Is the revolution any closer?
by Denis Rancourt / October 12th, 2015
Author and social scientist Stuart Tannock has recently published a historical and critical overview of the practice of grading in education, in which he concludes:
This article uses the example of assessment to argue that if the public university is to perform the role of fostering critical, reflexive, independent and democratically minded thinkers – a role that has been universally embraced by its promoters – then the use of grading in higher education assessment needs to be strongly contested. ((Tannock, Stuart, “No grades in higher education now! Revisiting the place of graded assessment in the reimagination of the public
…
I will take the punishment, the torture, the injustice with a fat happy consumer smile on my face
by Paul Kirk / October 12th, 2015
Here I go again – the at-will piece of human detritus that I am, according to Oregon’s great employers, twice now, non-profits, sacking me because I pushed the state’s vocational rehabilitation careerists outside their pathetic Little Eichmann lives by pushing for my clients – adults with developmental-intellectual-psychological disabilities – to get as much out of the state’s bureaucracies that are filled with middling folk who do not give a shit about people.
At-fucking-will means No Rights in the Workplace. That’s what these doublethink folk call it – right to work states. Making 18 bucks an hour, driving my ass off daily …
by Jack Balkwill / October 11th, 2015
The boy lived in New York City,
They chased the boy right through the park
In a case of mistaken identity
They put a bullet through his heart
Heartbreakers, with your forty four,
I wanna tear your world apart,
Heartbreakers, with your forty four,
I’m gonna tear that world apart”
– Mick Jagger, “Heartbreaker“, released August 1973
Last year, on the anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination, Tamir Rice, a 12 year old African American boy, was shot down in cold blooded murder by police in Cleveland, Ohio.
The boy had been reported by an onlooker as carrying a pistol, but the caller reporting it said it might be a …
by Ali Kazak / October 11th, 2015
For years Israel and its lobby around the world have been trying to normalise their relations with Arabs and Muslims without solving the Palestine Question.
One of the methods they resorted to in the last few years is using human rights and community organizations such as interfaith dialogue and Multiculturalism to achieve this objective and to: isolate the Palestinians, marginalise the Palestine question, end Israel’s isolation, and prevent criticism of Israel, knowing that these organisations will be the first to stand against Israel’s violations, racial and religious discrimination.
The group responsible for this task in Australia is The Australia/Israel & …
Save Children from War!
by Dr. Hakim / October 11th, 2015
I felt empty when I heard that to the north of where I work in Kabul, bombs were dropped on a ‘Doctors Without Borders’ Hospital in #Kunduz, for a full hour.
12 hospital staff and 10 patients were killed, three of them Afghan children. 33 persons are still missing.
Borderfree Afghan Street Kids say that the three Afghan children shouldn’t have been killed by a U.S. airstrike on a Doctor Without Borders Hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan.
I wondered if it was mainly medical personnel like myself who felt sad.
So, together with Ali, an Afghan Peace Volunteer, I asked the Borderfree Afghan Street Kids, …
by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers / October 11th, 2015
The confluence of Columbus Day Weekend and the Kunduz hospital bombing has us thinking about the deep levels of cultural violence in the United States and what can be done to change it. How does the US move from a country dominated by war culture to one dominated by a humanitarian culture? And, how do we do it in time to avoid war with China and Russia, which both advanced closer this week.
What does Celebrating Columbus say About the Character of the United States?
Popular Resistance has reported on the legacy of Columbus. Howard Zinn describes the true history of Columbus and …
Putin and the Press
by James Petras / October 11th, 2015
The major influential western print media are engaged in a prolonged, large-scale effort to demonize Russian President Putin, his politics and persona. There is an article (or several articles) every day in which he is personally stigmatized as a dictator, authoritarian, czar, ‘former KGB operative’ and Soviet-style ruler; anything but the repeatedly elected President of Russia.
He is accused of hijacking Russia from the ‘road to democracy’, as pursued by his grotesquely corrupt predecessor Boris Yeltsin; of directing the bloody repression of the ‘freedom loving Chechens’; of jailing …
by William T. Hathaway / October 11th, 2015
This year marks the 20th anniversary of wolf reintroduction in Yellowstone National Park. From 66 released originally they’ve increased to over 300 and are no longer endangered. That they thrive here is not surprising, for they are creatures of this raw land in a way that we aren’t. Wolves are fitted to this environment, and so to understand them, we have to know the country that nurtures them.
The area from Yellowstone to central Idaho has one of the lowest densities of human population in the United States. Those who do live here are held in thrall by land and weather, …
by Eva Bartlett / October 10th, 2015
Over the past five years, the increasingly ridiculous propaganda against President al-Assad and the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) has ranged from the scripted (OTPOR fomented -“revolution“) “peaceful protesters under fire” rhetoric, to other deceitful lexicon like “civil war,” and “moderate rebels.”
As the intervention campaigns continue with new terrorist and “humanitarian” actors (literally) constantly emerging in the NATO-alliance’s theatre of death squads, it is worth reviewing some of the important points regarding the war on Syria.
Million Person Marches
On March 29, 2011 (less than two weeks into the fantasy “revolution”) over 6 million people across Syria took to the …
by Jonathan Cook / October 9th, 2015
In the age of phone cameras, we have become increasingly used to photos and videos of Palestinians in the West Bank being shot by soldiers in unjustifiable circumstances.
Think of 18-year-old Hadeel Hashlamon, who was killed late last month at a checkpoint in Hebron. A series of photos of her suggest, in the words of Amnesty International, that she was “executed” by the soldiers there. She was shot multiple times and left to bleed to death.
