Latest News: Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

“Despite doing more to expose the actions of the rich and powerful than any other journalist in modern times, Assange’s plight has been ignored by the mainstream media who have either forgotten or turned against him on account of a longstanding and well orchestrated propaganda campaign to demonise a man who poses a grave threat to the established order.” — IN DEFENSE OF JULIAN ASSANGE reviewed by Morning Star

Friday, January 10th, 2020

Must-read on the persecution of Wikileaks whistleblower

Never before have so many states, intelligence agencies and powerful individuals invested such effort into confining, silencing and neutralising a single individual on account of his desire to inform people about the misdeeds of their governments and elites. In Defence of Julian Assange is an anthology of essays, articles, and commentaries written by journalists, lawyers and supporters among others who discuss Assange’s enduring persecution, his countless successes in exposing those deemed untouchable through the medium of Wikileaks and the terrifying implications that an extradition to the United States would pose not just to Assange but to journalism and democracy as a whole.

Divided into four sections, the book focuses on Assange’s confinement in the Ecuadorian embassy, his expulsion and arrest, the internet and censorship and the legacy of Assange and Wikileaks.It reveals how Assange, alongside whistleblowers such as Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, knowingly took great risks to perform an invaluable service to journalism and the truth by informing the public about war crimes and other wrongdoings committed by those in power.

Read the full review here.

“I’d never judge someone else for not working. But if I myself didn’t work, work, work, without slumping into psychic extremes I castigated myself as a corrupted failure.”—Alissa Quart, author of THOUGHTS AND PRAYERS, discuss her work in Poetry Society of America

Friday, January 10th, 2020

Alissa Quart on “In Ballard”

The event was a family vacation, in a rapidly gentrified neighborhood in a Northwestern city. The month was August, the end of the summer, a time when some people get manic from the increased light, like Norwegians finally seeing sun. My age was early middle. My professional anxiety was unusually high, as if to match the climate-weird hot temperature around me. By that year, 2015, newspapers had seen forty five percent of their jobs shrink since 2004, with freelance pay sometimes below minimum wage.

Over the course of the 48 hours in which I wrote “In Ballard,” I underwent what could be called an extended panic.

I was a lifelong freelancer, who also ran an organization devoted to journalists writing on inequality as they tried to survive themselves. I had started to report a book on the subject as well. In other words, I personalized my industry’s vulnerability:

Read the full piece here.

“The 2018 election of Far-Right politician Jair Bolsonaro to the presidency shook the Federative Republic of Brazil and rippled across the globe in a way similar to the shockwave caused by the US election of Donald Trump two years earlier.”—The Humanist interviews Conor Foley, editor of IN SPITE OF YOU

Thursday, January 9th, 2020

Dreams of Dictatorship and the Nightmare of Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro

Brazil is the fifth largest country in the world, as well as the largest economic force in South America. One of the most diverse societies globally (with a population over 211 million people) is now being led by a man who promotes military dictatorship, violence against political opponents, and strengthening the rule of the rich at the expense of the poor and the oppressed.

Wrapping himself in the Brazilian flag (figuratively speaking), Bolsonaro preached a political gospel of liberating the country from socialism, from “gender ideology,” and from “political correctness” with his inaugural speech on January 1, 2019. He called on “each congressperson to help me in the mission of rebuilding and restoring our homeland.” The term “homeland” here has more sinister connotations than “patriotic populism”—it’s a move into fascist territory. His vision of a country “whitened by iron and fire” is a more obvious example of such rhetoric.

Read the full piece here.

“As you collect documents and bring new information to light, be aware that you are in an escalating digital arms race.” —A PUBLIC SERVICE by Tim Schwartz excerpted in Boing Boing

Thursday, January 9th, 2020

Documentation Gathering, Sanitization, and Storage: an excerpt from A PUBLIC SERVICE

There will always be new ways that data forensics can identify you, or uncover information based on data that you inadvertently leave in your files, or data that is retained in logs noting who has accessed what files on what network. Recently it was discovered that noise from electrical grids can be used to quite accurately pinpoint when, and potentially where, an audio recording was made. The best way to win this war—or at least to avoid becoming collateral damage—is to work outside the standard methods and find partners who have experience.

