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pbarus@attentionage.com
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Peter Barus
At: /peter_barus

"What becomes possible, soon becomes necessary: invention is the mother of necessity"
       -- Peter Barus

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I'm an old Pogo fan. For some unknown reason I persist in outrage at Feudalism, as if human beings can do much better than this. Our old ways of life are obsolete and are killing us. Will the human race wake up in time? Stay tuned...


attentionage.com

OpEd News Member for 870 week(s) and 2 day(s)

142 Articles, 2 Quick Links, 306 Comments, 5 Diaries, 5 Series, 0 Polls

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Friday, July 22, 2022   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

Statement on the Disinformation Governance Board, From Uploaded(4 comments) SHARE More Sharing Anybody would look qualified after the 45th president's team. But Blinken. Nuland. No wonder, Afghanistan, Yemen, Gaza, Ukraine. These people have experience all right. Too bad for the rest of the world.

Saturday, July 18, 2020   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

world-economic-forum, From FlickrPhotos(13 comments) SHARE More Sharing This contains the word, "Bilderberg." Please ignore this, the function of that group is pro-Capitalist PR, its members already dominate everything, and the article is not about them anyway.

Tuesday, October 7, 2008   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

(5 comments) SHARE More Sharing Unfortunately for the majority of human beings now alive, this is going to hurt. It is going to hurt a lot.

Friday, September 26, 2008   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing But what is likely? That's the trouble: what is likely is much, much worse than the fascist takeover of the United States of America by a megalomaniacal dictator with a personal defibrillator.

Sunday, March 29, 2020   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing The madness from the highest office of public trust is obviously purposeful.
Series: The Big Mirror (12 Articles, 16539 views)

Friday, May 15, 2020   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

(7 comments) SHARE More Sharing If I close my eyes, nobody will be able to see me!
Series: The Big Mirror (12 Articles, 16539 views)

Friday, November 17, 2023   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

(8 comments) SHARE More Sharing Many Palestinians are being forced, by gunpoint, to leave behind their homes in northern Gaza and march down the road en masse as Israel executes its next face of ethnic genocide and forced population transport. Those walking have reported watching stray dogs eat the bodies of dead Palestinians
Series: Reports from Palestine (51 Articles, 37481 views)

Saturday, May 23, 2020   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

Cover- Levers of Power, From Uploaded(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing Who needs conspiracies, when reality is so much worse? They're comforting, I suppose. But we need people to start participating in public life, with awareness of what's actually at stake. That isn't going to happen by yelling at them about Bill Gates, whatever you want to yell at them about Bill Gates.
Series: Sources and Resources (5 Articles, 6507 views), The Big Mirror (12 Articles, 16539 views)

Saturday, April 1, 2023   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

Rupert Murdoch 2015., From WikimediaPhotos(3 comments) SHARE More Sharing The distance between this artificial structure and democracy cannot be traversed: the two cannot coexist. And this is the actual polarization that we continue to misidentify as political, endlessly squabbling over irrelevancies, to the enormous profit of a few feudal oligarchs, and to our great and terrible loss.

Thursday, September 11, 2008   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

(3 comments) SHARE More Sharing Bob Woodward's hints of a dire new weapon that has the Iraq war "getting better": Death Ray 1.0?

Saturday, December 4, 2021   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

oxycontin, From CreativeCommonsPhoto(21 comments) SHARE More Sharing A good friend of mine spent time behind bars because he wouldn't pay taxes for war. Since he was a chiropractor, he soon met dozens of convicted drug users with bad backs. They all had the same story: they were injured at work, given prescription opioids, and turned to street drugs when their insurance was gone. It would be several more years before the real mass-murderers were caught. And rewarded.

Thursday, May 18, 2023   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

(8 comments) SHARE More Sharing And as long as this goes on, or the next big terror, or the one after that, we are feeding ourselves to a machine we made, to make us safe from the machine we made.
Series: Antisocial Media (8 Articles, 9466 views)

Friday, April 3, 2020   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

To mask, or not?, From FlickrPhotos(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing It's not that people don't believe Science. It's that they don't believe anybody not on a screen while they talk.

Saturday, June 3, 2023   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

(20 comments) SHARE More Sharing The promise of the digital age has been abandoned and forgotten as a few trillionaires fasten the last blast doors keeping out ever-growing waves of homeless, starving, diseased, former middle-class professionals; those whose neighbors have not yet been replaced by machines. But they'll be along soon.
Series: Antisocial Media (8 Articles, 9466 views)

Wednesday, October 11, 2023   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing The issue of moral real estate is irrelevant, and evades the serious questions of humanity's essential viability, given the commodification of conflict itself...

Wednesday, April 8, 2020   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

ICNC interview with Palestinian activist Dr. Mazin Qumsiyeh, From YouTubeVideos SHARE More Sharing Middle-of-the-road in a new light: Solidarity is not the strength-in-numbers of a flock of turkeys crossing the road, or a lynch-mob. It starts with going-it-alone.
Series: The Big Mirror (12 Articles, 16539 views)

Saturday, January 28, 2023   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

SHARE More Sharing don't bother chasing any conspiracy theories, remember that this is all baloney. The big money makes it just one more obvious slate-wiping threat to everything living in the known universe. However, we must expect failure when humans try to set up such Babel-towers, long before anything resembling heaven's stairway appears.
Series: Antisocial Media (8 Articles, 9466 views)

Saturday, April 4, 2020   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing Because of the algorithms in Great Googly-moogly and the Book of Faces (our externalized brain), most of the traffic is not coming from the Internet to our screens. Of course not: the purpose of Information is no longer to inform. It was superseded by aggregated Attention, which moves so much faster, albeit in the opposite direction.

