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The Hidden Cost of Comfort: How Everyday Consumption Fuels Global Violence

In a world increasingly defined by convenience, luxury, and technological advancement, few pause to consider the true cost of their comfort. From the cars we drive to the cell phones we cradle, from the diamonds we gift to the beauty products we apply—modern life is saturated with commodities whose origins are steeped in exploitation, war, and environmental devastation.

This is not hyperbole. It is a reckoning.

Every airplane ticket, every high-rise building, every elite college education funded by oil wealth or corporate profit is part of a global system that thrives on conflict. The wars waged over fossil fuels, rare minerals, and …

Gaza Crisis: Will Britain Ensure Peace Is Set in a Legal Framework?

And will peace moves deliver long-awaited justice?

Baroness Chapman (Minister of State for International Development) has been telling Parliament: “We all wish this peace process well and will do everything we possibly can to see it sustained.”

At the same time John Healey (Secretary of State for Defence), answering a question, said it was not the case that British troops were in Gaza to monitor the ceasefire. “A small handful of British forces personnel have been deployed to the Civil-Military Co-ordination Centre at the request of the US, and it is the US that is leading that work.”

Neither of them is questioning the legitimacy of what’s going on. …

Major Collision or Fender Bender? Is MAGA Splitting over Israel, Anti-Semitism, and Neo-Nazis?

Elections Reflections

Yesterday’s election results are tremendously positive and hopeful for democratic socialists, progressives, liberals and just plain democracy lovers. The Trump regime was soundly defeated in important elections all across the country. The people made history!

But I woke up this morning wanting to reflect on the issue of elections, not so much from the standpoint of winners and losers but as a cultural/political phenomenon, how important they are on both personal and societal levels.

As I’ve grown older I have been doing a lot of grassroots, person-to-person electoral work, door-knocking and talking to …

Profits, Prophets and Overvalued AI Stock I

Targeting Palantir and Nvidia

In an industry of seedy soothsayers, cocksure charlatans and resourceful rogues, honest and accurate appraisals are exquisitely rare. When it comes to economics, investments and finance, this is particularly so. Certitude, however, tends to be in abundance for those predicting the next financial crash, the sort that will singe earnings and strafe savings. Take, for instance, hedge fund investor Michael Burry, a man of sufficient notoriety to warrant a celluloid depiction of himself by Christian Bale in the 2015 film The Big Short.

On that occasion, Burry’s hunch, albeit an educated one, was that the US housing bubble would implode in …

Portugal’s Fight over the Muslim Veil

A Dangerous Step Toward Islamophobia Disguised as Equality

Portugal, long admired for its tolerance and moderate social fabric, has taken a shocking and regressive turn. The country’s parliament has recently approved a bill proposed by the far-right Chega party to ban face veils such as the burqa and niqab in most public spaces. The bill, still awaiting constitutional review, introduces draconian fines ranging from €200 to €4,000 (approximately 234–4,670 or PKR 65,950–1,319,000).

This proposed punishment is not merely excessive. It is a deliberate act of religious discrimination disguised as social reform. While it …

Venezuela’s Oil, US-led “Regime Change,” and America’s Gangster Politics

The flimsy moral pretext today is the fight against narcotics, yet the real objective is to overthrow a sovereign government, and the collateral damage is the suffering of the Venezuelan people. If this sounds familiar, that’s because it is.

The United States is dusting off its old regime-change playbook in Venezuela. Although the slogan has shifted from “restoring democracy” to “fighting narco-terrorists,” the objective remains the same, which is control of Venezuela’s oil. The methods followed by the US are familiar: …

Florida “Schools of Hope” Law Intensifies School Privatization

Over the past 33 years privately-operated charter schools have seized billions of dollars in public funds and public property that rightly belong to public schools. This neoliberal parasitism has been achieved mainly through state laws and schemes that legalize and normalize such wealth transfers in the name of “school choice,” “parent empowerment,” “accountability,” “competition,” and “results.”

