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(1 comments) SHARE        Wednesday, April 15, 2020
Coronavirus: squabbling in our WWI trenches This could be WWI, if we all remain competing capitalist rivals. The covid-19 virus is an avatar, Nature's version of the capitalist virus destroying us.

SHARE        Friday, April 3, 2020
Love in time of covid-19 I'm struck by the fact that all our pandemics, in fact all pandemics are courtesy of 'civilization'. Time for a rethink. Covid-19 inadvertently shows us the way

SHARE        Monday, March 9, 2020
Leaving the EU was the right move for the wrong reasons Let's be clear: the EU was not set up to promote a friendly big socialist community, a Soviet-lite. The European Coal and Steel Community was set up in 1950 with the intent of promoting European integration, approved by Truman as a Cold War anti-domino measure.

SHARE        Friday, March 6, 2020
Review: Diana Johnstone, Circle in the Darkness: Memoir of a World Watcher (2020) Circle in the Darkness is one of the great personal accounts of the anguished decline of our uncivilization, both a riveting eye-witness account of many of the horrors and perfidies, and a primer for students of history and all those struggling to not only dismantle the beast, but to prepare us for what follows it. Read it and weep. And smile at the follies. And shout 'Yes!' as light bulbs flash in your mind.

SHARE        Wednesday, February 26, 2020
US strategy in Middle East: create martyrs, weaken Taliban & Iran, help IS Oh, for those peaceful 1990s! Saddam is already a footnote and al-qaeda and the Taliban have been eclipsed in the muslim world by the Islamic State, which miraculously expanded over the Levant, and is still hanging on there by a thread. Kept that way by US-Israel.

SHARE        Tuesday, February 4, 2020
Review: Weingarten, One Day: The extraordinary story of an ordinary 24 hours in America You can't help but love all his characters (okay, a couple murderers excepted). And be overwhelmed by the feeling of a huge (too huge) nation wildly careering into a dystopic future, full of half-digested bits of flotsam washed up on the shores of what was once the world's last pristine continent, and is now " Read it and laugh and cry.

SHARE        Friday, January 31, 2020
Israel-Palestine: It's time for Russia to step up to the plate Russia is playing a mediating, balancing role, as opposed to the US, Israel and Turkey, all pursuing their own warlike agendas. It looks now as if the Assad regime will survive and Syria will be able to rebuild (China is ready and willing), despite Turkey, Israel and the US. The next step is bringing some semblance of peace to Palestine. Why not a Putin- Netanyahu- Abbas 'deal of the century'?

SHARE        Friday, January 17, 2020
Review: Tim Anderson, Axis of Resistance: Towards an Independent Middle East Anderson's Axis of Resistance takes on the leftist position of 'a plague on all your houses'. Yassin Al-Haj Saleh, 'the intellectual voice of the Syrian revolution' (for westerners), presents a bleak portrait of "three monsters treading on Syria's corpse": (1) the Assad regime and its allies, (2) DAESH/ISIS and the other jihadists, and (3) the West. This is the general view from outside the Syrian cauldron, but leads nowhere.

(1 comments) SHARE        Wednesday, January 1, 2020
New Years 2020 fireworks: Iraq US embassy occupation The US blames the Iraq police and army for not preventing the demonstrators from entering the Green Zone, as if it is US territory. The image of survivors of the bombings bearing coffins of some of the 25 martyrs with them shows a different story. US actions only unite the Iraqis in opposition to them.

SHARE        Thursday, December 12, 2019
Timeline 2010-2019: United States&Canada, Latin America, Europe, Africa&Asia 2011 *Osama bin Laden killed in Abbottabad, Pakistan by US Navy SEALs, his body supposedly dumped at sea. *Occupy Wall Street against top 1% electrifies nation, finding common cause with protests and uprisings in Arab world and Europe, a fitting 10th anniversary of 9/11...

(2 comments) SHARE        Saturday, December 7, 2019
Timeline 2010-2019: Middle East 2010 *Hamas, elected the governing authority of the Gaza Strip in 2007, remains in power, the Palestinian Authority refusing to hold (and lose) elections. Gaza now an open-air prison, cut off with only Israel allowing legal contact with the outside world. Gazans produce arms from smuggled supplies and build homemade rockets. *BDS campaign targeting Israel picks up steam as Israel panics...

