Wanted: Phantom of /dev/null
School Yard Fights
The True Story of Canada's "War" of Extermination on the Pacific Tom Swanky
Genocide in Iraq: The Case Against the UN Security Council and Member States Abd Al-ohaqq Aanai
Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire Noam Chomsky with David Barsamian
America's Deadliest Export: Democracy – The Truth about US Foreign Policy and Everything Else William Blum
The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism Paul Craig Roberts
The Ugly Canadian Yves Engler
Indonesia: Archipelago of Fear André Vltchek
Topiary Adam Engel
Destroying Libya and World Order: The Three-Decade U.S. Campaign to Terminate the Qaddafi Revolution Francis Boyle
Freedom Sailors Greta Berlin
Any time we run anything about native Americans, our viewership goes to zero.
– interviewer from 60 Minutes
Every two or three years, as a break from chanting about how everybody in America is free and equal, some intrepid reporter from our mainstream media ventures to talk about the native people who were here 10,000 years before America was officially discovered. There’s rarely anything good to be reported, but if they can come up with something lurid or at least shocking, they can be assured that it will grab the news cycle for half an hour …
Sufyan bin Uzayr analyzes what Nawaz Sharif’s election victory means for Pakistan. Bin Uzayr writes that Sharif’s win “shows that the Pakistani masses crave for a change,” a seeming contradiction given that Pakistanis passed on political hopeful Imran Khan to choose Sharif who is more of the same from Pakistan’s past.
The payroll jobs report for May released today continues the fantasy. Goods producing jobs declined, with manufacturing losing another 4,000 jobs, but the New Economy produced 179,000 service jobs.
Are these jobs the high-powered, high-wage “innovation jobs” that economists promised would be our reward from Globalism. I’m afraid not.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the jobs created are the usual lowly paid non-exportable domestic service jobs–the jobs of a third world country.
Retail trade accounts for 27,700 of the jobs.
Wholesale trade accounts for 7,900 jobs. Ambulatory health care services accounts for 15,300 of the jobs.
Waitresses and bartenders account for 38,100 of …
Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald talks to Edward Snowden, the source behind the NSA files, about his motives for the biggest intelligence leak in a generation.
Bob Pollin: Education spending is the best job creator, so why are local and state governments firing teachers and closing schools?
The coca leaf makes lovely tea, for breakfast. Hemp or Laudanum in rosewater, sweetened, before bed.
But when you concentrate and manufacture, process, condense into concoctions, you lose essential properties to gain – what? what is it, what? What is is you want of Life it obviously cannot (will not?) give?
Our captains of industry, Your shareholders and CEOs; Our entrepreneurs, Your technocrats and managers; Our hard machines, Your brittle gadgets, “crunching” numbers unto bland abstraction.
Your “hectic modern lifestyle…”
Heaven help you and your cartoon Nietzsche, cut-and-paste Marx; your quarter billion dead and maimed. Your managers fiddle while you burn. And don’t play …
Reflections on How a Mediocre White Guy Can Try to Be Useful
I recognize that the title for this presentation—“The Craziest Person in the Room: Reflections on How a Mediocre White Guy Can Try to Be Useful”—is not particularly elegant or enticing, maybe not very clear or even coherent. So, let me begin by explaining what I mean by some of these terms.
First, the “white guy”: For some years now, I’ve begun talks on injustice and inequality by acknowledging my status: White, male, educated, comfortably middle class, and born in the United States—in short, a privileged citizen of a predatory imperial nation-state within a pathological capitalist economic system. Borrowing a line …
Solomon Mikowsky is a legendary professor of music, presently teaching at the Manhattan School of Music in New York City. He is widely recognized as one of the greatest piano teachers in the world. He is originally from Cuba, and he still feels Cuban; he supports and defends Cuba.
This year, professor Mikowsky (born in 1936) brought to Havana some of the greatest names in classical music. These include his former students, Yuan Sheng (China), Alexander Moutouzkine (Russia), Simone Dinnerstein (United States), and Wael Farouk (Egypt), as well as the many younger ones, his present-day students.
Under a surprisingly modest heading, “Encounter …
First, some transparency — I worked with Kshama Sawant in Seattle when I was tasked with the ungodly job of organizing thousands of workers in Washington state, by myself, at 11 of the state’s non-profit private colleges.
Adjunct academic workers. Low pay, no-way benefits, nowhere respect. As an adjunct myself, I’ve seen my huge stack of essays teaching composition (used to be the bedrock of ALL academic majors, and, alas, still is, but is being cut and cut by many disciplines, like Economics and the IT crap) as part of my nightly and weekend duty. Getting paid $1500 a class in …
On Monday, May 13, Seattle Schools Superintendent Jose Banda announced that “High schools may opt out of MAP [Measures of Academic Progress Test] in 2013-14.”
This announcement was greeted with spontaneous celebrations by teachers and students at Garfield High School where the boycott of MAP tests began in January.
