Martyrs to the Unspeakable: The Assassinations of JFK, Malcolm, Martin, and RFK James W. Douglass
Broken Stars: Gaza Poems Buff Whitman-Bradley
Complicit: Britain's Role in the Destruction of Gaza Peter Oborne
What I Saw in Ukraine: 2015-2022 – Diary of an International Observer Benoit Paré
Surviving the 21st Century Noam Chomsky and José Mujica
At the Lost and Found: Personal & Political Dispatches of Resistance and Hope Edward Curtin
Class War, Then and Now: Essays toward a New Left Chris Wright
Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine Scott Horton
Highway to Hell: The Armageddon Chronicles, 2015-2024 Scott Ritter
Visualizing Palestine: A Chronicle of Colonialism and the Struggle for Liberation Visualizing Palestine
The farce of Western regard for democracy has been revealed in several countries. Well known are the machinations of the Democratic National Commission to prevent the social democrat Bernie Sanders from becoming the leader of the so-called Democratic Party in the US. In the UK, there was the coalition of Labour Party insiders with Israeli Zionists who upended the elected party leader Jeremy Corbyn. Consider the Western support for the continuation of the corrupt government of Volodymyr Zelenskyy well past his democratic mandate; consider the abandonment of the presidential election …
Rapacious Capitalism
REE’s — Rare Earth Elements.
We’re all connected to the deep sea. There is no line in the ocean that says to us, ‘below this, nothing matters.’ The ocean is all connected. It’s the largest …
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood/Come gurgling from the froth-corrupted lungs . . . . My friend, you would not tell with such high zest / To children ardent for some desperate glory, / The old lie: Dulce et decorum est / Pro patria mori [It is a sweet and fitting thing to die for one’s country]
– Wilfred Owen, Dulce Et Decorum Est
On the morning of November 11, I was passing through Pittsfield, Massachusetts, heading north. The traffic was stopped as a Veteran’s Day parade headed south. It was a sight for a musing mind, so that …
“I always aim four-five inches away from the body. That way I know that I couldn’t not have possibly pump the lead into the poor bastard.”
“I aim at him but swing the muzzle to the right as I squeeze the trigger. If the lieutenant or the sergeant notice, I explain that I always flinch the moment the shot rings out.”
“When the lieutenant yells ‘Fire!’, I wait a second before shooting. With the body falling, my bullet will miss high.”
“By army regulation, one of the five carbines must be loaded with blank. I always fork over twenty bucks to the sergeant …
I am grateful for the invitation from The China Academy and its Thinkers’ Forum in Shanghai to shed light on the dark logic behind nuclear weapons—their possession, their use, their philosophy. (I know of no Western media that would extend such an invitation to me).
This creed of “nuclearism” is not a strategy; it’s a civilizational tragedy. So muddled is its reasoning that NATO, built on the threat of nuclear first-use—even against conventional attacks—is still called ‘defensive.’
Despite vast cultural divides, nuclear-armed states—NATO’s US, the UK, France and the countries that host nukes in …
So Trump suddenly threatens to sue the BBC for $1 billion for a misleading splice-up of video clips broadcast over a year ago. A BBC news editor — Raffi Berg — is suing journalist Owen Jones for exposing his biased judgement in reporting Gaza war news. And two top knobs at the BBC, Director-General Tim Davie and CEO of news Deborah Turness, jump before they’re pushed.
The British public are angry enough at having to pay the BBC’s extortionate TV licence fee only to have biased news beamed at them. If Trump were to win his $1 billion claim he’d be …
Note: Just ‘some’ of the feces in my ‘news’ (sic) feed in a two-hour period.
Defense industry heaps praise on Hegseth’s weapons-buying reformation
Terry Gerton You, I’m sure, paid very close attention to Secretary Hegseth’s speech last Friday on the arsenals of democracy. What was your takeaway?
Stephanie Kostro Thanks so much for asking, Terry. And not only was I listening with bated breath, I was actually in the room. And for …
From the Zionist lobby’s media buyouts, to Christian-nationalism’s grudge match with Christian-Zionism, to Mamdani-envoked moral panic to “the Mar-a-Lago face.”
The face of last stage empire on display at a Mar-a-Lago event:
The human psyche’s lexicon is imagistic in nature. The psyche speaks in visual metaphors. At empire’s end, the psyche becomes an artist of the absurd. Hence, the nature of the zeitgeist will be limned by means of fashion, form, and feature into emblems of the era.
Pictured: “The Mar-a-Lago face” i.e., human beings transformed by Spiritus Mundi into (inadvertent) supernumeraries of a Gogolian theatre of the (cringe-inducing) grotesque.
