Latest articles
Prohibitive Puffing
by Binoy Kampmark / February 18th, 2026
The cutting of pleasures, the trimming of delights and telling people how they can enjoy life, is the sort of thing that will be tolerated, up to a point. Otherwise liberal countries do suffer moral convulsions, be it about sex, drug taking, smoking and boozing. Regulations and laws are inevitably passed, much of it tolerated. But instead of addressing the vice in question, invigilating rule makers and bureaucratic needlers often end up creating something worse. That’s when questions start being asked.
The demon tobacco is particularly relevant here. While tobacco companies deserve their satanic reputations for ruining health, knowingly denying medical …
Culture, population, and quality of life
by Robert Malone / February 18th, 2026
Marriage is the cornerstone of a healthy society, and children are the conduit to the future.
Introduction
For the first time in modern American history, we are quietly entering an era in which having children is no longer the cultural default. The United States now sits well below replacement-level fertility, and each generation, absent immigration, will be smaller than the one before it. This fact is often discussed in purely economic terms: labor shortages, aging populations, entitlement systems, and GDP projections. But fertility is not merely a statistical problem or …
by Ted Glick / February 18th, 2026
A quarter of the way through this century, there is no doubt that the USA and the world are in deep trouble. This is true for everyone, even the families of those most responsible for this state of affairs, the “Epstein class” and those supporting them. Given the fact that the burning of fossils fuels and nukes, the continued reliance on destructive war as a way of determining who runs individual countries, and the growing disparity between the billionaire/multi-multi-millionaire (MMM) class and those who must work for a living, often barely making it—these and related injustices are what must be …
by Mahboob A. Khawaja / February 18th, 2026
Paradox of Time and History and the Myth of New World Order
America was not the superpower and European empires were more nationalists and aggressive when the 1857 Munich Conference held its assembly. Their delusional visions and priorities fell victim to their own vices and ruins, the consequential First World War and 2nd World War. What have Europeans learned from the past to unfold a New World Order? Paranoid, suspicious of mutual interests, devoid of rational global vision of peace and co-existence, American and European leaders continue to search for glory and triumph by military supremacy to dominate the rest of …
by Tricontinental Asia / February 18th, 2026
As the people of Thailand go to the polls this February, voters are offered three competing visions of progress: one that builds power from the village up, one that critiques from the seminar room, and one that pays to keep the countryside quiet. Amid the ongoing border war with Cambodia, Thailand is a microcosm of the Global South’s political laboratory.
The Phue Thai Party (PTP), often known to outsiders as the ‘Red Shirt Party’, has defined Thai politics for over two decades but has somehow itself defied definition – a peasant-backed populist movement in alliance with urban capitalists; privatising state assets …
by Jan Oberg / February 17th, 2026
Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen’s world view and threat statements as well as her disturbing stereotyping of the Russian people are beyond normal and must be seen as a threat to Denmark’s and Europe’s future.
The current threat of an attack by the US did not begin with any failure by Iran to negotiate. On the contrary, it began with the United States’ repudiation of negotiations that had already succeeded.
by Jeffrey Sachs / February 17th, 2026
Distinguished Members of the Security Council,
The President of the United States is issuing grave threats of force against the Islamic Republic of Iran if it does not accede to US demands. His actions risk a major regional war that would be devastating. Asked if he wanted regime change, he responded that it “seems like that would be the best thing that could happen.” When asked why a second US aircraft carrier has been sent to the region, President Trump answered “in case we don’t make a deal, we’ll need it … if we need it, …
by J.S. O’Keefe / February 17th, 2026
He repeats it with patient conviction to anyone who will stand still long enough: you enter this world without a shirt on your back, and you depart the same way. If there is food on your plate three times a day and cloth against your skin, you have already received more than you deserve and ought to keep quiet. He delivers this as a law of nature, as if all other human cravings were character flaws.
People nod when he speaks. They say he must be a man of rare spirituality, an upright figure who moves among us as though he’s …
by Binoy Kampmark / February 17th, 2026
Killing political leaders – metaphorically and actually – often ushers in a silly season where the Mad Hatter presides over an imbecilic party. Amidst coups, defections, dethronements and confusions on the right of Australia politics, we see ugly topics return to the fore with ghastly predictability. The Liberals, the Nationals, and Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party, are narrowing, rather than broadening the issues of debate. A suspicious, anti-establishment populism, if we are to believe the astrologers in the ranks of psephologists and pollsters, has become vibrantly feral, and top of the list of concerns is immigration.
