Earth Day at 56: Extinction Beckons
Please click on either of the ‘Donate’ or ‘Buy’ buttons below (via PayPal or Stripe) to make a donation towards the $2,500 (£2,000) I’m trying to raise to support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist over the next three months. To get links to all my work in your inbox, please also consider taking out a free or paid subscription to my new Substack newsletter.
56 years ago, 20 million Americans took to the streets to mark the first Earth Day, to promote support for environmental protections, and, as it was described in a full-page promotional advert in the New York Times, to “start to reclaim the environment we have wrecked”, via “a commitment to make life better, not just bigger and faster”, and to “provide real rather than rhetorical solutions.”
In large letters, the ad proclaimed, boldly, “A disease has infected our country. It has brought smog to Yosemite, dumped garbage in the Hudson, sprayed DDT in our food, and left our cities in decay. Its carrier is man.”
The name, and the promotional messages, came via the legendary advertising copywriter Julian Koenig, whose campaign for Volkswagen, “Think Small,” was later cited by Advertising Age as the “greatest advertising campaign of the 20th century.”
Iran and Lebanon: The Fake Diplomacy of the US Losers and the Israeli Butchers
Please click on either of the ‘Donate’ or ‘Buy’ buttons below (via PayPal or Stripe) to make a donation towards the $2,500 (£2,000) I’m trying to raise to support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist over the next three months. To get links to all my work in your inbox, please also consider taking out a free or paid subscription to my new Substack newsletter.
Reality means nothing to either the US or Israel, who launched an illegal and unprovoked war on Iran on February 28, and were then humiliated when Iran delivered devastating blows to the US’s outposts throughout the Gulf, pierced Israel’s defense systems, causing extensive damage that the Israeli authorities have desperately tried to hide, and dealt a massive blow to the world’s energy supplies by cutting off the transit of tankers in the Strait of Hormuz.
For the US, which had fallen for Israeli lies that the war would be swift, and that decapitating Iran’s leadership would lead to a popular uprising and the collapse of the government, this was a rude awakening, and after Donald Trump had spent days on his social media account posting increasingly unhinged threats against Iran, he suddenly backed down last Tuesday and announced a two-week ceasefire.
This was a tacit acknowledgement of defeat, but when a US delegation, led by Vice President JD Vance, headed to Pakistan for peace talks with their Iranian counterparts, they refused to leave their baggage of belligerent arrogance at home, and turned up with a delusional swagger, reflecting the depths of their leader’s derangement, and the extent to which their alleged “America First” policies has been entirely usurped by the tired old ghosts of the discredited neocon movement.
Iran Ceasefire? From Trump’s Nuclear Threats to Israel’s Gaza-Style Extermination in Lebanon
Please click on either of the ‘Donate’ or ‘Buy’ buttons below (via PayPal or Stripe) to make a donation towards the $2,500 (£2,000) I’m trying to raise to support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist over the next three months. To get links to all my work in your inbox, please also consider taking out a free or paid subscription to my new Substack newsletter.
Yesterday, as perceptive observers marked two and a half years of Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, Israel cemented its reputation as an unprecedented pestilential sickness on the face of the earth, contaminating everyone who comes into contact with it through its relentless barbarism, by launching almost a hundred devastating aerial attacks on Lebanon in the space of just ten minutes, rising to 137 in total in the space of just half an hour, in what the genocidal entity proudly proclaimed as “Operation Eternal Darkness.” Could the exercise of evil have a more transparently accurate name?
The attacks, in Beirut and across southern Lebanon, which rivalled in intensity the most violent attacks on Gaza in the early months of the Gaza genocide, were clearly indiscriminate — acts of terrorism, completely destroying numerous apartment blocks in Beirut, for example, and meant to kill as many civilians as possible, following the template established in Gaza, for which Israel has never been held accountable. At least 303 people were killed, and 1,165 wounded, and social media reports provided grim accounts not of murdered militants, but of unjustifiably slaughtered women and children.
Also, as In Gaza, the Israeli authorities sought to defend their actions by plying the complicit western media with unverified and clearly risible justifications for their actions, just as they have done so cynically and successfully in Gaza for the whole of their uniquely depraved descent into monstrous and devious inhumanity over the last 30 months.
Death by AI: My Interview About the Horrors of Automated Genocide with Chuck Mertz on “This Is Hell!”
Please click on either of the ‘Donate’ or ‘Buy’ buttons below (via PayPal or Stripe) to make a donation towards the $2,500 (£2,000) I’m trying to raise to support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist over the next three months. To get links to all my work in your inbox, please also consider taking out a free or paid subscription to my new Substack newsletter.