In contrast, the type of image above brings me solace, because, now, when I …
A Canadian Gothic political horror documentary comedy
29 minutes in 3 chapters
1. Who’s afraid of Yves Engler?
2. Dost thou toe the line?
3. The Pizzeria Niagara Falls
The 27th Amendment rewrites Pakistan’s rules and hands its courts and army to the powerful few.
According to Santiago Canton, the ICJ Secretary General, the 27th amendment introduces changes that raise serious concern. He warns that these shifts could weaken the courts’ role in checking executive power and compromise the basic rights of people in Pakistan.
Parliament has created a new Federal Constitutional Court and moved many core powers from the Supreme Court to that new body, including original jurisdiction over constitutional disputes and the transfer of all pending constitutional appeals and suo …
It’s so silly as to be depraved. Two countries, hardly exemplary when it comes to their environmental credentials, vying for hosting rights to an event that does more to emit greenhouse gases than it resolves to limiting them. But this is exactly what Australia and Türkiye are doing regarding the Conference of Parties (COP) for 2026, school louts seeking to make themselves the most noticed in the playground of climate change politics.
The scale in terms of hosting these gatherings of anthropomorphic crowding is decidedly onerous and horrendously costly. The 30th UN climate conference being held in Belém, Brazil has 56,118 …
What makes up a marriage has been the subject of state, community, and tribal control since human society took some form. Who is to marry whom; the process of selecting the appropriate breeding partners; and the limits and penalties imposed on those partners in cases of transgression. Love did not necessarily have anything to do with it.
Traditionally, the content of such marriages has been anthropomorphic, with the perennial question of whether one should be suitably partnered with one or multiple beings. Then, the more unusual instances: human beings attempting to wed non-human entities. With a certain notoriety, a Swedish woman …
The prison rape scandal in Israel; is there a defect, an effect of this on domestic policy that Netanyahu’s administration refuses to condemn what every other government in the world condemns, the forcible race rape of a helpless victim? This is a this is a major domestic issue in Israel, a major domestic story.
The difference between people who supported the British Empire and people who support the US Empire is that those who supported the British Empire knew they were supporting an empire.
Someone who supported the British Empire’s acts of mass military slaughter around the world did so because they supported the Crown and wanted His Majesty to civilize the godless savages and turn the whole world into his royal subjects. Someone who supports the US empire’s warmongering thinks they are doing so because Saddam is an evil dictator, because Gaddafi is an evil dictator, because Maduro is an evil dictator, because Hamas …
The US, under Trump, is unapologetically an empire operating without pretense. International law is for losers. A newly minted War Department, deploying the most lethal killing machine in world history, need not hide behind the sham of promoting democracy.
Recall that in 2023, Trump boasted: “When I left, Venezuela was ready to collapse. We would have taken it over; we would have gotten all that oil.” As CEO of the capitalist bloc, Trump’s mission is not about to be restrained by respect for sovereignty. There is only one inviolate global sovereign; all others are subalterns.
Venezuela – with our oil under …
Following the publication in 2001 of his book, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, John Mearsheimer’s notion of Offensive Realism (OR) has become widely regarded (in academe and in state policy circles) as a no-nonsense, pragmatic and now preeminent ‘theory’ of how and why it is that the so-called great powers of the world behave – and should behave – in the ways that they do.
Adherents to OR take the view, which can be inferred from the book’s title, that we may not like the way that it portrays the world, but that, unfortunately, is how things are.
As the progenitor …
My friends claim that I am irreverent to the Olympian gods. My interests I am told are unduly focused on ghosts, bogies and pillar cults. I prefer savage disorders, Dionysian origins, the tearing of wild bulls to the ordered and stately ceremonial of Panathenaic processions….The gods who once mirrored human unity with nature came to mirror human individuality. The Olympians, in their triumph of humanity kicked down the ladder from earth to heaven by which they arose….The Olympias seemed like a bouquet of cut flowers whose bloom is brief because they …
The disenfranchised, cast aside people of the US find hope when an AOC, Brandon Johnson, Zohran Mamdani and Bernie Sanders campaigns and wins public office. These campaigns overcame corporate backed opponents, relying on people power not corporate financing, organizing many thousands of our fellow working people to participate. Yet, possessing public office does not change the economic and class structure of this country, where the real ruling power lies. Our country’s system, on the local, state, and national level, is a government of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich.