Garfield High School’s librarian, Janet Woodward summed up the meaning of the MAP test boycott for Garfield saying, “I feel vindicated by the decision to remove MAP testing from the high schools. Our movement has succeeded in exposing all of the fallacies of using this canned assessment. It is a waste of …
Our nation’s prison-overpopulation problem is getting worse, especially in California, where they have too many cons and no death penalty. The Supreme Court has mandated reduction of con concentration by whatever means possible. One bright idea — to farm out the whole mess to the Vatican, profiting from its crime-and-punishment expertise — met with a landslide of favorable response, but that was only a talk show poll.
Besides, most respondents tended to be alternative people, tree-huggers and their communist ilk. Disappointingly, few cheers came from our sort of chaps, which leads us to conclude that …
A May 3 article in Air Force Times applauded the Air Force for achieving the longest ever hypersonic flight by a scramjet-powered aircraft on May 1.
The article states: “The X-51A WaveRider flew for more than three minutes under power from its exotic scramjet engine and hit a speed of Mach 5.1…”
The engine successfully operated for about 240 seconds, until it burned its 270-pounds of fuel. This established a record as the longest flight completed by a vehicle while powered by a scramjet engine. As intended, the WaveRider then splashed into the Pacific Ocean.
The most recent flight …
In the last week we have been following British and French’s desperate attempts to push for a military intervention in Syria. It is far from being a secret that both British and French government are dominated by the Jewish Lobby. In Britain it is the ultra Zionist CFI (Conservative Friends of Israel) — apparently 80% of Britain’s conservative MPs are members of the pro Israeli Lobby. In France the situation is even more devastating, the entire political system is hijacked by the forceful CRIF.
But in case anyone fails to grasp why the Jewish Lobby is pushing for an immediate …
Let me begin with some background not covered in the film. Dirty War derives from La Sale Guerre, the term the French applied to their counter-terror campaign in Algeria, circa 1954-1961. Algeria wanted independence, and France resisted.
Like subject people everywhere, the Algerians were badly outgunned and resorted to guerrilla tactics including “selective terrorism,” a hallmark of the Viet Minh, who fought the French until 1954, when America claimed Vietnam as its rightful property. Viet Minh tactics were derived largely from Mao’s precepts for fighting a People’s War.
Selective terrorism meant the murder of low-ranking officials – collaborators – who worked closely …
Robert Hunziker delves into the widening disparity between the good fortunes of capitalism versus the stumbling misfortunes of nation-states. This 40-year trend has now reached a point where the very existence of the legacy nation-states, like the U.S., is at risk.
Tears welled up in my eyes when I heard that 83-year-old Catholic nun Megan Rice is facing 20 years in prison — a sentence that, if delivered to the fullest extent this September, would essentially condemn her to spend the rest of her life behind bars. Unlike me, however, she reportedly smiled when the jury convicted her of interfering with national security and damaging federal property at a trial in Knoxville, Tenn., last month.
While the media has tended to dismiss Rice as an eccentric, if courageous, old woman, her decision to break into the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, …
Fracking—the process the oil and gas industry uses to extract fossil fuel as much as two miles below the ground—may directly impact the nation’s water supply, reduce water-based recreational and sports activity, and lead to an increase in the cost of food.
The cocktail soup required for each well requires about two million pounds of silica sand, as much as 100,000 gallons of toxic chemicals, and three to nine million gallons of fresh water. There are more than 500,000 active wells in the country.
In 2011, the last year for which data is available, Texas energy companies used about …
There is saying among religious progressives that Christianity should “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” Unfortunately, there are all too few of such Christians, but the new Pope, to his credit, is making some effort to, at least rhetorically, move his Church in that direction. While his preaching against self-satisfaction appeals to the discontented, it remains to be seen whether his words can turn the stone hearts of at least some of the contented into a warm-heartedness for those less fortunate than they. One obstacle is that the contented psychologically and sociologically insulate themselves from personal contact with the …
The Struggle for Democracy against Inequality, Oligarchy, Oppression, and Tyranny
It began innocently enough, it seemed, when a plan to turn Istanbul’s Gezi Park – located at Taksim Square – into a shopping mall spurred a small group of environmental activists to occupy the park in protest in late May of 2013. Within a week, a wave of urban uprisings had spread across the country, involving hundreds of thousands of protesters, in dozens of cities, met with massive state repression and violence, resulting in a few deaths and thousands of injuries and arrests. The world is now watching Turkey – the connecting landmass between Europe and Asia – once home …
Et tu, Gul? Then fall, Erdogan
One thing that Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said before pushing ahead on Tuesday with a four-day tour of the Maghreb tour still hangs suspended in the air. Hardly anyone picked it up. He said Turkish intelligence is looking into possible links between the recent incidents in Istanbul, scene of violently suppressed protests, and foreign elements.
Erdogan hinted that some leads are already available with the Turkish intelligence. “Our intelligence work is ongoing. It is not possible to reveal their names. But we will have meetings with their heads.”
His words suggested that there might have been concerted foreign interference. Logically, …