Thursday, June 18, 2020   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

(3 comments) SHARE More Sharing Meanwhile, as Tulsa braces for a convention that's certain to go down as a "super-spreader" event, we're being divided into two camps. One is for people who just don't believe there's a problem; Well, ok, only one camp. The other camp is all the normal, reasonably sane people -- most people.

Saturday, July 15, 2023   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

https://peterbarus.substack.com/, From Uploaded SHARE More Sharing We can't tackle these catastrophes in the usual way, as if they were separate problems that just happen to be coming to a head at the same time. They cross too many boundaries that are really insubstantial, just arbitrary boundaries of thinking, a legacy of bureaucratic departments and academic disciplines of the past. They're too hopelessly interrelated, like the Rubik's Cube puzzle, solving one problem un-solves another.

Thursday, April 2, 2020   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

Maurits Cornelis Escher (1898 - 1972), From FlickrPhotos(3 comments) SHARE More Sharing First of a series on Attending as key to restoring our world.
Series: The Big Mirror (12 Articles, 16539 views)

Thursday, May 21, 2020   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

(5 comments) SHARE More Sharing As to identifying an evil perpetrator, you and I have nothing to go on, and no knowledge, and no access, and no tools or weapons with which to do anything at all about that. And most of the people who claim such knowledge have a vested interest in our believing them, and scant actual credibility, except maybe a large following. Like the President. That's not going to make me drink the Clorox.

Sunday, December 20, 2020   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

Me Me Me Me Me --------------------Me, From CreativeCommonsPhoto(9 comments) SHARE More Sharing Under our present culture of untrammeled profit-seeking, a rising level of poverty is absolutely guaranteed, and democracy is not. One will constrain the other, and when democracy is constrained by commerce, it doesn't exist at all. The true measure of our success lies in the ordinariness of rape and child abuse and enslavement.

Friday, August 7, 2020   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

(10 comments) SHARE More Sharing Hospitals and prisons in America are now run as a sector of the Hospitality Industry. The product is not, as the name suggests, a warm and friendly sojourn for your family or business associates, much less healthy and safe outcomes for people in medical or legal difficulties.

Wednesday, June 7, 2023   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

(3 comments) SHARE More Sharing There is no way any problem-solving organization can solve the problem of proliferating problem-solving organizations. We're back to what we came in with: our own sensibilities, our tendency to project our own traumas on others, our automatic snap-judgments, our ulterior motives, our hidden agendas. All the mechanisms we evolved for mere survival in a world full of large predators, that got us this far.

Monday, May 18, 2020   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

Attention!, From FlickrPhotos(6 comments) SHARE More Sharing human beings create paradigms. We don't do that by the ways we vote. We do that by the ways we live. And we live according to what we perceive as reality. And that's a function of the paradigm...

Saturday, March 11, 2023   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

Hermes-louvre3., From WikimediaPhotos(9 comments) SHARE More Sharing Politicians are riding the ambient terror that's now normal in America for all it's worth. We are led by opportunists and con-artists drumming up business among the most uninformed. Not "misinformed" or "disinformed" or yet "malinformed" but just benumbed and hypnotized with fear, ripe for plucking. This has bankrupted democracy, and thrown public discourse into chaos.

Sunday, June 14, 2020   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

SHARE More Sharing We are not the pinnacle of Creation, or the high point of evolution, depending on your religious orientation. Or the descendants of extraterrestrials from Remulac. God, or Darwin, or Remulac, did not wind us up and set us ticking through the world repeating the same old crap under a different name, expecting different results. Each of these purportedly omnipotent sources is by definition way smarter than that.
Series: The Big Mirror (12 Articles, 16539 views)

Saturday, May 16, 2020   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

SHARE More Sharing "In today's dominant culture the bottom line is that you only get a good job if somebody else makes a profit by hiring you on terms that afford you a decent living. There is no reason why that auspicious outcome should befall every job seeker. It doesn't." - Dr Howard Richards
Series: Sources and Resources (5 Articles, 6507 views)

Saturday, October 14, 2023   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

Royal Uranium Miners, From Uploaded(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing Some of these important films are free online now. But just reading the short synopses in this list may change your views on this critical issue.

Wednesday, December 30, 2020   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

Glory Hole, Whitingham, VT, From Uploaded(4 comments) SHARE More Sharing Nobody has ever gotten very far with a brute-force attack on the system. Until now. Only one person on the planet can get away with this one. It's an action that negates every notion of justice, whether retributive or restorative, technical or philosophical. Ok, or moral (but that was gone before this clown showed up).

Thursday, May 4, 2023   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

SHARE More Sharing it is not a battlefield, on which a machine that actually could bring peace and harmony to this war-torn world evolves within the profit-imperative of our global culture. That field is thoroughly colonized. It is claim-staked territory, trampled and dusty under the thundering hooves of the latest gold rush.

