In May 2019, the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, that famous bastion of anti-whistleblowing fervour, unsealed an indictment charging former intelligence analyst Daniel Everett Hale with five counts of providing classified information to a reporter. The first four focused on obtaining national defense information, retaining and transmitting that information, causing the communication of that same information and disclosing classified communications intelligence information. The fifth alleged the theft of government property.
Yet again, the US government was making use of the beastly Espionage Act of 1917. Between 2009 and 2013, Hale worked with the US Air Force …
These ambitious goals, which included the eradication of “extreme poverty and hunger”, to “combating lethal diseases” and “reducing child mortality worldwide”, proved to be yet another empty gesture which, unsurprisingly, amounted to little.
Even if the architects of the project were well-intentioned as they labored to meet the 2015 deadline, the lack of true international solidarity made their commendable program simply impossible.
Sadly, whatever positive difference that these objectives registered is now quickly vanishing, not …
by Bill Hackwell and Alicia Jrapko / July 27th, 2021
Today with the height of imperial arrogance and hubris, the US State Department issued a joint statement to further its plans to destroy Cuba and all the gains it has made in health, education and welfare. Lining up 20 spineless, neo liberal countries beholden to them and led by right wing governments including; Austria, Brazil, Colombia, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Ecuador, Estonia, Guatemala, Greece, Honduras, Israel, Latvia, Lithuania, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Poland, Republic of Korea, and Ukraine to sign on to the statement that read in part, “we condemn the mass arrests and detentions of protestors in Cuba and …
Cartier Erecting a Cross at Gaspé Charles W. Jefferys Canada’s Past in Pictures, 1934, p.12On 24 July 1534, French navigator Jacques Cartier voyaged to the Gulf of Kaniatarowanenneh (River of the Mohawks, St Lawrence) and planted a cross on the shore of Gaspé. It signified claiming possession of the territory on behalf of the king of France, Francis I. Donnacona, chief of Stadacona (Québec city), was unhappy at this effrontery. Surmising this, Cartier lied and downplayed the significance of the 9-meter (30-ft) cross.
With the recent passing of your close associate Donald Rumsfield, we felt compelled to share with you our many thoughtful remembrances. Many of us are also approaching our final years, and have already suffered the first indications of failing memory. (In public figures of Rumsfeld’s and your high stature, the condition is termed “I do not recall syndrome.”) Despite your outstanding impact on the state of the world as of 2021, you too, like any other 75-year-old, may already be experiencing the tragic signs of failing memory. It is in this spirit of helpful remembrance that we write to you, …
On July 20, 2021, the Milwaukee Bucks won the National Basketball Association (NBA) championship. Their MVP was Giannis Antetokounmpo, a.k.a. “The Greek Freak.” His performance in the deciding game was stellar and this sent the sports media world in a predictable series of paroxysms. Antetokounmpo was virtually inducted into the Hall of Fame overnight by traffic-hungry sports reporters who succumbed to recency bias. There are far too many examples to list but here’s the title of one such article: “Giannis …
Citoyen Chouette Archive Liberte-Egalite-Fraternite: under Macron’s pass sanitaire guillotine?
For the few of us who are students of history, and its aficionado travelers, meaning those who muse and wonder at times about how significant figures of the past would view our often dire predicament, it is rather obvious that, for example, the founding fathers of the French Revolution such as Danton, Mirabeau, St Just, and Robespierre would be shocked and angry by what has recently happened to their Republic. Even France’s last great statesman …
So, maybe it didn’t begin there, but is that where it all came together and became the lip signed treaty between President and Party? Was the infamous 2017 around-the-table butt-kissing spectacle the inflection point; the official surrender of the Republican Party to Donald Trump?
They took turns demeaning themselves and the America people, with Reince Priebus offering up the best summation: “On behalf of the entire senior staff around you, Mr. President, we thank you for the opportunity and the blessing that you’ve given us to serve your agenda … and the American people.”
It might have come as a surprise, even to him – not just the willingness, …
It is a country other powers simply cannot leave alone. Even after abandoning its Kabul post in ignominy, tail tucked between their legs, Australia is now wondering if it should return – in some form. The Department of Trade and Foreign Affairs has been sending out a few signals, none of them definitive. “We will not comment on intelligence matters,” a spokesman for foreign minister Senator Marise Payne stated tersely earlier this month.
The spokesman was, however, willing to make general remarks about a belated return. When, he could not be sure, but Canberra’s diplomatic arrangements in Afghanistan “were always …
About 3.3 million students are currently enrolled in roughly 7,400 privately-operated charter schools across 45 states, Washington DC, Puerto Rico, and Guam. Five states remain opposed to these outsourced schools that appeared in the U.S. 30 years ago.
