Peter O’Toole has died and I’d like to draw a little attention to three of his movies: The Ruling Class, The Stunt Man and My Favorite Year.
Take a little of the madness of his title character in Lawrence of Arabia, put a magnifying glass on it the size of the sun and you’ll be eyeball to eyeball with O’Toole’s Jack Gurney character in 1972’s The Ruling Class, a Python-esque extravaganza labeled variously as a cult classic, a devastating social satire and the blackest of black comedies. Gurney is a schizophrenic nobleman who inherits a peerage, believes he’s God, sleeps upright …
"All governments lie", the US journalist I.F. Stone once noted, with Iraq the most blatant example in modern times. But Syria is another recent criminal example of Stone’s dictum. An article in the current edition of London Review of Books by Seymour Hersh makes a strong case that US President Obama misled the world over the infamous chemical weapons attack near Damascus on August 21 this year. Hersh is the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who exposed the My Lai atrocity committed by …
“The world has forgotten Gaza, its women and children. The blockade is as bad as the war; it’s like a slow death for everyone in Gaza. We are paying the price for disputes between different powers. Isn’t that shameful? The world has lost its humanity,” said Attiyeh Abu Khousa, a resident of Gaza.
At this time of year the mainstream media abounds with stories of how ordinary people across the world are preparing for the upcoming Christmas holiday. One story people will not hear about is the desperate plight of the 2 million people trapped within the Gaza Strip where …
“This year is likely to be among the top 10 warmest on record, according to the World Meteorological Organization.” ((Roger Harrabi (environment analyst), 2013 ‘One of Warmest’ on Record, BBC News, Nov. 13, 2013.))
According to Michel Jarraud, Secretary-General of the World Meteorological Organization, “All of the warmest years have been since 1998, and this year once again continues the underlying, long-term trend. The coldest years now are warmer than the hottest years before 1998.” ((Roger Harrabi (environment analyst), 2013 ‘One of Warmest’ on Record, BBC News, Nov. 13, 2013.))
As a consequence: “The president of the World Bank, Jim …
On this date 360 years ago, Oliver Cromwell was made Lord Protector of England. What does that have to do with Christmas, you may ask? Well, the parliament of puritanical Protestants that he led tried to ban Christmas for being un-Christian.
In 1645, four years before the execution of King Charles I, which ushered in the Cromwellian republic, a group of MPs created the Directory of Public Worship to purge the calendar not only of Christmas but of all holy days, while enforcing strict observance of Sunday worship. This hard-assed animosity toward Christmas (and human revelry in general) did not arise …
Precaution. Stop shifting the baseline. Stop mucking around because you have no common sense but plenty of computer engineering ADD-ADHD or what have you, on that autism spectrum. What have you, stop enlisting these money changers and game changers to define community.
The 1998 Wingspread Declaration is typical of precaution in the sciences:
“When an activity raises threats of harm to human health or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically. In this context the proponent of an activity, rather than the public, should bear the burden …
Creeping annexation, ethnic cleansing and ‘the politics of fragmentation’ inflicted by criminals who strut the world stage and thumb their noses at international law.
As the international conspiracy to rob Palestinians of their freedom and homeland is exposed a little more each day, observers and activists still puzzle over the duplicity of the United Nations in the decades-long illegal occupation and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian Territories, not to mention the true intent of Palestinian leaders. So when Richard Falk, professor of international law at Princeton and UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in Occupied Palestine, visited Norwich recently, I took …
MEXICO CITY — Are we living in a time when ordinary people have forgotten their history, when all those who fail to remember the past will be condemned to relive its harsh reality?
I thought of this as two Canadian tourists marched with thousands along the Paseo de la Reforma last week to demonstrate opposition to the energy “reform” bill being debated by Mexican legislators. The new law would allow foreign oil giants into the country for the first time in 75 years.
Certainly the people who had come from every corner of the country to form a human chain around …
Israel ruled guilty of genocide; the nuclear elephant in that region; and the ‘armies’ recruited to doctor Wikipedia. Seek truth from facts with leading war crimes prosecutor Professor Francis Boyle, Asia Times correspondent Pepe Escobar, top saxophonist and former Israeli citizen Gilad Atzmon, and UN Human Rights Rapporteur Professor Richard Falk.
Turkey is a secular state. So claim its government and nearly all mainstream Western media. They are mistaken.
