Shocking it might be, yet still part of an old pattern. The US Department of Homeland Security is floating the idea of using a reality television program to select immigrants vying for US citizenship. Whether this involves gladiatorial combat or inane pillow battles remains to be seen, though it is bound to involve airhead celebrity hosts and a set of fabricated challenges. What matters is the premise: the reduction of a government agency’s functions to a debauched spectacle of deceit, desperation and televisual pornography. Much, in some ways, like the Trump administration itself.
NED Weaponizes "Democracy" in Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba
by John Perry and Roger D. Harris / May 19th, 2025
The brief freeze and rapid partial reinstatement of National Endowment for Democracy (NED) funding in early 2025 helped expose it as a US regime-change tool. Created to rebrand CIA covert operations as “democracy promotion,” the NED channels government funds to opposition groups in Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba, meddling in their internal affairs.
Regime change on the US agenda
In 2018, Kenneth Wollack bragged to the US Congress that the NED had given political training to 8,000 young Nicaraguans, many of whom were engaged in a failed attempt to overthrow Nicaragua’s Sandinista government. Wollack was praising the “democracy-promotion” work …
Plato, writing soon after The Oath was written, discussed the voluntary and informed relationship between physicians and patients. The medical treatises of The Oath’s time depict an attractive model for physician–patient communication and securing consent. The first of the Aphorisms pointedly says: “The physician must be ready, not only to do his duty himself, but also to secure the cooperation of the patient.”
by Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East / May 19th, 2025
May 15 marked 77 years since the Nakba, which refers to the expulsion, destruction, and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians associated with the creation of Israel in 1948. While we advocate for the colonization of Palestine to be recognized by our leaders and institutions in Canada as an injustice, we are also witnessing the Nakba continue — and even accelerate — in Israel’s genocide in the occupied Gaza Strip and West Bank.
In Canada, even acknowledging the existence of the 1948 Nakba continues to be rejected. Nakba denial is a form of genocide denial and a mechanism for …
Speaking at a concert in Manchester, the American singer-songwriter said his country was “in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent and treasonous administration.”
Musicians protesting against political leaders and government policies have a long and distinguished history in the United States. …
This Day in Anarchist History, May 15, we remember the insurrectionary life and tragic, early death of Christos Tsoutsouvis.
Tsoutsouvis had been a member of one of the first Greek leftist guerrilla orgs known as the ELA or Revolutionary People’s Struggle.
Over the years he participated in a number of militant acts of property destruction and later graduated to political assassinations targeting some of the worst perpetrators of torture of the Greek military junta.
He died on 15 May 1985 in a shoot out with the police in which he managed to take 3 of them with him.
On May 17, MSNBC, a Democratic Party propaganda-site, issued an “opinion” article that was loaded with links to its sources, including Republicans, and the article honestly represented what it reported, and its sources were entirely credible, so that that article actually constituted news, and not only this, but it is very important news for every American: Donald Trump’s proposed tax-legislation would, if passed into law, include front-end-loaded (short-term) tax-cuts for the poor, and back-end-loaded — indeed PERMANENT — tax-cuts for multimillionaires and billionaires, so as to pay for the increased spending that Trump wants for just two federal Departments — …
On the Romantic poet John Keats’ tombstone in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome are these words, which he chose: “HERE LIES ONE WHOSE NAME WAS WRIT IN WATER.”
His name is not there, by choice. Keats was twenty-five when he died. In Ode to Psyche he wrote:
Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane
In some untrodden region of my mind,
Where branched thoughts, new grown with pleasant …
Contrary to the propaganda of moral upstarts, terrorism pays. It proves rewarding. It establishes states and reconstitutes others. It encourages change, for ill or otherwise. The stance taken, righteously pitiful, on not negotiating with those who practise it, is as faulty as battling gravity. The case of Syria’s interim president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, is a brilliant example of this. While seen as a new broom that did away with the government of President Bashar al-Assad in such stunning fashion, al-Sharaa’s bristles remain blood speckled.
