure” (Stage 5) and are in the phase of “Building Majority Support” (Stage 6) which is the last stage before “Victory.” In this article we delve deeper into the tasks of the movement in this stage and apply those tasks to current issues faced today.
In this stage, which can take many years, the primary task of …
What propels lust? Lust for power; lust for wealth; lust for … well plain lust. The latest in acquisitiveness by parvenus and politicians centers on stolen German luxury cars smuggled to Poland (a mere 50 miles from Berlin) and beyond, in the former Soviet Union’s orbit of influence. ‘Come to Poland, your car is already here’, has become a German joke playing on a travel slogan. Equipped with GPS-using anti-theft devices, the cars have been traced to luminaries such as the Ukrainian Minister of Justice, close associates and family of the President of Tajikistan, and other eminences favoring …
Compensation? After we pay the government lawyers, there’s about enough left for one good drunk before we commit suicide.
— Johnny (Bingo) Dawson, No fixed address, Vancouver, Canada
Preamble: Questioning Canadian mathematics, as revealed by two news items, albeit separated by a lapse of 107 years.
(1) In June, 1907, both the Montreal Gazette and the Ottawa Citizen reported that Dr. Peter Bryce, a medical director appointed by the Canadian Government, had completed a national inspection tour and concluded that the death rate in 141 Indian Residential Schools among the incarcerated …
The fact that a month ago the Permanent People’s Tribunal found Sri Lanka guilty of committing genocide against the Tamil people and so few non-Tamil media has informed us of such is unjust oversight at best. I didn’t find out about this important decision until today (January 4). The western media, including left-wing web sights, has been silent or ignorant of this.
The Rome-based Permanent People’s Tribunal (PPT) is an outgrowth of the original war crimes tribunal created during the war against Southeast Asia by Bertrand Russell and Jean Paul Sartre.
Its panel of 11 judges, experts in international law, former UN …
The Iraqi government has declared that Fallujah has fallen entirely into the hands of “Al Qaeda and Daash”. This follows over a month of US and Iraqi PR campaigning in the news media touting Al Qaeda’s ambitions to carve out an emirate in the region. It also comes just days after the revelation that the regime in Baghdad has received hellfire missiles and drones from the United States for the stated purpose of fighting Al Qaeda in the last month.
Behind the scenes, however, Shafaq Newsreports that some government sources admit that the claims are a …
If war should come, whichever side may claim ultimate victory, nothing is more certain that victor and vanquished alike would glean a gruesome harvest of human misery and suffering.
— UK Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, July 31, 1939, to the House of Commons
Fallujah has become a symbol of Iraq’s suffering since the onslaught on the country in 1991, numerous, uncounted interim US-UK bombings, then the 2003 invasion, occupation – and misery unending.
In 1991, a busy market was bombed, as was a hotel, which was “leveled.” Two hundred people were incinerated. Another attack: “destroyed a row of modern, concrete, five …
In 2010, ongoing wars and government corruption spread through a fog of apathy. The world appeared to be reaching a tipping point for either global crisis or transformation. In this climate, WikiLeaks emerged into the limelight like a call to the conscience of humanity. Over the last few years, they released secret documents revealing Kenyan government corruption, Iceland’s financial collapse, the criminality of US wars in the Middle East and more. Their very existence and what they revealed called into question the legitimacy of imperial power structures around the world.
Ever since its initial public …
Have you seen the economic recovery? I haven’t either. But it is bound to be around here somewhere, because the National Bureau of Economic Research spotted it in June 2009, four and one-half years ago.
It is a shy and reclusive recovery, like the “New Economy” and all those promised new economy jobs. I haven’t seen them either, but we know they are here, somewhere, because the economists said so.
Congress must have seen all those jobs before they went home for Christmas, because our representatives let extended unemployment benefits expire for 1.3 million unemployed Americans, who have not yet met up …
