Shooting a man slowly backing away is no way to preserve or protect
Some reasonable people are weighing the available evidence and waiting for more definitive proof of various allegations before they decide whether or not they think the death of Keith Lamont Scott, 43, in broad daylight in a parking lot in a housing development in Charlotte, North Carolina, on the sunny afternoon of September 20 was a police execution.
Those reasonable people are being unreasonable: the police clearly executed Keith Lamont Scott as he was slowly backing away from them, his hands at his sides, his body slack. The …
And it was interesting, because afterwards, there was a party, and there were couples who were arguing. Basically, the men, in general, didn’t like the movie. They were like, ‘I had hard times, he should have gotten a job, he should have pulled himself together, he had a kid.’ They were very tough with him. And the women were, ‘No, you don’t understand, he had mental illness, he was broken, he lost his wife.’ They were much more understanding toward him. I just stood back and thought, look at this.”
— An after-screening party at the Sarasota Film Festival: writer-director Oren Moverman
Bombs, domestic and foreign, are defining the nature of politics in the United States, the European Union and among radical Islamist groups and individuals. The scale and scope of bomb-politics varies with the practitioner. ‘Wholesale bombers’ are state actors, who engage in large-scale, long-term bombing designed to destroy adversary governments or movements. ‘Retail bombers’ are groups or individuals engaging in small-scale, sporadic bombings, designed to provoked fear and secure symbolic outcomes.
Apart from planned bombings, there are improvised bombings committed by deranged individuals who engage in …
Significant sums in Canadian “aid” are spent promoting international mining initiatives.
In a press release last week Ontario-based Carube Copper said it acquired over “500 square kilometres of the most prospective ground in Jamaica based on historic showings, the work completed and reported in 1993 by the Canadian International Development Agency (‘CIDA’).”
Canadian aid has facilitated similar work elsewhere. Researching Canada in Africa: 300 years of aid and exploitation I discovered examples of Ottawa funding the collection of geological data in Tanzania, Angola, Cameroon, Niger, Uganda, Kenya and elsewhere. Long time West Africa-based freelance journalist, Joan Baxter, describes a …
— Donald Trump, Hofstra University, September 26, 2016
It really doesn’t matter that these two creatures loathed and feared in varying degrees should even be conducting a debate. What, after all, is there to dispute? Both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump inhabit worlds of the disparately dislikeable, and reaped the bounty of the US with varying degrees of ruthlessness.
Of course, the assessment from the pundits resembled everything that had transpired before. Take the NBC live coverage, filled with the tepid, the unsure and the stunned. The presidential debate had been “surreal”; Clinton was “overly prepared” yet …
In search of a haircut, I found Analog, Eugene’s favorite barber shop according to Yelp. Also a tattoo parlor. Upstairs, the walls are lined with LP album covers of the 60s, 70s and 80s, with good tunes on the sound system. But it was too busy that morning, with a long wait.
A few blocks away Anderson’s took me right away. They had free IPA on tap for customers. “The Big Lebowski” was playing on their large-screen TV, next to the small wire-frame house where one barber’s small dog dwells. All very homey and laid back. Everyone there was relaxed and …
I remember a time when a cabbage could sell itself by being a cabbage. Nowadays it’s no good being a cabbage – unless you have an agent and pay him a commission. Nothing is free anymore to sell itself or give itself away. These days, Countess, every cabbage has its pimp.
― Jean Giraudoux, The Madwoman of Chaillot
This election seems to have traumatized the usually, and increasingly, somnambulant public in the US to the degree that a number of various mental affects are activated, and maybe even some old wounds finally surfacing again, but most of all it has generated a …
Following the EU referendum, a friend told me that he had voted to leave. His reasons were nothing to do with immigration or the democratic deficit in EU institutions. No. He said he just wanted to deliver a slap in the face to the establishment who were lining up to tell him of the dire consequences that would befall the British people if they left the European Union. Isn’t that a bit like cutting off your nose to spite your face, I said. Yes, he replied, but it felt good to puncture the smugness of the high and mighty who …
Ban Ki-Moon’s second term as the Secretary General of the United Nations is ending this December. He was the most ideal man for the job as far as the United States and its allies are concerned.
Of course, there will always be other Ban Ki-Moons. In fact, the man himself was a modified version of his predecessor, Kofi Annan.
The unspoken, but unmistakable rule about UN Secretary Generals is that they must come across as affable enough so as not to be the cause of international controversies, but also flexible enough to accommodate the US disproportionate influence over the United Nations, particularly …
(The Theory of Conceptual-Commodity-Value-Management within Post-Industrial Post-Modern Bourgeois-State-Capitalism)
by Michel Luc Bellemare / September 27th, 2016
Within post-industrial post-modern bourgeois-state-capitalism, value is no longer based on labor and/or on labor theories of value such as Marx’s theory. In fact, all post-industrial post-modern societies to various degrees have shed their modern labor theories of value and surplus-value; i.e., theories where labor-time and cost of production are the basis of price and value determinations. In contrast to labor theories of value, post-industrial post-modern societies are increasingly adopting theories of conceptual-commodity-value-management, where price and value determinations are increasingly based on perception and conceptualization-control through alliances of enterprise, alliances which structure price and value according to their own arbitrary whims …
Much has been made of the basic unfairness in how responsibility is shared between nations for ameliorating the refugee crisis. But the real question is the level of economic sharing that is needed to deal with its root causes, when the international response continues to be woefully inadequate.