Of course, the actual collection of documents has changed dramatically over the years. In 1969, Daniel Ellsberg systematically removed documents, including the Pentagon Papers, from the RAND Corporation in his briefcase, taking them to an advertising agency where he (sometimes with the help of his 13-year-old son) photocopied them, one page at a time. Though this took enormous courage and psychological stamina—and in 1969 all that copying was certainly time-consuming and undoubtedly tiresome—it was also technologically straightforward and relatively safe. As long as the guards didn’t stop and check his briefcase, and as long as no one saw him remove and return the reports, Ellsberg could duplicate the papers undetected.

Read the full excerpt here.

“The narrator in Dorfman’s short novel tells the story of a captive Cervantes and his meditations on writing, life, suffering and creativity.”—Morningstar reviews Ariel Dorfman’s CAUTIVOS

Wednesday, December 18th, 2019

Letters From Latin America

Miguel de Cervantes, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the Spanish language and one of the world’s pre-eminent novelists, was kept in captivity between 1575 and 1580 in the city of Algiers, then one of the most cosmopolitan cities of the Ottoman empire.

After his return to Spain, he briefly worked in Andalusia as a purchasing agent for the Spanish navy. This led to his imprisonment for a few months in Seville after a banker with whom he had deposited Crown funds went bankrupt.

It was during his brief stay at a jail in Seville that Cervantes started his masterpiece Don Quixote, a picaresque narrative that would become a founding work of Western literature — it’s often labelled the first modern novel.

Read the full review here.

“Unethical acts — not just illegal ones — need to be revealed. Society can only evolve when individuals stand up and shine a light on unethical practices. If you see something that doesn’t seem right, speak up.” —Tim Schwartz, author of A PUBLIC SERVICE, writes in A Public Seminar

Wednesday, December 18th, 2019

Whistleblowing, Disclosure and Anonymity

In 1965, 28-year-old Peter Buxtun was hired by the U.S. Public Health Service in San Francisco as a venereal disease investigator. Shortly after starting his job, Buxtun began hearing about a little-known, ongoing study on African-American males with syphilis. To Buxtun’s ears, this didn’t sound right — by the late 1940s, penicillin had been shown to be an effective drug against syphilis. How could there be an ongoing study of people with a disease that had become rare, thanks to a cheap and effective treatment that was discovered 20 years ago?

Though distracted by a return to school and a law degree, Buxtun continued to follow the trail, contacting the Centers for Disease Control and gathering documentation on the under the radar study. He continued to share the story with those around him, but no one he spoke with knew what to do. Was the study illegal? Surely it was unethical, but would it be possible to do anything about it?

Read the full excerpt here.

“There’s a saying at The Nation magazine: what’s bad for the nation is good for The Nation. When the right is ascendant, in other words, so are subscriptions to the left-wing magazine.”—The Los Angeles Review of Books reviews Matt Taibbi’s HATE INC.

Monday, December 16th, 2019

Making Money from Division

This might be called a business model, but not very convincingly. After all, left-wing magazines don’t make much money even in the worst years. (The Nation hosts, however incongruously, an annual cruise to help keep the lights on.) If their main aim was to make money fanning the flames of political division, they’d work elsewhere.

Matt Taibbi might say they’d find more lucrative work at MSNBC. In his biting new critique of partisan media, Hate Inc., he puts the progressive cable news channel in the same dishonorable category as Fox News. Despite their obvious political differences, he argues, both have made the news a consumer product designed “not just to make you mad, but keep you mad, whipped up in a state of devotional anger.”

Even if the information reported on MSNBC or Fox is factually correct, Taibbi says their work doesn’t amount to traditional journalism because their aim isn’t to inform viewers but to addict them — and addict them, particularly, to a narrative of permanent conflict where one side is always right and the other always wrong.

Read the full review here.

