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Visions of an Asian NATO

The Musings of Shigeru Ishiba

Japan’s new prime minister, Shigeru Ishiba, is stirring the pot – notably on regional security matters.  He has proposed something that has done more than raise a few eyebrows in the foreign and defence ministries of several countries.  An Asian version of NATO, he has suggested, was an idea worth considering, notably given China’s ambitions in the region.  “The creation of an Asian version of NATO is essential to deter China by its Western allies,” he revealed to the Washington-based Hudson Institute in September.

During his campaign for office, Ishiba had mooted changes to the deployment arrangements of the …

Cuba, Buckle up! Trump Elected US President

The people of the United States and most of the rest of the world woke up this week to the last news they wanted to hear.

Not only had Donald J Trump presiding over a proto-fascist Maga mass movement been elected president of the United States, he will enjoy a comfortable Republican majority in the Senate, and he also may have a Republican majority in the House of Representatives.

He obtained about the same number of votes as in 2020, 74 million, and he scored an electoral victory because the Democrat candidate, Kamala Harris, got well over 10 million votes less than …

Wasting Food

It has been suggested that to reduce landfill greenhouse gas emissions, food wastes should be ground up and sent to the sewer. This is the worst possible attempt to reduce greenhouse gases, and will, in fact, increase the amount of greenhouse gases released to process those food wastes.

I have worked at a wastewater treatment plant for the last five years. These facilities are located in every small, medium and large city, with public sewer systems, across the world. They are designed to process human fecal waste, capture organic matter and metals, and release treated water back into the environment. They …

AI Arrogance

Proving you are human to a machine.

Billionaires’ Own US Climate Policy

Billions of dollars will buy almost anything anybody wants, and on November 5 billions of dollars bought the world’s leading climate-skeptical political administration, aka: the Trump Administration, which is anti-almost-everything, except for a free reign to the almighty market. Price determines policy, and it buys political office.

According to Americans for Tax Fairness, 150 billionaire families broke all campaign-spending records by a country mile, spending $2 billion in total to get a Republican majority with $1.36 billion going to Republicans versus $413 million to Democrats and the balance to specific causes, proof positive that billions of dollars can buy anything.

The System …

A Silent Cry in the Fog of War

War never changes. The circumstances, participants, causes and locations may vary, but the essence remains unchanged: war is always a tragedy, since it is waged by people against people. And the suffering of the most vulnerable, silent victims of any conflict – children – always remains unnoticed. While activists and volunteers sound the alarm and try to organize humanitarian aid, the kings of the information field – media corporations – prefer to discuss the main actors of the conflict and cover politics and economics, as the most effective …

How & Why the Washington Post‘s Former Owner Now Pushes Biden to Go Nuclear Against Russia

Ever since the November 5 defeat of the so-called ‘Democratic’ Party and of its unanimous neoconservative obsession to defeat Russia with the help of Ukrainians (claiming all the time that doing this is necessary in order to protect Americans and America’s ‘democracy’), the Bilderburg member Donald Graham, who at the 2013 Bilderburg meeting met privately with Jeff Bezos and agreed to sell him the Washington Post, has been instead using his Foreign Policy magazine in order to increase the pressure upon President Joe Biden to escalate the U.S. Government’s proxy-war in Ukraine …

If Trump Can Be Believed, His Return to the White House Could be a Good Thing…at least Internationally

A left view of the election from an expat in the UK


TRUMP VOTER IN New Hampshire

Cambridge, UK — As the voting results started coming in here from Virginia at 4 am (GMT, which is five hours later than Eastern Time in the US), I went to bed, having seen enough to know that Kamala Harris’s  crash campaign for the White House was failing.

I knew what was coming.  I’d experienced it four times already. In 1968 I watched Richard Nixon, the notorious House version of Commie-hunter Sen. Joe McCarthy rouse what he dubbed  the “Silent Majority” of right-wing white bigots and …

We Don’t Want Our Islands to Be Used to Kill People

Ōriwa Tahupōtiki Haddon (Ngāti Ruanui), Reconstruction of the Signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, c. 1940.

For the past few weeks I have been on the road in Aotearoa (New Zealand) and Australia at the invitation of groups such as Te Kuaka, Red Ant, and the Communist Party of Australia. Both countries were shaped by British colonialism, marked by the violent displacement of native communities and theft of their lands. Today, as they become part of the US-led …

A Third Party Perspective on the Rightward Lurch of the US Body Politic

2024 Election Postmortem

The chickens that the Democrats hatched in 2016 came home to roost in 2024. Back then, the Democratic National Committee (DNC), representing the party’s establishment, promoted Donald Trump as the Republican nominee. They thought him to be an easy mark who would be opposed by both the Republican Party establishment and most US voters.

That stratagem turned out to be correct about the Republican establishment but wrong about the electorate. In any case, Trump went on to not only capture the GOP but the archaic Electoral College as well.