In civilized, democratic countries, secularism means not only a respectful separation between church and state but also freedom of religion. As we shall demonstrate, Turkish policies have long been the antithesis of secularism.
The Turkish government massively supports and funds Islam – specifically Sunni Islam – inside the country. Turkey simultaneously represses religions such as Alevism, and bullies and persecutes indigenous Christians, most of whom it liquidated in 20th century genocides. Moreover, it uses Islam to project Turkish political power into Europe, Asia, and …
In science, a theory is abandoned or substantially modified if it does not concur with the emerging facts, fails to predict important events, or is contradicted by experiments. That, alas, does not seem to apply to economic theories.
Free-market (neo-liberal) capitalism has been the dominant type of capitalism for the last three decades; it failed spectacularly to predict the 2008 global economic crash, the second largest economic crisis in history, after the great depression.
Many of its adherents were asserting before the crash that the market had correctly valued property, shares, derivatives and other exotic products that the “moneymen” …
There are conflicting accounts of how New Amsterdam’s Waal Straat got its name, but the generally accepted version is that the name was derived from an earthen wall on the north side of a footpath that straggled between Broad Street and the East River. The frugal Dutch settlers, with scads of experience in keeping out the Zuyder Zee, threw up the wall to keep out the English, who’d settled somewhere …
by The Real News Network (TRNN) / December 15th, 2013
Kevin Zeese: U.S. Trade Representative wants to keep the public in the dark because TPP will threaten food safety and raise drug prices, and many Asian countries involved in negotiations are also turned off by the deal.
Last week, Congressmen Walter Jones and Stephen Lynch introduced a resolution urging President Obama to declassify the legendary “28 redacted pages of the Joint Intelligence Committee Inquiry of 9/11” issued in late 2002, which point to official Saudi involvement in 9/11. After much lobbying, and under an oath of secrecy, Jones was allowed to read the censored document: “I was absolutely shocked by what I read. What was so surprising was that those whom we thought we could trust really disappointed me.”
PNAC (Project for a New American Century) published a “grand strategy” in 2000 calling for the US to maintain its …
It seems we in the west no longer believe in ourselves, and our capacity to generate prosperity for all. Is this surprising given the dismal state of the European and American economies? In other words, since the 2008 financial crash people around the world but especially in Europe and America, don’t see the future as being any better for the next generation. There is a loss of trust in the system itself it seems. In this sense 2013 is the year Globalisation has gone bust.
According to an article in the Financial Times, world wide surveys were conducted which show …
Through its provisions, Public Act 436 establishes a new form of local government, previously unknown within the United States or the State of Michigan, where the people within local municipalities may be governed by an unelected official who establishes local law by decree.
— Complaint for Injunctive Relief, Phillips et al. v. Snyder, U.S. District Court for Eastern Michigan
We are a country of law…. The government cannot just abrogate contracts.
– Obama economic adviser Larry Summers, quoted by Matt Taibbi discussing the sanctity of contracts in “Looting the Pension Funds”
With the cost of tuition at four-year colleges and universities growing out of control, it is no surprise people are more interested in two-year degrees. Let’s take a look at how popular associate degrees are and how they are paying off.
“…the ones who call the shots (in war) won’t be among the dead and lame
And on each end of the rifle we’re the same”
— John McCutcheon
Ninety-nine years ago this month one of the most unusual aberrations in the bloody history of warfare – never allowed to be repeated again – occurred. Europe was in the fifth month of the 52 month-long World War (the one that was supposed “to end all wars”) that was to end with the armistice four years later on November 11, 1918.
British, Scottish, French, Belgian, Australian, Canadian, German, Austrian, Hungarian, Serbian, and Russian pulpits in those …
The siege on Gaza constitutes a form of collective punishment by the Israeli military occupation against the civilian population in Gaza which is a violation of international humanitarian law. This siege has been causing much human suffering and serious negative effects on all aspects of life.
The current situation in Gaza is especially on the verge of a full-scale humanitarian disaster due to extreme weather conditions that aggravated the lives of an already beleaguered and besieged population.
Severe shortages in power and fuel supplies and lack of proper pumping equipment have made the task of alleviating people’s suffering a nearly impossible mission. …
There’s new growth forest covering the hill, maybe fifty years old, and it’s denseness is the only theoretical escape from riot cops, its cover the only consistent break in their line of sight. Everthing else is just plowed fields. Pungesti is the first target for Chevron’s nation wide fracking attack on the Romanian water supply, and the site is just 500 meters away from the village.
