Stupidity, stupidity everywhere – and not a word to witness.
“Stupid” is a commonplace term casually used in everyday conversation. Much less so in writing – especially when the subject is political personalities. It is heavily weighted with inhibition. Why this hesitation? Why at a time when manifest stupidity in speech and action is rampant?
“Stupid” is both blunt and conclusive. Straight-forward. It does not welcome qualification or discussion. It implies: matter settled, closed. Moreover, it suggests a character flaw as well as low intelligence. That somehow makes us uncomfortable. So we prefer: dense, slow, thick, dim or dim-witted; or pithy euphemisms, …
Donald Trump’s distasteful State of the Disunion address urged salvation, anything to give relief from the madness. A lack of empathy and gruff manner displayed a chilling use of the anguish of parents of ravished children to promote the war on immigrants. Did the parents want to be there? Did they want their deceased children used for political opportunity? Naming public places after the children, as if the parents had won a prize, is unconscionable. If a close relative had a major accomplishment and died peacefully and graciously, relatives would welcome having his/her name forged in the consciousness of the …
In the predawn hours of April 3, 1948, rebels assembled on the slopes of Mount Hallasan, a volcano that is located at the center of Jeju Island. On that highest peak in South Korea, the rebels lit fires that were meant to signal the start of armed resistance against both the occupation of South Korea by the United States and in support of the reunification …
The critics are utterly beside themselves in trying to understand the bruising odds and turns of Donald J. Trump, the reality showman and business tycoon who became US president twice. One particular group that have become prominent are the aggrieved and estranged. Former employees who were given their marching orders after brief spells in Trump’s administration have made a career in podcasting and punditry on the man whose bilious orbit they seemingly cannot escape. A common theme to their recent criticism is that of mental health. Trump, we are told, is unhinged, …
When investing, as in horror films, the most terrifying villains are the ones we thought were dead. Stagflation that economic nightmare of the 1970s characterized by stagnant growth paired with persistent inflation was supposedly dead and buried decades ago. But like any good movie monster, it’s clawing its way back to the surface, and Americans need to prepare for its return.
The warning signs are unmistakable. Despite the Federal Reserve’s aggressive rate-hiking campaign over the past two years, inflation remains stubbornly above target. February’s Consumer Price Index showed prices still rising at 3.2%, while previous months have delivered unwelcome upside surprises. …
European leaders meeting in an “Emergency War Summit” in Brussels have agreed on huge increases in arms spending. On entering the meeting, Denmark’s Prime Minister, Mette Frederiksen, declared “Spend, spend, spend on defense and deterrence.” And in response to an interviewer’s question, French Prime Minster Francois Bayrou dismissed the idea that the French public should have any say in this decision, adding “We can’t let the country be disarmed.” (CNews and Europe 1). …
by Mischa Geracoulis and avram anderson / March 11th, 2025
When Mark Zuckerberg terminated Meta’s diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs for hiring and training employees and procuring suppliers in January 2025, he forged “inroads with the incoming Trump administration,” abandoned Meta’s founding ethos of open innovation, and dramatically realigned how the tech giant will now do business, as critics like Bärí A. Williams, former lead counsel for Meta (then Facebook) and creator of its now-dissolved Supplier Diversity program, noted. Zuckerberg’s changes play right into the ultra-conservative presidential handbook, Project 2025, with potentially devastating consequences for the safety of …
Of course I want peace. Probably as much as anyone reading this.
Naturally, I get excited and hopeful, whenever there are any signs that we are moving in the direction of a more peaceful world.
At the same time, I’m fed up with being led down a primrose path only to find an Abrams tank waiting at the end.
Trump has made enormous strides, or the appearance of enormous strides, toward rapprochement with Russia and ending the Ukraine war. He rightfully points out that this was a needless conflict. Whether he could and would …
The BBC’s withdrawal of the powerful documentary, ‘Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone’, epitomises how much the UK’s national broadcaster is beholden to the Israel lobby.
Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Assistance to the Poor
by Eric Zuesse / March 10th, 2025
Trump’s Presidency thus far exhibits the most extreme example that I have ever found of a national leader who not only represents ONLY the extremely rich but who especially despises the poor — it’s a value-system that a person’s moral value is his/her net worth: a person’s value is his/her wealth, neither more nor less than that. The four main federal expenditures that Trump and Musk are investigating for “waste, fraud, and abuse” are Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Assistance to the poor. Whereas Social Security and Medicare are relatively safe …
by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies / March 10th, 2025
Woman at rally supporting peace negotiations between Russia and Ukraine in Berlin, Germany. (Photo: Reuters)
When European Union leaders met in Brussels on February 6 to discuss the war in Ukraine, French President Emmanuel Macron called this time “a turning point in history.” Western leaders agree that this is an historic moment when decisive action is needed, but what kind of action depends on their interpretation of the nature of this moment.
Is this the beginning of a new Cold War between the U.S., NATO and Russia or the end of one? Will Russia …
Pressured into removing a humanising portrait of Gaza’s children, the BBC offers instead a series on Israel-Palestine that frantically revives the very narrative that made the genocide possible
by Jonathan Cook / March 10th, 2025
There has been a prolonged furore over the BBC’s craven decision to ban a documentary on life in Gaza under Israel’s bombs after it incensed Israel and its lobbyists by, uniquely, humanising the enclave’s children.
The English-speaking child narrator, 13-year-old Abdullah, who became the all-too-visible pretext for pulling the film Gaza:How to Survive a Warzone because his father is a technocrat in the enclave’s Hamas government, hit back last week.
He warned that the BBC had betrayed him and Gaza’s …
For that some should rule and others be ruled is a thing not only necessary, but expedient; from the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule…
Political gains and dominance are some of the most notable captivating culpable twin objectives cum baits behind waging war. But on the other hand, the hardships and struggle of being a refugee is one of the most dreadful tumultuous aftermaths a war can shave out in the hands of an ordinary man. Fear, uncertainty, and arguably the most dominant element, finding oneself amongst many more displaced lost like a grain of sand, are excruciating and provocative to one’s stimuli.
For refugees, life straddles between a lovely lost homeland and an unwelcoming new land, leaving them suspended in a fragile existence. This …
Facts, Myths, and the Impact on Pakistani Communities
by Syed Salman Mehdi / March 10th, 2025
The Media’s Role in Fueling Misinformation
British society has been dealing with organised child exploitation through grooming gangs for an extended period. Official data contradicts media perceptions about who engages in these criminal activities by showing Pakistani men are not the main offenders. Official Home Office data indicates that defendants facing child sexual abuse prosecution in England and Wales are predominantly white since their number reaches 88 percent. News reports on offences by South Asian individuals receive unusually high attention from media outlets thus perpetuating racial misconceptions that deepen societal rifts.
According to Columbia Magazine, published by Columbia University’s Office of Alumni and Development, but ultimately named for a brutal imperialist mercenary, in 1933 while Nazis in Germany were burning books by Jews, Columbia’s president — and future Nobel Peace Prize recipient — Nicholas Murray Butler “welcomed Hans Luther, the German ambassador to the United States, to Morningside Heights, insisting that he be accorded ‘the greatest courtesy and respect.’” Columbia’s Daily Spectator newspaper “denounced what it saw as Butler’s courtship of the German government and …
A popular French TV show recently aired an undercover investigation by two young French journalists, Justine Jankowski and Marine Zambrano, who snuck into multiple clothing factories in China with one aim: to find evidence of forced labor.
And if you watched their program, part of France 2’s “Cash Investigation” series, you might be convinced that they found astonishing and scandalous evidence.
The fact of the matter, though, is that the show’s creators used blatant lies to come to that conclusion, and I have all the evidence on today’s show.
