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The Battle over Closed vs. Open Systems

The world is now moving through an epoch-shifting transition, and a new system will be brought online as the $1.2 quadrillion derivatives time bomb that has cancerously taken over the western economy crashes.

Now, this may not be a bad thing, as the system created over the dead bodies of JFK and his brother (which some have dubbed ‘post-industrial society’, consumerism or globalization) was always an atrocity premised around a Malthusian paradigm that rejected America’s historic tradition of morality and technological progress.

However, as the multipolar alliance races to bring a system of win-win cooperation, large scale development and long term thinking …

Targeting Childhood in the West Bank-By Distance

From October 7, 2023–July 31, 2024, Israeli forces and settlers killed Palestinian children in the West Bank at a rate of one child every two days. We partnered with Defense for Children International-Palestine (DCIP) to create visuals for their new report, “Targeting Childhood: Palestinian Children Killed by Israeli Forces and Settlers in the Occupied West Bank”.

Israeli forces and settlers targeted children playing outside, protesting in the streets, walking home from school, and even standing inside their own homes, at distances ranging from five meters up to 300 meters away. They killed a total of 141 Palestinian children during …

Nomophobia

Nomophobia: the fear of being without one’s smartphone. What’s so smart about that?

Contemplation: Which Values, What Actions?

By mediating between our minds and social reality, the all-encompassing communications media processes such raw social facts into more digestible morsels of factoids, benighted biases, ignorant assumptions, distorted opinions, and alluring pseudo-pleasures.

But imagine the following scenario: all interactive media break down.  Silence–and a blank, darkened screen.  No more conditioning and intermittent reinforcement and puppeteering–which string us along the information-glutted blind alley with its deafening roar of talktalktalk.

Cognitive dissonance: one sits alone, or perhaps fetishistically fondles one’s dead smartphone, Aladdin-like.  Panic: what is one to think?  But then, almost imperceptibly… one’s mind enters a state of relaxation, even repose.  Freed from …

Three New Kinds of Refugees in a World of Migrants

Rashid Diab (Sudan), Out of Focus, 2015.

One summer evening, the unrelenting sun over Niger refused to dip below the horizon. I sought out some shade with three anxious men in Touba au paradis, a small quiet restaurant in Agadez. These three Nigerians had tried to make the crossing at Assamaka, to our north, into Algeria, but found the border barred. They hoped their final destination would be Europe across the Mediterranean Sea, but first they had to make it into Algeria, and then across the remarkable Sahara Desert. By …

No Brainers

On July 23, 2022, the WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus went against the majority vote of the WHO expert committee (9 against 6 in favor): The committee was AGAINST the calling of a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC).

“We have an outbreak that has spread around the world rapidly through new modes of transmission,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said during a press briefing in Geneva on Saturday (July 23, 2022).

“I have decided that the global monkeypox outbreak represents a public health emergency of international concern.” …

Bypassing Sanctions: Russia, Trade Routes and Outfoxing the West

Invention is the mother of necessity, and Russia’s response to largely Western-imposed economic and trade sanctions has shown the extent of that inventiveness.  While enduring attritive punishment in its Ukraine campaign, the war remains sustainable for the Kremlin.  The domestic economy has not collapsed, despite apocalyptic predictions to the contrary.  In terms of exports, Russia is carving out new trade routes, a move that has been welcomed by notable powers in the Global South.

One of the chief prosecutors of sanctions against Moscow was initially confident about the damage that would be caused by economic bludgeoning.  US President Joe Biden, in …

Overthrowing the Constitution: All Sides Are Waging War on Our Freedoms

It is both apt and ironic that the anniversary of 9/11, which paved the way for the government to overthrow the Constitution, occurs the week before the anniversary of the day the U.S. Constitution was adopted on September 17, 1787.

All sides are still waging war on our constitutional freedoms, and “we the people” remain the biggest losers.

This year’s presidential election is no exception.

As Bruce Fein, the former associate deputy attorney general under President Ronald Reagan, warns in a recent article in the Baltimore Sun, “In November, the American people will have a choice between Harris-Walz and Trump-Vance. But they …

At what point are we permitted to…?

Five questions, and a sixth:

1. At what point does it become irresponsible not to compare Israel’s slaughter of the Palestinian people with the genocide westerners know best: the Nazi Holocaust?

2. At what point does shielding Israel from the revulsion its actions naturally inspire not turn into complicity?

3. At what point should western publics be offered proper historical context to make sense of Israel’s genocide: one that lets them understand how the Zionist movement was ideologically shaped by its exposure to ugly, century-old European ethnic nationalisms that culminated …

The Evolution of Humans

In 1871, Charles Darwin wrote The Descent of Man.

