Author’s
note: Saudi Arabia, which launched military operations in 2015, says its
aims in Yemen are to fight Iranian influence and restore the “legitimate”
government of Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi’s, run out in 2014 by Houthi rebels. But
Iran’s influence is heavily exaggerated, and Hadi is not popular. U.S.
involvement has to do with controlling Bab-el-Mandeb strait,
through which 3 million to 4 million barrels of oil travel daily.
Yemen continues to
suffer in silence as the world turns away from its ongoing misery.
Make no mistake about it: the United States has entered an era
of a New McCarthyism that blames nearly every political problem on Russia and
has begun targeting American citizens who don’t go along with this New Cold War
propaganda.
Sen. Joseph McCarthy, R-Wisconsin, who led the “Red Scare”
hearings of the 1950s.
A difference, however, from the McCarthyism of the 1950s is that
this New McCarthyism has enlisted Democrats, liberals and even progressives in
the cause because of their disgust with President Trump; the 1950s version was
driven by Republicans and the Right with much of the Left on the receiving end,
maligned by the likes of Sen. Joe McCarthy as “un-American” and as Communism’s
“fellow travelers.”
The real winners in this New McCarthyism appear to be the
neoconservatives who have leveraged the Democratic/liberal hatred of Trump to
draw much of the Left into the political hysteria that sees the controversy
over alleged Russian political “meddling” as an opportunity to “get Trump.”
Already, the neocons and their allies have exploited the
anti-Russian frenzy to extract tens of millions of dollars more from the
taxpayers for programs to “combat Russian propaganda,” i.e., funding of
non-governmental organizations and “scholars” who target dissident Americans
for challenging the justifications for this New Cold War.
For decades, the
American people have been repeatedly told by their government and corporate-run
media that acts of war ordered by their president have been largely motivated
by the need to counter acts of aggression or oppression by "evil
dictators." We were told we had to invade Iraq because Saddam Hussein was
an evil dictator. We had to bomb Libya because Muammar Gaddafi was an evil
dictator, bent on unleashing a "bloodbath" on his own people. Today,
of course, we are told that we should support insurgents in Syria because
Bashar al-Assad is an evil dictator, and we must repeatedly rattle our sabers
at North Korea's Kim Jong-un and Russia's Vladimir Putin because they, too, are
evil dictators.
This is part of the
larger, usually unquestioned mainstream corporate media narrative that the US
leads the "Western democracies" in a global struggle to combat
terrorism and totalitarianism and promote democracy.
President Trump opened
his big United Nations week … and his famous mouth … with a predictable plug
for one of his properties and some playful
glad-handing with French President Emmanuel Macron.
Trump also scolded
the U.N.’s unwieldy scrum for “not living up to its potential.” He made a
passing reference to the U.N.’s wasteful use of American money. And he called
for “reform” of the much-maligned
international forum.
It was a stolid prelude to
what will no doubt be “must-see” TV when he speaks to the UN General
Assembly on Tuesday about North Korea and Iran. And it was a far cry
from the way America’s leading “America Firster” spent the campaign lamenting how
unfair the U.N. is to the poor schlemiel we call Uncle Sam.
He is likely to use
his speech to throw a little bit of that same red meat to his base, but his
call for reform falls well short of what his supporters
want … which is an abrupt end of U.S. involvement in the
international body. They are motivated by a grab-bag of reasons that point to
the U.N. being a threat to their guns, their bank accounts and their God-given
freedom.
In America, we do not seek to impose our way of life on anyone,
but rather to let it shine as an example for everyone to watch.
Those were actual words spoken by President Trump today at the
UN. If only it were possible to see the thoughts swirling through the minds of
everyone listening.
The words "yeah right" most likely dominated at that moment.
If only
the president's words were true. Instead, the U.S. government has been at
constant war (both overt and covert) for an entire century. The globe is
bursting with American military bases that are stationed around every corner.