The scene says it all: a meeting lasting 37 minutes in Riyadh with a US President holding hands …
This article might offend everybody, but the links here are to the sources, and all of its sources are not only authentic when they are primary, but are true when they are secondary. (I have checked-out all sources within each secondary source that I link to.) Individuals who disagree with something here but don’t click onto the link to the documentation when they disagree, are not open-minded; and, for me, the first obligation is to be constantly open-minded, because only in that way can truths be discovered, and falsehoods become identified and replaced with truths. So: I open here by …
The development – or decline – of the Danish daily newspaper Politiken as a quality newspaper in the field of foreign policy pains me. Allow me a personal, somewhat nostalgic introduction. I wrote frequently for Politiken from 1971 to 1994. As a 20-year-old sociology student, I was naturally proud to be published in what was then a prestigious, liberal media outlet, which was initially shaped by Hørup’s anti-militarism and cultural radicalism.
In Denmark, there was a – albeit quite traditional but …
On May 13, U.S. President Trump announced he is ordering the removal of sanctions on Syria.
Some of the U.S. sanctions can be quickly terminated because they were issued by Executive Order. Other sanctions, including the extremely damaging 2019 “Caesar” sanctions, were imposed by Congressional legislation and may require Congressional action to terminate.
The Syrian people are joyous at the prospect of the end of their country’s economic nightmare. In 2010, before the conflict began, Syria was a middle-income country with free education, free healthcare, and no national debt. It was largely self-sufficient in energy and …
“Recommend ‘Heaven’ to your followers?” reads the punchline of a recent cartoon depicting a person who has arrived at the pearly gates. What was the name of your first pet reads a similar St. Peter cartoon about social media and the Internet.
While we try to laugh, social media has devolved from its original promise of an online identity and the chance to find like-minded peers and express an opinion to what is sometimes an opportunist and capitalistic monster.
Here are some of the ways it is devouring itself before our very eyes.
Review of Peter Beinhart's Being Jewish after the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning
by Eric Walberg / May 17th, 2025
The Golden Calf – Jewish Achilles Heel
My first thought on seeing Peter Beinhart’s title — Being Jewish after the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning (2025) — was: Argh. More Jewish angst, holier-than-thou hand-wringing, but leading nowhere. Half-way through I had completely changing my mind. Angst, yes. But lots of meat to chew on, ok, spitting out some grissle, but it was mostly intelligent, informative, and even inspiring (for a goy no less). Beinhart marshalls statistics that confirm my own extreme anger at not just Jews but anyone who …
As Israel unveils its final genocide push, and mass death from starvation looms in Gaza, western media and politicians are tentatively starting to speak up.
Who could have imagined 19 months ago that it would take more than a year and a half of Israel slaughtering and starving Gaza’s children for the first cracks to appear in what has been a rock-solid wall of support for Israel from western establishments.
Finally, something looks like it may be about to give.
The British establishment’s financial daily, the …
In 1988 I was travelling from NYC to Arizona by plane one night. It was a long 5 hour flight, and we were on a jumbo jet. I was standing alongside this man, early 40s perhaps, who said he was an Israeli engineer. During our conversation, I asked about his feelings on the Palestinian situation, and please remember that this was 1988. He began explaining things as he saw it, and then said the following, with no emotion at all:
You have to understand that we Israelis see the Palestinians as you in the USA see your blacks. Quite honestly, they …
America is targeting a hotter planet… Bring it on!
That’s the only plausible explanation for the Trump administration’s gung-ho push for 100% fossil fuels and as much coal burning as possible while trashing mitigation of climate change, which is characterized as an expensive hoax, a farce, a threat to the U.S. economy, plus massive roll backs of environmental regulations that force American businesses to spend more to keep America’s environment clean. Based upon these cutbacks of environmental regulations, they’re clearly ignoring climate change.
But the property/casualty insurance industry has no choice in the matter. They are forced to recognize the damage …
Early in life, I learned of the deliberate manner by which Zionists confuse the public and frame the Middle East conflicts to favor them. Commentators have gone to great length to explain the “special relationship” between Israel and the United States, treating it as a unique affair, in which both benefit. This slogan is a hoax, which originated during World War II as a description of the relationship between embattled Great Britain and a still neutral United States. Somehow and somewhere, a clever someone adapted the World War II slogan to Israel and managed to insert the relationship …
May 15 marks the 77th anniversary of the Nakba in the shadow of Israel’s continuing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and increased aggression and colonial expansion in the West Bank. Our newest visual, “Gaza, Stripped: The Colonial Isolation Of Gaza,” was created in partnership with Al-Mezan Center for Human Rights to show the many layers of colonial fragmentation and control that Palestinian lands are subjected to, shaped by the legacy of British colonialism, the Nakba, and decades of ongoing Zionist settler colonialism.