Today, thousands of segregated charter schools run by unelected individuals are either openly operated as for-profit schools or managed, directed, or overseen by one or more for-profit entities and businesses. In Michigan and Florida, for example, charter schools openly run for profit are the majority of charter schools in the state.
Review of Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It
by Donovan Cleckley / July 26th, 2021
“Knowledge of death helps us also to find a good road,” Jack D. Forbes tells us, “because perhaps it can bring us to deep considerations of our place in nature.” I recall this reflection Forbes makes, among other revelations, in his 1978 book Columbus and Other Cannibals, now, rather queerly, in relation to the environmental movement. Written by Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith, and Max Wilbert, Bright Green Lies comes at a critical moment, as this machine called by the …
With a population of 118 million (expected to top 200 million by the end of 2049) Ethiopia is the second most populous country in Africa. 70% (c.80 million) are under thirty, the median age being just 20.
The majority of people live in rural areas where infrastructure is poor or non-existent: around 67 million are currently without electricity; for millions of others (including in the capital, Addis Ababa) the supply is inconsistent, with frequent power cuts, 62 million, according to the WHO Joint Monitoring Programme, do not have access to safe drinking water (7.5% of the global water crisis is …
Yet another topic I’ve been asked to write about is why I quit activism all those years ago. To be radically honest, I’ve already tackled this subject in several ways but… I think I’ve found a new angle. Read on to learn more.
Recently, I was walking down Steinway Street in my neighborhood when I passed a man wearing two Covid masks. Not shocking these days, for sure, but the outer of the two masks had words printed on it: “I can’t breathe.” (insert deep sigh here) It wasn’t just …
Well, they say that time flies when you’re having fun, and as you grow older such an expression seems to have an increased impact and meaning as each new cycle spins. But I’m not sure that any point in human history has seen as much flux as this still-young decade of the 2020s has already been through.
We began the journey with a cool launch as version 2.0 of the roaring twenties commenced, but that quickly gave way to the Age of Terror in which the villainous machinations of mad scientists were revealed as they unleashed their plagues, which in turn …
UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres celebrated the extension of a “humanitarian” border crossing at Bab Al Hawa, on July 10th, as a “lifeline for millions of people” – many Syrians would rather describe it as a “lifeline” for Al Qaeda.
On the 15th July I visited Jurin, a village to the north of the Hama governorate and only 5km from the Syrian allied military frontlines with the Al Qaeda-dominated armed groups controlling Idlib, north-west Syria.
We arrived at around 9 am to the boom of mortar and rocket fire from the Jabal az Zawiya mountain that is under control of …
(Credit unknown)
Life in the United States of Algorithms has me thinking about Fight Club again — reading snippets, posting quotes, and watching YouTube clips until I finally gave it a re-watch. Such is the power of Fight Club. I saw it in the theater when it came out in 1999. It was love at first sight. Like the well-programmed white male “radical” I was, I swooned at the anarchy [sic] and anti-corporate virtue signaling and dutifully memorized Tyler Durden’s pithy one-liners. Over the ensuing years, I read …
The gap between rhetoric and reality is a persistent one when looking at the sustainability of commitments of Olympic Games hosts.
— Martin Müller, European Urban and Regional Studies, 2015
The organisers of the Olympics have always been into appearances and grand theatre. And the International Olympic Committee has always been keen in keeping them up, from the barely credible notion of political neutrality to the now popular goal of carbon neutrality. In 2015, the IOC decided to fully hop on the sustainability bandwagon, though it claimed to have been “an important topic for the IOC for many years”. Indeed, …
Interrogate the devil; he will tell you that beauty is a pair of horns, four claws and a tail.
Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary
Bullets of Justice is a gritty 2019 film made by Valeri Milev and Timur Turisbekov, which takes place in the United States during the Third World War. The story centres around Rob Justice, an ex-bounty hunter who is fighting a mixture of half humans and half pigs (human bodies and pig heads). They were bred under an American …
The UN Food Systems Summit (UNFSS), including a ‘pre-summit’, will take place in September 2021 in New York. The Italian government is hosting the pre-summit in Rome from 26–28 July. The UNFSS claims it aims to deliver the latest evidence-based, scientific approaches from around the world, launch a set of fresh commitments through coalitions of action and mobilise new financing and partnerships.
Despite claims of being a ‘people’s summit’ and a ‘solutions’ summit, the UNFSS is facilitating greater corporate concentration, unsustainable globalised value chains and agribusiness leverage over public institutions. As a result, more than 300 global organisations of small-scale food …
The auguries are not good for the Tokyo Olympic Games. Resignations have filled the ledger, including Japanese composer Keigo Oyamada, organising committee president Yoshiro Mori and the creative director Hiroshi Sasaki. Then there is the lamentable behaviour of the authoritarian International Olympic Committee and the obsequious conduct of the Suga government. The continued prospect of COVID-19 infections in the Olympic camp and public, have all been marked off as manageable.
