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4 Billion Dead: ‘There Are No Words’

Wildfire smoke billows over the Atlantic coast near Lacanau, France, in July. Photo by climate scientist Stefan Rahmstorf.
If you need an indication of how divorced the ‘mainstream’ media is from reality, consider this: the possibility of at least 4 billion deaths resulting from 3 degrees Celsius of global warming by 2050 made barely a dent in news headlines.

Last year, a team of experts from the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries and the University of Exeter published a report, ‘Planetary Solvency – …

Killing the Commons: The Hidden Politics of Industrial Cheese

The decline of regional British cheeses is emblematic of the broader process of homogenization, or the ‘great flattening’, through which land, culture and the human body lose autonomy and diversity. 

There is a huge library of literature on British cheese, but the vast majority of books focus on flavor profiles, history and the artisan cheesemaker. Many also appear to be gastronomical guides for consumers. 

However, here, the decline of regional cheese varieties is framed as a loss of agency and the destruction of a ‘biological lane’ that allowed humans to exist outside of a corporate-managed supply chain. The article uses cheese as …

It’s Obnoxious For Westerners To Criticize The Targets Of The Western Empire

I still find myself fuming at the way ostensibly well-informed individuals can stand right in the heart of the empire denouncing its targets, as we saw in the open letter that a group of left-wing Western individuals addressed “to Iran’s political prisoners,” framing Iran as a “source of oppression” equal to the US and its allies.

It’s crazy this even needs to be said, but if you are a Westerner, your ONLY job is to oppose the abuses of the Western empire. Not Iran. Not China. Not Russia, Cuba, or North Korea.

If you live in the US or one of its …

The Chopping Block

Is there a power hierarchy profiting from its crimes and conferred protection from the chopping block?

Deprived at Sea: The Tribulations of the USS Abraham Lincoln

The conflict with Iran continues to deliver its mean shocks to an increasingly doddering US imperium. Depleted munitions, depleted stocks of goodwill and, it would seem, a disruption in resupplying warships operating in the Middle East, have become dents in a struggling war machine.

This month, the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, lengthily stationed in the Arabian Sea, caught the attention of naval observers with reports of mental distress and sheer desperation on the part of members of the 5,000-strong crew of sailors and Marines. Personnel had endured a nine-month deployment – a record – having made only one stop in Guam …

Trump’s Positivity

What is the important consideration of Trump’s upbeat pronouncements?

Israel Is Not a Democracy: It Is Genocidal Apartheid

Naftali Tamir (former Israeli Ambassador to Australia) stated (2006): “Israel and Australia are like sisters in Asia. We are in Asia without the characteristics of Asians. We don’t have yellow skin and slanted eyes. Asia is basically the yellow race. Australia and Israel are not – we are basically the white race.”1Charlotte Hallé, “Envoy to Australia to explain ‘yellow skin’ remarks,” Haaretz, 16 October 2006.,2“Naftali Tamir,” Grokipedia.,3Zionist quotes re racism and Palestinian Genocide.”

Now in 2026  the present Israeli ambassador, Hillel Newman, has refused to apologize for the IDF murder of Australian Zomi Frankcom and her 6 aid …

Whither Humanity

The devastating critiques of our apocalyptic mess keep coming. I was blown away by McCarrareh The Enchantments of Mammon (2019), by Eisenstein’s Sacred economics: Money, gift and society in the age of transition (2021), Heying’s A hunter-gatherer’s guide to the 21st century: Evolution and the challenges of modern life (2021), David Graeber’s The dawn of everything: A new history of humanity (2021), by Monbiot’s Regenesis: Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet

Armed Neutrality and the Consistent Renunciation of War

A Left-Wing Position on Switzerland’s Military Sovereignty


Rosa Luxemburg in the Swiss Alps. Integral, armed neutrality is a quintessentially left concept.

(Original article here in German)

Armed neutrality means consistently renouncing war as a primitive, backward instrument of foreign policy. It represents progress away from war and toward peace.

For 170 years, Switzerland has had no enemies—either in the region or worldwide, and certainly no military enemies. During that time, it has neither waged a war nor had to endure one. This stands in stark contrast to every other European state. We on the Swiss …

Ice Age Hunters and Pastoralists: Bio-Evolutionary and Climatic Roots of European Individualism


Orientation
How far back does individualism go?

In my books Lucifer’s Labyrinth  Forging Promethean Psychology I attempted to describe the many ways that the West is different from the rest of the world. In Lucifer’s Labyrinth I traced the history of individualism as far as the Middle Ages. In my first book, From Earth-Spirits to Sky-Gods I contended that individualism in the West began in Axial Iron Age Greece. Kevin MacDonald, in his book that this article is based on, Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition, has convinced …

Materialism

What explains rampant American consumerism? Flashback to December 2006 when then president George W Bush exhorted Americans: “I encourage you all to go shopping more.”

Israel Manipuates AI Answers — And Most People Don’t Know It

People around the world increasingly get their information from AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, Claude, or Google’s Gemini. But in these youthful years for AI chatbots, there’s been a problem (for the ruling elite). Since the bots get their knowledge from massive amounts of information rather than one propaganda source, they often — but not always — feed the truth back to the reader. (Oh, the horror!)