Preventable Death

Unbecoming American

We should be clear about one thing. Death is not preventable. In fact it is assured. Even David Rockefeller, third generation patriarch of the gangster family on the Hudson, bit the dust at 101 in 2017. There may be some of his kind with ambitions of greater longevity but Daoist immortality has so far escaped them. However we may find that the improvements rendered notorious by Christiaan Barnard’s surgical experiments may reach a level to satisfy the most Methuselahaic of our ruling oligarchy. Perhaps some of these ancients are still around …

Israeli Torture Chambers Aren’t New; They Are What Provoked the Violence of October 7

If you can’t see the causal link between the Israeli abuse of generations of Palestinians and Hamas’ crimes, then you have no insight into human nature. You don’t understand yourself

For many years I lived just up the road from Megiddo prison in northern Israel, where new film of Israeli guards torturing Palestinians en masse has been published by Israel’s Haaretz newspaper. I drove past Megiddo prison on hundreds of occasions. Over time I came to barely notice the squat grey buildings, surrounded by watch towers and razor wire.

There are several large prisons like Megiddo in Israel’s north. It is where Palestinians end up after they have been seized from their homes, often in the middle of the night. Israel, and the western media, say these Palestinians have …

The Decline of Summer Festivals

How the Nuclear Family, Globalisation of Food Production, and International Trade and Travel has changed our relationship with Nature

Bonfire Night, St. John’s Eve by Jack Butler Yeats (Ireland)
Traditional summer festivals have always revolved around the solstice and bonfires on the feast of St. John (24 June) in many countries. Maypole dancing was also an important aspect of some rural and agricultural summer events, and other summer festivals like Ferragosto (15 August), involved celebrating the early fruits of the harvest and resting after months of hard work. The summer solstice was seen as the height of the powers of the sun which has been …

Logic and Pandemics

“PCR is separate from that. It’s just a process that’s used to make a whole lotta somethin’ outta somethin. That’s what it is.”

Kary Mullis, inventor of PCR test

US Seizes Venezuelan Jet Plane Confirming Who is the Rogue Nation

The Biden/Harris administration is renewing its attacks on Venezuela. On Monday, September 2, US officials seized a jet plane belonging to the Venezuelan government when it was in the Dominican Republic for servicing, then flew it to Florida.

Contrary to a false report in the NY Times, the plane was not “owned by Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro”. It is owned by the Venezuelan government and used for travel by various Venezuelan officials in addition to the president.

The NYT article claims, “The Biden administration is trying to put more pressure on Mr. Maduro because of his attempts to undermine the results of …

Humans Rescue Doomsday Glacier?

Rolling Stone
It was only 3 years ago when a group of distinguished climate scientists led by Erin C. Pettit (Oregon State University) said Thwaites Eastern Ice Shelf of the Thwaites Glacier/Antarctica, aka: Doomsday Glacier, could collapse “within as little as 5 years.” (Source: C34A-07 Collapse of Thwaites Eastern Ice Shelf by intersecting fractures, American Geophysical Union, December 15, 2021)

Assuming they nail it, what happens around the year 2026? Sea levels start rising more than previously but nobody is sure by how much as millions of people could …

Six takeaways from the UK’s decision on arms sales to Israel the media are hiding

British Jewish leaders are incensed by the 8% cut in weapons to Israel. Judged by the very rules Starmer imposed on Labour, that makes him a proven antisemite

The Guardian reported this week a source from within the Foreign Office confirming what anyone paying close attention already knew.

By last February, according to the source, Britain’s then Foreign Secretary, David Cameron, had received official advice that Israel was using British arms components to commit war crimes in Gaza. Cameron sat on that information for many months, concealing it from the House of Commons and the British public, while Israel continued to butcher tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians.

Several points need making about the information provided to the Guardian:

1. …

Eradication of Diseases

What is Big Pharma’s secret?

Holding the Press and White House Accountable: Solomon’s Afterword on the Gaza War

In Norman Solomon’s new Afterword in the paperback edition of his book War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine, the author excoriates the White House for arming a genocide with assistance from a negligent press. Solomon tracks events following Hamas’ killings and kidnappings of Israelis on October 7th, a few months after publication of the book in hardcover. The 31-page Afterword indicts the Biden administration for complicity in Israel’s genocide, a horror facilitated by Pentagon media stenographers who covered up, ignored …

Who Wants to Kill and Die for the American Empire?