Incapable of even coming …
by Sammy Attoh / February 16th, 2026
There is a particular kind of silence that settles over a society when injustice becomes routine. It is not the silence of peace but the silence of resignation—the silence that creeps in when people begin to believe that suffering is inevitable and resistance is futile. I have seen that silence in the ruins of Sudan, where families rebuild their lives with nothing but memory. I have seen it in Europe, where refugees wander through train stations carrying the last remnants of their former lives. I have seen it in the Bronx, where hunger hides behind apartment doors and pride keeps …
by Heather Stroud / February 16th, 2026
We are living through an age where genocide, oppression and the moral breakdown of humanity, is being revealed live on our television and mobile screens. Hostile actions that were once conducted in the shadows are no longer overt but openly covert. Targeted assassination of leaders, journalists, aid workers and doctors deemed to be in opposition, is bragged about and normalised. This moral breakdown is happening because the powers that be, consider themselves to be untouchable and beyond the Law.
That might be changing, as evidence of a grassroots pushback is emerging. …
by Jan Oberg / February 16th, 2026
The MSC’s closed groupthink militarism offers only one prescription — more weapons — even as record military expenditures, squeezed from taxpayers in economic crisis, destroy diplomacy and drive escalation and the highest war risks in decades.
From Dialogue Forum to Militarised Ritual
For decades, the Munich Security Conference (MSC) – which opened today and runs till Sunday – was one of the few places where adversaries could meet without theatrics. Founded in 1963 as the Wehrkundetagung, it served as a discreet Cold War dialogue forum between NATO …
by Binoy Kampmark / February 16th, 2026
For those with a sense of humour, consulting alleged facts compiled by an agency specialising in subterfuge, subversion, deception and plain mendacity must surely have been a delightful exercise. That delightful exercise would seem to have concluded earlier this month with an announcement by the US Central Intelligence Agency that it would no longer be publishing its World Factbook. Presumably the publication did not fall within what Director John Ratcliffe sees as a core mission of the agency.
The World Factbook was initially published in classified form in 1962 as “The National Basic Intelligence Factbook” intended for officials in …
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.
If you don’t read grotesque rightwing …
by Shawgi Tell / February 14th, 2026
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 …
by Charles Sullivan / February 14th, 2026
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 …
by Binoy Kampmark / February 14th, 2026
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 …
Citizens and Government Actions in Economics, Trade and Financial Sovereignty
by Jan Oberg / February 13th, 2026
Read Part 1 and 2.
A. Trade Measures & Market Signaling
Economic pressure can be applied instantly and scaled without violence.
Immediate Measures (within a week)
Government boycott US goods and services
A very powerful signal which over time will be felt.
Targeted tariffs on selected U.S. goods
Symbolic but high-visibility sectors send a clear message.
Suspend trade facilitation talks
A peaceful pause that signals deep concern.
Freeze U.S. participation in public procurement – military procurement in particular
A nonviolent way to reduce influence.
Competition law review of U.S. corporations
A legal tool to scrutinise market dominance.
Longer-Term Measures
EU–Asia–Africa trade corridors
Reducing …
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 …
by Binoy Kampmark / February 13th, 2026
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 Gallic Spirit)
by J.S. O’Keefe / February 12th, 2026
Not much happened that day.
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 …
Shielding the Architects of the Second Gilded Age
by Nolan Higdon / February 12th, 2026
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 …
by Ted Glick / February 12th, 2026
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 …
by Stuart Littlewood / February 12th, 2026
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.
And …
by Paul Larudee / February 12th, 2026
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 …
by Medea Benjamin / February 11th, 2026
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 …
by Mahboob A. Khawaja / February 11th, 2026
Leaders to See the Mirror
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 …
More Than 120 Workers Lose Their Jobs
by Shawgi Tell / February 11th, 2026
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….
by Elizabeth West / February 11th, 2026
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 …