Sunday, July 19, 2020   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing This is Economics. But don't let that throw you: this is Economics that might just save the world.

Saturday, November 4, 2023   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing The dead are disproportionately infants and young children, blown to rags, buried under buildings, shot, suffocated, etc., while occupied, imprisoned, detained, surrounded, besieged, starved, orphaned and helpless.
Series: Reports from Palestine (51 Articles, 37481 views)

Thursday, May 14, 2020   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

SHARE More Sharing Digital ads are not a good ROI these days. The window-dressing is falling away from the attention-mining machinery.
Series: The Big Mirror (12 Articles, 16539 views)

Friday, April 10, 2020   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

Germs... they're everywhere!, From FlickrPhotos SHARE More Sharing We are not in a zombie movie. And we all contain some of the virus now. The job is to keep from passing it on.
Series: The Big Mirror (12 Articles, 16539 views)

Sunday, October 15, 2023   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

(7 comments) SHARE More Sharing Netanyahu runs US foreign policy now. What happened to Zelensky? And who's next? Have they picked somebody in Taiwan yet? What will become of all those semiconductors?

Saturday, October 28, 2023   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing Some thoughts after a quote from French economist Andre Orlean, in a book by Howard Richards. I think it's about what happened to us when we invented money.

Wednesday, April 1, 2020   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

Paying Attention, From FlickrPhotos(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing It's time to starve the attention addict-in-chief. Don't mention that name; don't tell anybody how terrible he is. Stop making up funny, angry screeds. It only bloats the thing all the more.

Saturday, July 18, 2020   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

Fred Batchelder, Michael Bookspan, Carl Barus, Vets For Peace, protesting the recommissioning and deeployment oto eit Nam of bttleship New Jersy at the Phiuladelphia Navy Yard, From Uploaded(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing Because ten of the thirteen pounds of plutonium did not fission but were drawn seven miles into the stratosphere and rained back down on the planet, a huge area of the Southwest will be contaminated for 240,000 years with the most toxic poison known to man.
Series: Peace Boat (3 Articles, 3400 views)

Friday, May 5, 2023   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

SHARE More Sharing In this new world, a free and adversarial press cannot function as designed in our Constitution, i.e., as a check on political power. This structural feature of the old paradigm no longer works, because the structure has been replaced.

Sunday, January 1, 2023   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

Golden Rule in Cuba 2022-12-31, From Uploaded(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing The historic Golden Rule anti-nuclear sailboat arrived in Cuba this morning, December 31, 2022. The storied wooden boat, which was sailed toward the Marshall Islands in 1958 to interfere with US nuclear testing, set sail from Key West, Florida on Friday morning with a crew of five. The 34-foot ketch belongs to Veterans For Peace, its mission "to end the arms race and to reduce and eventually eliminate nuclear weapons."
Series: Peace Boat (3 Articles, 3400 views)

Wednesday, April 1, 2020   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

Closed Store, From FlickrPhotos(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing A cursory glance at the "U. S. Government COVID - 19 Response Plan March 13, 2020" tells us that it was hurriedly got up to confuse and delay the public about the degree of Executive engagement in managing the pandemic. (Zero degrees of Executive engagement.)

Saturday, October 18, 2008   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

SHARE More Sharing The Acorn kerfuffle, Obama's "eloquence": McCain turns assets into liabilities faster than a subprime mortgage...

Wednesday, November 30, 2022   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing Unbounded organization is a not-too-confrontational attitude. It has no a priori bias for or against market-based solutions. For any problem it is open to considering innumerable options. The fixed north star is not the solution, but the commitment to work together to solve it. It was born in the twenty-first century and it was born in Africa, the land of Ubuntu.
Series: Sources and Resources (5 Articles, 6507 views)

Monday, June 8, 2020   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

SHARE More Sharing Who said the revolution will not be televised? And it's not torches and pitchforks and burning castles this time. It's nuanced and detailed and documented. With circles and arrows on each one. There are people ready to step up and handle things, cause they've had to be.

Sunday, December 18, 2022   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

(10 comments) SHARE More Sharing This is so much bigger than an obscenely rich playboy playing pingpong with the public mind, much less a clever researcher into new slang and symbolism on the internet with a book to sell. These may be stories, but they pale next to what's been dumped in Taibbi's lap, probably because of his reputation for old-school journalistic integrity, that he is faithfully, and responsibly, reporting.
Series: Antisocial Media (8 Articles, 9466 views)

Saturday, April 8, 2023   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

The Borg are coming, From Uploaded SHARE More Sharing How many of us actually live life fully engaged, out on the field, in the thick of it, taking it as it comes? Who experiences real joy and sorrow, thriving community, authentic love?

Friday, April 24, 2020   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing It's going to take something to penetrate the numbness, after all these years of abuse.

Saturday, October 28, 2023   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing The key may be the neurological correlation of behavior and perception. Modifying either what we do, or the way in which we understand reality, can shift our trajectory. But behavior modification is too much like trying to back a triple-tandem truck into an alley: instant chaos. On the other hand, modifying the way in which we see and understand our world brings whatever the hardwired correlate to that view, instantly.

