no self-loathing white boy rant here — just a commentary on rats, this weedy species, called Man
Ya gotta love the white race. WASP, Jew, Catholic, Orthodox this, atheist that. Amazing how quickly we can see ourselves as both the escaped rat and the flea on that rodent’s ass. Bubonic plague and fornicating rodent, vicious incisors, an affinity for eating the babies of the world.
Rats, carrier of teeth, appetites, climbers, swimmers, mud-boggers, and flying, burrowing, stripping, eating things. We are the carriers of disease, of the apocalypse. How many things are going the way of the Dodo because …
A man without ethics is a wild beast loosed upon this world.
— Albert Camus, 1913-1960
On September 7th 2012, the US Department of State (“Diplomacy in Action”) assured on their website:
The U.S. Mission in Iraq remains dedicated to building a strategic partnership with Iraq and the Iraqi people … Iraq continues to develop as a sovereign, stable … country … a voice of moderation and democracy in the Middle East.
Iraq has functioning government institutions including an active legislature, is playing an increasingly constructive role in the region … US assistance … includes the modernization of Iraqi law.
Recent developments at the University of Vermont (UVM) in Burlington and St. Michael’s College (in neighboring Colchester, VT.) provide prime examples of a fundamental problem in post-secondary schooling in the United States. At UVM, three unionized units of the faculty and non-faculty workforce have contract talks looming. For only the second time since the three units have been unionized, the contracts are up for negotiation at the same time. As they have in the past, the UVM administration is warning of layoffs and other cutbacks as they prepare to negotiate these contracts. Meanwhile, at St. Michael’s, the administration refuses to …
On the 100th Anniversary of World War 1, the Western powers are again sleepwalking into destructive conflict. Hegemonic ambition has Washington interfering in the internal affairs of Ukraine, but developments seem to be moving beyond Washington’s control.
Regime change in Ukraine for a mere $5 billion dollars would be a bargain compared to the massive sums squandered in Iraq ($3,000 billion), Afghanistan ($3,000 billion), Somalia, and Libya, or the money Washington is wasting murdering people with drones in Pakistan and Yemen, or the money Washington has spent supporting al Qaeda in Syria, or the massive sums Washington has wasted surrounding Iran …
Tyrone Hayes on Being Targeted by Herbicide Firm Syngenta
by Democracy Now! / February 22nd, 2014
University of California scientist Tyrone Hayes discovered a widely used herbicide may have harmful effects on the endocrine system. But when he tried to publish the results, the chemical’s manufacturer launched a campaign to discredit his work. Hayes was first hired in 1997 by a company, which later became agribusiness giant Syngenta, to study their product, Atrazine, a pesticide that is applied to more than half the corn crops in the United States, and widely used on golf courses and Christmas tree farms. When Hayes found results Syngenta did not expect — that Atrazine causes sexual abnormalities in frogs, and …
Kanika Mishra’s cartoon looks at India’s khap panchayats, which are unelected all-male bodies opposed for having issued many misogynistic decrees, including ordering so-called honor killings.
Their diktats have ranged from banning women from wearing western clothes and using mobile phones to ordering the killing of young couples. Some councils have demanded that the minimum age of marriage be lowered to 16 from 18 for girls and 21 for boys as a way of coping with an increase in the number of rapes.
IPS — The Barack Obama administration’s insistence that Iran discuss its ballistic missile programme in the negotiations for a comprehensive nuclear agreement brings its position into line with that of Israel and senators who introduced legislation drafted by the pro-Israel lobby group AIPAC aimed at torpedoing the negotiations.
But the history of the issue suggests that the Obama administration knows that Iran will not accept the demand and that it is not necessary to a final agreement guaranteeing that Iran’s nuclear programme is not used for a weapon.
The demand for negotiations on Iran’s missile programme originated with Israel, both directly and …
by The Real News Network (TRNN) / February 21st, 2014
Michael Ratner, president emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York, the attorney for Julian Assange, and the president of the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights: Documents show the US engaged in major attacks against journalists, publishers, and whistleblowers, as a UK court upholds the legality of David Miranda’s detention at Heathrow airport.
Most of the Keystone XL chatter these days is about the U.S. State Department fantasy that tapping the tar sands of Canada will be a benign blessing for America and the world. But almost no one mentions the Texas Supreme Court case that could shut the pipeline down completely – since a court ruling for the appellant could mean that the pipeline was built on property to which the pipeline owner had no rights.
If completed, the 1,700-mile Keystone pipeline is intended to bring highly-polluting tar sands oil from the Canadian tar sands to the Texas Gulf …
Like ravenous beasts of prey attacking a weakened antelope, the forces of subsidized capital and their mercenaries sunk their fangs into the United Auto Workers (UAW) and its organizing drive at the Volkswagen factory in Chattanooga, Tennessee. The UAW narrowly lost – 712 to 626 – and the baying pack of plutocrats exalted, as if they had just saved western civilization in the anti-union, lower-wage South.
