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by Binoy Kampmark / May 4th, 2024
The compromised former top boss of the Australian civil service has the lick and smell of belligerence. Begrudgingly conceding error and when in office, a bully and meddler in party politics, an incessant advocate of threats visible and invisible, Mike Pezzulo switches into a warmonger’s gear with ease.
The former secretary of the Department of Home Affairs was sacked last November after revelations that he had used WhatsApp to communicate with abandon with former New South Wales Liberal Party deputy director Scott Briggs. Those messages, unearthed in a joint investigation by The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and 60 Minutes, confirmed …
Unbecoming American
by T.P. Wilkinson / May 4th, 2024
Where must we start? Every day, we start today
A disagreement or a criticism, before it turns into a fight, or a fight which might be reduced to a mere disagreement or criticism: Where we start or end is the frontier between phrases and fists. It really is that simple. The only way to prove any idea to be false is to kill everyone who holds it. At least that is certainly one of the more popular ways to resolve incoherence between verbal and non-verbal behaviour. My temperament at the end of …
by subMedia / May 4th, 2024
Have you heard the story of why we celebrate May Day?
In Chicago in 1886 police murdered two people at a general strike for an 8 hour work day. A rally for revenge on May 4thled to a riot when a bomb was thrown at the police. Several cops and protesters were killed in the ensuing gunfire and many more were injured.
The state then began rounding up known dissidents and sentenced most of them to death even though many of those arrested weren’t even there.
For over a century anarchists around the world have been avenging the Haymarket Martyrs through strikes, pickets …
by Dissident Voice Communications / May 3rd, 2024
In a letter 18 April to President Biden and top members of his administration, Veterans For Peace cited existing federal law that gives the President “…no discretion whatsoever to allow any military assistance of any form to be delivered to Israel,” based on that country’s “serial violations of the Symington-Glenn Amendments, codified at 22 U.S.C. § 2799aa.”
The letter cites a lengthy list of credible reports that Israel has possessed nuclear weapons for decades. Because Israel has not signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT), the Symington-Glenn Amendments to the International Security Assistance and Arms Export Control Act of 1976, which …
by Robert Hunziker / May 3rd, 2024
“Nearly nineteen thousand (19,000) weather stations have notched record high temperatures since Jan. 1.” (Source: “Earth’s Record Hot Streak Might be a Sign of a New Climate Era”, The Washington Post, April 19, 2024).
A blistering start to the 2024 year is breaking all-time global temperature records of 2023 and bringing to the forefront a looming threat of Wet Bulb temperature concerns.
Even though summer ‘24 has not officially begun for the Northern Hemisphere (solstice June 20th), according to DW News (German public broadcast network) d/d April 25th, 2024, “Extreme Heat in Southeast Asia Leads to School Closures”:
Hundreds of millions of people …
Book Review of Prophet Song by Paul Lynch
by Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin / May 3rd, 2024
In his book, How The Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland’s Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe, Thomas Cahill shows how the Irish monks maintained European culture during the dark ages when Rome was sacked by Visigoths and its empire collapsed. In the subsequent chaos and illiteracy, symbolism took over from analysis. Cahill writes:
The intellectual disciplines of distinction, definition, and dialectic that had once been the glory of men like Augustine were unobtainable by readers of the Dark Ages, whose apprehension of …
by Dongsheng News / May 3rd, 2024
This week we would like to recommend to you a Chinese song from 1967 called Bravely March On, Arab People! (奋勇前进，阿拉伯人民) in support of the pan-Arab movement.
If you don’t have a lot of time, this is what you should know:
For China, Iran’s attack on Israel was “an act of self-defense”
The West’s new narrative against China: overcapacity
China exceeds its 5% GDP growth target in first quarter
Historic “peace trip” by former Taiwanese leader Ma Ying-jeou
For China, Iran’s attack was “an act of self-defense”
In the context of the genocide that Israel is perpetrating on the …
by Edward Curtin / May 2nd, 2024
photo by Jeanne Lemlin
To be crucified is to suffer and die slowly and agonizingly. It was a common form of execution in the ancient world. It is generally associated with Rome’s killing of Jesus and carries profound symbolic spiritual meaning for Christians. In its figurative sense, it refers to many types of suffering and death inflicted on the weak by the strong, such as the ongoing genocidal slaughter of Palestinians by the Israel government.
