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Technology fetishism and dogmatic irresponsibility

Without the use of digital devices, instead mainly that analog apparatus known as the pen, I have managed to retain meaningful recollections and engage in analytical reflection for the better part of sixty two years. The manner in which I have worked since the earliest moments I can remember has engendered the habit of collecting, sorting, observing and evaluating life as I lived it or perceived it by others. It was about 1976 that I was introduced to Russell Ackoff, a professor at the Wharton School in …

Thanks to the credulity and docility of the majority of Americans, Big Pharma has largely succeeded in medicalizing virtually every deviation from corporate-dictated, machine-like, behavioral uniformity.  In an era of expanding ignorance, fear sells–especially through meticulously crafted TV ads.  (“Ask your doctor if Viagra may be right for you.”)

The collusion between Big Pharma and its distributors (i.e., doctors), with its obviously huge profit-incentives, might also (generously) be called a folie-a-deux.  Within their shared “medical model,” physiological anomalies detected by high-radiation(!) CT body-scans may suggest certain lurking diseases (or even “pre-diseases”).  “Early Detection” may offer the option of preventive surgery–what physician …

In various and fluctuating levels of awareness, we knew this was coming.

Rivers ceased to flow. Lakes and reservoirs dropped to record-low levels or dried up altogether. Maybe not every year in every region, but pretty regularly over the last decade. Then, Smokehouse Creek Fire in the Panhandle this past February—the largest wildfire in Texas history.

In 1896, Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius first predicted that changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels could substantially alter the surface temperature of the Earth through the greenhouse effect. In 1938, English steam engineer (and amateur climate scientist) Guy Callendar began gathering climate records from almost 150 …

One does not need to be a fortune-teller to understand that the Israel-US game plan for Gaza runs something like this:

1. In public, Biden appears “tough” on Netanyahu, urging him not to “invade” Rafah and pressuring him to allow more “humanitarian aid” into Gaza.

2. But already the White House is preparing the ground to subvert its own messaging. It insists that Israel has offered an “extraordinarily generous” deal to Hamas – one that, Washington suggests, amounts to a ceasefire. It doesn’t. According to reports, the best Israel has offered is an …

House of Representatives legislation that includes “$60 billion for Kyiv, $26 billion for Israel and humanitarian aid for civilians in conflict zones, including Gaza, and $8 billion for the Indo-Pacific region,” informs the world of the stupidity of it all — from Kyiv to Taiwan, dumbness governs fate. Examine each appropriation, one at a time.

Kyiv

Forced into a political decision that makes it appear that America does not desert its allies, the appropriation accomplishes nothing except to assure that more Russians are killed. It does not save Ukrainian lives or enable Ukraine to gain a leading edge in the …

Is there a point at which the genocide in Gaza becomes egregious enough to provoke other countries to directly intervene in the Gaza Strip to prevent further genocide? Can Israel exterminate the entire population without anyone stopping them?

This is not a rhetorical question. Intervention is not merely judgments by the International Court of Justice or resolutions introduced at the United Nations. It is not even shiploads of supplies sent to queue up for delivery into Gaza, pending permission from the Israeli occupying authorities. Rather, intervention means forcing one’s way into Gaza, whether the occupying authorities like it or not, and …

In the name of Hippocrates, doctors have invented the most exquisite form of torture ever known to man: survival.
— Luis Buñuel, My Last Sigh, January 1982

I recently lost someone dear to me and watched as they died in almost unrelenting agony over a period of three weeks. As American health care is dominated by sociopaths and a pathological corporate culture antithetical to bioethics, it became apparent to me that we would have to fight for the patient, which meant in this case, fight for their right to die with a modicum of comfort and dignity.

As these unsavory events were playing …

In the name of protecting Canadian Jews many are promoting the cultural and physical erasure of a faraway people.

Recently there’s been a push to suppress a traditional Palestinian garment. To the delight of many, the speaker of the Ontario legislature banned kaffiyehs from the provincial assembly. In a sign of support for this racist policy, prominent ‘progressive’ doctor and Ottawa-Carleton District School Board trustee, Nili Kaplan-Myrth, recently bemoaned a fellow trustee who “put on a keffiyeh”, making it “not safe for Jews”. Similarly, author Dahlia Kurtz posted about a friend who panicked when a worker at her child’s daycare had …

“I was three years old when he was killed,” says Xiomara Hernández. “My little brother who is here with me today is the baby, he was just six months old.”

Xiomara is standing on a rock above a rushing stream, looking down on the spot where her father, Sergio Hernández, was murdered along with U.S. engineer Ben Linder on April 28th, 1987. Another fifty meters downstream, Pablo Rosales was killed; shot and bayoneted through the heart. The three were ambushed and murdered by U.S.-backed Contra forces while they were building a weir, measuring the stream to install a hydroelectric system …

I love Naomi Klein. Strong, courageous, principled. In her latest, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World (2023), willing to open her life for us to see for ourselves what makes her tick. A world of doppelgangers, shadow selves of many varieties from our repressed inner Other, to an AI construct of who you are in public.

Your social media profile is constructed by the ad world, which creates our ‘Others’ worlds, which become our online ghosts. We like a certain level of automated customization (suggest music, books, people) …

Tourists visiting Spanish cities like Córdoba, Toledo and Sevilla have the option of whiling away an hour or so at a ‘Museum of the Inquisition’, sometimes known as a ‘Gallery of Torture’. For around three euros, visitors can view an exotic range of devices used to impale, immolate, strangle and dismember human beings in the name of God.

It’s tempting to reassure ourselves that these are relics of a far-distant past, horrors that could never happen now. But did the Dark Ages ever really end? Noam Chomsky …

This visual is based on statistical projections by researchers from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and the Johns Hopkins Center for Humanitarian Health. Their projections powerfully illustrate how many Palestinian lives are at stake in the next six months. They looked at four areas: traumatic injuries, non-communicable diseases, infectious diseases (including pandemics), and maternal and neonatal health.

Explore their projections and methodology here.

It is unfortunate that column space should be dedicated to Britain’s shortest termed prime minister and, arguably, one of its most imbecilic and cringingly juvenile.  But given that some people still sympathise with her and her views, it falls to one to tackle her latest work which resembles other types of the gloomy genre warning that action, if not taken now, will result in civilisational catastrophe.

From the outset, the premise of Ten Years to Save the West is confused.  She declares the work is not a political memoir so much as “a call to action for fellow conservatives who …

Maria Helena Vieira da Silva (Portugal), A Poesia Está Na Rua I [Poetry Is out on the Street I], 1974.

Fifty years ago, on 25 April 1974, the people of Portugal took to the streets of their cities and towns in enormous numbers to overthrow the fascist dictatorship of the Estado Novo (‘New State’), formally established in 1926. Fascist Portugal – led first by António de Oliveira Salazar until 1968 and then by Marcelo Caetano – was welcomed into the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) in 1949, the United Nations …

Muhammad Jaber, known as Abu Shujaa, the leader of the Tulkarem Brigade militia in Nur Shams refugee camp, emerges among mourners after rumors of his killing in the northern occupied West Bank during a two-day military operation, on 21 April.  Mohammed Nasser APA images
The Israeli military carried out bloody carnage and destruction at the Nur Shams refugee camp and surrounding areas in Tulkarem in the northern occupied West Bank during a two-day raid this week.

During the 54-hour operation, at least 14 Palestinians were …