A hermit back from deep forest haunts, perusing the wings of online punditry, would be staggered by pervasive, oddly-parallel End of Times bombshells. Throw in frazzled ecosystem scientists for a third homily on looming Armageddon. While right wingers with crackers for brains bewail how Obamacare and ruinous debts are sure to bankrupt American, if not western civilization, left wing voices snicker, “what civilization”?
Hail the Age of Apocalypse, a step up from the 20th C.’s Age of Anxiety or the 19th C.’s Great Awakening. While belief systems diverge widely, partisans rounding out the edges sound a similar drumbeat: our world is …
Our family legal system is built around inheritance rights. Yet it considers those rights only in monetary terms. Medical science is imploring us to rethink genetic inheritance rights as well. Reproductive technologies force us to consider if our genetic material is ours – solely – once it has been shared through natural reproduction or in a laboratory resulting in another life. If your genetic material, your DNA, becomes part of another human being, what right of privacy do you have, whether you raise the child or …
Two recent images encapsulate the message behind the dry statistics of last week’s report by the World Bank on the state of the Palestinian economy.
The first is a poster from the campaigning group Visualising Palestine that shows a photoshopped image of Central Park, eerily naked. Amid New York’s skyscrapers, the park has been sheared of its trees by bulldozers. A caption reveals that since the occupation began in 1967, Israel has uprooted 800,000 olive trees belonging to Palestinians, enough to fill 33 Central Parks.
The second, a photograph widely published last month in Israel, is of a French diplomat lying on …
Late at night, I sit alone in the office of The Afghan Peace Volunteer’s house in Kabul. The mountain cold wrapped itself around me. I finally got the Internet to work and found a message from Rashad, a good friend of mine in Sudan. I feel all the muscles in my chest tighten. Rashad wrote that in the protests in the streets of Khartoum our dear friend Mousaab had been shot and murdered by the police. I froze. Below his words is a picture of Mousaab bathed in his own blood in the back of a pickup truck. I …
Something about the Canucks versus Canadiens game last weekend has stayed with me, producing a mental itch that won’t go away.
No, it wasn’t the Canucks scoring on their own net, although that was one of the most ridiculous own goals in the history of professional hockey.
It was in a break from the action when my TV screen filled with beautiful images of crystal clear streams, healthy salmon and pristine British Columbia back country. A kind and gentle voice praised the incredible environment that Mother Nature has bestowed on this province. One felt a sense of soothing comfort, tinged with pride …
The election for mayor of New York City is less that a month away and Bill de Blasio’s lead in the polls appears insurmountable (about a 50 point lead), Joe Lhota’s attempts to curry favor with New Yorkers by red baiting de Blasio’s progressive activism has back fired on the Republican as the Democrat’s favorable rating has increased since the initial attack.
Lhota has now taken a new tack– to denounce de Blasio’s plan to guarantee a living wage to New Yorkers who work at projects that are subsidized by the city. This proposal has aroused the ire of the business …
Wow. Hurricane. Didn’t do any damage to Bushwick, Brooklyn (nothing does) except blow apart the lawn-chairs and roof-garden. X. still lives with her parents in New Jersey. I was there only days before the hurricane; weather-wise it was “Spring.”
Enter: Climate Change, stage Extreme Right. Blow apart the “burbs” and lower Manhattan. NYU was shutdown for a week, giving X. a much-needed vacation. She said trees had been scattered all over the Garden State, as well as the looser parts of peoples homes — outdoor lighting fixtures, shutters, lawn furniture, etc. My sister, her husband, and my three-year-old nephew were without …
Warning! The Lab contains war-porn and hard-core evil; watch and weep.
Yotam Feldman’s documentary, released in August, is one of the most important exposés of the obscene rationale and execution of Israel’s hugely lucrative arms and security industries through the voices of some of its ex-military key operators: Amos Golan, Shimon Naveh, Leo Gleser, and Yoav Galant.
Israel’s armament juggernaut currently turns over $7 billion p.a. and its phenomenal success is, as Feldman reveals, due to experience, that is, the testing of weaponry on the Palestinian population in the Israeli military ‘labs’ of Gaza and the West Bank:
On October 12, tens of thousands of Yemenis took to the streets of Eden in the South of the country, mostly demanding secession from the north. The date is significant, for it marks the 1967 independence of South Yemen, ending several decades of British colonialism. But for nearly five decades since then, Yemen is yet to find political stability, a semblance of economic prosperity, and, most importantly, settle the question of its national identity.