The public offices they won are one cog in …
Trump’s gunboat diplomacy in the Caribbean grabs the headlines, while quieter moves to destabilize other progressive Latin American governments go unnoticed by corporate media. A key case is a plot that would create chaos enabling a neoliberal candidate to be declared victor, with Washington’s connivance, in Honduras’s elections on November 30.
At stake is four more years of progressive government or – otherwise – returning to the neoliberalism that prevailed after the US-backed military coup in 2009. The electoral defeat of progressive parties in Ecuador and Bolivia earlier this year, and the uncertain chances of progressive candidate Jeannette Jara …
From Biden to Trump
Do Journalists Protect or Harm Democracy?
Almost half (45%) of teens in a recent survey by The News Literacy Project said journalists harm democracy. Only 56% believed reporters value fairness and accuracy. 80% concluded that news content is subjective, and nearly 70% thought press outlets intentionally add bias to their coverage. The cynicism illustrated in the study reflects one of the extreme positions toward the press that is undermining democratic norms.
The other …
Scientists have come to call the first 6-8 months of the COVID pandemic “The Anthropause.” During this time, industrial fossil fuel pollution plummeted and for the very first time in history, world-wide emissions were reduced enough to halt climate change. In The Edge of Nature, Oscar-nominated, Emmy-winning director Josh Fox (Gasland, Awake, A Dream from Standing Rock, and How to Let Go of the World and Love All the Things Climate Can’t Change) isolates himself in a one-room cabin in the woods as he struggles with the physical and neurological effects of Long COVID and ruminates on man’s relationship with …
Little Newport, OR, already has the makings of yet ANOTHER Gestapo Training Ground and Concentration Camp
Coming to a town nearby, or just right inside your city limits — Concentration Camps.
…
The BBC: A ‘Leftist Propaganda Machine’?
The resignations of Tim Davie, BBC director general, and Deborah Turness, BBC head of news, after an intense, right-wing campaign led by the Daily Telegraph reveals much about the state of British ‘mainstream’ media.
Before we discuss the latest scandal, consider first some relevant facts about BBC coverage of the Middle East. In June 2025, a devastating indictment of BBC ‘impartiality’ was published by the Centre for Media Monitoring (CfMM) in the form of a detailed report into the BBC’s coverage of Israel and Gaza. The …
If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.
– Walter Benjamin “The Storyteller,” 1936
Today’s rustlers are stealing the silence needed to allow stories to percolate in our minds. They are noisy speedsters, gunning down the highway of regret, constantly pushing us to abandon any sense of living deliberately and relaxed for the bait of faster internet speed and 24/7 lives in which no one is ever “off.” Like our machines, we are barely sleeping …
China's Green Revolution
Every year, around 8 million tons of plastic waste finds its way into the world’s oceans. Some of this plastic takes centuries to break down. For the plastic that drifts to the coast of Zhejiang, China, a new opportunity presents itself. Here it is collected, brought ashore and given a second life thanks to the “Blue Circle”. With nature’s generosity in mind, a growing number of people is choosing to stand with the ocean.
Zohran Mamdani’s quoting of Eugene Debs in his recent victory speech (for mayor of New York City) should awaken interest in the man who gained a name for himself as “Mr. Socialism.”
For seventeen years Debs was the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, starving himself of sleep to bone up on politics, economics, and history. With painstaking effort he made himself into a manager’s worst nightmare: an educated union man who could unravel the knots of capitalist contradiction, making the need for revolution plain for all to see.
Unable to ignore workers’ constant pleas …
The First Month of Life in Gaza After the Ceasefire
The morning carried a different scent…
One that I had been waiting two years to smell.
The weapons of war had finally fallen silent,
as a ceasefire draped the land.
— from The Scent of Life by Maryam Hasanat, Gaza author and refugee
On October 8th, 2025 the Occupation and the Occupied agreed to a permanent ceasefire. It’s the first step in a peace process that has been going on for generations.
Blessed are the bruised, for they remember the shape of mercy.
In a world increasingly adrift from its ancient moorings, I find myself compelled to share a profound truth, whispered not through dogma, but through the very pulse of the Earth and the enduring wisdom of generations. It is a lament, yes, but more powerfully, it is an urgent invitation to return, to remember, and to reclaim what has been tragically cast aside.
My journey to this understanding was, like many awakenings, born from a crucible of pain. Not long ago, a relentless dental agony drove me into the arms of modern …
There is a military axiom that if your positions are encircled by far superior forces, you will inevitably be annihilated, unless you break out. I have been a member of our labor movement and left wing since I got out of high school in 1979. For every one of those 46 years our labor movement has been under heavy attack, and at the end of every year we were smaller and more exhausted than when it began. This year will be …
