Graduation Speeches that Will Turn Your Stomach, Make You Diabetic, Transform You into Ted Kaczynski . . except . . . almost 20 years ago, in a very different sphere: Bill Kunstler, 1995.
What a difference 2 decades makes! Check out Kunstler’s Sept. 4, 1995 speech, four months before he died. Below. But first . . .
. . . Way too much work to do. New job working with Developmentally Disabled Adults. Writing an article on growth management and the future of so-called “smart” (dumb) growth. Another bunch of work on a collection of articles, writings, art, on Climate Change and Race, …
NAIROBI — They tell you ‘peace’, but you know you are living in a warzone. You know it from the start; you’ve sensed it ever since you were a very little boy or a girl. You wake up every morning, not certain whether you will witness another dusk, whether you will experience another sunrise.
A bullet can hit you at any moment while you are walking down the road. If you are a woman, you can be ambushed and dragged into a dark back alley or filthy shack along the way, then raped.
The police are very hard to find, and are …
In the last few years we have been witnessing the emergence of a self-gratifying populist culture in the midst of the Palestinian scholarly discourse. Two years ago we watched Ali Abunimah’s lecture about ‘culture’ and politics setting a new record of intellectual ignorance. We then came across ‘anti’ racist Israel boycott campaigner Omar Barghouti preaching in favour of biological determinism. This week I came across Columbia Professor Joseph Massad’s Last of the Semites, a talk on Zionism and anti-semitism the Professor delivered in Stuttgart last month. Unfortunately Massad repeats the exact same pattern. Watch Massad’s Lecture: …
It was not like on TV, which made it all the more unreal.
Sure, there were the typical bright lights and loss of time-sense, but who hasn’t experienced that particular mind-zap on a week-night, awake suddenly three hours before the nasty clock-radio-alarm, dreading the inevitable approach of “reveille?”
Damn digital alarm clock-radio/time-bomb. Most dreadful techno-majig this side of the stun-gun.
No, it was the talk, the screechy-scratchy gossip of space aliens that told me “We ain’t in Kansas, Toto!” and freaked me for a loop. High-pitched, crunchy sounds, like insects in debate.
Didn’t help my overall emotional condition that I was paralyzed, mute, and …
I don’t disagree that the cowardly removal by Aljazeera of everything written by Joseph Massad is a travesty of justice and journalism and that their reinstatement is justified. But why was Massad trying to defend Palestinian rights based upon them being “the last of the Semites?”
The term “Semite” was born of the assumption that all the languages of the world are the result of the sons of Noah – Shem, Ham and Japheth – going to different parts of the globe after the flood and creating different language groups: Semitic, Hamitic and Japhetic. The sons of Noah? Are we …
It is perilous and unbecoming to argue with and contradict the icons of our global society. Those who struggle courageously for the rights of others and speak eloquently with word and deed against war and tyranny deserve praise and comfort. They are beautiful people.
Uri Avnery, journalist, soldier, politician, Knesset member, peace activist, writer, wordsmith, master of the quip and Zionist is one of the nobles who warrants special consideration. Being human, Avnery can be faulted, and his fault is a rigid attachment to Zionism, which strays his thoughts from lofty objectives and guides him to instruct others toward confusion – …
In an article published May 15, 2013, American historical social scientist Immanuel Wallerstein wrote, “Nothing illustrates more the limitations of Western power than the internal controversy its elites are having in public about what the United States in particular and western European states should be doing about the civil war in Syria.”
Those limitations are palpable in both language and action. A political and military vacuum created by past US failures and forced retreats after the Iraq war made it possible for countries like Russia to reemerge on the scene as an effective player.
by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers / May 22nd, 2013
Finally – it’s over. The goal of Simpson and Bowles has been met, the deficit is shrinking rapidly. And the intellectual underpinning for deficit reduction, based on the study by Rogoff and Reinhart, has been destroyed.
Phew! Glad that is behind us. Now, can we actually try to fix the economy?
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) issued a report that shows a rapid decline in the deficit, $203 billion has been cut from the deficit making it the smallest since 2008. And they project that by 2015, the deficit will be under $400 billion, less than one-third of the $1.4 …
Can you call it a harangue when the entire mess of human survival is at stake? Usually, the school and the yard are tied to the continuous fight to empower youth to push away the structures, strictures and sanctities of the corporate imperative to turn every human being on earth into a data point, all anchored to digital money, digital actualization and their new hierarchy of needs around the economic growth imperative of an endless conveyor belt of more and more junk technology turning us into more than mere addicts to their stuff.
