Tied up with the apparently very longstanding tradition of claiming that all opponents of atrocities are purely engaged in what has recently been called “virtue signaling” is the idea that only certain types of people are qualified to protest certain things — or to ever say or do anything decent at all.
by David Swanson / February 14th, 2026
Columbia University professor Bruce Robbins exposed his students to possible criticism of the Israeli military, and was, for that reason, declared by his employer guilty of discrimination and harassment. Robbins could have written a book on the absurdities involved in defining criticism of genocide as discrimination, and defining criticism of any military on Earth other than the Israeli military as not discrimination. Instead, in Who’s Allowed to Protest?, he has written a debunking of some other absurd rejections of protesting.
Charter schools are outsourced schools, also known as contract schools. They are privately operated, deregulated, and laser-focused on siphoning substantial sums of public money, services, and facilities from public schools. Charter schools are essentially pay-the-rich schemes masquerading as great inventions designed to close the century-old “achievement gap.” There is nothing grass-roots about them.
Recognizing that privatization intensifies corruption, inefficiency, nepotism, opportunism, and criminal conduct wherever it appears, it comes as no surprise that scandal, controversy, and failure have long-plagued the charter school sector nationwide.
A February 11, 2026, article in Chalkbeat, “Underfunding or mismanagement? Financial troubles at multiple Chicago charters …
We are living at a time of historical significance. We feel it in our bones, and it relentlessly gnaws at our consciousness. The familiar is rapidly unraveling. The transition to whatever is to come is disquieting and disorienting, and we don’t know how to respond. We cannot grasp these events because the ethical codes of conduct and morality in which they occur are outside of the psychological norms of healthy human beings.
Information is bombarding our senses so fast that we cannot assimilate it. We cannot keep up. The geopolitical landscape is constantly shifting. We are overwhelmed, distracted by an avalanche …
The eulogies are starting to wear thin. The lamented passing of the rules and law-based order only makes sense to those who believed that such rules and laws existed in the first place. How easy it is to forget that the spanning hegemon of each age always presumes that its laws and norms are objective universal features, putative and significant enough to be revered and inked for eternity. That most irritating term “rules-based order” is more a stress on the order backed by might rather than the rules themselves, a figment of legal draughtsmanship. Without a degree of might, there …
by Andy Lee Roth and Shealeigh Voitl / February 13th, 2026
Trump administration officials, joined by a chorus of Republican politicians and right-wing media pundits, have been referring to public demonstrations against ICE in Minneapolis as an “insurgency,” a term typically used to refer to violent, armed rebellion, especially when it involves irregular forces opposing a larger, well-equipped military or state power.
On the surface, the use of the term to characterize these demonstrations appears aimed at justifying Donald Trump’s invocation of the Insurrection Act, which grants presidents authority to deploy military forces domestically to suppress civil disorder. But a closer analysis of how the use of “insurgency” frames the demonstrations reveals …
by John Perry and Roger D. Harris / February 13th, 2026
Laura Dogu, newly appointed US envoy to Venezuela, is described by the Los Angeles Times as an appropriate choice because she “navigated crises” in Nicaragua and Honduras during periods of “social and political volatility.” What the LA Times fails to add is that it was precisely Dogu’s job to create crisis and volatility in both countries.
In Latin America, she is widely regarded, for good reason, as the “US ambassador of interventions and coups.”
The LA Times appears entirely relaxed about a US diplomat’s job being to meddle in the internal politics of a country whose president the US has …
There were never the sharpest negotiators in the room, resembling a facsimile of Bertie Wooster in desperate need of the good advice of his manservant Jeeves. The Australian defence establishment has yet to find a wise head who will finally tell them that the A$368 billion AUKUS pact between the three Anglophone powers of Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States has only one oversized beneficiary in mind.
While the Australian treasury gets drained in throwing cash at US naval yards in acts of stealthy proliferation for Washington’s military industrial complex (A$1.6 billion has so far been forked out), it …
The golden boys arrived; polished shoes, great vigor. (They tried to take what their elders sat on; wanted their cut of the unfair cut sooner than due time. The elders only smirked and would not give in.)
The fight at the lone barricade was short.
Urchin of the back streets, Gavroche, he was cut down in a hail of bullets. The air turned breathless. Occasionally even the least can make history.
We remembered him: the shrieking voice, the impudent grin. Every alley whispered Gavroche. We buried him in silence.
Afterwards, the golden boys returned to school, the soldiers to …
Notice: My goal is to provide fresh insights with every post. This article focuses exclusively on new developments regarding the Epstein Files. For a comprehensive background on the saga, please visit our [full archive here]; the most recent updates are located at the bottom of the page.