The army claimed she had a knife, which they photographed on the ground nearby. But whether she was carrying the knife or it was planted there, still an issue that …
by Andre Vltchek / October 9th, 2015
Tens of millions of European and North American immigrants, legal and illegal, have been flooding both the cities and countryside in Asia, Latin America, and even Africa.
Western migrants are charging like bulls and the ground is shaking under their feet; they are fleeing Europe and North America in hordes. Deep down they cannot stand their own lifestyle, their own societies, but you would hardly hear them pronounce it. They are too proud and too arrogant! But, after recognizing innumerable areas of the world as suitable for their personal needs – as safe, attractive and cheap – they simply pack and …
As Long as They are not Ruling Class Children
by Jack Balkwill / October 9th, 2015
Teach your parents well,
Their children’s hell
Will slowly go by
And freed them on your dreams
— Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, “Teach Your Children,” from their 1970 album “Deja Vu”
As U.S. bombs and gunfire continue to fall on the Middle East, Southwest Asia, many nations in Africa and across much of the third world, corporate media remind us that Halloween is just ahead, and after that, the “holiday season,” so we should ignore anything but our primary purpose as consumers, to buy stuff, throw it away and replace it with new stuff.
This consumer job makes the rich richer, which is what …
by John V. Walsh / October 9th, 2015
One half of this year’s Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine went to Tu Youyou for her discovery of the antimalarial drug artemisinin. Many of us who do research in the biological sciences have felt that this award was long overdue.
The discovery of artemisinin has saved the lives of millions. And so the Nobel is proper recognition for Dr. Tu, for China and for the advancing role of women in science here and around the world.
There is an interesting and illuminating back story to Dr. Tu’s discovery. In the 1960s North Vietnam and the Vietcong were at war with the …
by John R. Hall / October 9th, 2015
God moves in a mysterious way,
His wonders to perform;
He plants His footsteps in the sea,
And rides upon the storm.
This is the first verse of a hymn entitled “Conflict: Light Shining out of Darkness,” written by William Cowper in 1773. The author failed at a suicide attempt after penning his creation. More than likely he was simply overcome with the mystery of God’s ways. Since that time, some version of the first six words have been repeated by devout Christians more than seven hundred trillion times (estimate). I’ve personally heard a form of the phrase at least three hundred thousand times …
Waiting in Vain for Moderation
by Binoy Kampmark / October 8th, 2015
The most unedifying spectacle since Russia’s full-blooded attempt to change the tide of conflict in Bashar al-Assad’s favour has been the lexical scrounging on the part of Western governments. They are on the hunt for excuses what, exactly, they are defending, let alone protecting.
There is little doubt that no intervention would be the best sort of intervention in Syria. That tends to be the rule for most countries where sectarian, brutal conflict takes place. Secular religions such as humanitarian intervention, or regime change in the name of human security, are no less dangerous than fanatics who have also …
by Jonathan Cook / October 7th, 2015
Here is the US changing its story for the FOURTH time of why it launched an air strike on the Doctors without Borders hospital in the Afghan town of Kunduz at the weekend, massacring at least 22 patients and hospital staff.
As Glenn Greenwald has doggedly pointed out, the western media have been faithfully changing their account repeatedly and largely uncritically of what happened to keep in line with US claims. CNN and the New York Times have been particularly egregious offenders. The media monitoring group FAIR has also produced a revealing overview of the NYT’s coverage …
And what is really happening in Syria?
by T.P. Wilkinson / October 7th, 2015
Seventy years after the UN Charter was supposed to prohibit wars of aggression, we can see that the only countries that have complied with the spirit of the charter have been the so-called communist block, now non-communist Russia and nominally communist China.
Unlike the Soviet government on 7 July 1950, inexplicably absent from the Security Council and hence unable to veto Resolution 84, used by the US as its pretext to invade Korea, the Russian President Vladimir Putin and his government have rejected any Security Council resolution rubber-stamping of the US war in Syria. That is probably the most remarkable historical …
by Eric Walberg / October 7th, 2015
The number of pilgrims visiting Mecca for the Hajj has increased exponentially—from 57,000 in 1921 to more than two million this year. As more Muslims want to come each year, the demand to accommodate them will continue to increase. But the death toll in this year’s Hajj continues to climb (1,112 and still counting) as a result of the incident where two waves of pilgrims in Mina converging on a narrow road (which had been partly closed to allow a VIP Saudi prince to jump the cue), causing people to suffocate or be trampled to death.
The Hajj was never intended …
by Joaquin A. Pedroso / October 7th, 2015
Seventeenth century England was full of debate over the divided loyalties of Englishmen and women. Many were said to be in the grips of papal allegiance, an allegiance that could not be shared with the King of England. We hear similar rumblings today in the U.S. The Republican Party establishment and their benefactors in the media have become increasingly hostile to the message of social justice emanating from the Vatican and it is for good reason.
Here in the U.S., it was not long ago that Republicans were concerned about whether the Pope would direct U.S. policy from …
Lynton Crosby in Canada
by Binoy Kampmark / October 6th, 2015
Lynton Crosby has a full schedule. He is the modern electoral PR hitman for parties in dire straits. He is hired to stir the pot of resentment and undermine hopes for change. His very existence suggests that democracies are shadows of their actual function, operating on traditional platforms of populism when required.
Those familiar with the Crosby portfolio should be aware about various hobgoblin practices he has been engaging in over the years. When he has the brief of desperation from governments in trouble, racial and immigration tensions will be fanned. The security state imperative will be …