The days preceding the vote were a corporatist frenzy with corporatist predators bellowing ‘the sky is falling.’ VW, which sensibly stayed neutral, but privately supported the UAW’s efforts and its collateral “works councils” (an arrangement …
On February 19, 2014, at a Press Conference by President Obama, President Peña Nieto (Mexico), and Prime Minister Harper (Canada), in Toluca, Mexico, Obama stated:
In Venezuela, rather than trying to distract from its own failings by making up false accusations against diplomats from the United States, the government ought to focus on addressing the legitimate grievances of the Venezuelan people. So, along with the Organization of American States, we call on the Venezuelan government to release protestors that it’s detained and engage in real dialogue. And all parties have an obligation to work together to restrain violence and restore …
On February 29, 2004 the US, France, and Canada overthrew Haiti’s elected government.
As my first two articles in this series outlined, ((Read Part 1 and Part 2.)) Ottawa helped plan the coup and was heavily implicated in the human rights disaster that followed.
But the most shocking aspect of the intervention was the role played by purportedly progressive non-governmental organizations. A slew of NGOs received tens of millions of dollars from the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) to advance Ottawa’s anti-democratic policy in Haiti.
A few months prior to the February 29, 2004 coup that overthrew Aristide for the …
Russian president Vladimir Putin behaves like a groom at his wedding feast in the midst of gang warfare: he tries to attend to his bride and disregard the gunshots, with less and less success. His wedding party is the Olympic games, a sports event that occupies him immensely; meanwhile his house is under attack from all directions. In the Ukraine, a confrontation between a weak government and pro-Western radicals threatens to eliminate his previous achievements. The Ruble is under heavy pressure and losing value, despite stable oil prices. In Syria, the US and France are planning a new offensive and …
The recent two-day first official visit in forty years by an Egyptian defense minister to Russia of Egypt’s strongman Field Marshal Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, accompanied by Foreign Minister Nabil Fahmy, was indeed an historic breakthrough in bilateral relations, but it is still premature to deal with or build on it as a strategic shift away from the country’s more than three-decade strategic alliance with the United States.
The US administration sounds not really concerned with this controversy about an Egyptian strategic shift as much as with the Russian President Vladimir Putin’s welcome of al-Sisi’s expected candidacy for president.
She was holding on to a supporting beam of her timeworn and now badly damaged house. Her name is Ibu Pinarti, and she is most likely over 80 years old, although perhaps she does not even know her real age, as so many women in Indonesian kampungs, villages, do not know.
Her face is wrinkled, and she may look somewhat frail, but then she speaks, she speaks well, and in just a few minutes she tells me more truth than those down below, 20 kilometers down the slope, than I was told by several priests, journalists, top military brass and even …
by East Timor & Indonesia Action Network (ETAN) / February 20th, 2014
The Oscar-nominated documentary The Act of Killing was projected on the World Bank headquarters in Washington, D.C. Thursday in an action by the East Timor and Indonesian Action Network. The group is calling on the World Bank to acknowledge its role in the 1965 military coup in Indonesia that lead to the massacre of an estimated one million civilians. The World Bank helped prop up the corrupt government of Suharto, the general who lead the coup and ordered the mass killings. The Bank sent the Suharto regime $30 billion in development aid over the course of three decades despite …
Here, a few column inches below my preface — the short article, on organizing, tied to, well, the wimpy American broke-back mentality that we have to ask for fairness, beg, negotiate with felons, murderers, the corporate elite and their wannabe followers and side-lined thugs.
You know, even DV publishes articles by fellows who have their say elsewhere, e.g., at Counterpunch, sometimes, and even that weird site, Alternet. The idea that what happened with the Volkswagen plant in Tennessee is tied to the pathetic nature of unions, their messaging flakes, the titillating mess of their big wigs and strategists, mostly white, certainly …
In Venezuela, at least six people have died in recent days during a series of anti-government protests. The latest casualty was a local beauty queen died of a gunshot wound. The protests come less than a year after the death of Hugo Chávez and present the biggest challenge to Venezuela’s new president Nicolás Maduro. Earlier this week, right-wing opposition leader Leopoldo López turned himself in to the National Guard after authorities issued a warrant for his arrest last week, accusing him of inciting deadly clashes. On Monday, Maduro ordered the expulsion of three U.S. consular officials while claiming the United …
A recent report released by the United Nations Development Programme (UNPD) at the end of January offers further confirmation about the role inequality has played in stifling economic recovery and preventing meaningful social reform; and the solutions outlined by the study are no less a deviation from mainstream proposals in calling for redistributive policies, increases in social spending, collective bargaining, and changes in social and cultural norms.
It has long been observed that genuine inequality exists in both low and high income countries. One area of particularly egregious inequality is income, and its implications are notoriously well-studied. The report wastes …
The fat cats’ media never reported it, naturally, so I heard about Pete’s passing from another folk singer. And that’s as it should be.
Pete was 94 when he died last month, but I first met him when I was barely thirteen.
