Recent Blogs
To anyone who values honest journalism, it was nice to see that this Reuters article did not let a statement by Venezuelan opposition leader, Henrique Capriles, totally mislead readers. The Venezuelan opposition is claiming they are being denied their constitutional right to a recall referendum against Nicolas Maduro. As I explained in some detail here, if Read more…
Nasir Khan, May 28, 2016 All human children are born in the same way, according to the physiological and biological reproductive system of human beings. Right from their infancy, they learn about the customs and rituals of their societies through their parents and other close relatives. Of course, they follow the religion of their parents Read more…
The international media and the president of the OAS, Luis Almagro, are demanding that Venezuelan president Nicholas Maduro allow a presidential recall referendum to take place in 2016. Why are they demanding that it take place in 2016? Both government critics and supporters appear to agree that if a recall vote is held before January Read more…
This BBC article by Mariana Zuniga says “This situation might be bearable if the Venezuelan oil-dominated economy was performing well, but it is expected to shrink by 8% this year after contracting by 5.8% in 2014.” The article doesn’t say – which is terrible reporting – but the prediction of 8% contraction comes from the IMF Read more…
Democratic socialism used to be a vibrant force in American life. During the first two decades of the twentieth century, the Socialist Party of America, headed by the charismatic union leader, Eugene V. Debs, grew rapidly, much like its sister parties in Europe and elsewhere: the British Labour Party, the French Socialist Party, the Swedish Read more…
Today’s NYT editorial “The Left on the Run in Latin America” underscores that there never really was a “good left” as far as U.S. elites were concerned. For years, Brazil’s left government was part of the “good left” that received vastly better press than Venezuela and other ALBA countries. It would have been very unwise Read more…
Kurdistan is currently divided between four countries: Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey. In each of the parts of Kurdistan, Kurdish identities and cultures have been repressed for generations. This book, by Eliza Egret and Tom Anderson, gathers together first-hand accounts of the struggles for a new society taking place in Bakur and Rojava – the Read more…
Nasir Khan, May 20, 2016 Humans created god by attributing many of their own qualities unto an imaginary ‘being’. But they also gave him a bit more than what they themselves were: they made him all-powerful and all-knowing! So are the fictional places that human beings created in their grand fantasies called Paradise, Hell and Read more…
Green Time TV Tough Environmental Decisions by Don Fitz The survival of humans requires confronting very difficult environmental dilemmas. We have the ability to change the flow of rivers, but is it a wise thing to do? How can we retrofit buildings so they use much less energy? Do we really want or even need Read more…
Go to source. I admit: It’s all speculation. On April 4th, I wrote on Facebook: “My prediction: the next President of the United States will be someone who is not yet in the race. (e.g., Possible alternative Dem ticket: Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren.) How crazy am I?” This wasn’t just a wild guess. It Read more…
Barring some unforeseen catastrophes, the well-greased campaign of Hillary Clinton is closing in on the Democratic nomination, while the “insurgent” campaign of Donald Trump rolls toward the nomination for the Republicans. As he has always said he would, Bernie Sanders will endorse Clinton, at the same time that he steps up his attacks on Trump. For tens of Read more…
The Right are winning – not because of their great policies and institutions – but because the Left is losing. But why is the Left losing? This is the six million dollar question! Furthermore, there is no one answer to it. The Left is losing for many many different reasons and we could analyse this Read more…
Go to source “Ideology, after all, is more influential than laws.….[N]o one…would dream of making legislation to force people to read certain books and prevent them from reading others.”1 –Literary critic H. Bruce Franklin The treatment of the movie Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe is an astounding example of ideological discipline performed by the American Read more…
Nasir Khan, May 6, 2016 “The point of modernity is to live a life without illusions while not becoming disillusioned.” ― Italian thinker and politician Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) Modernity means many things to different people. But in learned discourse, it refers to the collective body of particular socio-cultural norms and attitudes that emerged when the Read more…
Ever since the foundation of the American Republic, there has been both praise for and suspicion of the role the press plays in U.S. political life. Thomas Jefferson famously remarked that, if it were left to him “to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I would not Read more…
I have posted a visualization of Eqbal Ahmad‘s paper from 1980, “Postcolonial Systems of Power“, as part of my “History from Below” visualizations (earlier I did one on Mubarak Ali‘s English books broken down and catalogued by chapter). This particular paper with its lists of systems, countries and regimes is a natural candidate for a Read more…
First published: Mon, 18/04/2016 – 16:05 Lead photo caption: A commune meeting in Amude in Rojava’s Cizîrê canton, November 2015 The Kurdish region is currently undergoing a transformation. People are organising themselves in grassroots people’s assemblies and co-operatives, declaring their autonomy from the state and their wish for real democracy. Feminist and anti-capitalist ideas Read more…