Below, a road, on one side a rectangle, the building site for what will be the fracking exploitation, now neatly contained by a fence. The fence itself is also neat, absolutely the cleanest structure …
It is now more evident than ever before that Qatar is playing a vital role in stoking up the chaos which is tearing Syria apart.
Informed sources have recently exposed that in the heart of Doha stand centers for training assassins of different nationalities who are dispatched to Syria to fight against the government of Bashar al-Assad. These would-be assassins are subjected to heavy military training as well as Wahhabi teachings.
In point of fact, Qatari elements have ratcheted up their activities in several countries including Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Chechnya and embarked on an intensive recruitment of ready-to-combat warriors. Recruitment is …
Has Christmas become too commercialized? In some towns the display of decorated trees is now controversial. Is it a ‘holiday’, or is it a ‘holyday’? Is it ‘Christmas’, or is it ‘Xmas’?
Confused about whether to say, “Merry Christmas” or, “Happy Holidays”. What about Kwanza, Hanukkah, and the Holy Days of Islam? Maybe a simple greeting of, “Peace to you brother”, would be appropriate. Ah, the stress of it all could drive a person to over-indulge in the spiked nog.
Where do agnostics and atheists fit in — and others whose belief systems do not allow them to partake in …
What does it mean when a notoriously profit-driven, warmongering, climate-killing media system mourns, with one impassioned voice, the death of a principled freedom fighter like Nelson Mandela?
Does it mean that the corporate system has a heart, that it cares? Or does it mean that Mandela’s politics, and the mythology surrounding them, are somehow serviceable to power?
Consider, first, that this is what is supposed to be true of professional journalism:
‘Gavin Hewitt, John Simpson, Andrew Marr and the rest are employed to be studiously neutral, expressing little emotion and certainly no opinion; millions of people would say that news is …
With one fell swoop, the Vatican’s unstinting defender of health care as a universal right proposes a real-world answer to its one “American problem” open to change. Deep institutional fissures are more intractable, the still rippling pedophile scandal/coverup, dwindling church membership and, oddly enough, a rush by would-be altar boys for football, reckoning it was safer. Interestingly, both Pope Francis and President Obama share a destiny, struggling to serve the old and needy by urging younger folks to sign up and embrace their different versions of pie-in-the-sky.
Pushing reform, will the new Pope turn a blind eye when the Church’s richest …
The overwhelming flaw in the traditional peer review system is that it is listed so heavily towards consensus that it showed little tolerance for genuinely new findings and interpretations.
— David O’Leary, The ID report, Jun 15, 2006
The peer review process in the world of academic publishing. The process by which, it is assumed, peers of an academic field review peers in that field. The situation is fraught with meddling and distortion. Blind review is truly blind – reviewers often fail to read their allocated papers in full. Then come other issues: editorial limitations, concerns about timing, topicality and vested interests. …
1. 19 COPs won’t do
2. Mi’kmaq kick out the frackers
3. Thai pigs back the fuck down
4. Front End Loader Dreams
5. Greek cops on Fire
6. B.o.B.
7. Black Peter is Racism
To start, click on the above video box.
This episode marks the 7th year of me doing this fuckin show. …
In other news, Al Jazeera used some of the RCMP raid footage I shot in Elsipogtog and produced a 30 minute doc on the anti-mining struggle. You can watch that here.
And I recently wrote an article on anarchist filmmaking for the Fifth Estate.
Thanks to the East Bay Express and editor Jay Youngdahl for supporting Dissident Voice and allowing us to re-post his piece on the Bay Area. In fact, San Francisco is Seattle is Portland is Phoenix is, well, you get the picture, no?
I get this sick hard-edge smile from prospective employers as I do my massive look for jobs in Portland, Oregon, with several cradles of civilization under my belt …
“Indescribable… Indestructible! Nothing Can Stop It!” The Blob, staring Steve McQueen (Paramount Pictures, Sept. 1958.)
In a small rural Pennsylvania town an alien creature, The Blob, a jelly-like creature, grows every time it consumes something, and its appetite is all-encompassing. That was 1958 when, according to Jeff Sharlet, the author of The Family, The Blob film was all about the world’s fear of the creeping horrors of communism, metaphorically, The Blob.
Ironically, communist China is experiencing its own modern day version of The Blob. It is smog, and like The Blob, …
