Losing Innocence
Through government incompetence
Is it, or isn’t it? If it is, there is absolutely no room to equivocate. If an embryo is truly a human child, pontificating and political posturing must be put aside; drastic and immediate intervention is called for. The lives of real children are at stake.
In Alabama, it’s been decided: embryos are children; there’s nothing left to debate. Those in the know are absolutely certain that at the moment of conception, when sperm and egg unite to become an embryo, a human being is immediately formed. Those in the know are absolutely certain that every embryo is a child, and each child …
Through government incompetence
Abel Meeropol cited this photograph of the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, August 7, 1930, as inspiring his poem. Meeropol published the poem under the title “Bitter Fruit” in January 1937 in The New York Teacher, a union magazine of the New York teachers union. Though Meeropol had asked others (notably Earl Robinson) to set his poems to music, he set “Strange Fruit” to music himself.
Power Ballads: Don’t catch you slippin’ up!
Of all art forms the ballad has the benefit of expediency. From …
Remember Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster film Schindler’s List? In it Oskar Schindler, an ambitious Czech businessman, has his epiphany in Krakow, Poland during the German occupation. Schindler came to Krakow to make his fortune using Jewish labor at a factory he opened. Schindler worked the system to get unpaid Jewish workers by bribing the German Army contacts he had made. At that point in his life, Oskar just had the philosophy ofvgoing along to get along. As he got to see and understand what was going on regarding how the Germans treated the Jews, Schindler quickly got a conscience. From that …
The mass slaughter of Palestinian civilians by Israel has shaken people throughout the world. It is a brutal, unfathomable expression of hate and violence; systemic genocide, long in the planning, that can only be described as an act of evil.
Whilst the Israeli government and their henchmen are the principle perpetrators, they have been supported by the US and a coterie of timid western governments, plus much of mainstream western media from day one. And despite the current political rhetoric of restraint, they continue to supply the weapons that are being used to murder Palestinians.
It is not a war it, is …
If only we could say that Peter Dutton, Australia’s federal opposition leader and curator of bigoted leanings, was unusual in assuming that granting humanitarian visas to Palestinians might be problematic. But both he, and his skew-eyed spokesman on home affairs, James Patterson, have concluded that votes are in the offing. Refugees may be accepted from the Ukrainian-Russian War, as long as they are Ukrainian, but anything so much as a whiff of a Palestinian fleeing the Israel-Hamas conflict is bound to be concerning. Ukrainians are noble victims; the latter might be terrorist sympathisers or Hamas militants.
This view started being floated …
Part One: Origins
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, …
Republican congressman Matt Gaetz has called for requiring budget cuts to offset assistance to any overseas ally
Part Two: The Resurrection of Crimea
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 …
At my relatively old age or state of maturity there are many things about which to dream. As a youth much of this nocturnal secretion necessarily extends beyond conscious experience. Hence we can easily believe that dreams are fantasy, in the sense of words describing what we could not have witnessed or done, at the very least from the bed in which we lay. Since all that is accessible or assessable from what we call dreams are the words — if we have them — to describe, dreams might be called covert verbalization. The only detectable difference is that we …
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 …
And Charleton Heston isn’t around to save us
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 …
…the Left narrative, no matter how accurate and intellectually powerful it may be, cannot expect to catch the imagination of the citizenry without including a vision for a real alternative future. Moreover, working-class institutions need to be reinstituted for the enhancement of class consciousness and authentic socialist parties need to be rediscovered for the Left narrative to become politically effective. Social movements are important, but their actions rarely have lasting effects. Only political parties can succeed in forging the Left narrative into the policy agenda and turn it into a programmatic plan for social change. Understandably enough, this is quite …
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 …
While regular guys were putting their lives on the line fighting the “good war” for their country, what was their government doing?
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… …
On February 21, the Royal Courts of Justice hosted a second day of carnivalesque mockery regarding the appeal by lawyers representing an ill Julian Assange, whose publishing efforts are being impugned by the United States as having compromised the identities of informants while damaging national security. Extradition awaits, only being postponed by rearguard actions such as what has just been concluded at the High Court.
How, then, to justify the 18 charges being levelled against the WikiLeaks founder under the US Espionage Act of 1917, an instrument not just vile but antiquated in its effort to stomp on political discussion and …
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 …
Students display a butterfly they made at the Madu Adu (science, or ‘let’s do it’) corner. Credit: Photographs and collages by Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.
In 1945, the newly formed United Nations held a conference to found the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO). The main concern of the delegates, particularly those who came from the Third World, was literacy. There needs to be a ‘world crusade against illiteracy’, said Dr Jaime Jaramillo Arango, the rector of the National University of Colombia. For him, and several …
Surmising.
On February 20, it was clear that things were not going to be made easy for Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder who infuriated the US imperium, the national security establishment, and a stable of journalists upset that he had cut their ill-tended lawns. He was too ill to attend what may well be the final appeal against his extradition from the United Kingdom to the United States. Were he to be sent to the US, he faces a possible sentence amounting to 175 years arising from 18 venally cobbled charges, 17 spliced from that archaic horror, the Espionage Act of …
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 …
Photo courtesy of Ross Rowley
The Israeli government is like the bad friend who only calls to ask for money or favors. For 75 years, Jewish supremacists beguiled our nation into believing their problems were America’s problems too. By using the tragedy of the Holocaust, they captured our sympathies and eventually played us for suckers — now democrats are angry.
Not all, but a growing number are once they find out the 260 billion dollars U.S. taxpayers have given the Israeli government since WWll is money down the rathole when measured …
Three Years Later, We’re Still Failing
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.
What is wrong with this scene?
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 …
Orientation
The emergence of a strange, secular god
“I am the Lord Thy God, Thou Shalt not have strange gods before me” is not just a religious commandment. Every nation-state expects their citizens to give up or subordinate their regional loyalties, their class, their ethnicity and even their religion to this new god. If we could tell any culture in the world before the 18th century that we nationalists are willing to give our lives to fight strangers in a land we have never seen, they’d say we were crazy. I am a US …
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 …
Hospitals should be places of healing, not theaters of war.
Many decades ago in Chicago, my favorite of several part-time student jobs was operating the “old-style” telephone switchboard at a small hospital called Forkosh Memorial. The console of coils and plugs included a mirror so operators could keep an eye on the hospital entrance, which on weekends and evenings was also monitored by an elderly, unarmed security guard named Frank. He sat at a classroom style desk near the entrance with a ledger book. Over the course of four years, on weekends and evenings, “security” at the hospital generally consisted solely of Frank and me. Fortunately, nothing much ever happened. …