It has been two years and nine months since a large protest has occurred in the Yemeni capital. Sana’a initiated what was quickly named the Yemeni revolution …
Narcissism, the Veracity of Information, and MOOCs
The craze of “social media” shows no sign of abating despite its obvious flaws. I bracket the term with some hesitation since it is somewhat of a misnomer. The term as it is used denotes electronic technology which permits nearly real time exchanges of text, images, video, and audio, but such exchanges are not without precedent as older technologies, such as the telephone, television, radio, and email have permitted such exchanges: albeit separately depending upon the media appropriate to the domain of the older technologies. The single distinguishing factor of social media such as …
by The Real News Network (TRNN) / October 16th, 2013
On October 3 2013, Ecuador’s National Assembly authorized the project to drill for oil in the Yasuni National forest, which is a biosphere reserve and home of endemic tribes and unique animal species.
Should the “right” of a foreign corporation to make a profit trump governments’ attempts to create local jobs, improve environmental regulations, or establish laws that raise royalty rates? Most Canadians would say no.
But that’s what the Conservative government is pushing poor countries to accept if they want Canadian investment.
Barely noticed in the media, Canada recently concluded negotiations on a foreign investment promotion and protection agreement (FIPA) with the West African country of Côte d’Ivoire. In a press release Minister for La Francophonie Christian Paradis said: “The investment agreement announced today will provide better protection for Canadian companies operating in Côte …
Some of the corporate interests that are steering the U.S.-Canada Beyond the Border integration agenda are not quite satisfied with its progress so far and they would like the implementation process to be accelerated. The bilateral initiative which was launched almost two years ago promotes a shared vision for perimeter security. It seeks to improve information sharing between security agencies. Under the agreement, both countries are moving towards a coordinated entry/exit system and are developing a harmonized cargo security strategy. In addition, the U.S. and Canada are strengthening integrated cross-border intelligence sharing and law enforcement operations. Canada’s own electronic eavesdropping …
The adage, a picture is worth a thousand words, well, funny stuff in our collective simpleton world of quips. In the end, though, we have to be quip thinkers, lovers of the football-mainstream mush, just to understand these folk. Look hard at these Guardian photos — the death masks of politics, poli-trick-tians, pols.
The most insulated people on earth, and, well, sure, there is that prime sick thing, Zuckerberg (scroll down to the troll) , and his values, his marriage, his backdoor to the government, to the corporation for proctology 101 fun.
Vietnamese Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, who helped defeat Japan, then France, then the United States in a 35-year war for national independence, died in Hanoi on October 4 at the age of 102. He had been ailing and living in a military hospital for the last four years.
Giap’s extraordinary generalship drove French imperialism out of the three countries of Indochina — Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia — in the mid-1950s. At the time he declared the anti-French struggle “was victorious because we had a wide and firm National United Front… organized and led by the party of the working class — …
“We must reflect on the absurdity that the survivors of a shipwreck are put under criminal investigation,” said Cecile Kyenge, Integration Minister in the current center-left Italian government. ((Steve Scherer, “Divers recover more migrant bodies from Sicily wreck,” Reuters, 6 October 2013.))
Allegro – Local Failure
In 2010, I wrote an article titled, “Environmentalism is Dead,” decrying the ineptitude and/or downright skulduggery of large environmental nonprofit organizations. At the time, I still held the foolhardy belief that we could keep environmental activism alive at the local level through traditional nonprofit vehicles, particularly because of the “good people” typically involved in such outfits and the hypothesis suggesting small and nimble – and the development of personal relationships – could create more effective tactics within a comprehensive strategy or agenda.
Of course, I was wrong.
I suppose one could argue isolated circumstances …
Among the casualties of the U.S. government shutdown is President Barack Obama’s trip to Indonesia for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit. In calling President Yudhoyono of Indonesia on October 3, to express his regrets over the last-minute cancellation, Obama, according to the White House, “reaffirmed the importance of the U.S.-Indonesia partnership.”
It is a partnership that, despite its long-standing global significance, typically garners little attention in the United States. But it merits careful scrutiny, not least for what transpired 48 years ago. The beginning of October 1965 saw the kidnapping and murder of six Indonesian generals, killings that the …
Safe to say, most of us have never heard of agronomist Norman Borlaug. If I hadn’t been tangentially involved with Indian agriculture, I wouldn’t have heard of him. But Borlaug is not only a famous scientist, he’s one of only seven people to have won the Nobel Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the Congressional Gold Medal. Apparently, the only prize to elude him was the Cy Young Award.
Dr. Borlaug is most famous for having launched what came to be known as the Green Revolution—the agricultural phenomenon responsible for an exponential increase, a veritable explosion, in the amount of …
Debt Ceiling? What Debt Ceiling? That’s a unicorn in Congress’s garden!
by William Boardman / October 15th, 2013
For all the talk about the United States approaching a catastrophic Debt Ceiling and subsequent unprecedented but exceptional default that would have unpredictable but probably dire impact on pretty much everybody, one thing you don’t hear much is that There is No Debt Ceiling.
