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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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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. …
For a Big Anti-Trump Turnout November 3, Talk About Climate!
“Nearly four in 10 Americans say their communities were damaged by extreme weather in the past year, as climate change helps fuel high heat, intense flooding, and other events. And 57% of those US adults who have felt the effects of extreme weather in the past year are worried it’ll happen again in the next, according to the new poll from the Walton Family Foundation and Gallup. The East South Central states are most impacted, including Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Tennessee — all deep-red. Trump has come under scrutiny for cuts to the Federal Emergency Management Agency and …
Colluding with Violence: Aiding Israeli Settlers in the West Bank
The latest incidents of Israeli settler violence in the villages of Qusra and Kour, located in the northern occupied West Bank, have again caught international attention, reaching the halls of the United Nations with a gravity that, sadly, is unlikely to have much effect. Towards the end of July, the settlers had set their sights on local mosques, which they set on fire. From August 9, three families in Qusra – making up 15 people in all – were confined to their homes in terror, running out of food and necessities. (Settlers had deprived them of access to water and …
Unmasking AI
10 Myths Fueling the Silicon Mirage
“AI Has Memory and Humans Have Consequences. AI can be wrong and stay exactly the same—a person can’t,” read a headline from John Nosta in Psychology Today. Indeed, as so-called artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly deployed across critical sectors of everyday life, it is leading to high-profile failures that highlight the severe risks of over-relying on automated decision-making. For example, according to Politico, lawmakers in the U.S. Congress are using AI to draft bills that “are riddled with errors.” Meanwhile, the tech real estate marketplace company Zillow shuttered its home-flipping division …
The Sandinistas’ Work During the 16 Years of Governing from Below Enabled them to Regain Power
Many revolutions or socialist governments existed in the 1970s besides Nicaragua that later lost power or abandoned their socialist ideology by the 1990s. These include Mozambique, Angola, Zimbabwe, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, Tanzania, Congo (Stanleyville), Afghanistan, Grenada, and almost El Salvador, Portugal, Spain, and Ethiopia. In addition, the Communist Soviet Union collapsed (now 15 countries), along with East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and Albania.
When the Sandinistas lost the 1990 election, these other socialist leaderships were already disintegrating or had already been overturned. Only the Sandinistas continued the struggle and once again arose to retake power and implement their …
Cultural Relativism, Offensive Realism, and the Rise of China
It does not take a huge leap of imagination to see how the limits of a ‘one-best-way’ approach to state governance, exposed by cultural relativism, suggest identical failings in John Mearsheimer’s universalist notion of ‘offensive realism’ (OR), whose well-known principal tenets include:
“In order to survive, and because competitors cannot be trusted, states must …. acquire and maintain sufficient military and economic power to protect themselves against threats which, Mearsheimer (2019) concedes, ‘can be a ruthless and bloody business’. This is usually done at the expense of rival states and is a zero-sum game” (Blunt, 2025).
According to OR, …
On August 15, Admitting Guilt is Japan’s Only Way out
Public discourse in Japan has already shifted from “whether Japan should take responsibility for its war of aggression” to “whether it should worship ghosts on such a sensitive day.” Muddying the waters has long been a tactic favored by Japan’s right wing. But there’s no getting away with this one. As the international community watches closely, Japan must return to the fundamental question: What exactly should it do, to whom must it be accountable, and how should it answer for its actions?
August 15 marks the 81st anniversary of Japan’s …
Overflowing Toilet Sinks US Military Morale in Middle East
Rotten food, no room in the incoming missile shelters, confiscation of alert notification devices for incoming missiles (cellphones), infrequent mail, jumping off aircraft carriers, overflowing toilets... military families speak out for their loved ones, again and again.
U.S. aircraft on the flight deck of USS Abraham Lincoln on Feb. 28 in support of the U.S.-Israeli assault on Iran. (U.S. Department of Defense /Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain)
Rotten food, overflowing toilets into bunking areas, no room in the incoming missile shelters, confiscated cellphones that are the notification devices for incoming missiles, infrequent mail, social media closed down: these were some of the issues that military families identified at the national conference …
The Actual, Hidden Reason Europe Wants War with Russia
We all know the real reasons the US created the proxy war with Russia initially. It allowed the deteriorating US empire to cut Russia off economically from the consumer base of Europe – especially when it came to “energy” – thereby strengthening the petrodollar. (If sanctions didn’t do it, the US could always just blow up the Nord Stream pipeline, but we would never do that. Heh heh heh, ermmmm…)
The US rulers thought they could sanction Russia into oblivion and then easily create regime change — Push out Putin and …
Carney Invites Wealthy Friends to TO and We’re Told to Cheer
Playing to one’s strengths is generally smart, but Mark Carney may come to regret convening the world’s wealthiest bankers in downtown Toronto. The Canadian prime minister’s upcoming CEO summit is a prime opportunity to paint the former banker as an agent of the global rich.
On September 14 and 15 Carney “will convene the world’s largest investors, including top CEOs, entrepreneurs, and prominent global business leaders” at a luxurious hotel. The CEOs of financial behemoths Blackstone, BlackRock and Barclays, as well as representatives of the UAE and Saudi …
Wounding Victory: Nigel Farage Beats Count Binface
It was never really in doubt. The Reform UK leader, Nigel Farage, irritated, bothered, and keen to throw scrutiny off his financial affairs, was returned in the most pointless of by-elections on August 13. His share of the vote in the seat of Clacton was 63.34% (22,239 votes). The second in the voting tally, with 26.9% (9,455 votes), was a candidate sporting a bin, promoting himself as a 5,900-year-old intergalactic warrior hailing from Sigma IX by the name of Count Binface. No major party offered to stand a candidate, which did not prevent voters from filling in the longest ballot …
Rooted in La Tierra, Música, Aztlán, and the Fusion of Old Califa with that Portlandia Kinda Feel
Radio Interview: Freddy Trujillo has been playing so long that he will be put into the pantheon of Freddy Fender and Carlos Humberto Santana Barragán
The Sandy Hook Denial Law
What can we question?
Clownish Start for Trump Puppet in Colombia
Lawyer For Paramilitaries and Drug Traffickers Promises "Iron Fist" Policy That Has Repeatedly Failed
If Abelardo de la Espriella’s first four days are any indication of what his entire term will be like, we are in for some very dark comedy over the next four years. Here are eight highlights from his inauspicious beginning.
(1) On Inauguration Day a clip of him looking like a fool marching in place and saluting during military honors went viral after it was seen to have his own military officers looking at him with a look of bewilderment as to what on earth he thought he was doing. Meanwhile, the U.S. State Department revealed that Colombia will receive a …