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When established, well fed and fattened, a credible professional tires from the pursuit. One can get complacent, flatulently confident, self-assured. From that summit, the inner lecturer emerges, along with a disease: false expertise.

The Australian journalist Peter Greste has faithfully replicated the pattern. At one point in his life, he was lean, hungry and determined to get the story. He seemed to avoid the perils of mahogany ridge, where many alcohol-soaked hacks scribble copy sensational or otherwise. There were stints as a freelancer covering the civil wars in Yugoslavia, elections in post-apartheid South Africa. On joining the BBC in 1995, Afghanistan, …

The Canadian government needs to put the Israeli military on its terrorist list. And no Canadian should assist that organization in any way.

Over the past year the IDF has committed a holocaust in Gaza. The IDF has destroyed most of the occupied coastal strip’s buildings, water sources and agricultural land. According to the UN Satellite Centre (UNOSAT), 66% of buildings in Gaza have been damaged and “68% of the permanent crop fields in the Gaza Strip exhibited a significant decline in health …

The world is in shock; stricken by the realization that mass murder occurs unimpeded and those who were regarded as protectors against atrocities are those who enable the slaughter of innocents. An uneasiness has gripped the world and brought it to the depressing state of watching helplessly as democratically chosen leaders aid and abet in the most severe criminal activity ─ genocide. Israel has achieved a level of committing atrocities, denying humanity, and displaying insanity that is incomprehensible. Go back in history and return to Hulegu, prince of the Mongol Empire, besieging Baghdad in the thirteenth century. “Surrender …

You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.
— Bob Dylan

A water main breaks every two minutes somewhere in the U.S., resulting in contaminated drinking supplies and boil water notices.
One out of three bridges in the U.S. needs repair, endangering hundreds of millions of commuters. More than 42,000 bridges across the country, carrying about 167 million vehicles each day, are in disrepair.
It is estimated that 300 million people could face power outages across the United States …

Is the corporate/state media something that people want to claim as their mainstream?

As Israel begins another invasion of Lebanon, Australian officials from both sides of the imaginary partisan divide have been falling all over themselves to get Australians punished for speech crimes about the Lebanese resistance group Hezbollah.

The Australian political-media class have been in an uproar ever since footage surfaced of people waving Hezbollah flags at a protest in Melbourne over the weekend and displaying pictures of the group’s deceased leader Hassan Nasrallah, who was assassinated by Israel in a massive airstrike on Friday.

After initially stating …

It was good to hear that voice again. A voice of provoking interest that pitter patters, feline across a parquet, followed by the usual devastating conclusion. Julian Assange’s last public address was made in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. There, he was a guest vulnerable to the capricious wishes of changing governments. At Belmarsh Prison in London, he was rendered silent, his views conveyed through visitors, legal emissaries and his family.

The hearing in Strasbourg on October 1, organised by the Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights of the …

Left-liberals plea every four years that this really is the most important election ever and time to hold our noses and send a Democrat to the White House. The manifest destiny of US world leadership, we are told, is at stake, as is our precious democracy which we have so generously been exporting abroad.

Let’s leave aside the existential threats of climate change or nuclear war. However important, these issues are not on the November 5 ballot. Nor are they addressed in even minimally meaningful ways by the platforms of …

There is little substantive difference between the Republicans and Democrats; they are both corporate dominated and controlled parties. As futile as lesser evilism is, it is also futile to talk about there being a lesser evilism between the two utterly dominant political parties in the United States.

— “Evilism: There Is No Lesser,” Dissident Voice.

For sure since its 2023 invasion Russia has been taking a horrific amount of Ukrainian lives and causing a vast amount of injuries as most all wars do, however the constant and much longer ongoing killing and injuring during the Ukrainian civil war since the overthrow of the democratically elected Ukrainian government in 2014, has been entirely and utterly unmentioned in the hegemonic media of the West (as witnessed by this writer, who has been following this absence daily in both internet and television).

For example, although the present Ukrainian Government has been shelling Donbas since 2014, killing civilians including children. …

The Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) urges the leaders of the nations of the Americas to oppose the upcoming United Nations’ decision to renew the Multinational Security Support Mission (MSS) in Haiti for another 12 months. Additionally, we call on these regional leaders to challenge the United States’ proposal to convert this MSS into a full-fledged UN Peacekeeping mission by 2025.

On October 16, 2022, the Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) sent a letter urging the People’s Republic of China and the Russian Federation to “respect Haitian sovereignty …

There are times when keeping a sense of humor would be nigh impossible.

On 17 March 2021, OpenSecrets.org headlined “‘Dark money’ topped $1 billion in 2020, largely boosting Democrats” and reported that,

The 2020 election saw more than $1 billion in ‘dark money’ pending at the federal level, a massive sum driven by an explosion of secret donations boosting Democrats in a historically expensive cycle. That’s according to an estimate from OpenSecrets. The billion-dollar sum includes a whopping $660 million in donations from opaque political nonprofits and shell companies to outside groups.

In many prior years, most of the dark money had been going to Republicans, but now this has apparently …

Serendipity, picking Viet Thanh Nyugen’s memoir, A Man with Two Faces as the main book for the memoir writing class I am teaching. Last time it was Liar’s Club and Wild and other things to haunt the student with other writers’ haunting memoirs.

Mary Karr and Cheryl Strayed, and the students learned about all sorts of ins and outs tied to those two women’s memoirs. There is countless ink on Mary and Cheryl and endless YouTube uploads of them talking, being interviewed and giving memoir writing tips to selected and wide audiences.

Before I tackle Viet, here, some …

The ongoing Israeli operation against Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militia group so dominant in Lebanon, is following a standard pattern.  Ignore base causes.  Ignore context.  Target leaders, and target personnel.  See matters in conventional terms of civilisational warrior against barbarian despot.  Israel, the valiant and bold, fighting the forces of darkness.

The entire blood woven tapestry of the Middle East offers uncomfortable explanations.  The region has seen false political boundaries sketched and pronounced by foreign powers, fictional countries proclaimed, and entities brought into being on the pure interests of powers in Europe.  These empires produced shoddy cartography in the name of the …