“What we did in assembling IN DEFENSE OF JULIAN ASSANGE was to take every single facet of the case and present it before a reading public. And one reason we had to do this is because the [liberal] press have given up on him, having used WikiLeaks, having got their scoops, having raised their own circulations.” —Tariq Ali, IN DEFENSE OF JULIAN ASSANGE co-editor, talks toScheer Intelligence’s Robert Scheer

Monday, December 9th, 2019

The Plot to Discredit and Destroy Julian Assange

A day after dozens of doctors around the world released a statement about their mounting concerns regarding Julian Assange’s health as he’s detained in a U.K. prison, Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer spoke with Tariq Ali, a renowned British journalist and co-editor of the recent collection of essays, “In Defense of Julian Assange.” To Scheer, Ali and the many contributors to the book, the case against Assange boils down to an international effort to suppress press freedoms. Yet as Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States have all co-authored the WikiLeaks founder’s demise, many other journalists and publishers, including at The Guardian and the New York Times—two publications that published work based on Wikileaks—have refused to defend Assange.

“What we did in assembling ‘In Defense of Julian Assange,’” explains Ali, “was to take every single facet of the case and present it before a reading public. And one reason we had to do this is because the [liberal] press have given up on him, having used WikiLeaks, having got their scoops, having raised their own circulations.”

Listen to the full show here.

“Their raw images of living through this horror, day in and day out, is one that continues to haunt the readers long after the book is over. “—Cathy Otten’s WITH ASH ON THEIR FACES reviewed in Feminism in India

Friday, December 6th, 2019

Book Review: With Ash On Their Faces By Cathy Otten

This book particularly focuses on the genocidal attack, executed one summer afternoon in 2014 when thousands of men were massacred, and women and children were enslaved. Otten talks about the slavery these women went through at the hands of ISIS men and their experiences of living with this horror for years, before their stories could be told. This book is a much-needed attempt to document the struggles of the Yazidi community.

Considered to be one of the first accounts of the genocidal attack unleashed by Daesh against the Yazidi community in Iraq, With Ash on Their Faces: Yezidi Women and the Islamic State speaks volumes about the resilience of Yazidi women. It is a collection of survivor’s accounts; stories of women who sailed through those turbulent times to tell their story. It begins with a short analysis of the political scenario present in Iraq with reference to the Yazidi community, the Kurdish (minority) and the government, both during and after Saddam Hussein’s rule. Further, the book is divided into three parts taking us through the course of events as and when they happened.

Read the full review here.

“I believe that Quart’s work in the so-called abstract cultural superstructure is not opposed to, but rather, at the very least, a necessary complement, to physically trying to unarm a rabid white supremacist terrorist.”—Alissa Quart’s THOUGHTS AND PRAYERS reviewed in Entropy Mag

Friday, December 6th, 2019

Everything can go/on the grill: A combined review of Alissa Quart

Forgive me if I emphasize the thought over the lyricism, but “everything goes/on the grill” in Alissa Quart’s capacious writing. Her recent prose (Squeezed, 2018) and poetry (Thoughts & Prayers, 2019) appeal to both my “Creative Writing” as well as my “Critical Thinking” sides—or what some college composition classes call pathos, logos, and ethos and some poets call music, logos, and image, and in the process, Quart is able to reframe the relationship between the ‘public’ and ‘private,’ commercial and non-commercial, seriousness and humor, work and care, as well as the stigma of the ‘Jewish mother’ stereotype.

Read the full review here.

“ At the end of his court martial for treason, the fictional character, Lieutenant Philip Nolan, was asked if he had anything to say to the court before sentencing. Rashly, he blurted out, “Damn the United States! I wish I may never hear of the United States again!””—Counterpunch on BELÉN FERNÁNDEZ’s EXILE

Tuesday, December 3rd, 2019

Counterpunch reviews Exile!

Early in Exile, Fernández makes clear her disdain for American-style hypocrisy — its willingness to force its brand of Exceptionalism, an olio of neoconservative militarism married to debt-inducing neoliberalism, while allowing its own domestic policy-making to so erode confidence in the American Dream that the country entered social and economic crises, so catastrophic that citizens risked everything to elect a populist clown as president. As Fernández puts it,

Lest folks start to view the state itself as public enemy number one, however, more convenient menaces are regularly trotted out. In addition to the usual domestic suspects—blacks, poor people, immigrants, and so on—the wider world has proved fertile terrain for the manufacture of any number of freedom-imperiling demons.