Following the first ever United Nations Summit on Refugees and Migrants last week, many civil society organisations and concerned citizens are taking stock of our governments’ collective response to this unprecedented global crisis. The UN Summit was two years in the making, …
During the past three decades, the American people have been kept in the dark about the true status of the Social Security program. Politicians from both political parties give out false and conflicting information on a regular basis, and nobody knows who to believe.
The basic, indisputable fact is that the Social Security Amendments of 1983 included a hefty hike in the payroll tax rate which was designed to generate large surpluses for the next 30 years. Over the period from 1983, when the higher taxes were initiated, until 2010 when the annual surpluses came to an end, a total of …
Essentially she is now being tortured as punishment for an act of desperation.
— Nancy Hollander, lawyer for Chelsea Manning, September 24, 2016
It was not sufficient for US military authorities to sentence whistleblower Chelsea Manning to the onerous, disproportionate sentence of 35 years imprisonment for conniving with WikiLeaks in releasing classified material. (People have gotten less for gruesome, remorseless murders.) Punishment has a myriad of forms, and even within the carceral system, Manning has discovered that additional methods can be devised.
As with any penal system worth its brutal salt, minor infractions incite strong rebuke and hefty retaliation. Manning has previously been …
There is massive opposition to Israeli actions in the United States today, particularly importantly in the Jewish community, where there’s been an enormous shift in that discourse.
So you still have organizations, right-wing organizations like AIPAC that include very wealthy donors, no doubt, but they no longer can even make the claim–which was probably never true, but it certainly is no longer true–that they speak for the majority, let alone all, of the Jewish community.
You now have an organization like J Street in the center. You have Jewish Voice for Peace on the left, which has over 200,000 supporters across the
Settle your quarrels, come together, understand the reality of our situation, understand that fascism is already here, that people are dying who could be saved, that generations more will die or live poor butchered half-lives if you fail to act. Do what must be done, discover your humanity and your love in revolution. Pass on the torch. Join us. Give up your life for the people.
— George Jackson, Blood In My Eye
As the entire world bears witness to two more never-ending snuff-black-people videos, this time by this nation-state’s police forces in Tulsa, and yet another in Charlotte, NC, it is …
Corporate media bias on foreign policy is more pronounced than most critics even imagine. As part of a recent fact check for A Propaganda System: How Canada’s government, corporations, media and academia sell war and exploitation I discovered my own misplaced trust.
I searched Canadian Newsstand to confirm no media outlet commented on or investigated a 2011 Canadian Press report demonstrating Ottawa militarized its response to the 2010 earthquake in Haiti to control the population. According to an internal file CP uncovered through an access to information request, Canadian officials worried that “political fragility has increased the risks of a popular …
The recent article by professor Denis Rancourt, The Climate Religion, argues that belief in climate change is a religion. Although he is right that religion is a powerful belief system common to human societies, which leaders take advantage of to control people, he is dead wrong about acceptance of the science of anthropogenic global warming being a religion. This is a one-time rebuttal (no spitting match, thank you) of his contention.
Professor Rancourt is a climate change denier. Climate denial itself has become a religion, impervious to evidence. There have been many prominent climate deniers, such as …
One Earth is a core group of players ranging in age from 12-85. “NATO Blues” is our first release with 5-6 additional tracks to be released throughout the remainder of 2016. We are a musical and creative revolt against a straight-jacketed artistic, social, economic and political world.
Mainstream media would have most of us believe that the current struggle at Standing Rock, North Dakota is all about clean water – that its only focus is stopping the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) from running through Indigenous reservation land. And, yes, it is about these things. But while such a narrative may create “hot headlines,” it fails to capture the full truth and essence of what‘s really going on there.
On September 9 through September 12, our Workers World Party delegation gathered with 8,000 others to support the national call to mobilize for support.
Falsehood is a recognized and extremely useful weapon in warfare, and every country uses it quite deliberately to deceive its own people, to attract neutrals, and to mislead the enemy.
Who do you suppose wrote that? Noam Chomsky? Perhaps Gore Vidal in one of his grandiloquent moments? Or William Blum, as a preamble to his chronicling US military and CIA interventions in Killing Hope? No, it was none of our contemporary antiwar critics. It was Arthur Ponsonby, British Lord and pacifistic MP, in his 1928 tome, Falsehood in War-Time.
The war-time which inspired Ponsonby’s In-war-truth-is-the-first-casualty observation was the First World War; the …