The DNC reprised that strategy with the same suicidal results this year, putting …

The Price of Eggs: Why Harris Lost to Trump

It takes some skill to make Donald J. Trump look good. Two Democrats have succeeded in doing so: Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Kamala Harris in 2024. The conceit of both presidential campaigns, and the belief that attacking a staggeringly grotesque moral character for being such, was laughable. (When a Clinton mocks groping philanderers and creepy molesters, one must reach for, well, the Starr Report?)  In certain countries, abominating and execrating your political adversary for being a moral defective might work.  In the United States, such figures can draw benefit from being outside the constraints of law-abiding society. They are …

Let Us Eat Cake!

They attribute the famous quote ‘Let them eat cake’ to Marie Antoinette, Queen Consort of King Louis XIV of France. Apparently, she was told that the peasants did not have enough bread to eat. Her retort Let them eat cake, famous for all the Super Rich throughout history (and right smack dab into our present USA), shows the utter arrogance, indifference and lack of empathy for most of our low and middle income working stiffs. Last night’s disgraceful vote results to allow Trump back into power reveal just how far down the rabbit hole of immorality our nation has fallen! …

Hold onto Your Ethical and Intellectual Integrity with All Your Might

In the face of an avalanche of brain-numbing and spiritual-lobotomizing wrong “truths” and miseducated citizens, it is still incumbent upon the misinformed, ill-informed and uninformed to attempt to learn.

Deep learning deploys a set of lenses that takes the complexities of contradictions and not-so-self-evident truths and focus into some sense of why “they” are where “they” are economically, culturally and spiritually.

The US election is over (as of Nov. 5 midnight?), but the dangerous clown show of misanthropy and hegemony marches on. I am writing this for National American Indian Heritage Month (Nov.), because Native Peoples in this part of the world …

Who Won?

Have the people spoken?

Our Fragile Infrastructure: Lessons From Hurricane Helene

Asheville, North Carolina, is known for its historic architecture, vibrant arts scene and as a gateway to the Blue Ridge Mountains. It was a favorite escape for “climate migrants” moving from California, Arizona, and other climate-challenged vicinities, until a “500 year flood” ravaged the city this fall.

Hurricane Helene was a wakeup call not just for stricken North Carolina residents but for people across the country following their tragic stories in the media and in the podcasts now favored by young voters for news. “Preppers” well equipped with supplies watched in helpless disbelief as homes washed away in a wall of water and mud, …

What the Air Force Doesn’t Want Us to Notice on Election Night

Much significance will happen at the end of Election Day, and a countdown will begin at 11:00 p.m. PDT on November 5th. While everyone’s attention will be on who our next president will be, the U.S. The Air Force will test-launch an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile with a dummy hydrogen bomb on the tip from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The missile will cross the Pacific Ocean and 22 minutes later crash into the Marshall Islands. The U.S. Air Force does this several times a year. The launches are always at night while Americans are sleeping.
This is what …

Ancient Tales to Modern Struggles

Day after day, we are all subjected to Europeans cosplaying as Israelites straight out of the Book of Joshua carrying out Old Testament massacres with 21st Century weapons. It should be noted that the massacres detailed within that book very likely did not happen—the archeology does not back them up.

These modern massacres, however, are all too real, as we’ve all seen waking nightmares live-streamed to us every day. In the coming years, the full horror of the Gaza Genocide will be known. There will be those who wonder how it could have happened, and there will be those who support …

Trust the Science

As recorded in Hansard, Canada’s prime minister Justin Trudeau, as he did on so many occasions without ever citing the scientific evidence, stated, “We will continue to trust the science.”

Last Minute “Closing Argument” to Vote Against the Genocidaire Harris

It has become a commonplace among disillusioned radicals and independents that today’s choice of Harris/Trump fails to pose any of the most pressing issues facing the human race: climate change, potential world war, resource poisoning/depletion, and so on. But the most critical issue of all is indeed on the ballot: the genocide in Gaza, which has become nothing short of a watershed in defining human consciousness in our time. Conservative estimates place the death toll in that calamity at some 43,000 (perhaps as high as 186,000, according to one study), more than half of them women and …

Disabilities and Bullying and the Harris-Trump Road Show

Remember this?

Oh, yeah, that Messiah, Mister Rapist, Grifter, Dirtier than Dirt Kushner-Guided, Roy Cohen-Trained TRUMP: “My Uncle Donald Trump Told Me Disabled Americans Like My Son ‘Should Just Die’

Read the Time Magazine article written  by his nephew.

Here, reality check for democrats and republicans:

Some legit writing here from me to be published in “legit” media around my area:

When the whole world is silent, even one voice becomes powerful

“I’d like to have enough resources, money, to take a trip somewhere. I don’t want to be homeless if housing finds out I have extra money in my bank account.”

Seems like a wish …

Who Should be the Next Emperor of the Violent Global Imperium?