Twenty or so years ago when the wearing of crosses by all types of people was the cultural rage, …
by Dan Lieberman / May 2nd, 2024
The proven danger of two million Gazans, blasted from their homes and struggling to find survival, is being overshadowed by unproven “safety concerns” for a relatively few Jewish college students who argue they are harmed by careless words and show no physical injuries. News reports reveal malicious intent and media complicity — divert the protests against genocide to a non-existent anti-Semitism and impede the effectiveness of the campus demonstrations by citing “safety concerns.” Generate hate of the campus demonstrators and disguise the malice by falsely accusing them of hate, the Zionist Modus operandi from its inception — hide the truth …
by Don Fitz / May 2nd, 2024
Green Party member Jill Stein center.
After attacking Dr. Jill Stein, St. Louis police charged her with assaulting them. Stein is the presumptive Presidential candidate of the Green Party. On April 27 she spoke at a program of the Green Party of St. Louis and then went to support student protesters at Washington University. There, she was arrested along with Green Party campaign managers Jason Call and Kelly Merrill with about 100 others.
As students peacefully gathered in tents and on the lawn, they were soon confronted by police from four departments: University …
by Craig Wood / May 1st, 2024
The flotilla cargo ship in Istanbul (Photo credit: Medea Benjamin)
Two gutsy activists from the Twin Cities flew to Istanbul, Turkey April 17 to join over three-hundred others from about 40 countries on an eleven-hundred mile voyage across the Mediterranean Sea to raise awareness and bring lifesaving aid to Gaza.
Vietnam Vet and member of Veterans For Peace (VFP) Barry Riesch was nervous about signing on with the Freedom Flotilla Coalition (FFC), but felt he should try to do something for the vast majority of Gazans lacking medical care and being …
by Binoy Kampmark / May 1st, 2024
What a stinking story of inhumanity. A country intent on sending asylum seekers to one whose residents have actually applied for asylum and sanctuary in other states. But the UK-Rwanda deal, having stalled and stuttered before various courts and found wanting for reasons of human rights, has become law with the passage of the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill.
The story of this deal has been a long one. On April 14, 2022, the government of Boris Johnson announced the Asylum Partnership Arrangement with Rwanda, which was intended “to contribute to the prevention and combating of illegally facilitated …
Before you leave, turn out the lights
by T.P. Wilkinson / May 1st, 2024
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 …
by Philip A. Faruggio / May 1st, 2024
Fifty four years ago today this writer was getting ready to hitchhike to classes at Brooklyn College. It was a sunny, blue sky, early Spring day, and the college was a few miles from our apartment building. This writer was into just two important things in May of 1970: Meeting girls (as we called them then) and preparing for our school’s first football schedule in over 15 years. Ah, to be twenty years old and looking “lean and mean” with my bellbottom jeans, longish, wavy hair, Joe-Namath green eyes, and white buck shoes. I was ready to Rock and Roll …
by William Manson / May 1st, 2024
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 …
by Binoy Kampmark / April 30th, 2024
The rage and protest against Israel’s campaign in Gaza, ongoing since the October 7 attacks by Hamas, has stirred student activity across a number of US university campuses and beyond. Echoes of the Vietnam anti-war protests are being cited. The docile consumers of education are being prodded and found interested. University administrators and managers are, as they always tend to, doing the bidding of their donors and funders in trying to restore order, punish the protesting students where necessary and restrict various forms of protest. Finally, those in the classrooms have something to talk about.
A key aspect of the protest …
by E.R. Bills / April 30th, 2024
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 …
by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead / April 30th, 2024
The American governmental scheme is sliding ever closer towards a pervasive authoritarianism.