They say, ‘America, love it or leave it’: She left.

Read the full review here.

“What if I got heckled off the stage? I never thought to imagine what would happen if they laughed.”—Amy Sohn, author of CBD!, writes about stand-up for The New York Times

Monday, December 2nd, 2019

How I Found Myself in Mrs. Maisel’s Shoes

Last summer, the day my husband drove my daughter to sleepaway camp, I moved into my parents’ apartment building. Neighbors who had known me since childhood saw me in the elevator and asked what I was doing there. “House-sitting,” I said. In truth I was getting divorced, and crashing to save money until I found a new place for my daughter, 14, and me. When I told friends my situation, they said, “You’re the real-life Mrs. Maisel.” Minus the costuming and time period, there were striking similarities: difficult split, close Jewish family, prying neighbors.

Read the full piece here.

“How would a relatively inexperienced frontbench team cope with the quantum leap from opposition to government? How should they respond to businesses pushing back against their economic agenda, or cope with potentially unrealistic expectations among supporters about what can be achieved?”—The Guardian calls Christine Berry and Joe Guinan’s PEOPLE GET READY one of the best political books of 2019

Monday, December 2nd, 2019

Best politics books of 2019

It’s not long now until Britain finds out what Santa has brought us for a government. But whether the election delivers just what you’ve always wanted, or merely the political equivalent of a stocking full of ashes, somewhere out there is a book that may help make some sense of it.

Christine Berry and Joe Guinan’s People Get Ready! (OR Books) isn’t as well known as perhaps it should be, considering that it’s one of the few books written from a sympathetic left perspective to analyse potential vulnerabilities in the Corbyn project and how they might be countered. Given the argument that what the Labour leader is trying to do hasn’t been achieved in a democracy in modern times, Berry and Guinan examine what has defeated radical leftwing movements in the past, and which particular hurdles this one might face. How would a relatively inexperienced frontbench team cope with the quantum leap from opposition to government? How should they respond to businesses pushing back against their economic agenda, or cope with potentially unrealistic expectations among supporters about what can be achieved? Whether you’re thrilled or alarmed by the radical answers discussed, it’s one of the few political books this year likely to survive contact with an unpredictable general election. By Christmas it’s either going to be an invaluable primer for Corbyn’s team as they move into No 10, or it will be worth scanning for retrospective clues as to why voters chose not to make that happen.

Read the full list here.

“Kimberley talks with us about how the United States empire navigates a citizenry that increasingly opposes deploying troops to intervene in countries and how propaganda seeps into our popular culture.”—Margaret Kimberly, IN DEFENSE OF JULIAN ASSANGE contributor, talks toUnauthorized Disclosure’s Rania Khalek and Kevin Gosztola

Tuesday, November 26th, 2019

Interview With Margaret Kimberley Of Black Agenda Report

In a wide-ranging dismantling of mainstream media reporting on Julian Assange, award-winning journalist John Pilger has blasted the Guardian for its coverage of the WikiLeaks founder. Pilger took aim at a Guardian editorial published this week, which made the case for not extraditing the Australian to the US, where he could face 175 years behind bars for possession and dissemination of classified information.

The BAFTA award-winning documentary filmmaker has offered his interpretation of what the editorial actually meant.

“What the Guardian was really saying was this: ‘We are the fourth estate, the bearers of true liberal principles, the guardians of sacred rights. Such as the right to suck up to power. The right to invade countries and the right to smear those who expose our double standards and, if necessary, the right to destroy them,’” he said.

Listen to the full show here.

“Julian faces a 175 year sentence under the century old Espionage Act, passed during World War I to be used against spies”—Tariq Ali and Margaret Kunstler, editors of IN DEFENSE OF JULIAN ASSANGE, discuss the book on Law and Disorder Radio

Tuesday, November 26th, 2019

In Defense of Julian Assange

Whistle blowing truth telling journalist and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange now sits in solitary confinement in London’s infamous Belmarsh prison. The Trump administration has asked that he be extradited to Virginia for trial as a spy. Today we interview Margaret Kunstler and Tariq Ali who edited and introduce the just published book In Defense of Julian Assange The book demonstrates convincingly that what is at stake in his upcoming trial is the future of free journalism, here and abroad. Julian faces a 175 year sentence under the century old Espionage Act, passed during World War I to be used against spies. He is charged with conspiring with Chelsea Manning to publish the Iraq war logs, the Afghanistan war logs, and State Department cables.

