So, I’ve been excommunicated from Michael Shellenberger’s global anti-censorship movement. It’s my own fault. I was sowing dissension. I engaged in harmful speech in the group chat. I was making people feel uncomfortable. I was not playing ball. I was not with the program.
The program, as you may recall, was launched in Westminster, London, in June, when Mike and Matt Taibbi and Russell Brand exposed the Censorship Industrial Complex …
… for 35 pounds sterling a head.
My readers may recall this piece I published about the secret gathering …
Peter Koenig – PressTV Interview – transcript 21 September 2023
Background
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is in China on his first visit since the war and foreign-backed insurgency gripped his country some 12 years ago.
President al-Assad arrived in the eastern city of Hangzhou where he will attend the opening ceremony of the Asian Games on Saturday. He and other foreign leaders will then meet Chinese President Xi Jinping there. The Syrian president will also travel to Beijing to discuss bilateral issues and China’s help to rebuild his war-ravaged country. Beijing, which has long provided Damascus with diplomatic support, says that Assad’s visit will …
Shefa Salem al-Baraesi (Libya), Drown on Dry Land, 2019.
Three days before the Abu Mansur and Al Bilad dams collapsed in Wadi Derna, Libya, on the night of September 10, the poet Mustafa al-Trabelsi participated in a discussion at the Derna House of Culture about the neglect of basic infrastructure in his city. At the meeting, al-Trabelsi warned about the poor condition of the dams. As he wrote on Facebook that same day, over the past decade his beloved city has been …
Many have noted that the indictments of Trump ring of lawfare by the Biden administration. Donald Trump has now been indicted four times, and in blatant overkill, now faces 91 criminal charges. In New York alone he was hit with 34 felonies for the payments to Stormy Daniels. Trump also faces felony charges for claiming the 2020 election was the byproduct of fraud and then seeking to invalidate the outcome of that election through allegedly unlawful means.
These criminal cases rest on the assumption that Trump knew his claims of election fraud were false, making his actions to overturn …
A key function of state-corporate media is to keep the public pacified, ignorant and ill-equipped to disrupt establishment power.
Knowledge that sheds light on how the world operates politically and economically is kept to a minimum by the ‘mainstream’ media. George Orwell’s famous ‘memory hole’ from ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ signifies the phenomenon brilliantly. Winston Smith’s work for the Ministry of Truth requires that he destroys documents that contradict state propaganda:
When one knew that any document was due for destruction, or even when one saw a scrap of waste paper lying about, it was …
It looks like the Trudeau government in Canada is preparing to mandate masking again, despite the science, in randomized control trials, revealing no prophylaxis effect of masking compared to non-masking against respiratory viruses.
Diaspora politics can often be testy. While the mother country maintains its own fashioned narrative, governed by domestic considerations, the diaspora may, or may not, be in accord with the agreed upon story. While countries such as China and Iran are seen as the conventional bullies in this regard, spying and monitoring the activities of their citizens in various countries, India has remained more closeted and inconspicuous.
Of late, that lack of conspicuousness has been challenged. On September 18, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau revealed that there were “credible allegations” that agents in the pay of the Indian government had murdered …
Almost no one seems willing to hold their tongue on the latest claims. Here are my observations: not on the allegations, but on all the noise
by Jonathan Cook / September 19th, 2023
There are times when we would all be best advised to keep quiet and wait. But given that almost no one seems willing to hold their tongue on the latest claims being made about Russell Brand, I feel compelled – wisely or unwisely – to make a few tentative observations: not on the allegations, but on all the noise.
Let me preface these comments with an additional observation: It should be quite possible to hold more than one thought in one’s head at the same time. In fact, it is normally a pre-requisite for having anything interesting to say.
by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead / September 19th, 2023
There were relatively few secret police, and most were just processing the information coming in. I had found a shocking fact. It wasn’t the secret police who were doing this wide-scale surveillance and hiding on every street corner. It was the ordinary German people who were informing on their neighbors.