Wednesday, March 8, 2023   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing What makes a story a story nowadays isn't the information in it. What puts legs under it is the size of the instant virtualized audience it picks up as it ripples out across the network frog-pond from the big lilypad. Ribbit. Ribbit. Ka-ching! The sound of your now-virtualized eyeballs changing hands. But nobody cares what you were looking at, much less what you saw. They've already been to the bank.
Series: Antisocial Media (8 Articles, 9466 views)

Saturday, November 29, 2008   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

(4 comments) SHARE More Sharing I asked one of my friends, back there at the Taj over teacups, "What happens when the system collapses?" He said, "It collapsed hundreds of years ago. It's always collapsing. This is it."

Wednesday, July 15, 2020   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

Corruption, From InText(3 comments) SHARE More Sharing Education and upbringing, ceremonies and relationships, can be designed to form a society where there would not be anybody who thought only of benefits and costs to himself, not caring about others; there would not be anybody whose only question about the customs of the community was whether he or she could get away with breaking them. This is not an imaginary example. Before 1600 traditional cultures governed southern Africa.

Saturday, April 8, 2023   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

View of asteroid Ryugu from Hayabusa 2, From Uploaded(3 comments) SHARE More Sharing Had Hannibal not... had the Buddha not... had the builders of Stonehenge not done what they did, exactly as they did it, we would not have this thimbleful of sand from a place about as definitively inaccessible as a place can be.

Sunday, May 17, 2020   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

SHARE More Sharing The basis for the rollback is now crystal clear: to protect hospitals and other industry stakeholders from legal exposure for disobeying health and safety standards required by the OSHA and the CDC, by dumping the safety standards.

Friday, October 13, 2023   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing All commentary on the the carpet-bombing of the Gaza Strip makes a point of condemning the recent Hamas incursion as a War Crime. But this falls a bit short of today's reality. In this age of total surveillance (the prevailing economic logic now), war is a crime at which we can no longer feign surprise.

Monday, June 1, 2020   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

SHARE More Sharing A view is whatever you see from a certain point. A worldview does not involve an actual point in space-time: Only what we call "here". Another name for that location is "where I stand". We have dominion over that.

Thursday, June 2, 2022   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

(3 comments) SHARE More Sharing That, friends, is the "platform" on which all our communications, in all media, our legal documents, our school systems, our municipal records, our medical and legal histories, the operation of surgical equipment, the entire agricultural system that feeds us all...everything necessary to social coherence and survival belongs to a tiny handful of corporations whose vital interest is "Shareholder Value" and nothing else.

Tuesday, April 14, 2020   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

SHARE More Sharing Looking outward, we might want to stop and check on where we're standing and whether that point of view yields any power.
Series: The Big Mirror (12 Articles, 16539 views)

Saturday, March 5, 2022   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

(4 comments) SHARE More Sharing Our brains have been wallpapered with toxic body-image and self-destructive competitive anxieties, to the point where we can't even tell the difference between the Germ Theory, which defeated Polio and Rubella and Small Pox, and "Invasion of the Body Snatchers." Which was a movie.

Sunday, June 20, 2021   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

Book Cover, From Uploaded(3 comments) SHARE More Sharing By using the historical method, Ramsay was able to explain why the impoverished small towns of Crisfield and Princess Anne diverged so markedly in their policy preferences regarding economic development, thus providing a sharp critique of neoliberal economics.
Series: Reports from Palestine (51 Articles, 37481 views)

Sunday, May 10, 2020   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

Little bit of snow in May, From FlickrPhotos(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing After the strange snowstorm this morning, great gobs of slush hurtling out of the blue, and then little foamy pellets, some in bright sunshine, it occurs to me that all talk of how many years we might have to deal with global warming is the voice of denial. It is here now, with bells on. At stake is the end of life itself. All life, anywhere, ever. But each of us still has all the power it takes to turn this ship around.
Series: The Big Mirror (12 Articles, 16539 views)

Sunday, July 19, 2020   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

Droit du seigneur by Vasily Polenov, From Uploaded(3 comments) SHARE More Sharing The allocation of punishments still follows race first, and then net worth. Of two very famous men accused by many women of raping them, the black one is now in prison, and the white one, despite bragging about grabbing women "by the p*ssy," was made President of the United States of America, and may well be given a second term, albeit by hook or crook.

Friday, October 13, 2023   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing This comes way before "corrupt" and "stupid." This is patently batshit.

Wednesday, April 28, 2021   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

Qumsiyeh being arrested in Al-Walaja 6 May 2010, From Uploaded(3 comments) SHARE More Sharing Any rational examination of history sees that short term planning based on narrow and not people interests always backfires. Chickens come home to roost. There are hundreds of examples from US history.
Series: Reports from Palestine (51 Articles, 37481 views)

Monday, August 3, 2020   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

SHARE More Sharing Wait. Protecting the troops? Yes. That's what we were told those contractors are doing over there. What the troops are doing, is protecting American business interests, aka "our vital interests."

Wednesday, October 18, 2023   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing This is what happens when the definition of leadership is being in front of a stampede.

Thursday, May 4, 2023   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

SHARE More Sharing Taibbi has been a journalist, and let the chips fall wherever, which also means, never become part of the story you're reporting. That's high praise (well-deserved I think), and a near-impossibility in this case, even without an embarrassed media establishment hellbent on making him the villain of the story, in hopes of a spectacle that could displace the real story. Which also says something about culture.