What About Classism? is a new UK based pressure group geared towards making rigged economics a human rights issue. Perhaps you think that this is a good idea but feel that it is a very difficult, if not impossible, task. Here I would like to try to convince you that, at least in theory, it Read more…
Green Time TV Young Environmental Activists and Ideas by Don Fitz Protection of the environment requires experienced activists forging young ideas and training youth to take over their roles. May Green Time episodes look at developing actions and people, both in St. Louis and around the world. What experiences did young people have at the Read more…
I had this review posted years ago on Amazon but I no longer post content there since Amazon pulled Wikileaks from their site. *** Review of Brian Nelson’s “The Silence and the Scorpion” Nelson’s thesis is that the Chavez government “repressed a peaceful march with gunfire” on April 11, 2002. (p. 255). He acknowledges that Read more…
But don’t expect outrage from big “press freedom” advocates By Joe Emersberger (originally for Telesur ) Even before Mauricio Macri’s recent efforts to get Telesur off Argentina’s airwaves, the newly elected president had been tilting Argentina’s media landscape in his favor. What will Reporters without Borders (RSF), Human Rights Watch (HRW), and the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) Read more…
the infinitesimal is utopian; it falls behind the curve that slopes ever so slightly, tends to lie lest it fall behind further, at which point there is no real point, is there? “Utopia lies at the horizon. When I draw nearer by two steps, it retreats two steps. If I proceed ten steps forward, it Read more…
Nasir Khan, March 30, 2016 A suicide bomber belonging to extremist group, Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, associated with the Pakistani Taliban, attacked a large park in Lahore where people were celebrating Easter Sunday. His powerful bomb caused the deaths of at least 70 people, mostly women and children, and injured more than 350 people. The bomber seemed to Read more…
Re-post from 3-18-2011. [historical info taken from American Experience presentation and poetry from Jonathan Fink] On April 5, 2011, 400,000 New Yorkers, 1 out of 10, showed up in the rain to mourn the deaths of 146 garment workers, mostly young immigrant women, who had died in the deadliest workplace accident in New York history. Read more…
Nasir Khan On 22 March 2016, some suicide bombers carried out their indiscriminate attacks on the innocent people in Brussels. Their acts of vicious violence are shocking and despicable. ISIS has claimed responsibility for these attacks. ISIS has shown once again that it can strike anywhere it chooses and by such violent actions, it gains Read more…
The Democratic presidential primaries have been upended by Bernie Sanders’s populist revolution on the “left” tapping into the deep discontent of a broad swath of the population, still suffering the after-shocks of the Great Recession. His success has forced Hillary Clinton to adjust her rhetoric. Claiming she is the real “progressive”, who will get “Wall Read more…
Isn’t it rather odd that America’s largest single public expenditure scheduled for the coming decades has received no attention in the 2015-2016 presidential debates? The expenditure is for a thirty-year program to “modernize” the U.S. nuclear arsenal and production facilities. Although President Obama began his administration with a dramatic public commitment to build a nuclear Read more…
According to the Green Party’s 2016 Presidential candidate, Dr. Jill Stein, the Democratic Party cannot be trusted to defend the “interests of regular people.” Stein declares: “We need our own party, organized by, led by, and founded by, WE the people NOT the corporations!” “My Power to the People Plan is for deep system change, Read more…
the myth is not the fairytale, though it pretends to catch the drift, the smoke and the paltry guts that flake off when dents of time speak stilted ifs and buts, when the theme of now occludes, prevents power from showing where it really comes from from myth “The language of Realpolitik offers a poor Read more…
by Dr. Nasir Khan People around the world have become increasingly aware of the blasphemy laws in Pakistan. In fact, in a country where the 95-98% people are the followers of Islam, there was never any danger to this religion, its founder or its holy scripture. Then, why were these laws promulgated in this Islamic Read more…
INTRODUCTION (This introduces and supplements my recent op-ed, linked just below.) Farm justice, (labeled as a “family farm” point of view,) has not fared well against the dominant narrative in mainstream media in the 21st century, or even in alternative progressive media or among food progressives and other progressives, or among conservatives. Unfortunately almost all Read more…
(This blog is Part 1 of a 2-part article.) Monbiot’s Pro-Corporate Outrage (Authors note: This is a work in progress which I will further edit as I have time. There is demand for access to it, however, so I’m posting this now. The same goes for Part 2, which begins with his discussion of sustainable Read more…
Some History Biofuels are criticized for a variety of reasons. Here I focus on the impact of ethanol on corn prices (biodiesel on soybean prices). Numerous food films, books, blogs, and videos have highlighted the problems associated with cheap corn and other cheap farm prices. Corn prices, for example, were below the full costs of Read more…