Many thanks to Chuck Mertz for having me as the featured guest on this week’s “This Is Hell!”, now in its 30th year, a Chicago-based “long-form political interview program”, broadcast live every Wednesday morning, and then made available as a podcast.
You can find my hour-long interview on the “This is Hell!” website here, the full show on the website here, and on Patreon, where you can also make a donation to support the show, if you’d like to contradict Chuck’s assertion that it is “broadcast without the virtue of money or the vice of political agenda.”
I’ve also embedded it via Soundcloud below, and I very much hope that you have time to listen to it.
The Horrors of AI-Driven Military Targeting, From Gaza to Iran
Please click on either of the ‘Donate’ or ‘Buy’ buttons below (via PayPal or Stripe) to make a donation towards the $2,500 (£2,000) I’m trying to raise to support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist over the next three months. To get links to all my work in your inbox, please also consider taking out a free or paid subscription to my new Substack newsletter.
Anyone paying attention knows that, since October 7, 2023, when the State of Israel began carpet-bombing the Gaza Strip on a scale so grotesque that it can only realistically be compared to the impact of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, all sense of proportionality in warfare has been eviscerated, and has been normalized to such an extent that Israel, and its lapdog the US, are now engaged in similarly disproportionate attacks on Iran, and with Israel also extending its depravity to Lebanon.
While some of this blatant violation of international humanitarian law can be traced to Israel’s relentless contempt for any attempts to restrain its military actions, dating back decades, the truly shocking and soul-shredding intensification of its military actions over the last 29 months, in which the US has finally moved from being Israel’s main backer to being a fully-fledged partner, has primarily been facilitated through both countries’ embrace of military targeting powered by AI (artificial intelligence), which has both promised and delivered military targets on a scale that is hundreds or thousands of times faster than what was previously possible, although, crucially, with little or no human oversight to address profound problems with the accuracy of the targeting.
To provide some necessary background, proportionality in warfare seeks to minimize the loss of civilian life during military operations, and its key definition comes from the 1977 Additional Protocol to the 1949 Geneva Conventions, which sought to apply rules governing warfare in the aftermath of the horrors of the Second World War. The Additional Protocol specifically addressed the protection of civilians, and, in Article 51, established protections against indiscriminate attacks on civilian populations, providing two particular examples of attacks that “are to be considered as indiscriminate”, which have subsequently provided a benchmark for assessments of proportionality.
Will the World Survive As US and Israeli Death Cults Unite to Rain Down Endless Apocalyptic Genocidal Destruction on Iran?
Please click on either of the ‘Donate’ or ‘Buy’ buttons below (via PayPal or Stripe) to make a donation towards the $2,500 (£2,000) I’m trying to raise to support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist over the next three months. To get links to all my work in your inbox, please also consider taking out a free or paid subscription to my new Substack newsletter.
It’s worse than we thought.
While dirty, demented grandpa Donald, increasingly unhinged, keeps failing asleep and then waking up and indulging in bouts of incoherent ranting, he has already accomplished what his minders always intended: to bring together the two most twisted, delusional, genocidal, pseudo-religious movements in modern history — Zionism and Christian Zionism — and to launch an apocalyptic war on their behalf.
Donald Trump, of course, as a malignant narcissist, has no God but himself, and the same is true of his chief Zionist manipulator, the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, a slippery devil of a being who has dominated Israeli politics for much of the last 40 years, and who has, over the last 29 months, finally emerged in his true colours, as the bearer of nothing but mass murder and destruction without restraint.
Using the Palestinian resistance movement’s attacks on southern Israel on October 7, 2023 as an excuse, Netanyahu, leading a political establishment and a population that are almost entirely supportive of his bleak vision, has drawn on violent Iron Age religious texts to finally manifest the true apocalyptic intent of the genocidal Zionist settler-colonial cult whose first victory was the blood-soaked establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.
The “War” on Iran and the Extraordinary, Overreaching Hubris of Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu
Please click on either of the ‘Donate’ or ‘Buy’ buttons below (via PayPal or Stripe) to make a donation towards the $2,500 (£2,000) I’m trying to raise to support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist over the next three months. To get links to all my work in your inbox, please also consider taking out a free or paid subscription to my new Substack newsletter.
When Ancient Greek thinkers first began analyzing and categorizing the world around them, the role human beings play in it, and the workings of the human body and the human mind, one enduring concept they came up with was hubris, conceived as a dangerous revolt against the natural order, whereby those who became so caught up in their own sense of self-importance — via “extreme or excessive pride or dangerous overconfidence and complacency, often in combination with arrogance” — would be punished by the gods.