میرزاده عشقی (۱۲۷۳ همدان
- ۱۳۰۳ تهران)، شاعر، روزنامهنگار، نویسنده و نمایشنامه نویس
دوران مشروطیّت و مدیر نشریه قرن بیستم
بود؛ که در دوره نخست وزیری رضاخان، به دستور رئیس اداره
تأمینات نظمیه (شهربانی) وقت، ترور شد. وی از جمله مهمترین شاعران عصر مشروطه به
شمار میرود که از عناصر هویت ملی در جهت ایجاد انگیزه و آگاهی در توده مردم بهره
گرفت.
میرزاده عشقی نام اصلیش «سید محمدرضا
کردستانی» و فرزند «حاج سید ابوالقاسم کردستانی» بود و در تاریخ دوازدهم جمادیالآخر
سال ۱۳۱۲ هجری قمری مطابق ۲۰ آذرماه ۱۲۷۳ خورشیدی و سال ۱۸۹۴ میلادی در همدان زاده
شد. سالهای کودکی را در مکتبخانههای محلی و از سن هفت سالگی به بعد در آموزشگاههای
«الفت» و «آلیانس» به تحصیل فارسی و فرانسه اشتغال داشته، پیش از
آنکه گواهی نامه از این مدرسه دریافت کند در تجارتخانه یک بازرگان فرانسوی به شغل مترجمی پرداخته و به زبان فرانسه
مسلط شد.
چند سال پیش که این کتاب را خواندم
اندوه سنگینی تمام وجودم را فرا گرفت. دلیلش رفتار زشت و به غایت تهوع آور پدران ما نبود، که البته در این مورد هیچگونه
پوزشی پذیرفته نیست. ولی به این دلیل که اشعاری که با آنها از نوجوانی انس گرفته
بودم، و هر سطر آن اشعار باعث میشد که پندار شور انگیزی در ذهنم نقش ببندد، اکنون
چهره ننگینی به خود گرفته بودند، و آن ادبیاتِ دلآرا را به صورتی زشت و پلید میدیدم.
به عنوان مثال در مرجع دیگری خواندم که این شعر لطیف حافظ که میگوید: نگار من که
به مکتب نرفت و مشق ننوشت/ به غمزه مساله آموز سد مدرس شد، آن پنداری که من داشتم
نبود، که چهرهٔ ناز و عشوهگر دختر زیبائی را که برای حافظ شراب میریخت، در ذهنم
تصویر میکرد. دین سالاران البته معتقدند این شعر در مورد پیغمبر اسلام است، که هر چه
را که زیباست به گردن این موجود هزار و چهارصد ساله میآویزند. این نگار غماز در
واقع همان شاه شجاع خونخوار است که پدرش را میکُشد که جای او بنشیند وروزها خون میمکد
و چون حافظهٔ سرشاری دارد و اشعار بسیاری به فارسی و عربی و ترکی در ذهن دارد، شبها
هم پیالهٔ حافظ است!
The showdown with the
Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is a seminal event that can only end in
one of two ways: a nuclear exchange or a reconfiguration of the international
order.
While complacency is
always unwarranted, the first seems increasingly unlikely. As no less a
global strategist than Steven Bannon observed about
the possibility of a pre-emptive U.S. strike: “There’s no military
solution. Forget it. Until somebody solves the part of the equation that
shows me that ten million people in Seoul don’t die in the first 30 minutes
from conventional weapons, I don’t know what you’re talking about. There’s
no military solution here. They got us.”
This doesn’t mean that
Donald Trump, Bannon’s ex-boss, couldn’t still do something rash. After
all, this is a man who prides himself on being unpredictable in business negotiations,
as historian William R. Polk, who worked for the Kennedy administration during
the Cuban Missile Crisis, points out.
So maybe Trump thinks it would be a swell idea to go a bit nuts on the DPRK.