Saturday, September 6, 2008   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

SHARE More Sharing The crowd of sycophants, swindlers, hucksters and crackpots who have up til now held sway in Washington have at last found a voice!

Thursday, March 24, 2022   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

Ukrainian refugees try to settle into their new reality It's my life, it's nothing now,. said a Ukrainian refugee whose daughter was set to get married, but instead had to flee after Russia ..., From YouTubeVideos(6 comments) SHARE More Sharing As people spoke, the conversation turned to other mass displacements, that theirs was not the first nor worst such disaster. That as white people, they were being treated much better than other refugees with darker skin. They felt embarrassment and even guilt at what they saw as undeserved privilege, despite having lost everything.

Saturday, July 4, 2020   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

SHARE More Sharing Where did all this military repression come from? It didn't start last year.

Wednesday, February 8, 2023   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

(4 comments) SHARE More Sharing All media messages are designed to arouse, not inform. Ambient fear became the backdrop of our lives. As a result, we react instead of communicating. Social fragmentation is the toxic byproduct of competing feudal internet fiefdoms.
Series: Antisocial Media (8 Articles, 9466 views)

Saturday, October 3, 2020   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

(7 comments) SHARE More Sharing We might be asking ourselves how long we're going to continue pretending there's an election going on. Even before this great honking sabot was thrown in the gears, the election process was already sabotaged until the remains were unrecognizable without dental records.

Friday, December 30, 2022   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

12/29/22, 9:47 PM PRESS RELEASE -- Golden Rule Peace Boat On Its Way to Cuba, From Uploaded(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing The storied wooden boat, which was sailed toward the Marshall Islands in 1958 to interfere with US nuclear testing, set sail from Key West, Florida on Friday morning, and will arrive at the Hemingway Marina in Havana on Saturday morning, New Years Eve day. The 34-foot ketch belongs to Veterans For Peace, and implements its mission "to end the arms race and to reduce and eventually eliminate nuclear weapons."
Series: Peace Boat (3 Articles, 3400 views)

Sunday, July 12, 2020   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

Protesters march against racism and police brutality in Amityville, New York, on July 5, 2020, From Uploaded(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing Kevin Young, co-author of Levers of Power, argues that the route to successful protest does not involve building public opinion, but instead on disrupting "business as usual" until the powers that be in business and politics have to give in. MKL knew this and applied it!

Sunday, May 1, 2022   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

(4 comments) SHARE More Sharing Information isn't what drives collective behavior. Not who controls the past, or what they know. It's who controls this moment's media spotlight. And that's going to be the most terrifying, fascinating, media-enriching jackass of the hour. It won't matter that everybody hates him. That's the only form of "bipartisanship" left now.

Thursday, December 22, 2022   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing Here in Palestine, life is extremely difficult to keep hope alive. Decades of ethnic cleansing, destruction of local people's lives, segregation and apartheid. Every single day now a Palestinian or two are killed. Yesterday Netanyahu announced his success in forming the most extremist, fascist government in Israeli history so things likely will get worse.
Series: Reports from Palestine (51 Articles, 37481 views)

Monday, May 11, 2020   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

Virus, From FlickrPhotos SHARE More Sharing So we're crammed into the Seperator. We're all communicating, suddenly, face to face. This is the last thing the machinery was designed to deal with. The Surveillance Capitalists have been diligently isolating us into little tiny markets-of-one for the last half-decade.
Series: The Big Mirror (12 Articles, 16539 views)

Monday, January 23, 2023   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

Golden Rule in Miami, From Uploaded(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing Veterans For Peace is sailing the Golden Rule all over the United States to educate people about the growing danger of nuclear war, and to promote the historic UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which the UN General Assembly passed by a vote of 122-1 in June 2017.

Wednesday, September 30, 2020   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

(4 comments) SHARE More Sharing Do you think his bizarre career is coming to an end? Really? The next day a "debate" is staged as if this parasite was a letitimate contender for the highest office of public trust. Of course we thought it was the Office of the Presidency we were inviting into our living rooms. Instead we dignified and legitimized a deadly criminal.

Saturday, July 29, 2023   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

SHARE More Sharing A chaotically polarized electorate, social fragmentation, cultural incoherence, and logarithmically increasing carbon emissions are the extremely toxic byproduct of the algorithmic attention-mining that sustains and drives the privately-owned digital services our very lives now depend on for food, water, medicine, electricity, transportation, shelter, the clothes on our backs, our children's education.

Wednesday, November 30, 2022   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

SHARE More Sharing the humans who lit up this doomsday machine are long dead. The self-maintaining and adaptive algorithms have become a rueful joke, if they are acknowledged at all. But make no mistake: not intelligent, or hostile, or evolving into some new hybrid species, its intention is more like that of a toaster, just one simple function to perform endlessly. Earth will be a barren rock long before it fixes us in its malevolent gaze.

Tuesday, April 14, 2020   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

Anti-War Rally Chicago Illinois 4-21-18  0960, From FlickrPhotos SHARE More Sharing What if there ware a Peace Army, at a time like this, when our government seems to be actively hostile to its citizens?

Tuesday, May 12, 2020   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

SHARE More Sharing I'm not thinking about which character I want to be in A Night To Remember, as the deck tilts and the lights flicker.