The global condition can at any time be likened to the situation on the sinking Titanic with its crew re-arranging deck chairs and throw pillows as the ship continues to submerge. This analogy may not quite fit the present status of the global center, the USA. Here, the situation at a mental health crisis center under a full moon while suffering a shortage of powerful tranquilizers might seem pleasant by comparison. As always under profit and loss economics, increasing numbers face growing hardship bordering on absolute disaster while some enjoy ever more lavish splendor with their servant class living in …
World Bank head Jim Yong Kim and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon visit Congo on May 25th, supporting a framework for peace agreement that was engineered by Uganda and Rwanda, Western allies are accused of backing rebel armies committing war crimes in Congo.
In his final speech to the American people on January 17, 1961, just two days before the Kennedy inauguration, President Dwight Eisenhower warned the nation of the danger presented by what he called the “military-industrial complex”.
“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist.”
Today, “the disastrous rise of misplaced power” not only persists, but has grown exponentially. Today, we are governed not by the people, not merely by a “military-industrial” complex, but by a …
A tip-off from a prominent Toronto imam more than a year ago appears to be at the heart of arrests at the end of April in the alleged VIA Rail terror plot in Canada. In fact, counter-terrorism police began their press briefing by thanking Muslim leaders.
Even in the Boston marathon tragedy, national and local Muslim organizations have condemned the bombings. The largest Muslim civil rights group in the country, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, even asked Muslims to offer authorities any leads that they may have. Moreover, in an interesting twist, mosques refused to arrange Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s janaza (Islamic funeral prayers). In fact, a …
Kabul — Since 2009, Voices for Creative Nonviolence has maintained a grim record we call the “The Afghan Atrocities Update” which gives the dates, locations, numbers and names of Afghan civilians killed by NATO forces. Even with details culled from news reports, these data can’t help but merge into one large statistic, something about terrible pain that’s worth caring about but that is happening very far away.
It’s one thing to chronicle sparse details about these U.S. led NATO attacks. It’s quite another to sit across from Afghan men as they try, having broken down in tears, to regain sufficient composure …
Critics say Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa is creating a pro-government media system; Correa says there is a fundamental contradiction with corporate for-profit media involved in distributing public information.
Following the April 24 collapse of the Rana Plaza garment factory on the outskirts of Dhaka, Bangladesh, which killed (at last count) 1,127 factory workers, a group of the world’s leading apparel and retail companies got together to adopt a new set of safety rules, in the hope that future disasters (this was the worst accident in apparel history) could be averted.
While critics are already questioning whether this was more a public relations stunt—giving lip service to a life-and-death problem—than the real thing, it’s too early to say. In any event, several American companies, including Walmart, Gap, Sears …
Call on Middlebury College to divest from Israeli apartheid
by Jay Saper / May 20th, 2013
On May 15, students at Middlebury College in Vermont staged a checkpoint outside their dining hall during the busiest meal of the year to commemorate the 65th anniversary of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, which led to the establishment of the state of Israel.
As the Middlebury divestment campaign from arms and fossil fuels gains national attention, a coalition that included Palestinian, Israeli, and American Jewish students staged the act of political theater in solidarity with Nakba Daydemonstrationsaround the globe as a call to add apartheid to the students’ divestment …
They do themselves no favours. Like a hulking institution that has never seen the light of day lest it provide a degree of transparency, the cocooned individuals of the European Commission have decided to meddle in the restaurant trade. The mantra is always the same: quality and hygiene. From January 1, 2014, eateries will be prohibited from serving oil to diners in small jugs or dipping bowls. The nightmarish pre-sealed and non-re-usable bottles will take their place, an aesthetic monstrosity that will remind consumers who, let alone what, is really in charge.
In a time of peace the West is permanently at war. Massive standing armies are continuously fed their natural fare. And, incredibly, the myth of the UK being a peace-loving country is sustained by a ‘liberal’ media who endlessly regurgitate the spurious justifications of the political elite. There are currently only two states on the planet which routinely attack other sovereign states and yet the UK and the US persist in seeing themselves as on the side of righteousness and peace.
John McDonnell is an outstanding member of parliament who tells it as it is; together with Annie Machon (former MI5 …