Former CIA director and current Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has called WikiLeaks a non-state intelligence service. Hillary Clinton wanted him assassinated by drone. The United Nations special rapporteur on torture Nils Melzer recently visited him in prison and concluded that indeed he was being tortured. When he last appeared in court he was incoherent and couldnt remember his name or date of birth.

WikiLeaks was launched by Julian Assange in 2006, three years after Bush and Cheney commenced the illegal catastrophic war against Iraq in 2003.

Julian is a computer genius. He invented a way for publishers like WikiLeaks to receive truth telling information anonymously. The first bombshell he published in 2006 was The Iraqi war logs. He got them from whistleblower Chelsea Manning who was then in the military. They showed a video of American soldiers in a helicopter committing a war crime by gunning down and executing a number of Iraqi civilians, two Reuters journalists, and several children. Then they chuckled about it. A photo of the murders is shown on the books cover. This leak, furnished by Chelsea Manning, was devastating to the United States. Other whistleblower leaks followed. The government became relentless in trying to close down WikiLeaks.

Guest – Margaret Kunstler – a civil rights attorney who has spent her career providing movement support and protecting the rights of activists. A powerful speaker on human rights issues, Kunstler is a consultant to the emerging voices of Occupy Wall Street protesters and Anonymous supporters. Kunstlers Hell No: Your Right to Dissent in Twenty-First Century America, co-authored with Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights, is the leading handbook for activists today.

Guest ” Tariq Ali, writer, journalist and film-maker, born in Lahore and educated at Oxford University. He writes regularly for a range of publications including The Guardian and The London Review of Books. He has written more than a dozen books including non-fiction as well as scripts for both stage and screen.

Listen to the full interview here.

“Warren faced up to 20 years in prison for providing food, water, and shelter to two men from Central America who were traveling through the Sonoran desert.”—Natascha Elena Uhllman, author of ABOLISH ICE, examines the acquittal of Scott Warren and the cruelty of Customs and Border Patrol in an op-ed for Teen Vogue

Monday, November 25th, 2019

This week, a federal jury in Arizona acquitted human rights activist Scott Warren on charges of harboring undocumented migrants. Warren faced up to 20 years in prison for providing food, water, and shelter to two men from Central America who were traveling through the Sonoran desert. It’s a victory for activists across the country in a case that has come to define the stakes of humanitarian aid.

Warren was arrested by Border Patrol agents last year at an outpost maintained by No More Deaths, a faith-based humanitarian nonprofit organization providing basic necessities to migrants passing through the blazing desert that stretches across the Southwestern United States. That morning the organization released a report accusing U.S. Border Patrol of interfering with their aid efforts. Over a 46 month period, No More Deaths members tracked their humanitarian aid drop sites, and found that Border Patrol agents vandalized water left for migrants 415 times, or twice a week on average. They released footage of Border Patrol agents appearing to kick over water jugs and laughing, which quickly went viral, garnering millions of views within days. Border Patrol officials denied charges of retaliation: “We’re protecting immigration laws in the area, and there was a situation in which we needed to do the arrest because there were some illegal individuals in that area,” Carlos Diaz, a spokesman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, told The Washington Post. The No More Deaths report painted a damning picture of the agency, indicating a pattern of cruelty against undocumented migrants. As one migrant said in the report, “I needed water, some of the other people in the group needed water, but we found them destroyed. [I felt] helplessness, rage. They [the U.S. Border Patrol] must hate us. It’s their work to capture us, but we are humans. And they don’t treat us like humans. It’s hate is what it is. They break the bottles out of hate.”

Read the full article here.