Seriously, the relevant law literally does nothing to control the national debt. A serious Debt Ceiling law would prevent Congress from appropriating expenditures beyond the debt limit. Congress has never done that, Congress probably never would do that, even if it could. Congress doesn’t want to do that, and it would probably be irresponsible for Congress to …
We have sent to Washington a company of court jesters, supplying them with portraits of knights in shining armor in the shape of a handheld mirror, so that when they gaze at themselves they perceive heroes standing strong for all that is good and right. They have been given a script and they will not wander from it. They defiantly disbelieve everything the president, the economists and even the corporate wing of their own party says. They alone represent truth, justice and the American way. They alone are God’s chosen.
Can you imagine a less effective spokesperson for a political party …
Israel will not recognize an Israeli nationality while it seeks to maintain Jewishness at all costs
by Jonathan Cook / October 15th, 2013
Israel is almost certainly the only country that deceives the global community every time one of its citizens crosses an international border. It does so because the passports it issues contain a fiction.
When a border official opens an Israeli passport for inspection, he or she sees the passport holder’s nationality stated as “Israeli.” And yet inside Israel, no state official, government agency or court recognizes the existence of an “Israeli” national.
This month the highest court in the land, Israel’s Supreme Court, explicitly affirmed that it could not uphold an Israeli nationality. Instead, the judges ruled, citizenship and nationality in Israel …
Just scanning the junk of America, the stories about cops killing a Down syndrome youth for going into a movie twice while paying once (come on, search it on Zion-Google), or all the dreadful creeps defending Breaking Wind (Bad) (oh, god, the Huffington-NBC-NYT-Time Magazine-drool turning this half-assed drugged-out show into high art, beware, Margaret Atwood), or all the sickos yammering about how Petraeus the puke deserves his $150,000 a year from one institution (princeTon) as an adjunct faculty (one class a semester at CUNY) and that any youth willing to protest that piece of Princeton …
I never liked school right from grade 1 through to grade 12. I don’t think I was unique, but I think my dislike of school was of greater magnitude than most students. So after I graduated from high school, I declared to my mother, “I’ll never go to school again.” Dead-end, unfulfilling work post-school led me to violate my declaration with the approval of my parents. University was a different world. There were few overbearing professors harping at me to attend classes and do my homework. Much of my study was self-directed, and my learning and grades were more-or-less up …
There is an old joke about a tortoise saying to a hare, “you can run but you can’t hide.” So it used to be with politicians running for elections and relying on constituent donations — thus sensitive to voter sentiment. Not any more. Not when both major parties are bought and paid for quite legally by agenda driven large out-of-state interests and wealthy private donors.
Much more than a parliamentary system, U.S. federal governance is dependent on goodwill. The filibuster custom, the independence of the House, Senate and Executive, the right of each state small and large …
Regarding the painstaking process of historiography, someone of relative importance once remarked, “History is written by the victors.” A statement which echoes Plato’s dictum that, “those who tell the stories also hold the power,” its modern source is unclear. Still, many do not hesitate to attach these words to Winston Churchill, Britain’s renowned Prime Minister during the Second World War. Considering Churchill’s own history — born into an aristocratic family; his grandfather the 7th Duke of Marlborough; his father, Lord Randolph Churchill, a wealthy British statesman; his mother, Jennie Jerome, an “American socialite,” herself the daughter of a financier, speculator, …
More than two and a half years on, Israel’s purported neutrality in the Syrian conflict and the United State’s fanfare rhetoric urging a “regime change” in Damascus were abruptly cut short to unveil that the Israeli factor has been all throughout the conflict the main concern of both countries.
All their media and political focus on “democracy versus dictatorship” and on the intervention of the international community on the basis of a “responsibility to protect” to avert the exacerbating “humanitarian crisis” in Syria was merely a focus intended to divert the attention of the world public opinion away from their …
The need for more studies confirming that we’re approaching an irreversible ecological crisis, the tipping point beyond human control, is over. James Hansen, the world’s most eminent climatologist is so certain of this evidence that he’s added civil disobedience to his resistance repertoire. Along with legal challenges, expert testimony and lobbying governments, the 72-year-old grandfather advocates direct …
Under the administration of Barack Obama, America is waging a global terror campaign through the use of drones, killing thousands of people, committing endless war crimes, creating fear and terror in a program expected to last several more decades. Welcome to Obama’s War OF Terror.
When Obama became President in 2009, he faced a monumental challenge for the extension of American and Western imperial interests. The effects of eight years under the overt ruthless and reckless behaviour of the Bush administration had taken a toll on the world. With two massive ground wars and occupations under way in Iraq and …
