A harmonious, healing, sometimes home-bound setting brings closure
by Paul Kirk / October 15th, 2015
We live in a very particular death-denying society. We isolate both the dying and the old, and it serves a purpose. They are reminders of our own mortality. We should not institutionalize people. We can give families more help with home care and visiting nurses, giving the families and the patients the spiritual, emotional, and financial help in order to facilitate the final care at home.
– Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, On Death and Dying, 1969
Quantity or Quality of Life
We have an aversion around our own mortality and dying and death, but one adage is so apropos today – Nothing is certain in …
by Adrian Kuzminski / October 15th, 2015
You say you got a real solution,
Well, you know we’d all love to see the plan, oh yeah …
— John Lennon, 1968
Nearly a half-century later, there is still no plan. The current radical critics of “the system”–who mostly take a holistic rather than piecemeal approach–have yet to put forth a coherent public policy agenda to get us to a sustainable American and global future.
These critics are very good at analyzing our problems—peak oil, the long emergency, the stages of collapse, global warming and climate change, the financialization of the economy, the impossible debt burden, the maldistribution of wealth, the corruption …
Marco Rossi and the Ladder of Progress
by Eoin Higgins / October 14th, 2015
In Olympia, Washington, Marco Rossaire Rossi is running for mayor, but he is running as much to change the culture of electoral politics in Olympia as he is for office.
Rossi is running as an independent candidate. His campaign is part of a municipal movement in Olympia called “An Olympia For All.” The political movement seeks to use local government to change regressive economic policies to policies that will work for the betterment of the people of the city.
The electoral process in the city of Olympia works like this: There is a primary in August before the …
by William Manson / October 14th, 2015
Sorry I’m so irritable. It’s just my back again—kind of twinges, you know—especially if I bend over or sometimes when I drink too much. Doctor sent me for a CT scan—nothing. Waste of time and money. What do they know about pain?
Sorry to go on like this. It’s just nice to have you here, listening to me when I hurt. It hasn’t been easy, what with this aching back and my anxiety disorder. Oh, I know, I shouldn’t worry so much. But how would you feel? Prescriptions, painkillers—but that’s no panacea. But still, sorry to obsess like this—you’re a real …
Israeli prime minister targets Palestinian leaders in Israel as his ‘Mr Security’ image takes a beating
by Jonathan Cook / October 14th, 2015
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has announced a crackdown on Palestinian political leaders in Israel, blaming them for the current unrest, in what appeared to be an attempt to bolster his severely dented image as ‘Mr Security’.
After a lengthy meeting of the security cabinet on Sunday, Netanyahu directed officials to assemble the evidence to make possible the outlawing of the northern wing of the Islamic movement.
Led by Sheikh Raed Salah, the organisation is generally regarded as the most popular Islamic party among Israel’s 1.6 million Palestinian citizens, who comprise a fifth of the population.
Over the past two decades …
by Michael Keefer / October 14th, 2015
Stephen Harper has been talking recently about “old stock” Canadians — and at the same time stirring up fear and loathing against more recent arrivals in this country, notably those of Muslim faith, in order to mobilize electoral support for his Conservative Party.
I think it’s time “old stock” Canadians shared their opinion of these antics. Perhaps I qualify for the job, since my ancestors arrived here two and a quarter centuries ago. (That’s a blink of the eye by native standards, but we may have preceded the Harpers.)
The first thing to say is that my family — the widow and …
Iran Has Been Transparent and Accountable Over its Nuclear Program: Andre Vltchek
by Kourosh Ziabari / October 14th, 2015
An acclaimed philosopher and journalist who has recently visited Iran tells Fars News Agency that the reality of Iran is absolutely different from the way it’s being illustrated in the mainstream media.
Andre Vltchek says: “Iran that you see when visiting the country has nothing in common with that imaginary, terrible and cruel Iran that the West’s mass media has created.”
Commenting on Iran’s nuclear program and the international responses to it, Andre Vltchek says the majority of the Middle East nations and the global public don’t have any objections to Iran developing nuclear technology, considering Iran’s peaceful nature and its long …
by James Hoover / October 13th, 2015
America is pretty much a corporate state (a whimsical view): take your pick — a plutocracy, an oligarchy, or a corporatocracy. By just stating this, our job is not ended. In fact, we have stood by so long and let it happen, almost to the extent that its entrenchment is so complete that a social democracy is perhaps, not recoverable.
This culture has seeped into our pores like an infection you have difficulty getting rid of. All institutions have been drawn into the cultural mix but one element, a branch of government we forget, drastically affects our lives — the …
by Ramzy Baroud / October 13th, 2015
When my book Searching Jenin was published soon after the Israeli massacre in the Jenin refugee camp in 2002, I was quizzed repeatedly by the media and many readers for conferring the word ‘massacre’ on what Israel has depicted as a legitimate battle against camp-based ‘terrorists’.
The interrogative questions were aimed at relocating the narrative from a discussion regarding possible war crimes into a technical dispute over the application of language. For them, the evidence of Israel’s violations of human rights mattered little.
This kind of reductionism has often served as the prelude to any discussion concerning the so-called Arab-Israeli conflict: events …
by Ludwig Watzal / October 13th, 2015
BONN, GERMANY — Not many people have the guts to question the official narrative of the attacks committed on 9/11 in the United States of America, in London, Madrid, Mumbai or elsewhere, which governments attribute to Islamic terrorists. Elias Davidsson is one of those, who in 2002 became skeptical of the official account on 9/11 and later more generally of the widely held belief that Islamic terrorism exists as a real and distinct threat.
Elias Davidsson was born in Palestine in 1941. His parents left Germany due to the persecution of Jews. He lived in Jerusalem in his childhood and …
The deliberate torturous death of a once proud nation
by Andre Vltchek / October 13th, 2015
Last year, I stopped travelling to Indonesia. I simply did… I just could not bear being there anymore. It was making me unwell. I felt psychologically and physically sick.
Indonesia has matured into perhaps the most corrupt country on Earth, and possibly into the most indoctrinated and compassionless place anywhere under the sun. Here, even the victims were not aware of their own conditions anymore. The victims felt shame, while the mass murderers were proudly bragging about all those horrendous killings and rapes they had committed. Genocidal cadres are all over the government.
Don’t get me wrong: there is really nothing wrong …
Unrest grows among Palestinian citizens of Israel, outraged by restrictions on access to al-Aqsa and causalities in the occupied territories
by Jonathan Cook / October 13th, 2015
The violence rocking the occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem and now Gaza is on the verge of spilling into Israel, Palestinian leaders in Israel warned.
A wave of unrest has swept Palestinian towns in Israel over recent days, with repeated clashes with Israeli police in Nazareth, Jaffa, Lod, Ramle, Taibeh, Sakhnin, Rahat, Kfar Qassem and elsewhere. Dozens of protesters have been arrested.
On Thursday, as Palestinians declared a day of rage, police fired tear gas and stun grenades and led baton charges against several hundred protesters in Nazareth, the largest Palestinian city in Israel. Sixteen demonstrators, five of them minors, were arrested.
“We want …
by Stanley Cohen / October 13th, 2015
In its first full week of a “new” get tough policy, almost 500 young Palestinian demonstrators were injured, shot and maimed, and at least three teens murdered in response to what Israel sees as a rising tide of “militant” resistance against the illegally occupied and, by now, almost completely annexed West Bank. At the same time, the IOF has not only increased its already frequent bombing runs in the embattled, largely defenseless Gaza Strip, but tightened it’s concentration-camp like grip on 1.8 million civilians, reducing even further the trickle of essential goods, food shipments and medicines permitted into the beleaguered …
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 …