“The United States claims the right to snatch Assange up in England and drag him into court in the Eastern District of Virginia where the evidence he needs to use in his defense will be barred and where the bar for conviction is low.—Michael Steven Smith, author of LAWYERS ON THE LEFT, reviews In DEFENSE OF JULIAN ASSANGE forThe Indypendent

Monday, November 25th, 2019

The Trials Julian Assange

Whistle-blowing, truth-telling journalist and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange now sits in solitary confinement in London‘s infamous Belmarsh prison. The Trump administration has asked that he be extradited to Virginia for trial as a spy.

The just-published book In Defense of Julian Assange demonstrates convincingly that what is at stake in his upcoming trial is the future of free journalism, here and abroad. It is edited by British socialist scholar and writer Tariq Ali and civil rights attorney Margaret Kunstler.

Assange is an Australian citizen. He never set foot in the United States. He never published untruthful materials. Yet the Trump administration wants to reach across the ocean, have him extradited to the United States, try him and put him in solitary in a maximum-security prison for the rest of his life. If the government can get away with this, it will have established a precedent that could lead to the destruction of free journalism. It is the most significant challenge to a free press in our lifetimes.

Read the full review here.

“If Julian were to succumb to the cruelty he has endured, week after week, month after month, newspapers like the Guardian would share the responsibility.”—John Pilger, IN DEFENSE OF JULIAN ASSANGE contributor, criticizes Assange’s treatment by the press on RT

Monday, November 25th, 2019

‘Sacred right to suck up to power’: Pilger blasts ‘cruel’ media coverage of Julian Assange

In a wide-ranging dismantling of mainstream media reporting on Julian Assange, award-winning journalist John Pilger has blasted the Guardian for its coverage of the WikiLeaks founder. Pilger took aim at a Guardian editorial published this week, which made the case for not extraditing the Australian to the US, where he could face 175 years behind bars for possession and dissemination of classified information.

The BAFTA award-winning documentary filmmaker has offered his interpretation of what the editorial actually meant.

“What the Guardian was really saying was this: ‘We are the fourth estate, the bearers of true liberal principles, the guardians of sacred rights. Such as the right to suck up to power. The right to invade countries and the right to smear those who expose our double standards and, if necessary, the right to destroy them,’” he said.

Read the full article here.

Amy Goodman, Aaron Mate, Nathan Fuller, and Barry Pollack speak at IN DEFENSE OF JULIAN ASSANGE Launch Party

Friday, November 22nd, 2019

In Defense of Julian Assange Event

Margaret Kunstler, Aaron Mate, Nathan Fuller, Amy Goodman, and Barry Pollack urge justice for wrongly prosecuted Julian Assange on the occasion of the recent publication by Or Books of In Defense of Julian Assange composed of 39 authors offering insights and perspective. Event held at the home of the late Michael Ratner, Assange’s former attorney.

Watch the video here here.

Tariq Ali and Margaret Kunstler, editors of IN DEFENSE OF JULIAN ASSANGE, appear on Democracy Now with Amy Goodman to discuss the book

Friday, November 22nd, 2019

“In Defense of Julian Assange”: Why WikiLeaks Founder’s Case Threatens Press Freedom

Julian has been locked up in a top-security prison, Belmarsh, the liberal newspaper The Guardian has finally come out and defended him, using the fact that the charges have been dropped by the Swedes and said he should not be extradited, that it would be an outrage if he was. All he did was publish information which The Guardian published in its pages, The New York Times published, El País published, Repubblica published in Italy. So it would be a severe attack on civil liberties. So at long last, something is beginning to move on the mainstream front to defend Julian.

Now, basically, he should not be imprisoned at all. He was given a maximum sentence for not complying with the bail legalities. It’s very rare for anyone who has done that to serve a full sentence. Anyway, that sentence was served ages ago. So why is he still being kept in a maximum security prison? It is a vindictive punishment by the English judicial system on the authority of the government, which obviously wants this, to satisfy and appease the United States, and to punish Julian. They want him to be in this state that he is, has been described by the United Nations rapporteur a few minutes ago on this program. And they want to demoralize and destroy him. Otherwise, he showed even if he has to be imprisoned, which I don’t accept for a minute, he could be in an open prison where conditions are very different.

Watch the interview or read the transcript here.