The U.S. and North Korea are on the
brink of hostilities that if begun would almost certainly lead to a nuclear
exchange. This is the expressed judgment of most competent observers. They
differ over the causes of this confrontation and over the size, range and
impact of the weapons that would be fired, but no one can doubt that even a
“limited” nuclear exchange would have horrifying effects throughout much of the
world including North America.
A Korean girl carries her brother on her back, trudging past a
stalled M-26 tank, at Haengju, Korea., June 9, 1951. (U.S. military photo)
The Russian Revolution of 1917 erupted on the fiftieth anniversary
of the publication of Karl Marx’s Capital. From the
start, the October Revolution seemed both to confirm and contradict Marx’s
analysis. He had envisioned a working-class-based socialist revolution breaking
out in the developed capitalist countries of Western Europe. But the 1882
preface to the Communist Manifesto, written a year
before his death, amended this by pointing to a revolution in Russia as a
possible “signal for proletarian revolution in the West.”1 Yet although a worker-peasant revolution under Marxist
leadership triumphed in Russia in 1917, Russia was still a largely
underdeveloped country, and the revolutionary uprisings in Germany and Central
Europe which followed were weak and easily extinguished.
In these
circumstances, Soviet Russia, completely isolated, faced a massive
counterrevolution, with all the major imperialist powers intervening on the
side of the White Russian forces in the Civil War. “Socialism in one country,”
the basic defensive posture of the USSR throughout its history, was thus to a
large extent a geopolitical reality imposed on it from outside. This was
evident beginning with the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, in which Russia was forced
to give up much of the territory of the Tsarist Empire, followed soon after by
the Treaty of Versailles, which sought to isolate it still further.
دانشمندان يک روش غيرمعمول براي غلبه بر گرماي کره زمين يافته اند و آن هم اين است که کره زمين را به يک مدار دور تر از خورشيد يعني يک منطقه خنک تر حرکت بدهند!
اين ايده عجيب زائيده ي ذهن مهندسان ناسا و يکسري از اخترشناسان آمريکايي ست که معتقدند اين روش حدود ۶ بيليون سال به عمر سياره ما اضافه مي کند، به عبارت ديگر عمر مفيد زمين ۲ برابر خواهد شد! براي اين کار طرح هايي هم ارائه داده اند.
Scientists have found an unusual way to prevent our planet overheating: move it to a cooler spot. All you have to do is hurtle a few comets at Earth, and its orbit will be altered. Our world will then be sent spinning into a safer, colder part of the solar system.
One death and many
more injured later, the “Unite the Right Rally” to protest the removal of
General Robert E. Lee’s statue became firmly planted in popular consciousness
well after the band of white nationalists dispersed. Conversation regarding the
significance of the demonstration has continued over a week after the incident.
The demonstration comprised of hundreds of white nationalists from a number of
organizations, all assembled to defend white power. Their opponents, which
consisted of everyone from anarchists and communists, confronted the white
nationalist mob head on. And like a tidal wave, the media narrative that a
white supremacist takeover is flooding the shores of the US has many watching
the scene from afar wondering what to do from here.
“The
summer of 1919, called “The Red Summer” by James Weldon Johnson, ushered
in the greatest period of interracial violence the nation had ever
witnessed. During that summer there were twenty-six race riots in
such cities as Chicago, Illinois; Washington, D.C.; Elaine, Arkansas;
Charleston, South Carolina; Knoxville and Nashville, Tennessee; Longview,
Texas; and Omaha, Nebraska. More than one hundred Blacks were killed in
these riots, and thousands were wounded and left homeless. The seven
most serious race riots were those which occurred in Wilmington, N. C.
(1898), Atlanta, Ga. (1906), Springfield, Ill. (1908), East St. Louis)
Ill. (1917), Chicago, Ill. (1919), Tulsa, Okla. (1921) and Detroit, Mich.
(1943).”
