“We must remind Japan that if the radioactive nuclear wastewater is safe, just dump it in Tokyo, test it in Paris and store it in Washington, but keep our Pacific nuclear-free.” (Vanuatu’s celebrated former ‘Turaga Chief’ Motarilavoa Hilda Lini)
In the face of considerable worldwide criticism, TEPCO is moving ahead with its well-advertised plans to dump contaminated water from storage tanks at the Fukushima-Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant disaster zone into the Pacific Ocean. They are running out of storage space and the Pacific Ocean is conveniently right next door.
The Japanese government is courting trouble, as a contracting party to: (1) …
I can’t even produce a metaphor for the drug world anymore. I don’t even like the phrase the drug world since the phrase implies a different world.”
― Charles Bowden, Down by the River: Drugs, Money, Murder, and Family
You don’t need a thousand hours studying what trauma is, what forms it might take, delving into wars and conflicts, from the great war, when the psychologists in Europe attempted to study (sic; sick) shell shocked veterans, and, of course, how many civilians are there in that process of witnessing the most horrific treatment of humans and animals at the hands of, well, …
This beautiful Earth is no more than a brief resting place between the sea of salt where we were born and the sea of stars which we must now. venture forth
— Arthur C. Clarke Profiles of the Future
Orientation
In cross-cultural psychology, the major world divisions are between the West and the East. But what about Russia? Is it closer culturally to Europe or to China and India? As you will find out in this article, the answer is neither.
Absence of a bourgeois spirit, specialization, rationalism or empiricism in Russia
The super successful mega-investor, Warren Buffett, CEO of the giant conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway, was heard to say: There are only 535 members of Congress, why can’t 300 million Americans control them? That’s a pretty fundamental question since our senators and representatives are given their sovereign power by the people. Remember the preamble to our Constitution?
Buffett is a generous philanthropist. Among his contributions, he has given the Gates Foundation (public health projects) about $3 billion each year for over a decade. That’s over $30 billion dollars! Just one $3 billion contribution, devoted …
Maruja Mallo (Spain), La Verbena (‘The Fair’), 1927.
On 8 January, large crowds of people dressed in colours of the Brazilian flag descended on the country’s capital, Brasília. They invaded federal buildings, including the Congress, Supreme Court, and presidential palace, and vandalised public property. The attack, carried out by supporters of former President Jair Bolsonaro, came as no surprise, since the rioters had been planning ‘weekend demonstrations’ on social media for days. …
You’ve stood by me through everything. You didn’t flinch when I grabbed them by the pussy. When I revealed that Obama was born in an African shithole country, you nodded approvingly. When I pointed out that rapists, child-molesters, and drug smugglers were sneaking into Texas, you had my back. When I told my people to unmask, and urged their sluggish doctors to slice them open, slosh their insides with bleach, and stick them in tanning beds, you were right there with me. Even back in 2017, when I signed the God-given right of crazy people to express themselves with guns, …
If we were to choose a hill to die on, it would probably not be in defence of a British prince.
In truth, we don’t need to like or support – and may even abhor – the targets of media bias highlighted in our analyses. Our goal is simply to provide examples that most clearly expose the propaganda function of ‘mainstream’ media. Inevitably, that involves our focusing on thorns in the Establishment’s side.
It should be no surprise that there is actually much that divides us from, say, the fiercely patriotic and …
In a self-congratulatory article published in the Atlantic in 2017, Yossi Klein Halevi describes Israeli behavior at the just-conquered holy Muslim shrines in Occupied East Jerusalem in 1967 as “an astonishing moment of religious restraint”.
“The Jewish people had just returned to its holiest site, from which it had been denied access for centuries, only to effectively yield sovereignty at its moment of triumph,” Halevi wrote with a lingering sense of pride, as if the world owes Israel a ton of gratitude in the …
“You leave fragments of your spirit here and there over the years.
These pieces are glued — like barnacles on a ship — to various
places, objects, people, memories, and unfinished business.
Although detaching from them can be extremely difficult,
detachment is a far more natural practice for your soul
as well as emotions and mental health than holding on
to the dead zone of your past.”
–from “Entering the Castle,” by Caroline Myss, p. 92
Today is the 40th anniversary of the quadruple terror bombing of December 31, 1982, when I happened to be serving a short sentence on the 5th floor of the Metropolitan Correction Center …
In this age of ubiquitous surveillance, there are no private lives: everything is public.
Surveillance cameras mounted on utility poles, traffic lights, businesses, and homes. License plate readers. Ring doorbells. GPS devices. Dash cameras. Drones. Store security cameras. Geofencing and geotracking. FitBits. Alexa. Internet-connected devices.
There are roughly one billion surveillance cameras worldwide and that number continues to grow, thanks to their wholehearted adoption by governments (especially law enforcement and military agencies), businesses, and individual consumers.
The Peruvian Prosecutor’s Office has placed she who claims the country’s presidency, Dina Bolurate under investigation for crimes including genocide, resulting from her government’s treatment of protesters who prefer the elected President Pedro Castillo. Now much of her government is under investigation for genocide (“genocide, qualified homicide and serious injuries”): Alberto Otarola (the prime minister who just resigned), minister of defense Jorge Chavez, minister of the interior Victor Rojas, a previous prime minister Pedro Angulo and previous Minister of the Interior Cesar Cervantes.