One of the most recent and egregious examples of such pay-the-rich schemes is a newly-modified controversial Florida law known as the “Schools of Hope” law that permits charter schools (e.g., Miami-based charter-school operator Mater Academy) to …

China’s Ten Noes: Sun Tzu Has Swallowed the Frog and Is Keeping His Smile to Himself

In a conversation lasting one hour and forty minutes according to the Chinese stopwatch– “a long meeting” on President Donald Trump’s clock    —  President Xi Jinping first knocked the stuffing out of Trump’s warmaking threats, then forced him to beat a retreat behind a 12-month ceasefire with the man the Pentagon has designated its principal enemy but whom Trump praised effusively as “a great leader, great leader of a very powerful, very strong country…a tremendous leader of a very powerful country and I give great respect to …

How a Fed Overhaul Could Eliminate the Federal Debt Crisis, Part II: Curbing Fed Independence

There has been considerable discussion in recent years about reforming, modifying, or even abolishing the Federal Reserve. Proposals range from ending its independence, to integrating its functions into the U.S. Treasury Department, to dismantling it and returning monetary policy to direct congressional or Treasury oversight.

The Federal Reserve Board Abolition Act (H.R. 1846 and S. 869, 119th Congress, 2025-2026), introduced by Rep. Thomas Massie in the House and Sen. Mike Lee in the Senate on March 4, 2025, calls for abolishing the Fed’s Board of Governors and regional banks within one year of enactment, liquidating Fed assets and transferring net proceeds …

Taps

Who will place coins on the sightless eyes of American democracy when the river Styx carries it to the door of Hades where Charon awaits his due to ensure a serene eternal rest? It has been a shameful/ignominious ordeal and a cowardly demise. This would be the last chance for an act of grace.

Will it be Barack Obama, the aloof, laid-back observer perched on Cloud 9?

Will it be the two boys from Brooklyn – Schumer & Jeffries – whose Houdini disappearing act erased the “opposition” from the nation’s political equation?

Will it be the Bar Associations who temporized and equivocated in …

Trump: Sincerity and Verisimilitude

US president Donald Trump is apparently trying to burnish his Christian bona fides on Truth Social:

If the Nigerian Government continues to allow the killing of Christians, the U.S.A. will immediately stop all aid and assistance to Nigeria, and may very well go into that now disgraced country, “guns-a-blazing,” to completely wipe out the Islamic Terrorists who are committing these horrible atrocities. I am hereby instructing our Department of War to prepare for possible action. If we attack, it will be fast, vicious, and sweet, just like the terrorist thugs attack our CHERISHED Christians! WARNING: THE NIGERIAN GOVERNMENT BETTER MOVE …

From Strip Mall USA, to Gaza, to Venezuela: An Architecture of Lies

Empires constructed of mental microplastics, by Phil Rockstroh

So begins the revolution in behalf of soul:

The world is primarily and always an aesthetic phenomenon with which our animal senses and innate reactions are attuned.
— James Hillman, Healing Fiction

We tell white lies to avoid conflict or embarrassment. We tell ourselves wholly subjective tales in order to cope with crushing realities. Nations pull creation myths out of the ass of the nation’s collective unconscious. In the case of the Zionist ethnostate the (all too real) storyline has been banished, from the state’s inception, from the Israeli psyche.

What does it do to the collective soul of a nation whose crimes against …

Nobel Prize or Not, Trump is the Winner!

Venezuela’s opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro, and the United States President Donald Trump IMAGE/semana.com/Duck Duck Go

Trump

Some crave fame, recognition, medals, and honors persistently, more so in competitive cutthroat societies, one may say it is widely prevalent in the US — the most capitalist country in the world. President Donald Trump is one of those who love to be on top all the time with medals, honors, and what not.

Trump was looking forward to be announced recipient of 2025 Nobel Peace Prize …

Faith, Fire, and the Table We Build

Our assembly here transcends mere consensus; it is an urgent summons to awakening. We speak of a table, not hewn from material wealth or embellished by status, but forged in the crucible of collective memory. Its surface is etched with the silent pleas of the forgotten, the poignant elegies of the disenfranchised, and the unyielding tenacity of those who refuse to be erased from existence. This is a sanctuary where entry requires no credentials, where the famished find sustenance without interrogation, and the wounded are not compelled to bare their scars. Even ghosts have a seats and the the echoes …

Sanctuary Won and Lost

Human beings tend to long for a refuge, and occasionally find one.

