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Alexei Navalny under arrest

Alexei Navalny, a Russian political opposition figure whose popularity in the West far exceeded his support in Russia, died while incarcerated in a Russian prison. He was serving a combined 30-and-a-half-year sentence for fraud and political extremism, charges that Navalny and his supporters claim were little more than trumped up accusations designed to silence a man who had emerged in recent years as the most vocal Russian critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

According to a statement released by the Russian Federal Penitentiary Service, “On February 16, …

The Author (left) with the Head of the Crimean Republic, Sergei Aksyanov (right)

Deliberate neglect, followed by a blockade and now war have failed to break the resolve of the peninsula’s inhabitants.

As the Russian military operation against Ukraine approaches its third year, the focus on the ongoing conflict has allowed another anniversary to go relatively unnoticed – it’s now around ten years since the violent events in Kiev’s Maidan Square that put in motion the circumstances which precipitated the current conflict.

Over the course of five days, from February 18 to …

Presently it is very likely that Donald Trump will be the nominee of the Republican Party. Joe Biden will represent the Democrats as the DNC had refused to groom over the last four years or so a much more appealing candidate. This blunder is just one in a series of even more significant failures of past democratic presidents and their powerful associates to avoid the rise of Mr. Trump and his cultish appointees.

While it is very easy, based on documents, to declare Mr. Trump to be a neo-fascist and/or a criminal, historical events indicate that the Democratic Party failed over …

All peace advocates know that the military industrial complex needs people to live in fear in order for their propaganda to work, in order to get people into a warring mood. Well, Glenn Greenwald recently described how government officials are stoking the current Sinophobia, which could get the U.S. into a very hot war with a superpower:

…whenever state officials start trying to increase the fear that the population has about some threat, foreign or domestic, it’s always in the way of insisting that they need more power to protect you from that threat that they’ve got you to fear, and …

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In the High Arctic scientists discovered million-year-old methane (CH4) trapped under some of the world’s mightiest glaciers detected via unprecedented groundwater springs. Analyses of 123 springs found CH4 in all but one. As the massive glaciers recede, space opens at the edge of permafrost, releasing ancient methane. This is one more totally unexpected global warming headache.

Methane detected in the High Arctic puts a big hole in the Global Methane Pledge of more than 100 countries that agreed to cut emissions 30% by 2030. It’s an add-on that nobody knows how to deal with.

The High Arctic location is Svalbard, Norway …

It is a historical fact that powerful elites do not wish to be diverted from pursuing their selfish interests by the public. Minimal, unthreatening expressions of dissent may be tolerated in ostensible ‘democracies’. But public opinion needs to be managed, manipulated or, if necessary, simply ignored.

After all, as Noam Chomsky has said, real ‘democracy is a threat to any power system’. He noted that Edward Bernays, one of the founders and leading figures of the huge public relations industry:

reminded his colleagues that with “universal suffrage and universal schooling… …

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just for a few hours: out of the insanity of the insane and dementia patients and psychopaths ruling the world, inside and outside of government

Sure, I live along the Central Coast of Oregon. How many times, even in my small memoir writing class I am …

Surmising.

The ruins of Avdiivka. Photo Credit: Russian Defense Ministry

As we mark two full years since Russia invaded Ukraine, Ukrainian government forces have withdrawn from Avdiivka, a town they first captured from the self-declared Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) in July 2014. Situated only 10 miles from Donetsk city, Avdiivka gave Ukrainian government forces a base from which their artillery bombarded Donetsk for nearly ten years. From a pre-war population of about 31,000, the town has been depopulated and left in ruins.

The mass slaughter on both …

The remedy is worse than the disease.

— Francis Bacon, “Of Seditions and Trouble” in Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall

The government never cedes power willingly.

Neither should we.

If the COVID-19 debacle taught us one thing it is that, as Justice Neil Gorsuch acknowledged, “Rule by indefinite emergency edict risks leaving all of us with a shell of a democracy and civil liberties just as hollow.”

Unfortunately, we still haven’t learned.

We’re still allowing ourselves to be fully distracted by circus politics and a constant barrage of bad news screaming for attention.

Three years after …

Gaza. Palestinians.  Israel.  Genocide.  Taylor Swift?  This odd cobbling of words is the extent celebrities make a mockery of serious conversation, even in such middle-brow outlets as Australia’s Radio National.  Admittedly, it was breakfast, and the presenter a seasoned impressionist of journalism, but surely listeners did not have to know that Swift’s private jet had just arrived in Melbourne, making it an occasion of national significance?

Ground had already been tilled, and seeds scattered, by desperate academics keen to draw gold dust from the Swift worship machine at Melbourne’s Swiftposium 2024.  Seriousness was not the order of the day and …

De-linking from the dominant ideological themes of capitalist society is a difficult task. The globalization of capital under the regime of neoliberal deregulation has allowed consumerism to establish a pervasive presence throughout the world. Even if we get to know harrowing information about the inequalities and injustices of the reining consumption model, we don’t enact a radical transformation of our personality. The response to anti-capitalist information remains confined to a momentary reaction of repulsion. Even as new mental data enters our consciousness, the latter continues to remain in a passive state. The inflow of enlightened knowledge settles into a tiny …

Don’t want to spoil your weekend, but the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) has picked Foreign Policy (FP) magazine’s article, How Primed for War Is China, as a top commentary. AEI states: “The likelihood of war with China may be the single-most important question in international affairs today.

FP knows how to start an article and capture attention ─ start with words that startle the audience.

If China uses military force against Taiwan or another target in the Western Pacific, the result could be war with the United States—a fight between two nuclear-armed giants brawling for hegemony in that region and …

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Personally, we have yet to raise a hen big enough to plow a field!

That said, having chickens running around the barnyard or even in a backyard coop makes one feel glad to be alive.  People often think of chickens as dumb or mean, but they is an over simplification of the chicken psyche.

As they scratch in the dirt, peck around in the grass and curiously come up to great us, hens are anything but mean. Anyone who has had to catch a chicken, knows that they can and will …

The imaginative faculties of standard Australian politicians retreat to some strange, deathly place on certain issues.  In that wasteland, they are often unrecoverable.  Like juveniles demanding instant reward, these representatives find complexity hideous, troubling, discomforting.  Focus on the prospect of immediate electoral gain, the crude punch, the bruising, the hurt. That, in sum, is Canberra’s policy towards refugees.

With this month’s appearance of 39 asylum seekers on some of the most remote shorelines on the planet in Western Australia, the customary wells of hysteria were again being tapped for political gain.  “Here we go again,” lamented the Tasmanian Greens Senator …