Wednesday, February 14, 2024   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing 18 U.S.C. 2441(a) Offense.-- Whoever, whether inside or outside the United States, commits a war crime, in any of the circumstances described in subsection (b), shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for life or any term of years, or both, and if death results to the victim, shall also be subject to the penalty of death.

Saturday, April 3, 2021   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing You have to have feelings to hate. A psychopath doesn't hate, or love, for that matter. So they use other people, who do. They needed a vehicle, something that would scale up, a kind of distributed app, a cookie-cutter stink-bomb that could be ignited anywhere. Fear is low-hanging strange-fruit.

Friday, January 27, 2023   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing The platform, and not any person or community, finds this extremely profitable. But the people who were once related are now merely linked by some trivial attractant ephemera, with no way of knowing what happened.
Series: Antisocial Media (8 Articles, 9466 views)

Sunday, April 5, 2020   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

SHARE More Sharing Critical systems rely on private, for-profit companies. We knew this. We didn't call it "Fascism" when we should have.

Thursday, July 2, 2020   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing It's hard to put your knee on a man's neck and not fall off, without specific training. Then you have to know how much pressure to apply. It doesn't become "deadly force" when somebody dies from it. It's already deadly force. Those officers had to know what would happen. If they didn't, they were inadequately trained, and should never have been given a badge.

Friday, October 3, 2008   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing Everybody understands exxactly what is wrong. Exxactly. But we're not supposed to remember anything that didn't happen on TV less than 48 hours ago, and nobody with a microphone or a vote in Congress will pay the slightest attention to anything else. They're all like those two TV comics (how come there's only two of anything left?) who only make jokes about what goes on the last 48 hours of video.

Wednesday, April 27, 2022   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

(3 comments) SHARE More Sharing At this late stage, at this point of egregious imbalance and jeopardy, we might at least begin to notice how helpless we really are. But it looks to me as if humanity is incapable of perceiving Scale. We can understand it, but we can't grok it. This isn't too surprising, most of us don't see our own death as anything more than a vague concept, and something that only happens to other people.

Wednesday, October 21, 2020   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

SHARE More Sharing A great many things need to happen that will never happen unless and until Wall Street is shut down, and shut out. Maybe that could be done. It would probably take a General Strike. I've lived through one of those. It can't be faked, though. It has to be the real thing.

Sunday, April 24, 2022   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

From Uploaded(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing It all happened when the Internet went super-critical. It didn't wake up and supersede us, that will never happen, it doesn't have to happen. It probably can't happen with humans driving development. We're only interested in developing the ultimate cash cow. Which we did, so that's that.

Tuesday, April 7, 2020   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing One guy cannot possibly run the world's economy, or even part of it. And one guy could not possibly have pulled this off with out a lot of complicity from a lot of politicians. We need to take names.

Friday, March 10, 2023   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

Submit Button, From Uploaded SHARE More Sharing What query does the "search engine" actually run on the vast dump of SEO-tweaked "sponsors" that "want" to be found first regardless of what you ask for?

Wednesday, April 15, 2020   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

SHARE More Sharing We're huddled together on this vast island in "the Cloud". Now what?

Tuesday, November 3, 2020   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

Amazon Fires, From Uploaded SHARE More Sharing Howard Richards knows whereof he speaks. He was Cezar Chavez' and the United Farm Workers' lawyer in the '60s. He witnessed the US-backed coup in Chile that brought Pinochet (and Chicago-school Freidmanomics) to power. When he says greedy people are not the cause of our global crisis, he doesn't mean there are no greedy people making a mess of things.

Saturday, May 21, 2022   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

(5 comments) SHARE More Sharing Yes, I'm saying that functionally, "liberals" are "conservatives," Democrats are Republicans, in the eyes of whomever can pit them against each other. We see them as these identities, but what they really are is pawns.

Tuesday, October 20, 2020   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing If our election goes badly, as it will in any case for a lot of reasons besides the ascendancy of a true American dictatorship, Bolivia may well be the next project for the trainees that have cut their teeth (and broken a few) on Venezuela. In fact, this may happen regardless of a Biden win. Because it is What Wall Street Wants.

Tuesday, October 13, 2020   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

Coronavirus, From PixabayPhotos(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing Up in the great Polling Place in the Sky, cherubim and seraphim are flitting to and fro, unfazed by the seething demons sent to "watch," delivering supplications from below, angels tallying the results: "3 million more for permanent lung damage," and "43 more for full recovery." Nobody prays for another person's death. Do they?

Sunday, September 13, 2020   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing Community doesn't ask whether you like it or not. All it takes is a few of us hanging onto a piece of flotsam, and now that's all of us: because that's who is on the losing team if we lose. Maybe your end has some nicely carved wood or soft upholstery. Precious metals don't float. It won't matter who was President when the storm came ashore.

Wednesday, March 18, 2009   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing Public discourse about the healthcare crisis is, as usual with our popular media, filtered and depth-gauged beyond absurdity. Here is a useful way of approaching the problem that offers real if somewhat annoyingly simple and easy solutions.

Saturday, July 4, 2020   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

SHARE More Sharing Even the fouth is a bone of contention now. This has me thinking in annual terms. Where will be be next year? Has anyhing even changed?