“Omnipresent are the prison guard towers, the barbed wire, the Israeli soldiers with their massive guns and the separation wall” —Greg Shupak, author of THE WRONG STORY, writing in The Electronic Intifada

Tuesday, November 19th, 2019

Attacking Palestine’s future

Traveling across Palestine, as I did to give lectures earlier this year, means following a perpetually fresh trail of repression.

Omnipresent are the prison guard towers, the barbed wire, the Israeli soldiers with their massive guns and the separation wall.

The day before an event at which I was speaking in Beit Sahour, a small town adjacent to Bethlehem, residents held a funeral for Sajid Mizher, a 17-year-old volunteer medic Israeli soldiers had just shot dead in Dheisheh refugee camp despite his wearing an identifying vest.

The night before my talk at Birzeit University near Ramallah, a group of undercover Israeli forces broke into its campus and kidnapped three Palestinian students.

Persecuting students in this manner is part of a larger pattern as is Israel’s routine killing and maiming of Palestinian children, 44 of whom it shot on 25 October in Gaza.

Read the full article here.

Colin Robinson, co-owner of OR Books, discusses Jeremy Corbyn, The Labour Party, and the upcoming parliamentary election on Law and Disorder Radio

Tuesday, November 19th, 2019

Labor Party’s Jeremy Corbyn For British Prime Minister: Analysis

Next month and December 12 Great Britain will hold national elections. Jeremy Corbyn, a social Democrat similar in some respects to Bernie Sanders heads the British Labor Party. He has said “I will be a very different kind of Prime Minister, not the kind of Prime Minister who believes he was born to rule.“

Working people in Great Britain are struggling like they are in the United States. The Labor Party has addressed what to do about their situation. It has grown qualitatively in recent years and has a chance of winning the election. What the Labor Party stand for and what has their leader Jeremy Corbyn done to prepare for taking power is what will be discussed.

Guest – Colin Robinson, longtime member of the Labor Party. Originally from Liverpool, he was educated in London where he was an active socialist. He moved to New York 30 years ago to work as a publisher. He splits his time between New York City and London. Robinson has written for The Guardian newspaper and the London review of books. He is the co-owner of OR Books with offices in New York City, London, and Calcutta..

Listen to the full show here.

“All the news media—with a few online exceptions—are part of a single poisonous and self-reinforcing information ecosystem.”—The New York Review of Books reviews Matt Taibbi’s HATE INC.

Tuesday, November 19th, 2019

The Medium Is the Mistake

In the pattern Taibbi describes, this was a typical expression of the ethic that pervades the anti-Trump media. After all, what journalistic imperative requires a collective purpose of grouping or framing? The very idea of framing—like a TV producer’s “thematic” links from episode to episode—may be incompatible with saying what is both true and important. Unless you believe that reality writes its script according to themes and frames, the duty of an honest reporter is to shun precisely the fictive convenience provided by a frame. A journalistic outlet may have a predictable slant in spite of its attempts at impartiality, but it seems odd to wear the prejudice as a badge of honor.

Most days at the Times are felt to warrant (at a rough estimate) between four and six stories with Trump’s name in the headlines. The front page on October 15, for example, in addition to many stories on Syria and Turkey, carried an item on a “gruesome video” that was “played at a meeting of a pro-Trump group over the weekend.” To swell the chorus of follow-up stories on Syria and Turkey, the front section on October 19 added a full half-page exposition and analysis of Trump’s recent visit to Texas—a piece of ordinary political maneuvering that in another administration might have rated six inches or maybe none. All this keeps the pot boiling. We can’t take our eyes off Trump, and besides, the stories are good for business; subscription numbers are going up, and readers feel a mild glow of validation from the energy of disapproval. We can hate Trump with a semi-civilized smirk.

Read the full review here.

Matt Taibbi discusses HATE INC. with Joe Rogan on Joe Rogan’s Experience

Tuesday, November 19th, 2019

Joe Rogan interviews Matt Taibbi

Matt Taibbi is a journalist and author. He has reported on politics, media, finance, and sports, and has authored several books including his latest “Hate, Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another” is available now & look for his podcast “Useful Idiots” is available at RollingStone.com

Watch the show here.