The political opponents of President Trump
have found a new lever for sabotaging his presidency – his alleged embrace of
white supremacists and Neo-Nazis. He is now being labelled a «sympathizer» of
fascists and bringing America’s international image into disrepute. Cue the
impeachment proceedings.
Notably, the same power-nexus that opposed
Trump from the very outset of his presidency is vociferously condemning his
alleged racist leanings. Pro-Democrat media like the Washington Post, New York Times and CNN can’t give enough
coverage to Trump «the racist», while the intelligence community and Pentagon
have also weighed in to rebuke the president. Former CIA chief John Brennan
said Trump’s comments on racial violence were a «national security risk».
The
director spoke about the U.S. political system during a master class at the
Sarajevo Film Festival.
Oliver Stone has said in response to the
Charlottesville riots that the problem is not President Donald Trump, but
"the system" in America.
The director, whose latest work is a four-hour series of televised
interviews with Russian President Vladimir Putin that aired on Showtime in
June, did not specifically criticize Trump when asked for his reaction to the
weekend's events in Charlottesville, Va., during which one woman died and
several people were injured after a car plowed into non-violent demonstrators.
Speaking Tuesday during a master class at the Sarajevo Film
Festival following a screening of his movie Snowden, Stone said he had not been in the U.S. for
some time but was following events.
The US submarine captain says, "We've all got to die one day,
some sooner and some later. The trouble always has been that you're never
ready, because you don't know when it's coming. Well, now we do know and
there's nothing to be done about it."
He says he will be dead by September. It will take about a week to die, though
no one can be sure. Animals live the longest.
The war was over in a month. The United States, Russia and China
were the protagonists. It is not clear if it was started by accident or
mistake. There was no victor. The northern hemisphere is contaminated and
lifeless now.
A curtain of radioactivity is moving south towards Australia and
New Zealand, southern Africa and South America. By September, the last cities,
towns and villages will succumb. As in the north, most buildings will remain
untouched, some illuminated by the last flickers of electric light.
Maryam Mirzakhani, Stanford mathematics professor and the only
woman to earn the Fields Medal, died Saturday at age 40 after a four-year
battle with breast cancer.
Iranian-born Mirzakhani won her Fields Medal, mathematics’ most
prestigious honor, in 2014. The award is often equated to the Nobel Prize.
Mirzakhani’s colleagues have honored both her academic achievements and her
character.
(Courtesy of
Stanford News)
“Maryam is gone far too soon, but her impact will live on for the
thousands of women she inspired to pursue math and science,” said Stanford
President Marc Tessier-Lavigne to Stanford News. “Maryam was a brilliant mathematical theorist, and also a humble
person who accepted honors only with the hope that it might encourage others to
follow her path. Her contributions as both a scholar and a role model are
significant and enduring, and she will be dearly missed here at Stanford and
around the world.”
Amid
the proverbial doom and gloom pervading all things Syria, the slings and arrows
of outrageous fortune sometimes yield, well, good fortune.
Take
what happened this past Sunday in Beijing. The China-Arab Exchange Association
and the Syrian Embassy organized a Syria Day Expo crammed with hundreds of
Chinese specialists in infrastructure investment. It was a sort of
mini-gathering of the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), billed as
“The First Project Matchmaking Fair for Syria Reconstruction”.
This is the state of war in the United States in July
2017.
The US bombing campaign in Iraq and Syria is now the
heaviest since the bombing of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos in the 1960s-70s,
with 84,000 bombs and
missiles dropped between 2014 and the end of May 2017
That is nearly triple the 29,200 bombs and
missiles dropped on Iraq in the “Shock and Awe” campaign of
2003.
The Obama administration escalated the bombing
campaign last October, as the U.S.-Iraqi assault on Mosul began, dropping
12,290 bombs and missiles between October and the end of January when President
Obama left office. The Trump administration has further escalated the
campaign, dropping another 14,965 bombs and missiles since February
1st. May saw the heaviest bombing yet, with 4,374 bombs and missiles
dropped.