“By some baffling twist of logic, it concluded that Oakes was guilty …
Early in my progressive activist/organizer life, begun in 1968, I was a big believer in the need for a “third party.” A primary reason was the prosecution of the Vietnam War by Democratic President Lyndon Johnson. As I studied in college in 1967 about the history of that war, I learned that the USA had taken over from France the role of imperialist colonizer in the mid-50’s after the French were defeated by the Vietnamese independence forces.
US imperialism in Vietnam was not benign. Hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese by 1968 had been killed as the US supported a series …
UK Government: “I would not want to give the House or the public the impression that we have not taken significant steps in the course of the last 18 months.”
Last week the House of Commons debated a motion on Parliament’s “obligation to assess the risk of genocide under international law” in regard to Occupied Palestine.
There is no longer a question about the “risk” of genocide in Gaza, it’s a undeniable fact – as confirmed by the UN itself, the International Association of Genocide Scholars and countless other authorities. But both main political parties in the UK think they know better.
Twice in the last year, Israel and its Big Brother have started a war to crush Iran. Without success. But if at first you don’t succeed… So Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is still trying to sell the leader of the dwindling superpower on the idea of destroying Iran.
Netanyahu is obsessed, because — in his view — Iran is the only sworn enemy of Israel that is powerful enough to prevent his aim of complete domination in West Asia. The destruction of Iraq, Libya and Syria were stepping stones on the path to his vision, but he calculates that only …
Electric motorcycles are Cuba’s response to the fuel crisis.
Marta Jiménez, a hairdresser in Cuba’s eastern city of Holguín, covered her face with her hands and broke down crying when I asked her about Trump’s blockade of the island—especially now that the U.S. is choking off oil shipments.
“You can’t imagine how it touches every part of our lives,” she sobbed. “It’s a vicious, all-encompassing spiral downward. With no gasoline, buses don’t run, so we can’t get to work. We have electricity only three to six hours a day. There’s no gas for cooking, so we’re burning wood …
History exists on facts of life and shallowness of a nation’s history are the inept and egoistic leaders. In wars, logic fails to define foes and friends. India and Pakistan have an enriched history to blame games for their failure to preserve freedom, security and the ideological foundation of their existence.
Insecurity and injustice stem from corruption and failed political leadership. India opted for institutional development to avoid military interventions, Pakistanis got derailed for change and national development by continuous military coups and foreign alliance to maintain its survival. British colonialism lasting a few centuries divided …
Two Atlanta, Georgia charter schools that are part of the notorious KIPP Charter Schools Network (KIPP Soul Primary School and KIPP Soul Academy) will be closing at the end of the 2025-2026 school year. At least 122 staff will lose their jobs and hundreds of stunned parents and students will be forced to fend for themselves as they scramble frantically to find another school….
On February 11,1990, Nelson Mandela was released from Victor Verster prison in South Africa after having been incarcerated for twenty-seven years.
On that same day I was trying, not very successfully, to recover from a slew of personal hardships. My partner had died, too young, not long before. After nursing him over four painful years, I fell into incapacity myself, utterly drained and dispirited. My relatively privileged North American life had not well prepared me—by my mid-twenties– for oncology wards and hospice care. The aftermath of his illness left me seeing …
The Epstein abominations, to state the obvious, are revealing, in lurid detail, hidden in plain sight, unnerving aspects of human nature; withal, what transpires during human sexuality is an analog, sublime and grotesque, redemptive and soul-decimating, of all things human. Epstein and his billionaire boys club …
by Jeffrey Sachs and Sybil Fares / February 10th, 2026
The Middle East stands at a crossroads between endless war and comprehensive peace. A framework for peace does exist. Will the US finally seize it?
History occasionally presents moments when the truth about a conflict is stated plainly enough that it becomes impossible to ignore. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi’s February 7 address in Doha, Qatar (transcript here) should prove to be such a moment. His important and constructive remarks responded to the US call for comprehensive negotiations, and he laid out a sound proposal for peace across the Middle East.
The day kept going the way days do, except it didn’t feel like it belonged. At the well a woman swore under her breath because the rope slipped again and she stood there a moment staring at her palm. Kids tore through the olive trees, not chasing anything, not running from anything, just running.
