Новости за 24.05.2024

In one of the most egregious uses of the pardon power since Bill Clinton freed billionaire tax cheat, Israeli agent and international fugitive Marc Rich as the clock struck midnight on his lamentable administration, last week Texas Gov. Greg Abbott freed an avowed racist who ran a red light, before plunging his car into a crowd of protesters and fatally shooting a man who was trying to protect people from being run over. Abbott granted the killer a pardon, even though the gunman had been obsessed... Читать дальше...

The Washington Post’s David Ignatius has always been an apologist for the Central Intelligence Agency; then he added the Pentagon to his list for institutional apologies.  But now Ignatius is going much further; he has become the mouthpiece for both the administrations of President Joe Biden and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.  His most recent editorial (“The U.S. is assembling the pieces of a Gaza war endgame”) foresees the “contours of a possible exit ramp” in Gaza that is constructed out of sheer fantasy. Читать дальше...

Tina Cordova is intimately familiar with the legacy of the atomic bomb. Her hometown, Tularosa, New Mexico, is just thirty-four miles downwind from the Trinity Test Site, where Manhattan Project scientists first detonated what they called “the Gadget.” When both of her great-grandfathers, who were in Tularosa during the blast, succumbed to stomach cancer ten years later, it was just the beginning of her family’s troubles. More

“Over the years, Boeing and its employees have played a vital role in the advancement of Cal State Long Beach.” Jane Close Conoley, President, California State University, Long Beach Pro-Palestinian student protests and encampments have bloomed this spring across U.S. universities. Unsurprisingly, campus administrators have responded with calls for civility and peace — that is, More

A bit of recent history seems worth recalling as the nation careens towards an election that seems somewhat likely to put a man Noam Chomsky once rightly called “the most dangerous criminal in human history” back in the world’s most powerful office. It’s quite possible that the fascist monster Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors” Trump would More

So many trips back and forth from the US to Pakistan ever since I "left" Lahore on Sep 12th, 1979. My 21st birthday. I was off to conquer the world, become the free and independent woman I had always dreamt of being, away from the strictures of desi patriarchy- or so I imagined. So many tearful and joyful reunions, departures, and arrivals over four and a half decades that now appear to have passed in the blink of an eye. More

There has to be some irony that as Donald Trump sits in the dock in lower Manhattan, on charges of cooking his corporate books for $130,000 after paying off a porn star (only the flag-waving Supreme Court would let him walk), while slightly to the west, on Wall Street, the same grifter (here as the More

Well-deserved indictments keep hitting Congress. The latest indicted legislator is Texas Democrat Henry Cuellar, the politician backed by former House speaker Nancy Pelosi in his last election, against a more progressive opponent, of course. On May 3, the justice department charged Cuellar with accepting roughly $600,000 from Azerbaijan’s state-owned oil company and a Mexican bank. More

While statements that “No one is above the law,” are repeated in the U.S. over the trials of former President Donald Trump, can the same be said internationally? By analogy, Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan of the International Criminal Court (ICC) said yes when he announced he was seeking arrest warrants for Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. More

There are constants in this world — occurrences you can count on. Sunrises and sunsets. The tides. That, day by day, people will be born and others will die. Some of them will die in peace, but others, of course, in violence and agony. For hundreds of years, the U.S. military has been killing people. More

Inadvertently, Israel has pressed the reset button on its war with the Palestinian people, taking back the so-called conflict to square one. Save for a few self-serving Palestinian officials affiliated with the Palestinian Authority (PA), most Palestinians do not seem consumed with the return to the peace process, or even engaged in discussions about two-state More

I was politicized and radicalized fairly late in life, beginning at the age of 30 at the end of the 1980s, when I embraced left politics and radical feminism at the same time. Despite tensions between the two philosophies, I remain committed to both. Back to the ‘80s: Until then, I had been a fairly More

“A major question is whether a large-scale collapse of the Amazon forest system could actually happen within the twenty-first century.” (Source: Bernardo M. Flores, et al, Critical Transitions in the Amazon Forest System, Nature, Feb. 14, 2024). It may seem absurd to consider collapse of the Amazon rainforest (65-million-years-old) which seems impossible, too far out, More

Israel has, for decades, created many versions of itself—Israel in politics, in history, in the United States, in books, in movies and on television.  The real Israel, however, has been shrouded behind a veil of deception.  After 7 October 2023, the undisguised coarse Israel has revealed itself.   For years, Israel has made sure that Palestine, with its More

No symbolic system [i.e., basis for culture] in history has been able to rival religious faith, which forges a bond between the routine behavior… of individuals and ultimate, imperishable truths.  It’s the most enduring, deep-rooted universal form of popular culture that history has ever witnessed….            – Terry Eagleton, Where Does Culture Come from? London Monthly Review 4/25/24 More

An Eastern race well versed in Western culture and profoundly in sympathy with Western ideals will be established in the Orient. Furthermore, a Jewish state will inevitably fall under the control of American Jews who will work out, along Jewish lines, American ideals and American civilization. —William Yale, US State Department consultant, 1919 Unrelenting mass More

If a colloquium on early entrepreneurs had been convened in the early 20th century, most participants would have viewed traders as operating on their own, bartering at prices that settled at a market equilibrium established spontaneously in response to fluctuating supply and demand. According to the Austrian economist Carl Menger, money emerged as individuals and More

The labor movement in the United States used to be respected and looked to for leadership; people cared about what positions labor took, watched when they mobilized, and noticed the causes they supported.  This was especially true among the left. Today, for most of the country, crickets.  Including much of the left.  And yet, labor More

It is not until the last of the eight episodes of Ripley, which dropped in April on Netflix, that Bach’s music makes an appearance. I’d been expecting it, and not just any piece from among the one-thousand-plus numbers in the Baroque master’s catalog. It had to be the Goldberg Variations. One of Bach’s most celebrated More

“Gen·o·cide: the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group.” -Oxford Dictionary “Now we all have one common goal— erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth.” — Nissim Vaturi, Deputy Speaker of the Knesset [Israeli parliament]. More

Living through the 1970s was like walking through a never-ending storm.  The cavalcade of world-changing events never seemed to end.  Trying to make sense of the maelstrom was a constant game of catching up and keeping pace.  This was true in politics, international affairs, culture and community.  The contradictions of the post-World War Two world More

“Libertarianism is a people’s movement and a liberation movement. it seeks the sort of open, non-coercive society in which the people, the living, free, distinct people may voluntarily associate, dis-associate and, as they see fit, participate in the decisions affecting their lives. This means a truly free market in everything from ideas to idiosyncrasies. It More

Asian American households have the highest median income of the major racial and ethnic groups. Although Asian Americans have a higher median income than the non-Hispanic white population, they also have a higher poverty ratethan the white population on the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM). (The SPM is a more comprehensive poverty measure that also makes More

The oasis that was once Africa: Travel is neither romantic nor adventurous: It is biblical: It is about a past not yet seen. It is about a place known as our plane.: I have grappled with the significance and pleasures of my photography from series and series series of historical compositions and recitations. My mind More

Important missive from Gladys Flagg, Patriot: They say courage is just another word for bravery, but on that fateful day, I learned the real meaning of courage is refusing to give in to the woke leftist mob. On that fateful day, I was going to the store. A harmless ordinary woman (born that way, thank More