“The Internet has proved remarkably resistant to state governance. Its use can certainly be shaped by expensive government initiatives such as China’s Great Firewall or the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).”—Scott Malcomson, author of SPLINTERNET, writes in Foreign Affairs

Friday, November 15th, 2019

The Real Fight for the Future of 5G

With 5G it is possible to do enormous amounts of computing at very high speeds and without having to connect the input device—a cell phone, say, or a self-driving car—to a wire of any kind. But those high speeds are possible only if the rest of the system (signal towers, base stations, distributed servers, and the megascale centers that house the data and do a great deal of computing themselves) is physically near enough to these input devices. Having your phone, car, or pacemaker in constant contact with vast computational power in the so-called cloud sounds amazingly untethered and extraterritorial. Yet in its physicality and focus on location, the emerging system is more grounded than the Internet ever was.

Read the full piece here.

“The VA and its oversight organizations have failed to provide safe pathways for those who want to protect our veterans by exposing corruption when they see it” —Tim Schwartz, author of A PUBLIC SERVICE, writes in Medium

Thursday, November 14th, 2019

Whistleblowers Protect Veterans

Reporting violations to the OAWP is not safe. Even anonymous hotlines might not truly be anonymous, because your voice certainly isn’t anonymous. Instead, find a partner outside the VA to work with, whether a journalist, lawyer, or someone at a public advocacy organization. Many out there have experience working with whistleblowers and can help you formulate the safest plan.

Read the full piece here.

“Thinking is an obstacle for my writing. “—an interview with Cuong Lu, author of THE BUDDHA IN JAIL, published inThe Dewdrop

Thursday, November 14th, 2019

Author Q&A – Cuong Lu

How do you write? I am in deep concentration when I write. In that state of mind, I don’t think. Thinking is an obstacle for my writing. You can say that I meditate when I write. For me, meditation and writing are exactly the same. I write very fast. When it is done, I know: it is done. Writing always gives me a happy feeling. A feeling of being connected with myself and with life.

Read the full interview here.

“In the last seven years or so, resilience has become a programming imperative for large philanthropies, including the Hogg Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and many others. Resilience has also become a theory to explain the good — from countries that adapt well to climate change to what allows some to survive addiction.”—Alissa Quart, author of THOUGHTS ON PRAYERS, writes in The Boston Globe

Thursday, November 14th, 2019

Rethinking ‘resilience’ and ‘grit’

Christine “Cissy” White is an advocate for survivors of trauma and is one herself. The 52-year-old lives in Weymouth, Mass., earning her living as a community facilitator for an organization that provides a social media hub and other forms of support to people who have struggled as she did.

Helping others in this way is also her personal passion: she experienced many setbacks. White’s mother was just a teen when White was born and throughout much of her childhood, her mother was the sole provider — her mother’s first husband was violent, homeless, and absent. Growing up poor, she would hide the tape and paper clips that held her broken glasses together behind her bangs. She said she was “not hungry” when she was out with friends and starving but couldn’t afford food, and she used paper towels instead of tampons when she was a teenager because she couldn’t afford them, either.

Read the full article here.

“I thought about your teaching ‘doing nothing,’ and I did nothing. I sat and watched my anger disappear.” —an excerpt ofTHE BUDDHA IN JAIL by Cuong Lu published in The Dewdrop

Friday, November 8th, 2019

Practicing Behind Bars

Cuong Lu’s book, The Buddha in Jail, is a collection of 52 stories and vignettes from his experiences working as a prison chaplain. The stories are meant to broaden our perspectives, not just about others but also about ourselves, and they get to the root of human goodness. This excerpt, the 18th story in the book, is about anger and not reacting to it. Here, Cuong Lu – who is a student of Thich Nhat Hanh – tells the story of a person he worked with who was able to sit with his rage and not react, eventually solving the problem he had in a peaceful manner. An inspiring read.

Read the full excerpt here.

Matt Taibbi discusses HATE INC. with Mitch Jeseich on KPFA’s Letters and Politics

Tuesday, November 5th, 2019

Mitch Jeseich interviews Matt Taibbi

A conversation about U.S. Foreign Policy and The Trump Impeachment Inquiry with Rolling Stone journalist Matt Taibbi. He is the author of the book Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another.

Listen to the show here.

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