Latest articles
Duty to Warn
by Gary G. Kohls / December 13th, 2013
“…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 …
by Alray / December 13th, 2013
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. …
by Luca Oprea / December 13th, 2013
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 …
by Ismail Salami / December 13th, 2013
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 …
Peace on Earth, Good Will to All
by Rosemarie Jackowski / December 13th, 2013
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 …
by Gary Engler / December 13th, 2013
Even Vladimir Lenin was surprised when the Russian Revolution began in 1917.
Is this just an interesting historical tidbit or a profound example of how fast seemingly stable political, social and economic systems can collapse?
The subject of how long lasting our current system really is comes up frequently in discussions about global warming and what we can do about it.
Usually the conversation goes something like this:
“Scientists tell us we’re getting close to the point of no return. We don’t have much time left to drastically cut our carbon emissions.”
“Yes, but corporation keep investing billions in the tarsands, in coal, in building …
The Media's Hypocritical Oath
by Media Lens / December 13th, 2013
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 …
Slaps Down U. S. Bishops' "Social Wedge" Outrage
by Robert S. Becker / December 13th, 2013
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 …
Repudiating Science, Nature and Cell
by Binoy Kampmark / December 13th, 2013
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. …
by subMedia / December 12th, 2013
This Week:
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.
All for now!
Love …
by Paul Haeder / December 12th, 2013
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?
We had it here, at DV — “Collective Stockholm Syndrome . . . “
We see it over at middling Alternet, here: “San Francisco’s Unique Character Crumbling as Wealthy Techies Take Over.”
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 …
by Robert Hunziker / December 12th, 2013
“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, …
by Shepherd Bliss / December 12th, 2013
Thirteen-year-old Andy Lopez was killed by sheriff’s deputy Erick Gelhaus on October 22, as the boy walked home in his Latino neighborhood in Santa Rosa, California. The Iraq War veteran claims he mistook the eighth-grader’s toy rifle for a real one.
A month later another Army vet, Paul Duffy, took his own life nearby. Duffy, as some friends called him, was found by his wife hanging from a rope in the writer’s cabin he had built outside his Tomales home by the Pacific Ocean. Far more veterans of the American wars on Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan committed suicide than were killed …
by Ismail Salami / December 12th, 2013
There is no remission to Washington’s belligerence towards Iran and no deal seems to be an antidote to this venom of spite secreted out on the part of the US officials on a daily basis.
In a tone not unfamiliar to Iranian ears, US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel on board the USS Ponce, just 120 miles off the coast of Iran once again reminded the servicemen that the “threat of US military force still exists even though the Obama administration is pursuing a six-month long diplomatic process with Iran to freeze its nuclear program.”
There was some hope that the nuclear …
To Catch a Master Thief
by Alexander T. Deley / December 12th, 2013
A tired adage states that: “talent borrows but genius steals.” This has certainly been true of the folk tradition in which homage and the borrowing of ideas has always been an integral part. Folk musicians – most notably Bob Dylan, have always sprinkled their work takings from the tradition, giving their work added depth and imbuing it with a sense of timelessness. Dylan’s work has varied in quality and in subject matter over-time, but has remained firmly rooted within this folk tradition, borrowing the odd-melody here or phrase there, but often creating new work, within new contexts that has often …
by Paul Haeder / December 11th, 2013
Here it is, really – the bold-two/faced lie of the liberal class, the 19 percenters holding up their share of the pain for the rest of us. We make paltry livings and have zero benefits. We see the cuts to food assistance, see the massive funding of transfinancials through our hard-earned work. We see the dumbdowning of America, the dog-eat-dog reality of these rabid souls. You can name them in your nightmares, or see them on Charlie Rose. You can thumb through their rap sheets in the magazines of their class – Forbes, the Economist, WSJ. These are the kingpins …
by Paul Haeder / December 11th, 2013
As a preface here, as I have done many times as my role as writer for DV, I have to default to the local, as in, where you see fault lines and bright lines in a local situation, you can pretty much make the larger microcosmic statement about many things for a state, region, country, culture, what have you.
The School to Prison Pipeline has been written about many, many times, and my hat goes off to some of those writers:
The ACLU has it on its radar.
So does the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund.
Hell, there is a …
by Kim Petersen / December 11th, 2013
I have not read Max Blumenthal’s book, Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel, but I am in solidarity with his opposition to racism in “Israel.” I was, however, very disappointed by his and Paul Jay’s interview segment were Blumenthal smeared Gilad Atzmon on air. Jay acquiesced to this smear and refused Atzmon a chance to defend himself. It was gutter journalism. ((Kim Petersen, “Independent News as Vehicle for Character Assassination,” Dissident Voice, 23 August 2013.)) It is deplorable because The Real News is among the best video information sources out there. The fact that such news …
by Jay Knott / December 11th, 2013
Note: throughout this review I refer to concepts like “racial oppression”, “Jewish supremacy” and so on. None of this is intended to imply that the concept “race” is meaningful, biologically or otherwise. Racial supremacy does not depend on the reality of race, but merely on the belief in it. Whether race is or is not meaningful is a completely separate question from whether Israel is an instance of racial supremacy. I cover this separate question in another article, “Invention, Imagination, Race and Nation.”
Max Blumenthal just had a book published, entitled Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel. He …
by Pushpa Achanta / December 11th, 2013
At first glance, Kiran looks like a man much younger than his 27 years. He lives in Bangalore, India, with Kavya, 26, a cheerful and determined woman. Hailing from agricultural families, the two had met as students in their hometown in Warangal district in Andhra Pradesh, the largest southern Indian state. It wasn’t safe for them to stay close to their families, however, because Kiran was born as a girl.