It will not matter that athletes suffer infections. It will not matter that they will be spread. It will be irrelevant that the Japanese public do not want these games. The …
Indian Doctors for Truth (IDT) have written to Prime Minister Narendra Modi stressing the importance of an urgent need to stop the overzealous universal vaccination drive against COVID-19.
Twenty doctors have signed the letter and highlight numerous scientific data about immunity achieved by the Indian population among both adults and children in light of the latest sero-survey done by the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in Delhi along with the World Health Organization.
Based on the evidence, IDT urges the PM to immediately stop the drive for vaccination of the entire population and limit it to voluntary vaccination of only those …
I was asked to appear on What’s Left?, a podcast put on by three fellows, all identifying as socialist, and all concerned about the shut down of critical thinking, the shuttling of alternative narratives and censoring of plain old questioning paradigms and authorities of any ilk. Their concern covers why questioning the scientism of today’s Corona Craziness is somehow verboten, or why we can’t discuss what the Lockdowns do and do not do, or worse, how the censoring of medical treatments (like ivermectin) — life saving ones — by mass media, left media and …
Préfète Duffaut (Haiti), Le Générale Canson, 1950.
In 1963, the Trinidadian writer CLR James released a second edition of his classic 1938 study of the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. For the new edition, James wrote an appendix with the suggestive title ‘From Toussaint L’Ouverture to Fidel Castro’. In the opening page of the appendix, he located the twin Revolutions of Haiti (1804) and Cuba (1959) in the context of the West Indian islands: ‘The people who made them, the problems and …
Amnesty International report highlights how Israeli police protect Jewish supremacism from any challenge by Palestinian citizens
by Jonathan Cook / July 22nd, 2021
Police made sweeping arrests of Israel’s large minority of Palestinian citizens after protests rocked the country in May during Israel’s 11-day attack on Gaza. Officers were documented beating demonstrators, and in some cases torturing them while in detention. Police also failed to protect the Palestinian minority from planned, vigilante-style attacks by far-right Jewish extremists.
This was the damning verdict of an Amnesty International report published last week. The findings indicate that Israeli police view the country’s Palestinian minority, a fifth of the population, as an enemy rather than as citizens with a right to protest.
A story much favoured in western media has been about China’s alleged genocide of its Uyghur population. The origins of the story are unclear, although it has often been attributed to the work of the Newton Institute for Strategic Policy and to a German propagandist who works for a markedly anti-Chinese organisation based in the United States.
The Uyghurs are based in the Xinjiang autonomous region, a large and strategically located region of China’s Northwest. The statistics provide absolutely no support for the propaganda. The Uyghurs constitute approximately 90% of …
Europe’s identity crisis is not confined to the ceaseless squabbles by Europeans over the EU, Brexit or football. It goes much deeper, reaching sensitive and dangerous territory, including that of culture and religion. Once more, Muslims stand at the heart of the continent’s identity debate.
Of course, anti-Muslim sentiments are rarely framed to appear anti-Muslim. While Europe’s right-wing parties remain committed to the ridiculous notion that Muslims, immigrants and refugees pose a threat to Europe’s overall security and unique secular identities, the left is not entirely immune from such chauvinistic …
It’s not unusual for politically minded people on Facebook to claim that they’re being targeted and censored. They all think they’re “too radical” in one way or another and thus, must be silenced by the authorities. Hey, in my activist days, I’d even get insulted if I wasn’t pulled off the line to board a plane. Don’t they know who I am? These delusions of grandeur, however, are based on real, longstanding policies. The Land of the Free™ has always spied on, manipulated, and controlled its population. …
More disappointing than watching the Habs lose to Tampa in the Stanley Cup finals were the ads during the games on TV. As Lytton, BC, broke Canada’s all-time temperature record three days in a row and was then wiped off the map by a forest fire, Canada’s public broadcaster promoted resource intensive, space consuming and carbon spewing trucks.
Decades ago when it became clear humanity was hurtling towards a climate crisis, car ads should have been banned. Stopping auto companies’ unrelenting ideological assault on the population is an important, probably …
The reason Yankee fans and Red Sox fans hate each other goes a lot deeper than sports. In his book American Nations, Colin Woodard identifies eleven regional cultures in the United States. He compares the conditions of the home country, settler conditions, climate, geography, religious history, population density and international loyalties. He points out the parallels between how settlers’ regional locations in England impacted the type of regional culture they developed in the United States. My purpose in this article is to:
