Archive 1986 – 2017

By Riane Eisler Via ahtribune.com • Mohsen Abdelmoumen: Can you explain us the term “domination culture”? Dr. Riane Eisler: Many people today believe that elections will lead to freedom and equality. But people often vote for regressive leaders – as dramatically illustrated by the recent election as U.S. President of a man who promised strong – man rule, condoned violence, degraded women, and stoked fear and scapegoating. To understand, and change, this, we need new thinking. Psychological linguists have found that the terms available to us channel our thinking. So new thinking requires new language. Our traditional social categories – such as ancient vs. modern, technologically developed vs. undeveloped, capitalist vs. socialist, Eastern vs. Western, and religious vs. secular – fragment our thinking. Each describes only a particular aspect of a social system. And all fail to take into account findings from psychology and neuroscience showing that what children experience...

Via ethicalmarkets.com • In the USA, founders feared concentration of power in government.  They installed separation of powers in the US Constitution—-buttressed by freedom of the press.  The very first Amendment reinforced this free media which became known as “the Fourth Branch” of US democracy. Today, two new threats have emerged:   1):  political interference with press freedom by intimidation, propaganda from both foreign powers and domestic interest groups, advertising, planting fake news, trolling online and mainstream media using “bots” and big data analytics. Crusading media experts’ reports, such as Jacques Ellul’s classic Propaganda (1968), Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium is the Message (1964) on the power of advertising and television and Ben Bagdikian’s The Media Monopoly (1983) all warned us of the accelerating merger and consolidation of control of US and global media.  Today the 50 owners of 90% of  US media described by Bagdikian is down to six!  The takeover of media ownership now controls most...

By David Loy Via huffingtonpost.com • What is money? We use it every day, so we must understand how it works… or do we? Perhaps our familiarity keeps us from appreciating just how strange money actually is – and how it uses us. What is a dollar bill? A piece of paper. You can’t eat it, ride in it, or sleep on it. The same is true of digits in bank accounts. In and of itself, money is literally worthless, in effect nothing. Yet money is also the most valuable thing in the world, because we have collectively decided to make it so. It is our socially agreed, and legally enforced, symbol of value. The anthropologist Weston LaBarre called it a psychosis that has become normal, “an institutionalized dream that everyone is having at once.” A dream that sometimes turns into a nightmare. – – – Needless to say, there...

By Scilla Elworthy Via ted.com • How do you deal with a bully without becoming a thug? In this wise and soulful talk, peace activist Scilla Elworthy maps out the skills we need — as nations and individuals — to fight extreme force without using force in return. To answer the question of why and how nonviolence works, she evokes historical heroes — Aung San Suu Kyi, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela — and the personal philosophies that powered their peaceful protests.  

Af Jan Øberg   I år 2000 blev der på verdensplan dræbt 400 mennesker og såret 700 ved terror angreb. I 2015 var tallet steget til 32 000 mennesker! Dvs sige at antal ofre for politiskle terrorhandinger er steget 80 gange siden man påbegyndte “den globale krig mod terror”. Vi i vesten synes at vi er hårdt ramt, det er ikke sandt. Langt de fleste terrorangreb sker i Mellemøsten. Hvad gør vi forkert? Hvordan får vi det stoppet? Jan giver sit bud på hvorfor det er gået så galt. Enhedslisten i Esbjerg. Fredagscafé, 1. september 2017.

Via wikileaks.org By Julian Assange • In this extract from his new book When Google Met Wikileaks, WikiLeaks’ publisher Julian Assange describes the special relationship between Google, Hillary Clinton and the State Department — and what that means for the future of the internet. WikiLeaks readers can obtain a 20 percent discount on the cover price when ordering from the OR Books website by using the coupon code “WIKILEAKS”. Eric Schmidt is an influential figure, even among the parade of powerful characters with whom I have had to cross paths since I founded WikiLeaks. In mid-May 2011 I was under house arrest in rural Norfolk, about three hours’ drive northeast of London. The crackdown against our work was in full swing and every wasted moment seemed like an eternity. It was hard to get my attention. But when my colleague Joseph Farrell told me the executive chairman of Google wanted...

Via .nytkampfly.dk • Der er meget stor sandsynlighed for at de samlede levetidsomkostninger for anskaffelsen og driften af de 27 danske F-35 kampfly bliver langt højere end de 57 mia. kroner, som forsvarsminister Claus Hjort Frederiksen i et aktstykke til Folketingets finansudvalg estimerer de forventede levetidsomkostninger vil blive. Faktisk er der sandsynlighed for at levetidsomkostningerne over 30 år kan ramme 100 mia. kroner. Det fremgår af en evalueringsrapport af økonomien i de tre kampflykandidater, som blev udarbejdet af Forsvarsministeriets eget kampflykontor i marts 2015. Nytkampfly.dk har fået aktindsigt i evalueringsrapporten, som ikke tidligere har været offentliggjort.     Read more… Jan Øberg’s ironiske kommenterer som den står på Facebook “Det er kun cirka 17 000* danske kroner per mand kvinde og barn i Danmark. Det er klart vi skal vise generøsitet når det gælder om at hjælpe De Forenede Stater nu når landets internationale rolle er ved at være udspillet...

Via www.globalresearch.ca November 28, 2017 • Global Research has received from Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, 4th Prime Minister of Malaysia (1981-2003) an important message, addressed to Muslims in Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States and Yemen. This message, however, is also addressed to the U.S. and its indefectible British ally which have relentlessly supported Saudi Arabia’s war against the people of Yemen, a criminal act tantamount to  genocide under international law. The U.S. has been instrumental in supporting the naval blockade on the delivery of food and medicine to Yemen’s starving children. In turn, the corporate media has payed lip service to the inaction of  Western governments and their self-proclaimed “international community”.  Both the US and Britain have sold billions of dollars of weapons to Saudi Arabia, while also advising them on the conduct of military operations. In the words of Rep. Ron Paul “[Why does] Washington support Saudi Arabia – a tyrannical state with one...

Via jonathan-cook.net November 22, 2017 By Jonathan Cook • Can anyone still doubt that access to a relatively free and open internet is rapidly coming to an end in the west? In China and other autocratic regimes, leaders have simply bent the internet to their will, censoring content that threatens their rule. But in the “democratic” west, it is being done differently. The state does not have to interfere directly – it outsources its dirty work to corporations. As soon as next month, the net could become the exclusive plaything of the biggest such corporations, determined to squeeze as much profit as possible out of bandwidth. Meanwhile, the tools to help us engage in critical thinking, dissent and social mobilisation will be taken away as “net neutrality” becomes a historical footnote, a teething phase, in the “maturing” of the internet. Can anyone still doubt that access to a relatively free...

  Via lobelog.com November 28, 2017 By Emile Nakhleh • Saudi-Israeli relations, especially between their intelligence services, started several years back under the direction of Bandar bin Sultan, a former Saudi ambassador to Washington and a former director of the Saudi national security council. These relations, however, accelerated significantly during the P5+1 negotiations over the Iran nuclear deal, and especially since Muhammad bin Salman (MbS) became the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia and Israel joined forces in a vigorous lobbying campaign in Washington to thwart the nuclear deal, to no avail. Despite failing to derail it, they have since collaborated closely to undermine the agreement and demonise Iran. Their claims that Iran has violated the conditions imposed on it under the deal have not been recognised by international observers or the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). With MbS’ dramatic rise to power, bellicose attitude towards Iran and more recently Hezbollah, along with the...

By Robert Fisk, The Independent • I was called by an Irish radio station in Dublin to respond to President Donald Trump’s decision to recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. What did I think was going on inside the US President’s mind, I was asked? And I replied immediately: “I don’t have the key to the lunatic asylum.” What might once have seemed an outrageously over-the-top remark was simply accepted as a normal journalistic reaction to the leader of the world’s greatest superpower. And re-listening to the speech that Trump made in the White House, I realised I should have been far less restrained. The very text of the document is insane, preposterous, shameful. Goodbye Palestine. Goodbye the two-state solution. Goodbye the Palestinians. For this new Israeli “capital” is not for them. Trump did not even use the word “Palestine”. He talked about “Israel and the Palestinians” – in other words,...

By Jan Oberg • Oberg comments on the tit-for-tat policies of the U.S. and Russia when they force each other to register their media as “foreign agents”. It is a weak U.S. that cannot accept that it no longer has a virtual monopoly on shaping perceptions of the world. Just find your role and accept that there are other angles and priorities than those you’ve dominated the global information structure with fore decades. As we have said before, censorship is not the way – educating people to sense the difference between real and fake news and look for omitted news, angles and facts – in contrast – is a solution.