(1 comments) SHARE        Thursday, November 28, 2019
Tab Hunter: American culture's hat trick Tab survived the poison of Hollywood long enough to leave his mark and then have a real life afterwards, despite his 'secret'. And that's the way he wanted it.

(1 comments) SHARE        Thursday, October 10, 2019
Review: Tamim Ansari, Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes (2009) Those of us lucky/unlucky enough to live in the West see the rest of the world revolving around us, like Europe's 17th-century sun, which, of course, orbited around the earth. Galileo tried a counterfactual: what if I were standing on that blazing sun? Well, the rest-is-history. Maybe we aren't the centre of the world. What if I were born and learned history as a Muslim?

(2 comments) SHARE        Monday, September 16, 2019
Grossman's A Socialist Defector: Back in the GDR - you don't know how lucky you are Grossman swam the Danube one night and after wandering for hours, finally found an Austrian guard and asked to see the Soviet commandant. He joked with the Russian guard about Pushkin and Doestoevsky, the only Russian words he knew. He was accepted and sent to Bautzen, a hill-top town in eastern Saxony on the river Spree, complete with castle and magnificent Lutheran-Catholic cathedral.

SHARE        Tuesday, September 10, 2019
Lake Ontario by bike: Waterfront Trail Okay, a bit of Lake Ontario -- the fabulous Waterfront Trail from Oshawa to Toronto, 60km, almost all in sight of the lake. The panorama, the air. Such a relief from Toronto. And no 'ribbons of death' to contend with. The deadly 401 a safe distance, buried behind lots of trees.

SHARE        Sunday, September 1, 2019
Whittaker Chambers or Alger Hiss: Who's the real traitor? Though #1 on the New York Times' bestseller list for 13 weeks in 1952, despite being hailed as "one of the dozen or so indispensable books of the century" (George Will), Witness quickly disappeared from our collective consciousness. We remember its most famous victim, Alger Hiss, as a nice guy who was mercilessly hounded, the prelude to the McCarthy purges of the 1950s, a gruesome stain on US history.

(7 comments) SHARE        Wednesday, August 28, 2019
Putin and Russia, the world's 'heartland' Today's standoff between the Russian bear and the American eagle is yet another epic struggle in Russia's history, at the heart of Eurasia--the world's "heartland". It had a narrow brush with complete collapse in 1985--98 under Gorbachev/ Yeltsin, a weak, indecisive leadership, a metaphorical reenactment of Boris Godunov seizing the throne in the 16th century. 1985--98 was a repetition of the legendary Time of Troubles

(1 comments) SHARE        Wednesday, August 28, 2019
Review Rob Kall's Book, The Bottom-Up Revolution: Mastering the emerging world of connectivity (2019) Of course, it is the top, the 1%, who shape us and any technological advances which are deemed profitable, and thus incorporated into the economy. And interactions in the economy are in the first place top-down, until, that is, there is some kind of revolution which empowers the bottom. Bottom-up is democratic and should be our model. Are we living through such a revolution?

SHARE        Monday, August 19, 2019
Orwell: Neocon icon How do you explain the fact that the John Birch Society used 1984 as its main office telephone number in the 1960s? Or that both 'Animal Farm' and '1984' are force-fed to virtually the entire western world in people's formative years, even as Big Brother jacks up repression and surveillance, and pursues ever more cruel and senseless wars? A look at Orwell's weaknesses reveals how Big Brother got the last laugh.

SHARE        Thursday, August 1, 2019
Animal Farm, 1984, Darkness at Noon: Death Knells of Communism? Orwell and Koestler's classics, Animal Farm (1945) and 1984 (1949) vs Darkness at Noon (1940), all of them written in the heat of WWII, couldn't be more different. Orwell's colourful, if gloomy, social parables, were both successfully adapted more than once for the screen. Darkness at Noon never attracted any film offers. However, it is the first notable work equating Hitler and Stalin as totalitarian dictators

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