Last October, in a post on Medium, Manfred Kets de Vries, a Dutch psychoanalyst, described how, for the Greeks, hubris “wasn’t just poor judgment. It was a serious moral failing, a kind of arrogant blindness that led people to overstep human boundaries. Those caught in the grip of hubris begin to believe that the world should conform to their view of it. They overestimate what they can do, ignore the consequences, and often reject criticism entirely. Even when things go wrong, they remain convinced they were right all along.”
As the world reels from the decision by the United States and the State of Israel to launch an illegal and unprovoked “war” on Iran on Saturday, everything about the attacks screams ”hubris” at the highest amplification imaginable.
Trump Isolated as His Illegal and Unprovoked “War” on Iran Backfires
Please click on either of the ‘Donate’ or ‘Buy’ buttons below (via PayPal or Stripe) to make a donation towards the $2,500 (£2,000) I’m trying to raise to support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist over the next three months. To get links to all my work in your inbox, please also consider taking out a free or paid subscription to my new Substack newsletter.
On day three of Donald Trump’s cataclysmically stupid decision to indulge Benjamin Netanyahu in his malignant 40-year dream of destroying Iran, it’s starting to look as though it will backfire on him spectacularly.
Today, it’s been reported that Pentagon officials told Congressional staff yesterday that “Iran was not planning to strike US forces or bases in the Middle East unless Israel attacked Iran first”, undercutting Trump’s fatuous claims, as “Operation Epic Fury” was launched, that the US’s attacks on Iran, in conjunction with Israel, were aimed at “eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime.”
It was already screamingly apparent that Trump’s claims of legitimacy were tenuous, because he had, typically, refused to seek approval from Congress, even though only Congress can approve US military action, and had also failed to seek approval from the UN Security Council.
The Hubris of Dead Men Walking, as Trump and Netanyahu Launch Deranged and Grotesquely Illegal Attacks on Iran
Please click on either of the ‘Donate’ or ‘Buy’ buttons below (via PayPal or Stripe) to make a donation towards the $2,500 (£2,000) I’m trying to raise to support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist over the next three months. To get links to all my work in your inbox, please also consider taking out a free or paid subscription to my new Substack newsletter.
Beware the sick old men with hate in their hearts. As their earthly virility fades, they may well decide to take the whole world down with them.
As Israel and the US this morning launched massive and entirely unprovoked attacks on Iran, which has already led to retaliation against both the aggressors, and which may well destabilize the whole of the Middle East, both Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump — sick, old and full of perpetual rage against the dying of the light — may well have decided that, as their power fades, they will take vengeance on life itself.
23 years ago, it took many long months for George W. Bush and Tony Blair to manufacture a false case for the illegal invasion of Iraq. Dodgy dossiers were compiled, and Congress and the UN Security Council had to be convinced to approve an illegal war on the fictional basis that Iraq posed an existential threat to the west.
in the new world order of Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump, however, none of these complicated webs of lies and deception are even needed anymore.
Trump’s “Board of Peace” Meets, Promotes Its Dystopian Vision for Gaza’s Regeneration, as Hamas’s Disarmament Still Eludes Everyone
Please click on either of the ‘Donate’ or ‘Buy’ buttons below (via PayPal or Stripe) to make a donation towards the $2,500 (£2,000) I’m trying to raise to support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist over the next three months. To get links to all my work in your inbox, please also consider taking out a free or paid subscription to my new Substack newsletter.
On February 18, in the apocalyptic wasteland of the Gaza Strip, the Palestinian survivors of Israel’s ongoing 28-month genocide celebrated the start of Ramadan with astonishing ingenuity, crafting decorations from the recycled detritus of destruction, powering and stringing up lights, and holding communal meals drawing on the increase of food deliveries since the ceasefire that began four months ago.
This is in spite of the fact that Israel has persistently refused to honor the requirements for the delivery of 600 trucks of humanitarian aid a day under the ceasefire deal, which began on October 10, and which was trumpeted by the US as Donald Trump’s “Peace Plan”, even though most of the hard work had been done by negotiators from Qatar, Egypt and Turkey, working with Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff.
Much of what has been begrudgingly allowed into Gaza by Israel consists of commercial goods that are unaffordable for the majority of the population, who have been made homeless, are reduced to living in tents with few of their possessions left, and have little or no money.
While the Palestinians’ spirit contrasts buoyantly with the grimness of their surroundings, it cannot disguise that they continue to live in a landscape that is brutally shattered, to an extent that is almost beyond comprehension, and that no salvation is on the horizon. Voices from within Gaza emphasize that the majority of the displaced population haven’t been attending these communal meals, and numerous photos show much more wretched scenes, of families struggling to put together even the most basic meals in landscapes of utter destruction.
Who's still at Guantánamo?