International relations remains the sum game of vast hypocrisies, a patchwork of compromises and the compromised. Every moral condemnation of a regime’s conduct is bound to be shown up as an exercise in double standards, often implicating the accusers. In the case of the military regime in Myanmar, double standards are not only modish but expected.
A number of international declarations and measures have targeted Myanmar’s regime for its blood-soaked brutality, its genocidal practices against the Rohingya, and its general contempt for the human rights of its citizenry. In a statement last November, US Secretary of State, Antony …
In 1919, South Carolina’s Charleston Museum acquired an unusually massive jar bearing the inscription “made at Stoney bluff; / for making dis old gin enuff / May 13 – 1859 – / Dave & / Baddler”. The following year another large, alkaline-glazed vessel came into the museum’s possession bearing the same date and names within its inscription. At the time little was known about South Carolina’s pre-war stoneware industry or the highly skilled enslaved labor that it relied on at every level of manufacturing. It would not be until 1930 that “Dave” was identified as the “might good” potter, David …
Probably no corporation possesses a bigger share of control over America’s Government than does the one that sells more to the U.S. Government than does any other: Lockheed Martin. Actually, its top owners, or the group of stockholders who dominate the firm and cooperatively together control its policies and determine whom the corporation’s top executives are, are, together with one-another, the individual persons who cooperatively produce the decisions that constitute this “bigger share of control over America’s Government” than any other corporation does (and vastly more than the American public does). Some of these top owners …
The policymaking apparatus behind the AUKUS security pact was shoddy from the start. It has raised questions about the extent US power will subordinate Australia further in future conflicts; it has brought into question Australia’s own sovereignty; and it has also raised the spectre of regional nuclear proliferation via the use of otherwise closely guarded propulsion technology.
The other feature of this whole enterprise, as it always is regarding the procurement of submarines, is their rate of production. The US Navy’s fast attack submarine program, …
Japan’s actions in a certain period of the past not only claimed numerous victims here in Japan but also left the peoples of neighboring Asia and elsewhere with scars that are painful even today. I am thus taking this opportunity to state my belief, based on my profound remorse for these acts of aggression, colonial rule, and the like that caused such unbearable suffering and sorrow for so many people, that Japan’s future path should be one of making every effort to build world peace in line with my no-war commitment. It is imperative for us Japanese to look squarely
Review of Martin J. Sherwin’s “Gambling with Armageddon: Nuclear Roulette from Hiroshima to the Cuban Missile Crisis”
by Lawrence Wittner / January 16th, 2023
The development and the deployment of nuclear weapons are usually based on the assumption that they enhance national security. But, in fact, as this powerful study of nuclear policy convincingly demonstrates, nuclear weapons move nations toward the brink of destruction.
The basis for this conclusion is the post-World War II nuclear arms race and, especially, the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962. At the height of the crisis, top officials from the governments of the United States and the Soviet Union narrowly avoided annihilating a substantial portion of the human race by …
Whatever your feelings about the government, as a worker, you must pay into a government-administered pension plan, so receiving a pension is collecting what you are due.
The dirty bomb and its purportedly famed radiation dispersal attributes has an undeserved mythology. It serves to bloat budgets and confer grants on specious theories propounded by specious theorists. It is all rather easy to make a security threat up, and a celluloid, Hollywood scenario of a dirty bomb going off in the middle of a metropolis killing thousands is just one of those instances. Scaring people is child’s play and often the work of the unscrupulous.
This month, it was announced that staff …
What they [regular people] need, and what they feel they need, is a quality of mind that will help them use information and to develop reason in order to achieve lucid summations of what is going on in the world and what may be happening within themselves… what may be called the sociological imagination.
What if someone of consequence and world attention, difficult for US monopolized and controlled media to ignore, reminded us that one year before receiving a bullet to his brain, King had made bold print headlines in newspapers worldwide reading, “KING CALLS US “GREATEST PURVEYOR OF VIOLENCE IN THE WORLD.
Would it not weaken US deep state media credibility as it tried to explain how this world-shaking event in the life of Martin Luther King has not been known by millions who celebrate …
You and I, dear reader, if you are of the composition of say Rosa Parks, or Rachel Carson, MLK, Paul Robeson, Angela Davis (or, fill in the social justice champion of your choice), did not sign up for this, or approve of it, or okayed it in our name:
Some researchers who have long studied the technology are deeply troubled that the company, Make Sunsets, appears to have moved forward with launches from a site in Mexico without
How many times have the publics in U.S.-and-allied countries been lied-to about invasions their Governments had made on the basis of falsehoods that their ‘news’-media knew at the time were false but nonetheless reported to them as being true? How many times have those ‘news’-media reported as being ‘a democratic revolution’ the overthrow of a foreign Government when those ‘news’-media knew, either while it was going on or else less than a month afterward, that it had actually been just another U.S. coup — and yet those same ‘news’-media still, even to …
Every Sunday about a dozen high school teenagers gather without their iPhones on a little hill in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, USA. They form a circle and quietly start to read serious books (Dostoevsky, Boethius) (paperbacks or hardbacks), or draw in sketchbooks, or just serenely sit listening to the wind.
As the New York Times reporter Alex Vadukul wrote last month these youngsters have had enough of the addictive Internet Gulag run by corporate incarcerators. “Social media and phones are not real life,” said Lola Shub a senior at Essex Street Academy. She expressed the group’s consensus: “When …
