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Today (March 20, 2014) US President Barack Obama has extended the sanctions against Russia, introduced earlier by an executive order declaring “a national emergency” in view of the “actions and policies of persons — including persons who have asserted governmental authority in the Crimean region without the authorization of the Government of Ukraine – that undermine democratic processes and institutions in Ukraine; threaten its peace, security, stability, sovereignty, and territorial integrity.”  This order blocks all property and interests in the United States  that belong to individuals under sanction, suspends entry into the United States, as immigrants or non-immigrants, …

Governments find it hard to do the right thing for their people – why?

There are those who say that the idiots running western and allied governments (the “civilized” countries) are pitching the world towards a pair disasters, the full realization of either of which, in its most extreme form, would likely change life on earth for the worse for most folks, whether it’s the continuing, unabated nuclear meltdowns in Fukushima or the continuing, unabated political meltdown over Ukraine that risks nuclear war. There are also those who don’t say that these leaders are idiots. We’ll see how things turn …

Countries who seek to gain control over their people through the Internet have their own agendas. They are in search of larger governmental control or even censorship online.

— Marietje Schaake, European Parliament Member, February 2014

Politics, claimed the German chancellor Otto von Bismarck, is the art of the possible. Exceed that limit, and you are bound to make a hash of it. By all means, care to dream, but be aware of limitations. The Turkish government, led by Recep Tayyip Erdo?an, has given that sentiment substance. Ahead of the local elections on March 30, he has attempted …

At a time when the risk of civilizational collapse is widely forewarned, it is time to recognise that the call for sharing is a cause that can unite concerned citizens working on a diverse range of interconnected global issues.

More than ever before, analysts and organisations are advocating for the process of sharing to guide our response to pressing global issues. One recent example is a research project sponsored by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, which modelled a range of scenarios “closely reflecting the reality of the world today” and found that civilizational collapse will be “difficult to avoid”. Although …

Dear President Obama:

As you ponder your potential moves regarding President Vladimir V. Putin’s annexation of Crimea (a large majority of its 2 million people are ethnic Russians), it is important to remember that whatever moral leverage you may have had in the court of world opinion has been sacrificed by the precedents set by previous American presidents who did not do what you say Mr. Putin should do – obey international law.

The need to abide by international law is your recent recurring refrain, often used in an accusatory context toward Mr. Putin’s military entry in Crimea and its subsequent …

It set a trend, but the Crimean referendum has the discussion on separatism tittering away. As ever, the narrative of the national compact, bound by mystical unity and statehood, powers the narrative, while separatist movements seek to draw parallels and sketch contrasts. Movements from as far as Catalonia in Spain and Scotland in the UK have taken heed of the referendum. The Spanish case is significant – Spain, along with four other European Union members, have not recognised Kosovo’s 2008 declaration of independence from Serbia.

Crimea’s new information minister, Dimitry Polonsky, was happy to throw some fuel …

Since the early 1990s, Israel, US, and their submissive European allies, supported by their uncritical and subservient media, have been peddling allegations, fabrications, accusations, and lies that the government of Iran was pursuing a secret, military adjunct to its regularly inspected civilian nuclear program. The main thrust of Gareth Porter’s book, Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare (Just World Books, 2014), is to demonstrate that this crisis was “manufactured” and the accusations were bogus, i.e., Iran never had a military nuclear program. For over 20 years Israeli politicians have been claiming that Iran’s nuclear device …

Shoot, yeah, ending another quarter teaching at another college, here in WA state, and, whew, of course the Chomsky’s and Giroux’s and Hedges of the world DO NOT get it.

Think of faculty in the trenches, working with youth, in my case, a whole load of high school students in a community college swap program called Running Start. We take juniors and seniors out of their high schools, they take college courses, and they get high school credit AND college credit.

You think it works well, uh? You think getting these young folk out of the high schools and into college classes …

Just in case you think [lard] is unhealthy, don’t be put off by that.
— Clarissa Dickson Wright

The last half of the duo known as The Two Fat Ladies has left the cooking world. Clarissa Dickson Wright came across as the sharper one in the outfit which stormed to television culinary stardom in the 1990s. Jennifer Paterson fronted as the other half, the driver of the celebrated Triumph Thunderbird which took both of them across Britain in a cheery hunt for food. The overwhelming effect of their presence lead to parodies, resentment and a good deal of affection.  They were quite …

The needs of the natural world are more important than the needs of the economic system.

— Derrick Jensen, Endgame Volume One: The Problem of Civilization

We can find the state of the environment through a quick survey of facts: Satellite photos tracking declining ice sheets, emissions monitoring showing the passing of the 400 p.p.m. tipping point ((Global carbon dioxide in atmosphere passes milestone level, The Guardian)); the actual decline and near disappearance of key species like bees ((Bees in Decline, full PDF report from Greenpeace)); deforestization ((European Commission Report on deforestization)); overfishing ((90% of …

Farewell to the British, as they leave the country that took their soldiers, and more than a sense of dignity.  Forces are being withdraw (the popular term is drawn down, as if they were blinds) and it is hard to see the mission in Afghanistan as anything but another intervention that did not quite pan out well for the invader.  At one point, 137 bases dotted Helmand province.  In an operational sense, only two bases remain: Camp Bastion, the main base for UK personnel, and Observation Post Sterga 2.  Lashkar Gah and Patrol Base Lashkar Gah Durai now find themselves …

News that 2015 might turn out to be the first year since 1914 when British troops will not be fighting a war somewhere in the world appeared to come as a shock to many. But, in fact, the British record of Permanent War stretches back much further. Seumas Milne commented in the Guardian that empire forces “were involved in violent suppression of anti-colonial rebellions every year from at least the 1760s for the next 200 years, quite apart from multiple other full-scale wars”.

One might think a rational society would try to identify and counter the institutional forces responsible for …

Writing in The Washington Post on February 27, 2011, Rachel Bronson asked: “Could the next Mideast uprising happen in Saudi Arabia?” Her answer was: “The notion of a revolution in the Saudi kingdom seems unthinkable.”

However, on September 30 the next year, the senior foreign policy fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy, Bruce Riedel, concluded that the “revolution in Saudi Arabia is no longer unthinkable.”

To preempt such a possibility, the kingdom in March 2011, in a “military” move to curb the tide of the Arab popular uprisings which raged across the Arab world from sweeping to its doorsteps, …

Long before the Boycott, Sanctions and Divestment campaign inched slowly from the fringes of global solidarity with Palestinians to take center stage, Tony Benn had been advocating a boycott of Israel with unrestricted conviction, for years.

“Britain should offer its support for this strategy by stopping all arms sales to Israel, introducing trade sanctions and a ban on all investment there together with a boycott of Israeli goods here and make it a condition for the lifting of these measures that Israel complies with these demands at once,” Benn wrote in his blog on April 19, 2002, under the title “A …

I look upon some of the recent scandals in American academic philosophy programs with great intrigue (I used to study philosophy at the graduate level) because these scandals provide case studies of what ails that discipline in particular, and what makes the humanities disciplines in general a laughingstock to the public and those concerned about the role the university should have in society.

Recently, a prominent philosopher at the University of Miami resigned over allegations that he sent sexually suggestive emails to a female graduate student; another prominent philosopher recently resigned his tenured position decrying the sexism …