This means that if you ask ChatGPT right now whether Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, it will tell you yes….

Exonerating Murder: The IDF and the World Central Kitchen Killings

Being a resident in Gaza has proved lethal not merely for civilians eking out a wretched existence. Mortality rates among journalists, medical staff, and aid workers have been egregiously high since Israel’s military opened its account after the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023. (In truth, Israel’s account regarding striking, bombing and embargoing this little strip of territory has been open for decades.) The regularity of killings, largely at the hands of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), negatives the claim that there isn’t a policy or approach in place that forgoes the rigours of international humanitarian law in favour of …

Let’s Not Forget: The CIA Overthrew Mossadegh in Iran

August 19, 2026, marks the 73rd anniversary of the 1953 CIA/MI6 coup that toppled Prime Minister Mossadegh in Iran and ended Iran’s mid-20th-century experiment with parliamentary democracy. This consequential intervention is largely forgotten in mainstream US culture. While US officials for decades portrayed Iran as a threat, the US public remained unaware of how and why US-Iran relations have reached such a deadly state of military confrontation today. If asked, most North Americans will likely believe the origin of US-Iran animosity goes back to the 1979-1981 Hostage Crisis, when militant Iranians took US Embassy staff hostage for 444 days, an …

Trump’s Prevarications

Add Sudanese to Ottawa’s List of Expendable People

Twenty-eight years ago today the US bombed a Sudanese pharmaceutical plant causing tens of thousands of deaths. Canada’s backing for that war crime and ongoing support for UAE highlights Ottawa’s indifference to Sudanese lives.

Canadian officials defended the illegal August 20, 1998, US bombing of the Al- Shifa pharmaceutical facility in Khartoum. Washington claimed the plant produced the deadly nerve agent VX. It didn’t.

In a rare move, CIA analyst Mary O’Neil McCarthy sent …

A Century of Zionist Domination

How America’s foundational values were destroyed by a special interest group

The tightly-coordinated Zionist project of creating a Jewish state in Western Asia, initiated in the early 20th century, involved every conceivable form of clandestine activity.
From Alison Weir’s book gainst Our Better Judgment: The hidden history of how the United States was used to create Israel1All sources all come from Alison Weir’s extensively-researched 2014 book.we learn that in 1913, an academic named Horace M. Kallen founded an elitist secret society called the Parushim which, according to former New York Times editor and author Peter Grose, means ‘Pharisees’ and ‘separate’ in Hebrew. The Parushim grew out of Harvard’s …

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    All sources all come from Alison Weir’s extensively-researched 2014 book. ↩︎

Militarist Absurd Theatre with Dead Horse Punditry?

No. There Are Only Alternatives

When this morning I saw the above new US Trump map, I came to think of Frank Zappa, The Mothers of Invention, who said that politics is the entertainment division of the Military-Industrial Complex.

That formulation beats many academic analyses – as you will have understood when you listen carefully to today’s geopolitical and geopolitical (male) experts who, most likely, the next 48 hours will be beating the above dead Trump Hormuz horse that doesn’t even qualify as a horse in the first place.

What is really dead in today’s international …

Call to Deny Entry to Canada by an Extremist Israeli Settler and Anti-Palestinian Racist

We have learned that Jerusalem Deputy Mayor Arieh King, an extremist Israeli settler and anti-Palestinian racist, has been invited to speak in Toronto on August 25.

King is directly responsible for illegal efforts to dispossess Palestinians from their homes in occupied East Jerusalem, and replace them with settlers, which is a war crime. He is an open racist, wanting “maximum Jews to own maximum land” and who calls Palestinians “natural swindlers.” He was investigated by police and condemned by the European Union for inciting violence and terror against the UN …

Genocidal Reverberations

Most people in Victoria don’t realize we’re on treaty land.

— John Lutz, a University of Victoria historian and scholar on indigenous and colonial histories, Time Colonist, 19 February 2017

Throughout Canada, the spillover effects of colonialism continue to be experienced. In the  west coast city colonially designated  as Victoria,1mətúliyeʔ in Lək̓wəŋən, the the traditional language of the Songhees; METULIYE in SENĆOŦEN, the traditional language of the W̱SÁNEĆ. named after an imperialist queen who never set foot in the city, a political reckoning is underway to return pockets of land to the Songhees.

The return is being opposed by a certain section …

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    mətúliyeʔ in Lək̓wəŋən, the the traditional language of the Songhees; METULIYE in SENĆOŦEN, the traditional language of the W̱SÁNEĆ. ↩︎

Swampy or Okefenokee or Just Plain Holler Music, this Front Man for Richie Havens is Reinventing himself Once Again

"My music philosophy simply is to make quality, meaningful music to and look for people who want to hear it and pay for it." Walter Parks

 Listen HERE ahead of the KYAQ FM August 26 airing!!