— Professor Robert Gellately, author of Backing Hitler, March 2002
This image is symbolic of everything that is wrong with modern society. A gas leak from Union Carbide’s pesticide plant in Bhopal in 1984 resulted in around 560,000 injured (respiratory problems, eye irritation, etc.), 4,000 severely disabled and 20,000 dead. Not only that, but the pesticides produced at the factory and the model of farming promoted has caused well-documented misery for farmers, harm to soil, water sources and the health of the population and a radical transformation of social relations in rural …
During the Cold War, assassinations most foul were entertained as necessary measures to advance the set cause. In Latin America, military regimes were keenly sponsored as reliably brutal antidotes to the Marxist tic, or at the very least the tic in waiting. Any government deemed by Washington to be remotely progressive would become ripe targets for violent overthrow.
To this day, the murderers of Chile’s socialist president Salvador Allende, (wait, we hear the first apologist mock, he was not murdered but suicided out of choice) along with thousands of innocents continues to receive briefs in their defence.
Why the Democratic Party is Worse Than the Republican Party For 85% of The US Population
by Bruce Lerro / September 16th, 2023
I’m reposting this article about the Democratic Party five years after it was published because after re-reading it, I wouldn’t change a thing. In addition, the Democratic Party has become even more right-wing since it gained power in 2020. At the end of the article I will name the many ways it has gotten still worse.
How to Conceive of the Two-party System
Lesser of two evils
Among liberals and all the different types of socialists, when the subject of the Democratic Party comes up, there are at least two variations. One is the familiar …
Corporate law firms have taught their wayward corporate clients how to use accretions of privileges and immunities to ward off or wait out the most devastating books, documentaries and media exposés. Corporate P.R. firms know that the media doesn’t follow the efforts of civic advocacy groups as a regular beat. Feature exposés are prime candidates for big journalistic awards like the Pulitzer Prizes. Reporters usually do not get awards for covering ongoing reform efforts, which require consistent media coverage to put heat on hesitant lawmakers or prosecutors – say on the push to make Congress increase corporate accountability.
The broad lament from commentators about global economic growth is that China is not pulling its weight. Not enough is being done to stir the sinews and warm the blood, at least when it comes to the GDP counters. And many such pundits hail from countries, most prominently the United States, which have done everything they can to clip the wings of the Middle Kingdom even as they demand greater strides in its growth. “China’s 40-year boom is over,” declared the Wall Street Journal last month in a tone of some satisfaction. “The economic model that took the country …
Jungfraujoch’s foreboding temperatures this September at the top of the world in Switzerland at 2.25 miles altitude alarmed glaciologists.
If anybody has lingering doubts about global warming’s strength of power to directly impact Earth’s ecosystems, think again. Antarctica, at the bottom of the world, experienced record high temperatures during its winter, as record high temperatures were also recorded at the top of the world in the Swiss Alps, where it’s always icy cold. As it happened, both the top and the bottom of the world hit record high temperatures, simultaneously, give or take a few days. There’s no known record of …
There are reasons for Libya’s ‘chaotic’, ‘dysfunctional’ response to the disaster. And to identify them, we need to look closer to home
by Jonathan Cook / September 15th, 2023
The reality of the West’s trademark current foreign policy – marketed for the past two decades under the principle of a “Responsibility to Protect” – is all too visible amid Libya’s flood wreckage.
Many thousands are dead or missing in the port of Derna after two dams protecting the city burst this week as they were battered by Storm Daniel. Vast swaths of housing in the region, including in Benghazi, west of Derna, lie in ruins.
The storm itself is seen as further proof of a mounting climate crisis, rapidly changing weather patterns across the globe and making disasters like …
What happened is, the prosecutor visited my blog and read a column I published in July, The Criminalization of Dissent (Revisited), which included screenshots of the alleged “hate-crime” Tweets that the original criminal investigation is based on, and that resulted in the Order of Punishment that the Berlin District Court handed down two weeks ago. So, the …
Much has been made of the September 9, 2023 simultaneous reports in The New York Times and Vanity Fair of the claims of a former Secret Service agent, Paul Landis, who was part of the security detail in Dallas, Texas when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963. Like so many reports by such media that have covered up the truth of the assassination for sixty years, this one about “the magic bullet” is also a red herring.