And there exist places, outside of geography, that serve as playgrounds of thought, shared intimately between people. Even though these spaces are never physical, they can still generate strong connection through unspoken understanding. The existence of such chimeric islands fosters a sense of having sanctuary where true identity and original ideas can be revealed, free from governmental restrictions and polite society’s moralistic expectations.

But, eventually, the landscape shifts, dark forces get wise to the game. The elites believe they cannot allow uncontrolled concepts cropping up all over, threatening …

Accomplishing Change

Obtaining Control

Accomplishing change in the institutions that control and manipulate society for their personal benefit has been difficult. Inability to succeed in the endeavor is due to the inability to create the organizations that can effectively oppose the powers that exercise control. This control is maintained by investment. Protecting the investment by preventing alternative teaching and preaching is the first line of defense. Knowledge is a challenge to power.

Modern science and scientific methods promote developments, analyze problems, and guide solutions to the problems. Those in control, more and more, proceed with archaic science, in which they are invested, and eschew scientific …

In the Time of the Open Secret: Palestine and the Fundamental Choice of Our Era

“Imperialism is capitalism in that stage of development in which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital has established itself; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun; in which the division of all territories of the globe among the great capitalist powers has been completed.”

“Imperialism has the tendency to create among the nations a class of ‘rentiers’ (people who live by income from property or investments), a state …

Stagflation: Stagnation, Inflation, and Beyond

Since my prediction in April of 2007 of an impending economic crash, I’ve vowed not to risk my unblemished record with any further predictions. But a simple thing that I learned from the run-up to that catastrophe was when the “little people” — the “every man and every-woman” — found their way into stock market speculation, trouble was looming. Early in 2007, I recall acquaintances then announcing that they were day-traders, bragging that they were making more money buying and selling on their devices than from their regular job.
The Wall Street Journal headlined in early October that “More …

In the Age of Trump, Americans Don’t Need a Halloween Hell House to Experience Horror

Halloween Hell Houses, or Judgement Houses, are basically a relic from the fire-and-brimstone days of the Moral Majority and other Christian evangelical enterprises. These days, however, Americans do not need a church-sponsored haunted house to experience horror and damnation. The gates of hell—orchestrated by the …

Draining Practices: Amazon, Water Consumption and Data Centres

Amazon, ruthless, mean spirited, soulless and wedded to the obscene profit margin, is also in the business of habitual deception. When it comes to the use of water for its thirsty data centres, this is most telling. In its aggressive push towards artificial intelligence, more are set for construction. When one considers that, in 2021 alone, US data centres were found to be consuming approximately 415,000 acre-feet of water, the statistics are bound to be staggering.

Unlike its competitors, the tech behemoth is rather cagey on how much water is used by its data centres. Statistics on absolute water …

Trump, Nuclear Weapons, and the NNSA

Furloughing Workers for Armageddon

Instead of satirising nuclear war – a possible if difficult thing to do – the time has come to satirise the laying off and furlough of those who solemnly monitor and maintain such machinery fit, not for preserving life so much as ending it at a fiery, radiated terminus. If it’s not possible to totally disarm a nuclear inventory, it might be possible to reduce the forces behind them or render some idle. It turns out that this is happening in Freedom’s Land itself, the United States of America.

Those responsible for maintaining the US nuclear weapons arsenal have not …

Blood in the Water: Profit over the People of Timor-Leste

Contrary to popular belief, it turns out that sharks have an undeserved reputation for indiscriminate lethal attacks on people whose blood they detect in the water. In fact, sharks much prefer their customary aquatic prey, can tell the difference between that blood type category and others, and will therefore usually spurn edible humans that might be on offer in favour of marine animals. As food for sharks, people are a rare and usually accidental option.

No such luck with corporate-controlled capitalist governments, however. For them, so long as they …

They Want You Relying On Artificial Intelligence So That You Will Lose Your Natural Intelligence

Your rulers want you to depend on machines to do your thinking for you.
They want you relying on AI to do your reasoning, researching, analysis, and writing.