The American people, the permanent underclass in America, have allowed themselves to be so distracted and divided that they have failed to notice the building blocks of tyranny being laid down right under their noses by the architects of the Deep State.
This steady slide towards tyranny, meted out by militarized local and federal police and legalistic bureaucrats, has been carried forward by each successive president over the past fifty years regardless of their political affiliation.
Biden, Trump, Obama, Bush, Clinton: they have all been complicit in carrying out the Deep …
The western media is pretending the West’s efforts to secure a ceasefire are serious. But a different script has clearly been written in advance
by Jonathan Cook / April 30th, 2024
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 …
by T.P. Wilkinson / April 30th, 2024
Stories, Histories, Fantasies and Desire
Essentially there are three standard scripts for the history of the United States of America. They partly overlap, exposing or concealing contradictions. They are taught or staged in schools, in homes, at work, on the playground and in the workplace. They are taught all over the world, too.
The USA originates as part of British North America, especially after the French were all but driven out of the continent with British ascendency and the capture of Quebec. A UDI followed by an insurgency, aided by the vindictive French, …
From Kyiv to Taiwan, dumbness governs fate
by Dan Lieberman / April 30th, 2024
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 …
by John Perry / April 29th, 2024
Dear Friend
We need your help to push out this petition (see below), urging the US Senate to Vote No on S1881 – a bill that will place additional unilateral coercive measures/sanctions on Nicaragua. This Bill moved in the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee after Nicaragua argued at the International Court of Justice to defend the Palestinian people from genocide. We have also just found out that it will no longer pass through the Senate’s Banking Committee, where we would have had an opportunity to slow it down, but go directly to the full Senate for a vote. This could happen very …
by Paul Larudee / April 29th, 2024
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 …
by Binoy Kampmark / April 29th, 2024
On April 25, along Melbourne’s arterial Swanston Street, the military parade can be witnessed with its bannered, medalled upholstery, crowds lost in metals, ribbons and commemorative decor. Many, up on their feet since the dawn service, keen to show the decorations that say: “I turned up”. Service personnel, marked by a sprig of rosemary.
The greater the pageantry, the greater the coloured, crimson deception. In the giddy disruptions caused by war, this tendency can be all too readily found. The dead are remembered on the appointed day, but the deskbound planners responsible for sending them to their fate, including the bunglers …
by David Penner / April 29th, 2024
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 …
by Kim Petersen / April 29th, 2024
Chinese President Xi Jinping meets with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, capital of China, April 26, 2024. Photo: Xinhua
A foreboding article was published on April 24. It was pointed out that China had provided a berth to a Russian ship Angara that is purportedly “tied to North Korea-Russia arms transfers.”
Reuters cited Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) – that boasts of itself to be “the world’s oldest and the UK’s leading defence and security think …
by Yves Engler / April 29th, 2024
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 …
by T.P. Wilkinson / April 29th, 2024
Coming soon: Unbecoming American, A War Memoir, available at amazon.com
Fifty years ago the Portuguese became the first and only populace to overthrow its national fascist regime.
Although I was in Brazil in 1986 when the 1964 Atos Institutionais that defined the American incited and inspired military dictatorship were replaced by a new civilian constitution and in Berlin when the annexation of the GDR began and ultimately witnessed the first months when Anglo-American and other international owners of South Africa’s natural resource extraction system imposed an end to Afrikaaner domination, I missed the …
by Becca Mohally Renk / April 29th, 2024
“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 …
US President Proclaims Enduring Peace
by Roger D. Harris / April 29th, 2024
The US Congress authorized a $95 billion military aid package for continuing the wars in Ukraine and Gaza as well as for war preparations against China. This represents, in effect, a downpayment on World War III. US President Joe Biden, reading from a playbook that could well have been scripted by George Orwell, announced: “it’s a good day for world peace.” And in order to dispel any doubt, he added, “for real.”
Biden proclaimed: “It’s going to make the world safer.” In fact, the bipartisan authorization, passed on April 23, could nudge the doomsday clock a little closer to …