The Haiti/Americas Team of the Black Alliance for Peace condemns the increasing militarist aggression by U.S. imperialists in Our Americas that targets Africans, indigenous peoples and poor communities and calls for regional pan Africanist strategy and anti imperialist unity to defeat the war on Africans and colonized people at home and abroad. The increase of violence in the region, whether in Haiti, Ecuador or the Caribbean, through armed paramilitary groups often with ties to neo colonial puppets and the US/West, is used as a justification to expand U.S./NATO militarism, economic domination, and interventionism in the region to guarantee full spectrum …
A review of AMERICA, AMÉRICA: A New History of the New World, by Greg Grandin
by John Perry / May 15th, 2025
“An American team will win the next soccer World Cup,” a Nicaraguan boy once told me. It took me a second to realize he meant Brazil or Argentina, not the United States. Greg Grandin’s new book shows that America (or, in Spanish, América) was the name used for the whole hemisphere by the late 17th century. In the 18th century, the great liberator Simón Bolívar set out his vision of “our America”: a New World free of colonies, made up of distinct republics living in mutual …
The ingredients for any community should start with the basics: active and informed citizens. Participants in a community’s past (context, knowledge), present (all those factors tied to the weakest and most vulnerable, are they included?) and future (getting to a place where climate chaos, predatory capitalism, neofascism doesn’t completely pull all the loose strings of a threadbare set of safety nets). There are plethora of planning books on the smalltown.
Then what about a sustainable city? Unfortunately, when planners and politicians talk about making cities more sustainable, they are thinking of large urban centers like Portland or Seattle. Oh, the buzz …
Image credit: Dossier no. 87 ‘The Bandung Spirit’, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, 2025.
Seventy years ago this month, leaders of twenty-nine newly or nearly independent Asian and African nations inaugurated the historic Bandung Conference, embarking on the ‘Freedom Walk’ along Asia-Africa Road to the conference’s Freedom Building (Gedung Merdeka) in Bandung, Indonesia. As a diplomatic performance and collective political action, these leaders walked among the teeming crowds to announce that the peoples of the Third World had stood up after centuries of colonialism.
Israel and its worldwide supporters are relatively few, maybe 50 million confined to the western world, compared to those who recognize the genocide of the Palestinian people, maybe 500 million throughout all continents. Despite the disparity in numbers, Israel and its followers have overwhelmingly controlled the information sources, media involvement, and government apparatuses throughout the western world. The Palestinians have won the “battle of minds,” and are ready to lose the “battle for liberation.” How can this be?
How can governments and those in powerful positions permit an obvious genocide? What does a human being gain from being party …
There was no excuse for the BBC to follow Israel in treating the head of UNRWA as though he is aligned with terrorism. This kind of craven journalism just makes Israel’s job of genocide easier.
There was yet more shameful reporting by BBC News at Ten last night, with international editor Jeremy Bowen the chief culprit this time.
He prefaced an interview with Philippe Lazzarini, head of United Nations refugee agency UNRWA, with an utterly unwarranted disclaimer – as though he was talking …
The idea to separate from Canada appeared with the Social Credit Party of Alberta in 1930s, but it failed to win widespread support there and then. Separatist sentiment in the province strengthened only in 1980s, after the Canadian government introduced the National Energy Program trying to tighten federal control over the sector. Being the largest producer of crude oil in the country, Alberta suffered great losses, leaving a huge number of locals unemployed.
The election victory of Mark Carney’s Liberal Party on April 28, 2025, provoked fresh strain and already rigid posing …
by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead / May 13th, 2025
Few modern political figures have done more to prompt spontaneous national discussions about the Bill of Rights and constitutional limits on government power than Donald Trump—if only because he tramples on them so frequently.
Indeed, President Trump has become a walking civics lesson.
Consider some of the constitutional principles that Trump can be credited with bringing into the spotlight unintentionally during his time in office.
First Amendment (free speech, press, religion, protest, and assembly): Trump’s repeated confrontations with the First Amendment have transformed free expression into a battleground, making it impossible to ignore the protections it guarantees. From branding the press as “…
For once, the BBC aired a documentary showing Israeli society’s dark underbelly. The backlash is not because Louis Theroux got it wrong. It’s because his film tells us far too much about ourselves
Louis Theroux explains in a commentary published by the Guardian on 10 May why the backlash to his recent film about violent, Israeli state-backed settlers misses the point.
His critics say he is unfairly presenting a few marginal “crazies” in Israeli society, who rampage across the West Bank to drive out …