They want you to require easily controllable software to form your understanding of the world, and to express that understanding to others.

They can control the machines, but they can’t control the human mind. So they want you to abandon your mind for the machines.

They want you relying on artificial intelligence so you stop using your organic intelligence.

They want your critical thinking skills to atrophy.

They …

Teasing the Armageddon Fanciers: Trump’s Announcement on Nuclear Testing

Nuclear weapons have made the world safe for hypocrisy and unsafe in every other respect. Astride the nonsense that is nuclear apartheid – the forced separation of the states that are permitted to have nuclear weapons and those that do not – sits that rumpled, crumpled creature called the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). For decades, the nuclear club has dangled an unfulfilled promise to eventually disarm its arsenals by encouraging non-nuclear-weapon states to pursue peaceful uses of the atom.  Preference, instead, has been given to enlarging inventories and developing ever more ingenious and idiotic ways of …

Canadian Hypocrisy Taints Anand’s Condemnation of Violence in Sudan

On Tuesday, foreign affairs minister Anita Anand condemned atrocities reportedly committed by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in western Sudan. She failed to mention a Canadian company’s involvement or Canada’s historical support for violence in the northeast African country.

The Canadian-owned Streit Group has provided armored vehicles to the RSF. Long based in southern Ontario, the Streit Group’s operations in the UAE have recently supplied the RSF, which has been armed and backed by Abu Dhabi since it fought Ansar Allah (Houthis) in Yemen. Canadian officials have directly assisted the Streit Group.

Canada has exported hundreds of millions of dollars in weapons …

“The Middle East Has Oil; China Has Rare Earths.” — Deng Xiaoping

A Brief Comment on Rare Earths, China and U.S. imperialism

“Control over rare earth elements … is a central determinant of geopolitical power and industrial sovereignty in the 21st century.”

— Dr. Kalim Siddiqui[1]

As part of US-China trade talks, we are hearing a great deal about China’s near-total domination over rare earth elements, or REES. Beijing controls extraction, refining, and the global supply chains — over 70% of production, 85-90 % of refining, and 92% of the global output in processing.

These 17 elements on the periodic table are virtually ubiquitous in everything from Tomahawk missiles, high-end smartphones, and lasers to submarines, electric motors, and satellites. Just one example: A …

Every Day is Halloween in Trumpland!

With his storm troopers… oops, his ICEMEN,  rambling into a town like a pack of ghosts, replete with no faces. With his navy , My **** navy, blowing up speedboats outside a sovereign nation (Venezuela) with no evidence of drug dealing or terrorism. With his Congress shutting down so the Big Man can keep the truth regarding Jeffrey Epstein and he and his Super Rich buddies from us. With his ‘Junior partner’ Benjamin Netanyahu getting the go ahead to continue the genocide in Gaza, while he boasts of developing another Riviera …

The Mirage of Development: Gwadar’s Water Wars

A view of the Gwadar port of Pakistan Photo: VCG

While the rest of Pakistan’s major cities were drenched in monsoon rains, a group of children stood hand in hand and chorused this in unison in Gwadar’s New Tobagh Ward near Koh-a-Bun Ward:

Pani Dho, bijli dho, warna Kursi Chor Dho.” ( Give us water, give us electricity, or vacate the chair).

As Gwadar and its surrounding villages and towns are confronting an escalated water crisis, protests — and this slogan to ask for water — have become common across the city. Just a …

Nuclear-powered Missile, Underwater Drone, and Proposed Pause in Ukraine Conflict

Russian President Vladimir Putin visited a military hospital in Moscow on Wednesday, meeting servicemen wounded in the Ukraine conflict. The president spoke about the frontline situation, namely the encirclement of Kiev’s troops in two critical locations, as well as the testing of new cutting-edge nuclear-powered weaponry, including the unlimited-range Burevestnik cruise missile and the massive Poseidon underwater drone.

Here are the key takeaways from Putin’s speech:

Moscow ready for pause in fighting

The frontline situation has been developing

The president floated the idea of briefly pausing fighting in the two locations to allow Western and Ukrainian journalists in. The proposal has already been discussed …