Latest articles

Ranking universities remains a misleading, fatuous exercise as useful as comparing the tasteful qualities of, say, dependable Russian piroshki with those of an aromatic beef rendang. Chalk and cheese; apples and oranges. But this nasty contrivance has become an annual feature that clogs the email accounts of university staff members and students like cloacal spam, glorified by management moguls. It all depends on whether the institution in question is interested in the Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) measure, or perhaps the Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings. Maybe preference will be had for the ShanghaiRanking Consultancy’s Academic Ranking of World Universities, …

Donald Trump’s second term has precipitated a tsunami of criticism from Democrats over his foreign policy. Yet when it comes to Washington’s efforts to dominate Latin America and the Caribbean, the substantive dispute – if there is any substance remaining, once stripped of partisan bickering – is less about ends than means.

Beneath the rhetoric of inter-party conflict lies a broad bipartisan consensus in favor of promoting US hemispheric hegemony and crushing governments that resist it – with Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua at the forefront. While Democrats frequently portray Trump as reckless, they generally accept the underlying premises of economic coercion, …

No one with the slightest respect for diplomacy would ever name Ronald Johnson ambassador to anyplace but Hell. Hiring him to be top diplomat is like hiring Jeffrey Epstein to be recreation director at a girls high school. His appointment as ambassador to Mexico indicates a hard-line policy of force over diplomacy towards Claudia Sheinbaum and the Fourth Transformation.

Johnson is a retired Colonel, a “former” CIA agent, a super-hawk, an expert in undercover psychological operations and asymmetric irregular warfare, and a seasoned ex-Green Beret with extensive tours of duty in three …

Genocide Watch has gradually taken over the media interface of this issue globally. Providing authoritative coverage of genocide since founding by Gregory Staunton in 1999, Genocide Watch is rarely criticized. People have instinctively recognized its necessity. Staunton is so faithful, well credentialed and experienced in this field it’s disconcerting when he makes a mistake. Genocide Watch has covered and absorbed Canada’s leading genocide organizations as they failed through lack of support. While the organization’s work is reliable, as part of a genocide-prevention industry it was too slow to address Israel’s crimes of genocide against Palestine but if it can be …

As of Jan 12, 2024, more than 9,600 Palestinian children in Gaza have been killed by the Israeli genocidal assault on the besieged population. Thousands more are missing and presumed dead. Gaza has been described as a “graveyard for children” by UN Secretary-General António Guterres.

Mass killings are the tip of the iceberg of Israeli violations against Gaza’s children. The vast majority are currently displaced. Most face severe hunger, with malnutrition posing lifelong developmental risks for young children. There are 71,000 cases of diarrhea in children under 5 in Gaza, which can …

The first two articles in this series explored the proposition that artificial intelligence and robotics will soon be ushering in an economy of unprecedented abundance, and examined the resource and energy constraints that could limit that voluminous growth. If machines eventually replace most of the workforce, society may need some form of Universal High Income (UHI), as Elon Musk and others have suggested, simply to keep purchasing power aligned with productive capacity. In a world where goods and services can be produced in abundance, the challenge may no longer be creating …

Britain boasts stewardship of a centuries-old accretive system of justice built on the principles of balanced rights, an independent judiciary and, most importantly, the right to trial by jury.

Yet England and Wales have the highest prison population per capita in Western Europe, and 60% of prisons are overcrowded.

Could this be because the safeguards are being systematically dismantled before our eyes to eliminate the fundamental civil liberties that it has taken centuries to acquire?

The surge in brazenly oppressive treatment of ordinary citizens who oppose British complicity in Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians has shone a light on the extent to which the …

What should we make of the latest pause in the US/Israeli war against Iran?

I realize that for readers of this journal, others who do not take at face value what they are told by the mainstream media, the increasing number who do not believe anything that the US government and its President say, and everyone in Iran, this is a rhetorical question of such crashingly obvious proportions that it is barely worth asking.

But it is important nevertheless to remind ourselves of the extensive grounds upon which such a conclusion rests and on that basis to speculate briefly about what is …

“At midnight all the agents
And the superhuman crew
Come out and round up everyone
That knows more than they do”
– Bob Dylan “Desolation Row.”

Perhaps you have noticed – if you have any idea who I am or give a damn – that I have slowed down my political analyses of our current situation. It’s gotten tiresome, with little changing despite all the spilled ink.

What I am going to say is not uplifting, so you can rip up this letter now if you want encouragement. The people whom I thought I knew never changed. They continue to believe the false premises that keep …

It might come as no surprise that the US Congress, which has proven to be a favorite friend of Israel, decided to legally formalize Israel’s widespread military participation within the US Government without public hearings or a public debate; what may be surprising is the depth of compliance to hand over a wide range of classified and covert information to a foreign government including its military industrial complex and its intelligence industry; the effect of which may ultimately eliminate the Constitutional status of the US as a sovereign and independent government.

Since the Federal legislature has seen corruption by a foreign …

The realization that you have an incurable autoimmune disease is not only unsettling, it changes everything. If there is an effective treatment that suppresses the symptoms, you can learn to live with it, provided that you can afford the treatment, which is fantastically expensive, and you must take the injections every two weeks for the remainder of your life. If you cannot afford the treatment, you are in serious trouble.

Events of this kind are unexpected, but they can happen to anyone, anywhere, and at any time. They tell you that there will be unrelenting turbulence for the remainder of …

The full, bloody arc of 250 years of U.S. history’s contradictions is foundational, not accidental. Domestically, the United States was built by brutalizing and extracting from colonized and enslaved communities. From the Middle Passage to the plantation, from the massacre of Indigenous nations to the convict leasing system, from Jim Crow to mass incarceration, from redlining to Flint’s poisoned water, the U.S. has never known a peace not purchased by Black, Brown, and Indigenous flesh. Internationally, the same logic applies. The country that dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; that carpet-bombed Southeast Asia; that trained death squads throughout the …

Cornelia Gipson is trying to understand the hold that whiteness has on white people.

“I grew up black in Mississippi, and from the time I was 4, I knew I was black and what that meant,” she said. “How do white people come to understand they’re white? When did you first realize what it meant to be white?”

Recently the least popular person alive said, “I didn’t guarantee no war. Why would I have built the strongest military in the world?”

Already unpopular with kind and decent people, Trump may have — with that comment — tanked his popularity with every weapons company public relations hack on Earth. Their most deeply held pretense has always been that military spending isn’t needed for wars but rather to prevent wars.

Of course, Trump promised not to start any wars and to end existing ones easily and …

When the DNC finally released its 192-page “autopsy” of what went wrong in the disastrous 2024 election that propelled Donald Trump back into the White House, it was a poorly written document full of typos that offered few if any insights. As Michael Arria noted in “It’s the Genocide Stupid,” the report contained “virtually no analysis of the Democratic policies that might have helped propel Trump to another victory. If one were compiling such a list, support for the Gaza genocide would presumably be near the top, but the issue is not mentioned once in the massive report.”

The Biden, then Harris campaigns …