Every so often, I take up the keyboard to weigh in on the doings of the people running the ancient and great nation of Iran. There is no cynicism in this statement: Iran is a highly technologically advanced, well-educated and fairly prosperous nation. However, Western news consumers would never know this because of the way the Iranian government and religious authorities act in trying to get what they want.
I chose this title for two reasons: one simple, the other more complex. The basic facts state that 7 adults were killed during the Sandy Hook atrocity; that 6 of those adults were women, and 20 children, all between the ages of 6 and 7; and also the shooter himself, Adam Lanza, the only adult male on the Sandy Hook death list.
It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.
— Harold Pinter’s Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, 2005
Just now, a major media corporation asked for my opinion for an article they are preparing, and I answered the following. The background of my thinking is here.1
Iran’s Islamic Revolution remains as bellwether, even though attempts to emulate it have not yet succeeded.
— Journalist Eric Walberg1
There are obviously some serious linguistic issues and disagreements between the West and the rest of the world. Essential terms like “freedom”, “democracy”, “liberation”, even “terrorism”, are all mixed up and confused; they mean something absolutely different in New York, London, Berlin, and in the rest of the world.
The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election Year finds me ensconced in Tucson, Arizona. This is definitely not Trump country. Our man in The U.S. House of Representatives is Raul Grijalva, possibly one of the most influential liberals in D.C. Tucson’s newly-elected mayor is Regina Romero, a Latina leftie who doesn’t shrink from the task of taking on every conceivable social issue. And I have begun attending what might just be the most influential church in the U.S.A.
I just read the open letter by Noam Chomsky, Bill Fletcher, Barbara Ehrenreich, Kathy Kelly, Ron Daniels, Leslie Cagan, Norman Solomon, Cynthia Peters, and Michael Albert calling on the Green Party not to run a candidate this year.
As of 24 January, a grand total of 25 people in China have died from a new strain of flu being dubbed “Wuhan”, after the city where it started. A few days ago, when 17 had died, Chinese media reported that 16 of them were over 65 years of age and the 17th was 61. So, clearly, the elderly is the most at risk group. But, that’s the case for mutating flu viruses every winter.