Friday, November 13, 2020   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

(3 comments) SHARE More Sharing People who have no integrity and no dignity can only stay afloat by pushing everybody else under. Now, thanks to Palast, at least we now how they did it, and who they are. The ball's in our court, now.

Sunday, November 8, 2020   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

(8 comments) SHARE More Sharing This landslide took the kind of extra measure that women and "minorities" (this refers to lack of voting rights, not skin color), and people who are both women and in a minority, along with the rest of us who have to work for a less-than-living wage, have to bring to work with them day after day, all their lives.

Saturday, December 23, 2023   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

Pond 2023, From Uploaded(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing Big business is so much bigger than business now, that the few economic models that ever made sense are all distorted. For instance, if there was a ceasefire imposed on just one of the ongoing foreign massacres (and there are at least three at any give moment), the "economy" would be in real trouble. But if people are homeless, unemployed, destitute and starving, the market doesn't even notice.

Tuesday, May 24, 2022   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing Our elections, as ugly, inept, and corrupt as they truly are, might be without blemish, for all we really know. It wouldn't make much difference, because of something upstream that we're not focusing on.

Sunday, February 26, 2023   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing Taibbi and Gerth and others are being called "revisionists" now. But "Hamilton 68" was as inevitable as the election of a mediocre con artist to the presidency, or our current apparent descent into permanent world war. In both cases neither side, not the babbling hucksters nor the supposedly cooler heads, had the least intention of changing trajectory, much less addressing it.
Series: Antisocial Media (8 Articles, 9466 views)

Saturday, June 25, 2022   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

(4 comments) SHARE More Sharing "The majority has overruled Roe and Casey for one and only one reason: because it has always despised them, and now it has the votes to discard them. The majority thereby substitutes a rule by judges for the rule of law."--Justices Sotomayor, Kagan and Breyer, in dissent.

Monday, November 16, 2020   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

(4 comments) SHARE More Sharing Eventually I found a setting that made my computer read to me. Not only that, it reads in a voice that sounds just like an Australian woman in her twenties. I picked that one because it was the least creepy. I can imagine being read to by Courtney Barnett, who should never have to pay taxes. Suddenly, drowsing along to Courtney's nuanced reading of a draft of my next book, I heard her take a breath!

Sunday, November 1, 2020   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

ravenstealssun2, From CreativeCommonsPhoto SHARE More Sharing And first thing that appears in any worldview worthy of the name is the incontrovertible fact that it is Reality, the only reality possible, out there where rocks are hard and water is wet. Of course, a worldview would say that...

Monday, March 15, 2021   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

From Uploaded SHARE More Sharing This neat summation seems quite clear. But it remains safely within the box it is attempting to think outside of. All we can do in here, is move the pieces around according to the prevailing logic.

Saturday, November 7, 2020   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing At least maybe now the most powerful nation on Earth (if we are to be believed, which is a question) will stop trying to kill off three quarters of humanity, and start working on a solution to global warming that's a little more likely and a lot more sane than that scheme.

Friday, July 22, 2022   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

SHARE More Sharing Like scar formation, trauma is a sign that the bleeding has stopped. It is the beginning of a painful journey, perhaps to full recovery, but at least to continued existence, that America has yet to begin.

Monday, January 18, 2021   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing Art and literature people want to enjoy is displayed to non-subscribers heavily interlarded with ads, many of which are frankly disgusting. These attention-parasites are annoying and distracting, and that is their sole purpose. Nice article. Shame if it got buried in ads that make people think of erectile dysfunction. The old name for this form of business is "protection racket."

Sunday, January 10, 2021   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

(7 comments) SHARE More Sharing Explaining events is only possible in a scenario, in a frame of reference. A context in which explanations, which are stories, can make sense. Otherwise, as is often the case lately, everybody will use the same language to mean completely different things, in their own private Idaho.

Friday, October 23, 2020   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

SHARE More Sharing I think it might finally be getting to me. But you can't look away from this kind of horror. Tell you what: I'm just gonna rant for a minute. I'm just tired of trying to make sense.

Tuesday, February 21, 2023   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

SHARE More Sharing Carter's career reveals much about present day conflicts, the thinly-disguised imperial American agenda, and it's violent alliances.
Series: Reports from Palestine (51 Articles, 37481 views)

Sunday, January 24, 2021   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

Code of Hammurabi - Pergamon Museum - Berlin, From Uploaded(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing In the Attention Age, this is what we mean by stupid catch-phrases like "moving forward". As if we had a choice about that. There are now "gyres" in the Pacific Ocean, rotating with new currents driven by greenhouse gases, barnacle-encrusted acres of wasted phrases, like "moving-forward" and "this-moment".

Monday, May 23, 2022   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing I'm delighted that the ads are disappearing! But appalled that voices are being capriciously silenced because some program found some forbidden key word on some web page. And if that's not why, the implications are much worse.

Saturday, January 16, 2021   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

patterns, From Uploaded(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing According to the Kubler-Ross stages of grieving (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance), I'd say we're just about in the "bargaining" phase of grief. Pretty quick, except that the denial phase is hard to measure, being, well, denial and all. It's starting to look like that took a little longer than it took me to be old enough to qualify for the next round of vaccinations. About a hundred and forty years before.