“It’s brave to admit your fears” – Ukrainian recruiting poster. Photo credit: Ministry of Defense, Ukraine.
The Associated Press reports that many of the recruits drafted under Ukraine’s new conscription law lack the motivation and military indoctrination required to actually aim their weapons and fire at Russian soldiers.
“Some people don’t want to shoot. They see the enemy in the firing position in trenches but don’t open fire. … That is why our men are dying,” said a frustrated battalion commander in Ukraine’s 47th Brigade. “When they don’t use …

Give Me Missiles: Gina Rinehart and the Pathologies of Mining

Power should only ever be vested carefully, and certainly not in the hands of mining magnate Gina Rinehart, a creature so comically absurd as to warrant immediate dismissal in any respectable commentary.  But Australia’s richest human being demands to be noticed, given the insensible influence she continues to exert in press and policy circles.  Rants of smelly suggestion become pearls of perfumed wisdom, often occasioned by large amounts of largesse she disgorges on her sycophantic following.

Of late, she has been busy in her narcissistic daftness.  At the National Bush Summit held last month, she proved particularly unstoppable.  While advertised

DNC 2024 and Gaza


Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (left) with US Vice President Kamala Harris IMAGE/Independent/MSN/Duck Duck Go

A quote, wrongly attributed to Abraham Lincoln, reads:

You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.

Well, that may be true but what is also true is that you can fool most of the people (followers of politicians, political parties, religions, celebrities, stars, social media influencers, businesspersons, and so …

AC/DC

When AC/DC is not about a rock band, it is usually about certain personalities.

Craven Tokenism: The UK Suspension of Arms Export Licenses to Israel

The government of Sir Keir Starmer, despite remaining glued to a foreign policy friendly and accommodating to Israel, has found the strain a bit much of late.  While galloping to victory in the July elections, leaving the British Labour Party a heaving majority, a certain ill-temper could be found among the ranks on his attitudes regarding Israel’s war in Gaza.

Mish Rahman, a member of the Labour Party’s National Executive Committee, summed up the mood by professing embarrassment “about my affiliation with Labour” in light of the party’s response to the killings in Gaza.  “It was hard even to tell …

The People Who Never Learn

“Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.” So the saying goes.

The idea is found in a book written by Anthony Weldon in 1651 titled The Court and Character of King James. Weldon writes, “The Italians have a Proverb, ‘He that deceives me once, it’s his fault. He that deceives me twice, it’s my fault.’”
Don McMinn

The Democratic Party Conventional Convention

Did the real Kamala Harris Standup?

President Joe Biden read the tea leaves, and, from the periphery of the political system, Vice President (VP) Kamala Harris abruptly emerged as the Democratic candidate for President of the United States of America. The American public knew that Kamala Harris was VP, was not sure of how to pronounce her first name, and was not familiar with her voyage to the top spot. By announcing  that the convention theme “’For the People, For Our Future,”’ will further introduce Vice President Kamala Harris and Governor Tim Walz to the nation and …

The Vietnam War Protest Songs are as Relevant Today as When They Were Written

The Vietnam War protest movement left us with a number of timeless anti-war songs, which are, despite the absence of a draft and large numbers of American soldiers dying, still extremely pertinent as they underscore the growing dangers posed by Washington’s pathological addiction to war.

Country Joe McDonald’s “I Feel Like I’m Fixin to Die” let loose a volley of vitriol directed against conscription, the war on students, and American oligarchs who have long sought to solve all problems with violence. The song makes use of humor and sarcasm to remind listeners that imperialist wars are invariably rooted in hubris …

Corporate Globalist Lingo

What do corporate globalists call their program?

What It Means to Go Back-to-School in the American Police State

Every day in communities across the United States, children and adolescents spend the majority of their waking hours in schools that have increasingly come to resemble places of detention more than places of learning.

—Investigative journalist Annette Fuentes

It’s not easy being a child in the American police state.

Danger lurks around every corner and comes at you from every direction, especially when Big Brother is involved.

Out on the streets, you’ve got the menace posed by police officers who shoot first and ask questions later. In your neighborhoods, you’ve got to worry …

“Intellectual Hick”: Sorting Out Our Complex Identities

I am from rural America, sort of. I’m an intellectual, sort of. I’m certainly on the political left, but some comrades believe I’ve turned conservative.

Like many people, I don’t fit easily into conventional labels used in today’s polarized political debates. To understand me—and anyone else—takes some sorting out. Here’s how I sort myself out.

I was born in North Dakota and grew up mostly in the big city of Fargo (well, it’s the largest city in the state). I never lived in a rural area, but I was a part of a larger rural culture, in which most everyone had some …