Upcoming shows

8/22 St Louis, MO Kirkwood Performing Arts Center

8/26 Seattle, WA The Triple Door

8/28 Newport, OR Pacific Maritime Heritage Center

8/29 Portland, OR Artichoke Music

8/30 Bellingham, WA New Prospect Theatre

“The blues expresses the ubiquitous and perpetual unfortunate human condition. There is great blues music being made today.” — Walter Parks

“The blues delivers the message via plain “street” language but rap endeavors towards …

The Miscarriage Texts

What Fauci and Walensky discussed privately in January 2021, and what pregnant women were told

This essay is written for both a general audience and expert scientists and physicians interested in this topic. I have been trained as a pathologist and taught pathology (as well as molecular biology) to medical students for many years, and so it should be no surprise that some of the language is rather technical.

For this, I apologize to and empathize with general-interest readers, and ask that you bear with me so I can communicate precisely with experts and policy specialists who may also read the essay. Keep in mind …

The Benefit of Not Reading

Drawing by Rita Curtin
“For my sister Rita, an artist who didn’t imitate and who died on this day long ago, trying.”

It is a commonplace that a steady diet of the mass media can rot the brain and so fill one’s mind with nonsense that a creative thought becomes impossible. The Internet, television, film, and miniseries addictions are widespread and keep electronic minds flashing in and out and everywhere so as to avoid that much maligned word “boredom,” the feared state where real …

Layers of Deception

How does the government deceive you?

Imperial Nostalgia: Afghanistan after Five Years of Taliban Rule

The lesson scrawled and etched across the neglected covers of history books (few read them these days) suggests one mighty, consistent rule: Never invade Afghanistan. The history of the country is one of admirably stout resistance to invasions and intrusions from foreign powers, and, significantly, a severe dislike to imposed social and political solutions. Along the way, three empires – the British, the Soviet and the American – have suffered defeats.

The clerically stern Taliban, scourged by supposedly enlightened Western powers for being hopeless brigands in government and impossible as functionaries, have lasted for five years. “We pray to Almighty God …

Little Eichmann’s are Bigger than Ever Before — R.I.P. Ward Churchill

Simple stuff: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” Or: “Fascism is capitalism plus murder.”

2006 — Nearly 18 months after an uproar erupted over a professor who likened some Sept. 11 victims to Nazis, the University of Colorado on Monday took its biggest step yet toward firing him.

The highest-ranking official at Colorado’s main campus called on the university to dismiss ethnic studies professor Ward Churchill for “a pattern of research misconduct committed over a period of time.”

Churchill did not immediately return …

Will Montreal Vote to Sever Ties with Genocide?

Few are worse than Itamar Ben-Gvir, but if you hang him in effigy Montreal’s mayor will label you racist. The real question is how many in the mayor’s party will break from her Ben-Gvirist politics to support a motion to cut ties with the genocidal state.

“There are people there who are not worthy of life. They shouldn’t live. They’re not even people,” noted Israel’s national security minister in a speech in which Ben-Gvir called to “kill 30 or 40” Palestinians in Gaza nightly. Ben-Gvir followed this up by …

The Moral, Civilizational, and Global Implications of Artificial and Synthetic Intelligence

The Synthetic Mind: Humanity’s First Engineered Mirror, Part 5

Humanity is living through a crisis deeper than politics, economics, or technology. It is a crisis of meaning — a slow erosion of the human capacity to interpret reality, trust truth, anchor identity, and locate purpose.

This erosion did not arrive with spectacle. It seeped in through distraction, overstimulation, synthetic narratives, and algorithmic environments that increasingly substitute for lived experience.1Taina Bucher, If…Then: Algorithmic Power and Politics (Oxford University Press, 2018), ch. 2. What confronts us is not an intellectual dilemma. It is a civilizational emergency.

I. The Fragmentation of Reality

Reality once rested on shared foundations — common stories, common truths, common …

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    Taina Bucher, If…Then: Algorithmic Power and Politics (Oxford University Press, 2018), ch. 2. ↩︎

Charlatans in Academe: When Jason Arday Went Too Far

The self-inflicted passing of Jason Arday this month following his resignation from the University of Cambridge is an unsettling yet fitting reminder about what the groves of academe tolerate (or not) regarding its members. Arday’s unmasking as a plagiarist and fabulist was treated as a tour de force by a contingent of conservatives and right-wing academics, keen to neuter the dogma of diversity and return to perceived notions of unalloyed merit. For his defenders, the exposure was tantamount to bad faith, diminished by the personal defects of those making the claim. The university’s chancellor Lord Chris …

The Danger of De-contextualized Reporting: A Case Study of Mainstream Media’s Cuba Coverage

Recently, while listening to an NPR interview with Cuban-American musician Arturo Sandoval, I was reminded of the late political scientist Michael Parenti’s classic text, Inventing Reality: The Politics of the Mass Media. In his 1986 book, Parenti described a situation that is still relevant forty years later— when the US fears that another country’s non-capitalistic political model (and its attendant advances in social justice and quality of life) could cause US citizens to question their own system, it regularly imposes an embargo and sanctions against the country. …