Shots cracked from somewhere behind the hills. People heard them, but nobody moved. It was the kind of distance that turns noise into weather: Someone said it was thunder though the sky had no intention of rain. After a while there were heavier booms, maybe mortars, maybe …
A carpenter does not craft chairs only to hide them under a bed. A tailor does not sew garments just to store them away. So, then—does America manufacture military weapons and war machines only to keep them in the White House’s military depo ? No. They must be sold. And how? Through war. The more human blood spills like the Hudson River, the more the so‑called American Dream is realized. War fuels profit, and profit fuels power.
This is not metaphor. It is the economic theology of the United States.
For decades, America has perfected a system in which the suffering …
How awful could it get? The New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) expired on February 5, terminating an era of arms control and imposed limits on lunatically contrived nuclear weapons programs of the United States and Russia. The New START Treaty entered into force on February 5, 2011 and initially imposed a timeline of seven years for the parties to meet the central limits on strategic offensive arms. Those limits would then be maintained for the duration of the Treaty.
Till its expiry, the countries maintained limits on the following nuclear arms and systems: 700 deployed intercontinental ballistic …
From the Avenues of Paris to the Streets of Minneapolis, the Power of Broad-Based Movement Building Is Becoming Evident
by Ida Susser / February 9th, 2026
Born in South Africa just a few years after the end of World War II and reared by activists in the anti-apartheid movement, I witnessed my parents’ struggle against fascism and its accompanying racism in both my country of birth and Europe. This created in me a sense of the fragility of democracy and fear of losing civil rights and collective values. The wave of brutal ICE raids and the Trump administration’s assault on political and legal norms prove this fear well-founded.
At the age of five, my father told me, “We fought fascism in Europe and then came home to …
There is nothing more dangerous to ruling class interests than people getting in touch with their inborn sense of empathy and acting as their brothers’ and sisters’ keepers.
by Gary Olson / February 9th, 2026
Empathy is the capacity to think and feel oneself into the inner life of another person. — Heinz Kohut
“Zionist Imperial Mafia” — Antisemitic? Nah.
Nah, it is NOT so-called, “antisemitic” (antispetic?) to point things out, man oh man.
Sam Altman, who has been awarded a one-year military contract worth $200 million from the Trump administration, has invested in technology to allow parents to gene edit their children before conception to produce “designer babies.”
Epstein, anyone?
One of Jeffrey Epstein’s teen accusers alleged she was used as a “human incubator” to have the late pedophile’s baby — and the newborn was apparently snatched from her just minutes after giving birth.
We are at a crossroads of civilization, facing contradictions that cannot be solved by the same logic that created them. We are attempting to answer the future of humanity with a mindset inherited from the past.
“Life is what happens when you are busy making other plans.” — John Lennon
We live in the most materialistic epoch in history. Everything revolves around production—the making of objects. Factories, warehouses, housing developments, cars, films, videos, data centers. Even churches are increasingly objectified: they manufacture faith. Schools become factories for tomorrow’s workers and their bosses.
Political parties have become the marketing arm of these materialist structures. …
Nominal realities bedevil politics. They usually find form in polling statistics, airings in the land of pundits and those self-appointed wise people who think they have a measure of the electorate and its various wishes. Folly often follows, garlanded with errors of judgment and failed predictions: Brexit and Donald Trump’s election in 2016; Trump’s re-election in 2024. The list is wearisomely long, the electorate often inscrutable. Yet the pollsters always live another day, at large and unpunished.
In Australia, the cathedral of commentators and psephologists is expressing interest in the emergence of a new horse from the political stable. Not a thoroughbred, mind you. …
Imagine telling someone who has experienced the most apocalyptic conditions known to man to give their perpetrators a “chance.” That’s exactly what it felt like when I opened my phone the other day and saw headlines from The Washington Post and Wall Street Journal talking about Trump’s sham “Board of Peace,” which is supposed to govern Gaza.
Not only is it tone deaf, but it’s also downright racist. Palestinians have spent decades being strung along like puppets, being told what’s going to happen to our land instead of letting us have it. We have been raped, maimed, starved, displaced, imprisoned, tortured, …
The title of the article at Foreign Affairs (FA) — “Xi the Destroyer” — speaks loudly of another Sinophobic piece by the US foreign policy magazine published by the Council on Foreign Relations.
FA opens the article by noting the “purge” of People’s Liberation Army general Zhang Youxia in what it termed a “Shakespearean moment in Chinese politics” — seemingly indicating a lighthearted mistake by chairman Xi Jinping.
Yet Xi’s decision is framed as “suggest[ing] a new level of intrigue.” This is based on the long time familiarity between Xi and Zhang and that their fathers were “comrades-in-arms during China’s …