It encourages pseudo-debates and confusion and is a rather …
Following on from its decision to donate widely banned cluster munitions to Ukraine the US is sending armor-piercing depleted uranium (DU) munitions to fight Russia. Indifferent to the poisonous effect of these weapons, the Justin Trudeau government has remained mum on Washington’s escalatory move.
Depleted uranium (DU) is a by-product from the production of fuel used in atomic power stations. A heavy metal, DU is good for armor-piercing rounds.
But it’s also toxic. Studies have linked DU munitions to cancer and birth defects. The US DU munitions will add to the growing health and ecological damage of the war.
None of us has previously witnessed a barrage of extreme weather events of the kind that has been devastating lives across the globe this summer. Canadian wildfires the size of Austria, a Hawaiian town incinerated by a hurricane-fuelled firestorm, a Greek island devastated by three years of rainfall in a single day, a Libyan town washed into the sea after 40cm of rain fell in twenty-four hours leaving 20,000 dead, killer hurricanes fuelled by oceans overheated by climate change. And then there were the extraordinary heatwaves in …
Tsherin Sherpa (Nepal), Lost Spirits, 2014.
Dilemmas of humanity abound. There is little need to look at statistical data to know that we are in a spiral of crises, from the environmental and climate crisis to the crises of poverty and hunger. In 1993, the philosophers Edgar Morin and Anne-Brigitte Kern used the term ‘polycrisis’ in their book Terre-Patrie (‘Homeland Earth’). Morin and Kern argued that ‘there is no single vital problem, but many vital problems, and it is this complex intersolidarity …
Early morning radio listeners might’ve thought they’d tuned into the wrong station. No, they had the right one — KPFA at 94.1 FM. But yes, something was strange, weird, and even downright wrong. Listeners were hearing a pitch for improving the Military Industrial Complex, a need to build up U.S. defense industries in order to send more weapons to the proxy war in Ukraine.
This new show was “Background Briefing,” hosted by Ian Masters. He came to KPFA in April 2023.
“I had never heard of him until I tuned in at 5 a.m., and there he was,” a listener emailed. “I …
Monday, September 11, 2023 marked the 22nd Anniversary of the NYC 9/11, a day of global mourning, the beginning, or activation, of a crime of biblical proportions like never before in history remembered. Activation stands for onslaught of a colossal War on Humanity. What the small supremacist elite calls War on Terror is nothing less than an endless war on mankind. A war waged by a death cult. The preparation for the war started decades or probably hundred-plus years before.
Two planes hitting the twin towers of the NYC World Trade Center (WTC) on September 11, 2001 – probably remote-controlled – …
About eight months ago, the Michigan Department of Education revealed that at least 36 charter schools are failing in the state of Michigan. Many other charter schools are considered close to “low-performing.” This is not a small number of charter schools. It is not unreasonable to assume that several dozen more charter schools are in troubled waters (see here, here, and here).
The vast majority of charter schools in Michigan are openly for-profit charter schools. A chaotic “Wild West” pro-competition ethos prevails in the state because of the proliferation of such deregulated schools governed by unelected private …
“[I]t seemed so obvious from a purely psychological perspective that ‘face coverings’ were a bad idea that I believed my principal question would be: ‘How come we got saddled with the practice?’” — Alan Kennedy, emeritus Professor of Psychology at the University of Dundee
The tear-squeeze remembering those who died in the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington has become an annual event. In the words of US President George W. Bush, it was an attack on “our very freedom”. The US had been targeted because it was “the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world.”
Five decades ago, that brightest beacon of freedom and opportunity proved instrumental in destroying a democracy in Latin America. (Others before and since followed.) The 1973 coup that overthrew the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in favour of General Augusto Pinochet, an …
