Given the fact that nuclear war means the virtual annihilation of life on earth, it’s remarkable that many people continue to resist building a nuclear weapons-free world. Is the human race suicidal? Before jumping to that conclusion, let’s remember that considerably...
ZNet
The U.S. Government Should Promote the General Welfare
An event revealing a great deal about the kind of government Americans want occurred this March, when members of the U.S. Congress voted on the American Rescue Plan. This legislation, staunchly supported by the Democrats, provided federal funding for the provision of...
Maria Páez de Victor: Eight Years Without President Chávez
This superb speech by Venezuelan-Canadian scholar Maria Páez de Victor should soon be up on www.NoSanctions.org , but I decided to post it here so I can spreading it around right away. **** Talk given in Webinar: US/Canada: HANDS OFF VENEZUELA, END SANCTIONS ON...
A Rapidly Globalizing World Needs Strengthened Global Governance
The world is currently engulfed in crises—most prominently, a disease pandemic, a climate catastrophe, and the prevalence of war—while individual nations are encountering enormous difficulties in coping with them. These difficulties result from the global nature of...
The Great Evasion
Two related events—the 75th anniversary of the January 24, 1946 UN General Assembly Resolution 1 (which established a commission to plan for the abolition of nuclear weapons) and the January 22, 2021 entry into force of the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear...
Trump’s coup attempt: dangerous for the US and the rest of the world
Trump incited his supporters to violently storm the Capitol Building in Washington DC in an attempt to revive his failed efforts to overturn the results of the election. Five people are dead as a direct result of the attack, including one police officer (ironically a...
UN agencies not above playing politics with statistics
It’s clear that technical departments within the UN sometimes have their work corrupted by the US government and its allies. Consider recent reporting by the Grayzone on OPCW whistleblowers who exposed manipulation of an investigation into alleged chemical weapons use...
Reassessing the Leopoldo López trial of 2014-15
One of the reasons people may get duped into seeing Venezuelan politician Leopoldo López as a victim is his trial which began in 2014, when he finally went to jail after supporting a fourth US-backed attempt to violently overthrow Venezuela’s democratically elected...
Review of Hensman’s ‘Indefensible’
Defense of the Easily Defensible By Dave Markland In 2018 Haymarket Books published Rohini Hensman’s Indefensible: Democracy, Counter-revolution and Anti-imperialist Rhetoric. Its focus is on left journalists and analysts like John Pilger and the late Edward S. Herman...
The Impossibility Conjecture of Humanoid Artificial Intelligence and the Non-Benign Singularity
Abstract [A Rough Draft of a Work-in-progress.] The idea of machines which are almost identical to human beings has been so seductive that it has captured the imaginations of the best minds as well as laypeople for at least a century and half, perhaps more. Right...
Trump’s Broken Promises to U.S. Factory Workers
Back in 2016, while campaigning for president, Donald Trump discovered a useful tactic for drawing the votes of disgruntled blue-collar workers: denouncing the loss of U.S. manufacturing jobs and promising to restore them. At a rally in hard-hit Ohio, he assailed the...
Latest UN report on Venezuela is not remotely honest (Part 2)
On September 15, UN investigators ( the so called “Mission”) published a 411 page report about the human rights situation in Venezuela.[1] Part 1 of my analysis of the report focused on its gross dishonesty about opposition leader Leopoldo Lopez. The Mission...