Caught in an undertow of ever-escalating amorality, we, the American people, drift ever farther from the shores of a representative democracy. For one more national presidential election, will we throw away another opportunity to rescue ourselves and our country, not to mention the rest of humanity as well as our very planet? Will we choose Read more…
INTRODUCTION TO JILL & GREEN NEW DEAL! #JillStein: Green Party prez candidate: physician, her Green New Deal to eradicate unemployment & mitigate climate change! #JillStein: Green Party prez candidate fighting ferocious corporate media blackout of her campaign for environment & economic/social justice. #JillStein & Green Party can bring about paradigm shift from patriarchy win/lose, violence, Read more…
On February 10, 2016, Peace Action—the largest peace organization in the United States—announced its endorsement of Bernie Sanders for the Democratic nomination for President. Peace Action is the descendant of two other mass U.S. peace organizations: the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE) and the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign (the Freeze). SANE was Read more…
Below is a presentation of the basic plan, in three stages, for our new pressure group called What About Classism? The idea in presenting this here is to give people a general feel for the overall direction we hope to move in and how we intend to get there. Stage One: In 2015 we Read more…
Nasir Khan, February 8, 2016 To murder any person, Israeli or Palestinian, is not just because of ‘human nature’! In normal circumstances, any act of premeditated homicide is a crime in any state where the rule of law prevails. There are also ‘abnormal’ political circumstances when a people occupy another people’s country and keep their Read more…
Below are what I regard as the key excerpts from the UN working group ruling in favor of Julian Assange. The following excerpt from the ruling sums up the “argument” that Sweden made for its prosecutors refusing for years to move the “preliminary investigation” forward by coming to London to interview Assange: In the case Read more…
Writing in The New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell asks what can be learned from the residents of New Orleans who left for good after Hurricane Katrina struck. Quoting research that compared a group of evacuees who relocated to Houston with residents who returned to New Orleans, Gladwell writes that the residents who preferred New Orleans “put Read more…
The latest NYT reporter to be parachuted into Venezuela writes “Press freedom throughout Latin America is under threat, though the Committee to Protect Journalists ranks Venezuela as a better place for reporters than Colombia or Mexico in terms of the number of journalists killed. But deaths are not the only way to measure attacks on Read more…
A fight now underway over newly-designed U.S. nuclear weapons highlights how far the Obama administration has strayed from its commitment to build a nuclear-free world. The fight, as a recent New York Times article indicates, concerns a variety of nuclear weapons that the U.S. military is currently in the process of developing or, as the Read more…
Green Time TV Safety for People and the Environment by Don Fitz Protecting people and the environment can be two sides of the same coin. February Green Time episodes present efforts to integrate the two. Fission reactors produce very expensive energy, require a huge amount of water, and have risks that are seriously understated. In Read more…
Tom Anderson and Eliza Egret report from the war-torn city of Kobanê and meet those trying to rebuild what Daesh and US bombs have destroyed January 2016 Kobanê city ‘We have cleared 1.5 million tonnes of rubble,’ Abdo Rrahman Hemo (known as Heval Dostar), head of the Kobanê Reconstruction Board, tells us humbly as we sit Read more…
Tom Anderson and Pete Smith 14 January 2016 Reflections on the Paris climate talks from members of the Corporate Watch collective. The Agreement We won’t spend too much time discussing the agreement itself as plenty of others have done that already (see this excellent summary from ROAR magazine and this from climate scientist, Kevin Read more…
Looking at high energy carbohydrates from an evolutionary, political, disease, sports and science perspective. “Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food” Hippocrates Ancestral Health Global cooling around the last modern ice age, 2.5 million years ago, meant early humans found fruits and vegetables scarcer to find and helped bring about the adaption Read more…
Expanding access to high quality early childhood education is among the smartest investments that we can make. Research has shown that the early years in a child’s life—when the human brain is forming—represent a critically important window of opportunity to develop a child’s full potential and shape key academic, social, and cognitive skills that determine Read more…
Nasir Khan, January 9, 2015 This message of Chief Sitting Bull can stir the conscience of every human being. In any case, this is a hope and wish I have for the for common men and women in the world. But the situation is not so simple. There are people who are immune to what Read more…
Nasir Khan, December 27, 2015 I assure the followers of one Supreme God who belong to different religions, both monotheistic (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) and others (Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, etc.) that old gods and goddesses were not ‘real’. They were only man-made and existed in the imagination of their believers. However, it is important to point out Read more…
Nasir Khan, January 7, 2016 President Obamas shedding tears for the US children killed in gun violence Oh, what a sad sight! The kind-hearted and benevolent US president Obama has shed tears for the US children who were victims of gun violence! But he didn’t shed any tears on the cold-blooded killings of men, Read more…