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The human mind is often incapable of tolerating the limitless nature of a universe, the absence of a divine architect, or appreciate that intended designs may be absent when it comes to events awful, ghastly and catastrophic.  A disaster with some human agency is bound to have arisen because of a constructed plan, a template to harm, a scheme to injure.

The collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore was another event to befuddle those searching for the plan.  The Singaporean-flagged MV Dali container ship lost power on March 26 and collided with the bridge in the early morning, …

In my first couple of years of progressive activism in the late 60’s, many of those I worked with who were also young took a pretty dismissive view of elder activists. And it wasn’t just elders. “Don’t trust anyone over 30”– that was a widespread point of view.

As I experienced it, I think a large part of the reason for this belief was the reality of an “old left” that was not just small but top-down and bureaucratic in its ways of functioning. In addition, McCarthyism and attacks on members of the Communist Party, the major national group on the …

Cancer is a stomping bugger of a disease.  It seeks the worm-ridden end, a thief finding its way into your body unasked and willingly helping itself.  This cellular mass army will, in a most tribal way, make off with your remains chance permitting. So, it’s understandable that people speak about it.  Blog, discuss, worry, grieve and gather in the digital house square.  But not all grief and its content are ever the same.

The recent obsession with Catherine, the Princess of Wales, who many still see as Kate Middleton, is a fitful reminder that no one’s business is seemingly everybody’s, especially …

According to the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), a war by Israelis against the Palestinian population for more than 75 years has become a global war against the Jews.

“The Global War on the Jews, Anti-Semitism surges, even in the West, which shows why Israel exists,“ by The Editorial Board WSJ, Oct. 30, 2023.

The disturbing fact of the past month is that Jews are under attack not only in Israel and not only by Hamas. The weeks since the barbaric Oct. 7 Hamas invasion of Israel have witnessed physical assaults on Jews the world over, including in the U.S. and Europe. This …

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Inflation is a scourge on those cursed with living under the capitalist order. It especially punishes those least able to weather the pain of constantly falling behind rising prices and expanding debt.
Inflation harms nearly all working people whose income growth trails the rise in prices, including those with union contracts that bridge periods of rapid price increases.
Small businesses suffer because of their inability to match supplier increases with price hikes of their own. Also, they are more likely to be locked into a cycle of incurring greater and greater …

Rarely has the International Court of Justice been so constantly exercised by one topic during a short span of time.  On January 26, the World Court, considering a filing made the previous December by South Africa, accepted Pretoria’s argument that the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was applicable to the conflict in so far as Israel was bound to observe it in its military operations against Hamas in Gaza.  (The judges will determine, in due course, whether Israel’s actions in Gaza meet the genocidal threshold.)  By 15-2, the judges noted that “the catastrophic …

Haroon Siddiqui’s 2023 memoir, My Name is Not Harry, is a dazzling journey through Indian Sufism, pre-partition Muslim-Hindu harmony, the horrors of partition, a leap across the ocean to the middle of nowhere (sorry, Brandon Manitoba), finally finding his home at the Toronto Star, from whence, back to central Asia (Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India during the tumultuous 1979+), hobnobbing with media and political stars, stopping for heart surgery, all the time building and defending his new multicultural faith, adding his own distinct, Muslim flavour to what it …

Joe Biden and other Democrat politicians portray the upcoming Presidential election as a choice between fascism and democracy.  But Genocide Joe and most Congressional Democrats, like most Congressional Republicans, operate with an unadmitted mindset: that democratic rights are only for some people, and that oppressive fascistic rule is appropriate for certain others.

Biden et al evade the facts of Israeli persecution of Palestinians.  For them: Israeli lives (seen as white) matter, Palestinian lives (seen as other) don’t.  In fact, the Zionist state entitles Jewish Israelis to liberal civil rights such that they generally cannot be jailed without a fair hearing in …

Will carbon capture technology bail society out of the latest version of greenhouse gas emissions, CO2 suddenly doubling its rate of increase when compared to the past decade, in breathtaking fashion, thus overheating the ocean and the Arctic and Antarctica and hammering Greenland?

The relationship between greenhouse gas emissions and carbon capture technology is best seen as a metaphor of athletes in the Olympic games: Team Emissions is setting world records in the 100-meter dash; Team Carbon Capture is still training for the 10,000-meter marathon.

Direct Air Capture (DAC) and Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) fall far short of meeting timelines as …

Nabil Anani (Palestine), In Pursuit of Utopia #1, 2020.

On 15 February 2024, Jared Kushner (Donald Trump’s son-in-law and former senior advisor during his presidency) sat down for a long conversation with Professor Tarek Masoud at Harvard University. During this discussion, Kushner talked about ‘Gaza’s waterfront property’, which, he said, could be ‘very valuable’. ‘If I was Israel’, he continued, ‘I would just bulldoze something in the Negev [desert], I would try to move people [from Gaza] in there… [G]oing in and finishing the job would be …

Photo credit: Behind Enemy Lines
Photo caption: U.S. Marine and Afghan War veteran Zachary Kern burns his medals and a paper flag at anti-genocide “Cancel the DNC” rally 3/22/24 in Chicago.
In his March 24th opinion piece for the Times, David Brooks agrees with a “broad consensus atop the Democratic Party” (is there room for such breadth on the peak of that lofty mountain?) saying that Israel has the right to defend its apartheid regime by killing, banishing or imprisoning not only Gaza’s entire military but its entire …

Previously, Part 6, I stated that weakening, cancelling Russia’s presence in the world, planning to partition it, or even destroying it has been a fixed U.S. objective. I also stated that U.S. anti-Russian hostility predates the events in Ukraine by decades. For that purpose, I gave two examples out of four. The following are the other two.

Example 3: Under the headline: Revelations from the Russian Archives, The Library of Congress outlines U.S. stance toward Russia in clear terms. I’m citing here two consecutive paragraphs.

Paragraph A: “The United States government was initially hostile to the Soviet …

The future always surprises us to some degree. But we make plans, anyway, based on our projections, and we adjust them when our predictions are at least partially wrong, which they always are, because they make assumptions based upon things that we take for granted, such as our health and that meteors and tsunamis will not disrupt those plans. Bearing that in mind, I will make some predictions for the immediate future of Gaza and Israel, and their relationships with the rest of the world. I’m sorry if it is not a happy picture.

First, I predict with sadness and disgust that …

What is it about British justice that has a certain rankness to it, notably when it comes to dealing with political charges?  The record is not good, and the ongoing sadistic carnival that is the prosecution (and persecution) of Julian Assange continues to provide meat for the table.

Those supporting the WikiLeaks publisher, who faces extradition to the United States even as he remains scandalously confined and refused bail in Belmarsh Prison, had hoped for a clear decision from the UK High Court on March 26.  Either they would reject leave to appeal the totality of his case, thereby setting the …

May’s family
Latifa Najjar superimposes hearts over the faces of her children’s online photographs in the classic mother’s move to protect them. But, unfortunately, her children are in a Rafah refugee camp, and it’s the middle of the Israeli-Gaza war. So she’s unknowingly saving me from missing their beautiful faces, if I learn one day they’ve been murdered by bombs or famine. Exterminated by the bad luck of being born in Gaza, a country stripped not only of its housing and masjids (mosques), but food, water, and medical care. A …