Monday, January 11, 2021   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing This is in response to the response to the article by Moon of Alabama, and the long string of commentary from a mixture of worldviews, most of which seemed not to recognize that their world differed in any particulars from the others. I was going to make a couple of remarks and move on. But a lot of smart people seem to place very different emphasis on some pertinent central facts of the case.

Saturday, February 13, 2021   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

Zoom-to-Zoom Infinity, From Uploaded(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing Ever point your smartphone at your laptop zoom-to-zoom? Like two mirrors?

Thursday, December 25, 2008   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

(5 comments) SHARE More Sharing On Obama's first day, the CIA and the Pentagon are still fastened like sucking lampreys to our wounded flanks. Hundreds of festering, fermenting time-bomb disasters are becoming new markets all over the world. If we want substantive change, we are each going to have to put something at stake, and face the music. I'm going to have to recognize and own up to the Dick Cheney in me, and that ain't a pretty thought.

Friday, February 2, 2024   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing Why should we believe this will stop, given a level of corruption that provides blanket impunity for live-streaming extermination of an entire people? It's a growth industry after all.

Wednesday, September 2, 2020   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing Has a conspiracy theory ever been involved in the bust? Insiders and professionals, somebody with direct knowledge, blows the whistle, or makes a mistake, or there's some kind of audit, and the whole thing falls apart. I can't recall any popular theories ever leading to such an outcome.

Thursday, October 1, 2020   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

SHARE More Sharing The FBI released a dire report on white supremacist "militias" just as the President was speaking directly from the "debate" to one of the most notoriously violent of these fringe groups, clearly, as they have now confirmed, telling them to "get ready for a war." Did the President mean it? The violent wackos say so, so what's the difference?

Saturday, September 12, 2020   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing We began consuming the world in just the last few moments. Starting about the time History began, When we started writing.

Thursday, January 22, 2009   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

(8 comments) SHARE More Sharing And you say he's just one man? You think he's somebody's puppet? That the Mysterious Ones Who Control Everything anointed him to lull us back to sleep again?

Monday, August 3, 2009   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

SHARE More Sharing Then it began to dawn that the whole myth about how insurors were taking "risks" was shot to hell. The only risk involved had always been the only risk involved, except that now the rubes could see it: the only risk the insurance companies ever had taken was the risk that somebody would actually qualify for the payments to which their policies entitled them, Now everybody has a fatal pre-existing condition...

Saturday, February 10, 2024   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

UkraineTie1, From Uploaded(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing I haven't followed Carlson, or Putin for that matter. But in this lengthy and very candid interview, the contrast between two heads of state is so striking it bears more than a cursory glance.

Tuesday, January 20, 2009   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

(5 comments) SHARE More Sharing Mr. Obama is about to take the Oath of Office in about half an hour as I write. I took the day off, and I got a big box of kleenex. I'm all set to hear this man articulate a vision that everyone I know shares and has cherished in the long, cold dark since the assassinations of the sixties. Call me a sentimental old softy. But then go out and grab hold of the vision and work like you've never worked before.

Saturday, January 3, 2009   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

SHARE More Sharing If there is a solution to the problem of peace in the Middle East, it certainly is not to be found where anyone in power is looking.

Tuesday, March 5, 2024   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing If you didn't know when this article was written, you might think it was yesterday. I wrote it in 2014. The only apparent change since then is in the numbers of dead and dying children, whole families wiped out, and open declarations of genocidal intent by government leaders, and not only Israeli, but also those now asking for my own vote.

Wednesday, February 7, 2024   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing Without a lineage of guided practice, only an impoverished artifice of distraction, deflection and denial remains. Jurisprudence, for instance, has been inverted and reduced to a fancy set of lock-picks and escape tricks.

Wednesday, November 26, 2008   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

SHARE More Sharing What we need are centrally-located, climate-controlled facilities with pleasant common spaces, good plumbing, and other basic amenities, so that American families down on their luck, robbed of everything by the Cheney/Bush gang of bandits, will have someplace to live out the indeterminate sentence imposed on them by the people supposedly elected to prevent just such an eventuality.

Monday, January 12, 2009   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

SHARE More Sharing I actually thought Bush was going to cry, right there at the last Press Conference today.

Thursday, December 13, 2007   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

SHARE More Sharing USAID spins liabilities into assets again, as the administration eats its young, tossing depleted agencies at the pursuing mob... do flimsier flimflams and smellier red herrings portend a last desperate all-or-nothing attempt to rule the world?

Saturday, August 11, 2007   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing Exploring the relationship between Capitalism and Democracy

Friday, March 27, 2009   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing If, like me, you believe that our system is properly named Economic Feudalism, then yes, it will certainly work - for the holders of the fiefdom in trouble just now. And from their point of view, the fact that so many millions of people have been bumped off the drastically shortened "middle class" shelf and relegated to a lifetime of serfdom is all good.

Wednesday, September 19, 2007   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing As Cheney writes a letter to the Editor about "the Real Presidential Record," U.S. is poised for a spectacular nuclear attack on Iran. What will stop this?

Sunday, March 16, 2008   |   Full Article   |   Print Article

(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing Header: Now that Greg Palast has overturned the rock under which the Administration's payoff to the subprime swindlers was supposed to stay hidden, I feel vindicated in my skepticism about Eliot Spitzer's public take-down. This may well be the creepiest story in a year that is shaping up as the mother of all creepy years in American politics.

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