What is even more delicious is that the show also featured seasoned anti-China …
I have sent the following Letter to major Australian media and to nearly all Federal and Victorian State MPs:
Mainstream Western media (e.g. the BBC) have published the estimate in the leading medical journal The Lancet that violent (direct) deaths in Gaza totalled 64,260 in 9 months i.e. 111,000 by the Ceasefire on 20 January 2025. However they resolutely ignore expert estimates also published in The Lancet that non-violent (indirect) deaths from imposed deprivation may be 4 times greater, this indicating Gaza deaths from violence and imposed deprivation totalling about 553,000 or 23% of the pre-war population by 20 January …
One thing that instantly struck me watching the White House press conference February 28, 2025 with US President Donald Trump, Vice President J. D. Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was that the grand welcome accorded to Zelenskyy by the previous US government of Joe Biden and some Western European governments had gone to Zelenskyy’s head. He expected that as he was like an idol to warmongers like Biden and to reporters itching to see Russia defeated, that he would be so to Trump, too.
[M]ost people do not need to worry about getting the bird flu, and since there’s not yet evidence of human-to-human contact, there’s no immediate danger of a new bird flu pandemic.
International Women’s Day (IWD) was founded by working-class women who staunchly opposed war and fought for labor rights, peace, and equality. Rooted in the anti-war and socialist movements of the early 20th century, IWD emerged as a day to challenge oppression and demand justice. However, IWD has been co-opted by intersectional imperialists—women of diverse cultural backgrounds who unite under the banner of the U.S. empire, perpetuating violence and destabilization across the globe. This betrayal of its radical origins demands a reckoning.
The U.S. empire, draped in the language of feminism and empowerment, has weaponized IWD to justify its gangsterism. In …
The urge to throw more money at defence budgets across a number of countries has become infectious. It was bound to happen with Donald Trump’s return to the White House, given his previous insistence that US allies do more to fatten their own armies rather than rely on the largesse of Washington’s power. Spend, spend, spend is the theme, and the UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer has shown himself willing to join this wasteful indulgence.
On February 25, just prior to his visit to Washington, …
Orientation This article is about the differences between the micro psychology of liberals and the macro psychology of communists. Differences include: how society and the individual is configured; the impact of capitalism on personal life; how the mind-body relationship is conceived; how the objective and subjective worlds are integrated; how politics impacts personal life and how research should be conducted. These differences are not self-evident or easy for liberals to understand. In order to attempt a breakthrough, I describe the story of Flatland, Edwin Abbot’s great 1884 science fiction book of why …
Collaboration with Empire, Economic Warfare, and Immiseration of His Own People
by Peter Bolton / March 7th, 2025
“One should never speak ill of the dead,” so the old cliché goes about the recently deceased. Those with less inclination toward sentimentality, however, hold that this rule applies only to those who have lived a life exclusively in private and whose actions have had an effect only among their close-knit circle of family, friends, coworkers and neighbors. For those who have lived a public life and who have wielded power over others in a political capacity, their decision to live such a life exempts them from this freedom-from-criticism even, or perhaps especially, in death. For it is in the …
I need to be alone. I need to ponder my shame and my despair in seclusion; I need the sunshine and the paving stones of the streets without companions, without conversation, face to face with myself, with only the music of my heart for company.
— Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer
Deep down, we struggle to come upon accurate words to describe the terrible beauty of our aloneness. In this plight, we are together. In this musing, I, …
What lies ahead is the beginning of something more difficult and greater. Ahead of us are years filled with sorrow that will never end, days of accumulated pain, and long hours of crying and lamenting. Our wounds are much deeper than they can easily heal. Surely, their scars will remain etched in us for as long as we live, like a thorn deeply embedded in the left side of our chests. We are now living with the hope of reunion, searching for a ray of light in a world filled with …
The assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X represent some of the most pivotal and tragic moments in modern American history. While official narratives attribute these killings to lone gunmen, persistent questions remain about potential covert influences behind these events. One of the most controversial theories suggests a connection to MKUltra, the CIA’s clandestine mind control program designed to manipulate behavior through psychological conditioning, hypnosis, and drug experimentation.