In addition to being female-to-male transgender, Kiran is an Adivasi, a member of a marginalized indigenous community. The numerous types of Adivasis are so low on the Indian caste hierarchy as …
by Stuart Jeanne Bramhall / December 11th, 2013
Slow Democracy: Rediscovering Community, Bringing Decision Making Back Home, by Susan Clark and Woden Teachout (2012 Chelsea Green Publishing), is about a process known as “deliberative democracy.” This is a type of direct democracy in which community members play a genuine role in local governance decisions.
The book is mainly about the growing number of communities (in New York, Chicago, Washington State, Oregon, Maine, Gloucester Massachusetts, Boulder Colorado, Austin Texas, Canada, India, Eastern Europe, Australia) that have incorporated deliberative community meetings into decisions involving planning, governance, and budgeting. In the US, the 2008 global meltdown has led …
Last Waltz in Saga of US Army Intelligence Program
by John Stanton / December 11th, 2013
A review of internal emails from 2011 provides an example of the bent ethics and professionalism that was so common in the US Army’s Human Terrain System (HTS) and scores of other US military programs; for example, the US Army Center for Substance Abuse Programs.
HTS attempted to embed anthropologists and other social scientists from academia within US military units roaming the human terrain of Iraq and Afghanistan. The thinking was that qualified social scientists would be able to interpret cultural practices, develop network/relationship diagrams and provide US military commanders with data that would subsequently be used by those commanders …
Global Power Project: Part Three
by Andrew Gavin Marshall / December 11th, 2013
The Group of Thirty, a preeminent think tank that brings together dozens of the world’s most influential policy makers, central bankers, financiers and academics, has been the focus of two recent reports for Occupy.com’s Global Power Project. In studying this group, I compiled CVs of the G30’s current and senior members: a total of 34 individuals. The first report looked at the origins of the G30, while the second examined some of the current projects and reports emanating from the group. In this installment, I take a look at some specific members of the G30 and their roles in justifying and implementing …
A Digital Bill of Rights
by Binoy Kampmark / December 11th, 2013
Every global state, or clunky imperium, deserves its global counterpart, a balancing lever to ensure that it doesn’t fall into depravity. The state of global surveillance, so extensive it not so much subverts as pushes pass bills of rights and entitlements to privacy, demands some counter measure. Lawyers are dusting off the files anticipating litigation, but importantly, the humdrum citizen is getting ready to propose an alternative.
The options in winding back Surveillance Inc. have been scarce. The onus to change the status quo has been placed, somewhat unreliably, on state authorities fired by national indignation. The United States and Britain …
Arabic Thoughts Amidst the Alps
by Ramzy Baroud / December 11th, 2013
Here in Switzerland, the train chugs along nicely between Geneva and Lausanne. The Alpine mountain range desperately fights to make its presence known despite the irritating persistence of low- hanging clouds. A friend had just introduced me to the music of J.J. Cale, but my thoughts were moving faster than the speed of the train. Time is too short to sleep, but never long enough to think.
It has been nearly a week since I embarked on a speaking tour in French-speaking countries of Europe. The trip was more difficult than I thought it would be, but also successful. I am …
by Gareth Porter / December 10th, 2013
In the wake of the preliminary nuclear deal with Iran, the Washington Post’s “Fact Checker,” Glenn Kessler, has questioned whether Obama administration officials should have taken the anti-nuclear fatwa by Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei seriously. But the column is less a disinterested investigation of the truth about the issue than a polemic that leans clearly toward the related position of Israel, AIPAC and their Congressional supporters.
After quoting Secretary of State John Kerry’s acknowledgment in November of Khamenei’s fatwa against the possession or use of nuclear weapons, Kessler referred to it as “the alleged fatwa” and as …
by Michel Warschawski / December 10th, 2013
“Mandela was an exemplary figure of our era, and he will be remembered as a first class moral leader. He was a liberation fighter who rejected violence…” By these words, Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu not only reveals his very limited knowledge of South African history (to say the least), but has passed over on the other side of decency. In the unanimous worldwide expression of admiration for Mandela, the best that official representatives of the state of Israel can do is to shut their mouth with shame and humility.
Until today, no Israeli leader has asked Mandela and the South African …
by Barbara Roberts and Martha Rosenberg / December 10th, 2013
The American Heart Association (AHA) and the American College of Cardiology (ACC) recently released new cardiovascular disease prevention guidelines. They are an egregious example of much that is wrong with medicine today.
The guidelines propose a vast expansion of the use of statins in healthy people, recommending them for about 44 percent of men and 22 percent of healthy women between the ages of 40 and 75. According to calculations by John Abramson, lecturer at Harvard Medical School, 13,598,000 healthy people for whom statins were not recommended based on the 2001 guidelines now fall into the category of being advised to …
by Kim Petersen / December 10th, 2013
Wherefore, as becomes Catholic kings and princes, after earnest consideration of all matters, especially of the rise and spread of the Catholic faith, as was the fashion of your ancestors, kings of renowned memory, you have purposed with the favor of divine clemency to bring under your sway the said mainlands and islands with their residents and inhabitants and to bring them to the Catholic faith.
– Inter Caetera Papal Bull issued by pope Alexander VI on 4 May 1493, granting Spain dominion over the western hemisphere
We also have no history of colonialism…
– Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper
It has long been …
by Jonathan Cook / December 10th, 2013
As United States envoys shuttle back and forth in search of a peace formula to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a matter supposedly settled decades ago is smouldering back into life.
In what was billed as a “day of rage” last month, thousands of Palestinians took to the streets to protest against a plan to uproot tens of thousands of Bedouin from their ancestral lands inside Israel, in the Negev.
The clashes were the worst between Israeli police and the country’s large Palestinian minority since the outbreak of the second intifada 13 years ago, with police using batons, stun grenades, water cannon and …