I was sunning myself one afternoon in our back yard to avoid doing my homework when a banjo-plucked tune began wafting my way from my brother’s open bedroom window. The sound was pure magic. But it was the words of that first of many Pete Seeger songs that went straight through my heart and lodged in there somewhere, setting the …
Karnika Kahen, the cartoon character was born when I was feeling very angry after reading the news about Godman Asaram Bapu, a high-profile guru who remarked that the 2012 Delhi gang rape victim, Nirbhaya, (( Indian laws forbid the publishing of a rape victim’s name, Nirbhaya means “fearless” in Hindi; it is the name used by the media.)) was equally guilty with those who raped, tortured, and killed her. In 2013, Asaram was accused of sexual assault against a 16-year old girl himself. He raped her on the pretext of exorcising her from evil spirits. …
Part 3 of the three-part series “Whose Body is It?” takes on the controversial topic of the right to end one’s life. (Read Part 1 and Part 2.)
*****
Melinda had never seen anyone die or even seen a dead body, and she had only been to one funeral in her 43 years on the planet. Her view of death had come mainly from television and shows she downloaded from online.
However, now she was face-to-face with the specter of dying. Her best friend Peter had Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease and he was severely afflicted by dementia as a result. They said that …
You know what will happen there. These overpriced and extremely dangerous vanity products will be seized upon by the masses who have become, through years of hard training, indoctrination and manipulation, turned to believing all the bull crap from these cosmetics giants.
‘You too can be youthful to the bitter end!’
But in all fairness to the cosmetics industry they are no better (nor worse) than the rest of the …
As the dramatic events in the Ukraine are unfolding the topic of what President Yanukovich can, or can not do, regularly comes up and I think that this is a good time to go back to basics and look at what a government — any government, regardless of its political orientation — can and even must do when confronted with an urban armed insurrection.
First, a head of state, any head of state, has an obligation to uphold the Constitution, the law and order, to protect its citizens from abuse and violence against their persons and their property. Sounds …
To seek to tow the boats back on to the high seas or to the Indonesian exclusive economic zone well exceeds Australia’s legal rights under the 1982 UN Convention of the Law of the Sea.
— Donald Rothwell, The Australian, Mar 10, 2012
Australia’s refugee policy, specifically with regards Indonesia, can be summed up as calculatingly brazen or breathtakingly incompetent. Having admitted that Australian vessels entered Indonesia waters six times during the months of December and January, an internal report found that such incidents are the result of challenged calculations on the part of the Royal Australian Navy (RAN).
On Friday, February 14, 92 prisoners escaped from their prison in the Libyan town of Zliten. Nineteen of them were eventually recaptured, two of whom were wounded in clashes with the guards. It was just another daily episode highlighting the utter chaos which has engulfed Libya since the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.
Much of this is often reported with cliché explanations as in the country’s ‘security vacuum’, or Libya’s lack of a true national identity. Indeed, tribe and region seem to supersede any other affiliation, but it is hardly that simple.
On that same Friday, February 14, Maj. Gen. Khalifa …
On September 12, 2013, Syria’s President al-Assad committed to surrender Syria’s chemical weapons, with the caveats that the United States must stop threatening his country and supplying weapons to the terrorists. He has been as good as his word. The same cannot be said for the US and its boot licking allies.
Three days earlier US Secretary of State John Kerry – who had been killing Vietnamese in the US onslaught on Vietnam as American ‘planes rained down 388,000 tons of chemical weapons on the Vietnamese people – had threatened Syria with a military strike if the weapons stocks were …
The US, the UK, Russia, China and France are rebuilding or upgrading their arsenals of nuclear weapons. The other four nuclear states too are ‘improving’ their arsenals. As we discuss the statistics and strategies of ‘nuclear arsenals’ and ‘nuclear deterrence’ it can be hard to keep in mind the reality underlying the abstract discussions. The nine nuclear states have over 10,000 nuclear weapons in their stockpiles. This is enough to wipe out the entire population of the planet many times over together with all other life forms. Is this sane? Has the human race lost its senses? A single …
Lenin on the "Withering Away'' of the State and Violent Revolution, Chapter 1, Section 4
by Thomas Riggins / February 18th, 2014
Lenin discusses these two topics in section four of chapter one of The State and Revolution (1917). This section begins with a long quote from Engels’ 1870’s work Anti-Dühring. The quote begins with “The proletariat seizes state power and turns the means of production into state property to begin with. But thereby it abolishes itself as the proletariat, abolishes all class distinctions and class antagonisms and abolishes the state as state.”
There is a problem with this formulation. Article 11 of the Soviet Constitution (1977) clearly stated “State property, i.e. the common property of the Soviet people, is the principal form of socialist property.” …
Nothing that Israel does in its affairs would be of quite such great concern to the world were it not for the fact that Israel drags along, willy-nilly, the world’s greatest power, much like some impressive-looking but feeble-willed, dazed parent stumbling along behind a screaming toddler demanding yet another goody. The threat of serious wars has grown exponentially in recent decades precisely owing to this fact, and not just wars but wars reflecting neither justice nor principle, the aggressive reordering of other people’s affairs by sweeping them into the pit of hell. The so-called war on terror is just part …