As US voters go to the polls on November 5, they need to remind themselves that when the US elects its next domestic president, it is also selecting the emperor of a violent, global imperium.  Choices made over sundry domestic issues have far reaching effects, far beyond local pocketbook or civil rights issues.  They determine who lives and dies across the planet, and how much pain, harm and suffering the rest of the world will have to bear.

In this context, it’s fair to ask, who is the lesser evil?  Trump or Harris?

The answer, of course, is “neither”.  Like …

Malnutrition and Mortality in Gaza, One Year Later. Who’s Counting the Dead?

It’s a tragic sign of the times when little introductory narrative is needed to set the near-apocalyptic scene that exists in Gaza today. The world watches from a distance as Israel’s onslaught continues and the civilian death toll escalates to unimaginable levels. Now, the nightmare that Palestinian survivors are currently enduring is about to take on another dimension.

The prediction made one year ago of a man-made famine is about to be realised, though in truth, Gazans have suffered food insecurity for decades. Despite a heavy dependency on international agencies for humanitarian …

Ruthless Settlements: BHP, Brazil, and the Samarco Fundão Dam Class Action

The BHP Group, as with other mining giants, has much explaining to do in the way it has approached the environment.  It has become a master of the greenwashing experiment, an adept promoter of sham environmental responsibility (take, for instance, its practice of merely selling its oil and gas business to Woodside Petroleum in 2021 rather than retiring them); and, it transpired recently, a ruthless negotiator and litigant over contentious claims.

After nine years of negotiations and attritive legal proceedings, BHP has reached a settlement with Brazilian authorities regarding its role in the Fundão tailings dam collapse in Mariana, Minas …

Kamala is the In-Girl

Everyone loves her


IMAGE/Monthly Review

The criteria for winning a presidential debate is very simple: the candidate who fumbles less, makes less mistakes, avoids too many verbal gaffes, etc., who is able to present a rosy picture for the future, and, who believes in people’s “ambition, the aspirations, [and] the dreams,” is the winner — provided all bullshitting is done with a serious face.

However, it’s entirely a different matter whether that person has any genuine solutions to the problems majority of the people face.

Exactly eight years ago, …

The Numbing Election

Before radio waves vibrated in Calvin Coolidge’s 1924 campaign, voters had scarce knowledge of candidates in presidential elections. Despite the limited communications, only a few presidents of the United States (POTUS) were disasters and most were more acceptable. The rapid growth of communications brought the faces and words of candidates into everyone’s living rooms; it did not improve the selection of chief executives who moved into the White House living room. The assortment remained the same — a few great, most acceptable, and some sub-standard presidents.

Donald trump is the only elected president who never held public office or …

Taxes

Defined by how the government apportions taxes collected.

Post-Election Truths: The Things That Won’t Change (No Matter Who Wins)

If voting could ever really change anything, it’d be illegal.

— Thorne, Land of the Blind (2006)

After months of handwringing and mud-slinging and fear-mongering, the votes have finally been cast and the outcome has been decided: the Deep State has won.

Despite the billions spent to create the illusion of choice culminating in the reassurance ritual of voting for Donald Trump or Kamala Harris, when it comes to most of the big issues that keep us in bondage to authoritarian overlords, not much will change.

Despite all of the work that has …

South Africa’s Memorial to the ICJ: More Evidence on Israel’s Genocide

The timing, as with so much in the ongoing wars in Gaza and Lebanon, was most appropriate. The Israeli Knesset had signalled its intent on crippling and banishing the sole agency of humanitarian worth for Palestinian welfare by passing laws criminalising its operations by 92 to 10 on October 28.

The attack on UNRWA also came with a contemporaneous legal effort, this time from South Africa.  Pretoria had already made its wishes clear on December 28, 2023 in filing an application in the International Court of Justice alleging “violations by Israel regarding the [United Nations] Convention on the Prevention and …

Internationalism: Is It Dead or Dying?

It is difficult to think about Cuba without engaging emotionally. I couldn’t get back to sleep the other night, distressed over the tragic blackout of nearly the entire country with a hurricane approaching.
Yes, the genocide in Palestine and Lebanon evokes similar fits of emotion and sleeplessness; the actions of the Israeli government are obscenely bestial and criminal. Yet Cuba, because of its over six decades of defiance of US imperialism and its enormous sacrifices for other peoples, holds a special place for me.

No country with so little has done so much for others.

In the first half of the twentieth …

Disappeared Doctors

We are in some of the darkest days of this genocide. The Israeli military is currently carrying out a systemic extermination campaign in north Gaza, committing massacre after massacre while completely cutting off humanitarian aid and banning UNRWA.

On October 29, 2024, an Israeli airstrike killed 93 Palestinians in Beit Lahia, north Gaza. Those injured in the massacre have no access to medical care, because on October 26, 2024, Israeli forces attacked Kamal Adwan Hospital and abducted 44 of its 70 staff. Our …