by chycho

On 27 February 2009, the Conservative government revived a bill to impose automatic jail terms for drug-related crimes, “which would send people to jail for growing as little as one marijuana plant for the purpose of trafficking.” On June 8, the House of Commons passed this bill, Bill C-15, which “has been widely criticized by criminal justice experts, who point to the total failure of mandatory minimum sentencing in the United States to deter or reduce the amount of drug crimes occurring.” This bill now only needs Senate support to become law.

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by Stephen Lendman

On May 26, the UN Human Rights Council issued a report titled "Promotion and Protection of All Human Rights, Civil, Political, Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, Including the Right to Development - Report of the Special Rapporteur (Philip Alston) on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions."

Alston was damning in his criticism regarding "three areas in which significant improvement is necessary if the US Government is to match its actions to its stated commitment to human rights and the rule of law:"

(1) Its imposition of the death penalty under which innocent people are executed. Alston was shocked about "glaring criminal justice system flaws," citing Texas and Alabama as examples, but many other states are as derelict. He criticized politicized judges and recommended that Congress "should enact legislation permitting federal court habeas review of state and federal death penalty cases on their merits."

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William C. Carlotti

"There is no doubt that there are wack a dacks in this world that
emerge as anachronistic expressions of anti-semitism. An occasional
zwastika on a synagogue, vandalism in a Jewish cemetary, etc., etc."

Systemic anti-semitism no longer exists in United States society---not politically, not economically, not philosophically, not academically. Its anachronistic expressions in various venues are akin to a regurgitation of the earth as the center of the universe that haunted Copernicus and nearly got Galileo at the stake; or the flat earth postulations as they were promoted by the Christian monk Cosmos Indicopleutes.

As a matter of fact, if we examine all of those matters that would be the practical effects of anti-semitism we find that they simply do not exist. Some few examples of the many that can be cited about government, about academia, about think tanks ---The median income of the Jewish community is higher than the median income of the rest of our population. The median income in the United States is about $25,000 a year. That means that one half of all Americans earn more than that, and one half earn less. The median Jewish American income is double that, i.e., $50,000 a year. About 40% of American High School graduates go to college. However, 85% of Jewish American high school graduates go to college. There are 13 Jewish members in the United States Senate and 30 Jewish members of the United States House of Representatives.

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By Khalid Amayreh, Occupied East Jerusalem

There is no doubt that Benyamin Netanyahu’s odious screed at Bar Ilan University Sunday night was a slap in the face to all those who gave the so-called “peace process” between the Palestinian people and Israel the benefit of the doubt.

First, it was a brazenly direct affront to President Obama who thought rather naively that nice words about peace would make the Israeli leadership change its fascistic mindset and reconsider it colonialist approach toward the Palestinian people. Just last week, Obama reasserted America’s commitment to the safety and security of Israel as if the Zionist entity, which possesses hundreds of nuclear warheads, was facing any real threats from its neighbors.

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Andy Worthington

On Friday, al-Jazeera English’s “Listening Post” ran a feature on the New York Times’ now-notorious May 21 cover story, “1 In 7 Detainees Rejoined Jihad, Pentagon Finds,” which quoted uncritically from a Pentagon report alleging that 74 ex-prisoners had “returned to the battlefield.” I discussed the many problems with this story in a recent article, “New York Times finally apologizes for false Guantánamo recidivism story,” and was featured in the program, with other interviewees including Mark Denbeaux of the Seton Hall Law School in New Jersey, whose team of lawyers and students have done more than anyone else in debunking the Pentagon’s many reports about Guantánamo, proving, time and again, that they are nothing more than propaganda masquerading as evidence. The School’s latest report, “Revisionist Recidivism: An Analysis of the Government’s Representations of Alleged ‘Recidivism’ of the Guantánamo Detainees,” is available here as a PDF.

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Mark Ames

If I was an oligarch and I wanted to buy my spoiled little shit of a son a toy that would make him laugh and laugh for hours, I'd buy him a middle-class American. Because Americans are funny the way all dupes and chumps are funny. You can trick today's Americans time and again, and they always fall for it. And when you trick them, they stomp around dramatically and make a lot of blustery noise about "the people" who allegedly "aren't going to stand much more of this" because "our founding forefathers bla bla bla" and of course the ol' "you can fool some of the people some of the time, buttcha can't fool bla bla bla..." Basically, if you've seen your Elmer Fudd, then you've seen your American sucker in all of his cartoon comic-foil glory: a sentimental buffoon, a harmless chump whose guns don't fool anyone but himself.

Every day, Americans play the role of Elmer Fudd to the oligarchy's Bugs Bunny--if you look at it from the oligarchy's point of view, at least.

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Allen L Roland

Something important happened in Iran this weekend and its color is green. The idea of adopting the color Green was begun, for the first time in an Iranian election, by supporters of Mr Moussavi, who apparently lost to fundamentalist president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in a disputed election. However, in the process, Green has now become the color of national protest:

Something important happened this weekend in Iran's presidential election and it resembled the tactics, organization, mud slinging and perhaps even vote manipulation of recent American national elections.

As the Washington Post reported ~ "As Iranians go to the polls Friday to choose a president, the country is more deeply polarized than at any time since the Islamic revolution that overthrew the shah 30 years ago. After a bitter campaign that included personal attacks on some of Iran's leading families, both sides are preparing to contest the results, and many Iranians wonder whether the social and economic rifts exposed by the election will deepen."

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Bill Moyers

Journalist Jeremy Scahill warns against the growing power of corporate private armies and the "disintegration of the nation state apparatus."

The following is a transcript from the Bill Moyers Journal on PBS, broadcast on June 5.

There was good news and bad news about Afghanistan this week. And it was the same news.

That's right. The Senate held confirmation hearings for Lieutenant General Stanley McChrystal, slated to be the next commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Here's how two different news organizations reported his testimony:

The Associated Press headline read, "War in Afghanistan is 'Winnable,'" but the "Washington Independent" reported that the general had, quote, "painted a bleak picture of the Afghanistan war" and that the United States "needed to show significant progress within '18 to 24 months' or risk the war spiraling out of control."

What we know for sure is that the fighting in Afghanistan is escalating. At least 21 thousand more American troops are going in and the number of private security contractors working for the military there jumped 29 percent in the last three months alone. Get this: there are now more private security contractors in Afghanistan than there are U.S. soldiers. And as of next year, according to new Pentagon documents, the war in Afghanistan will be costing more than the war in Iraq.

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by Philip Henshaw

Economic theory is based on the observed regularities of the past. Some are considered as general principles, or “natural laws” that are expected to never change. From a systems view, though, such laws are emergent properties of the complex system they are regularities of, and prone to change as the system changes form.

Growth systems, for example, invariably change form when they climax, but the present laws of economics describe a complex system that has perpetual growth that never changes form. The question is partly how to tell when such changes might be appearing. Complex systems may vary a great deal without indicating a change in the form of the whole system. What would raise the question are events of kinds that are never supposed to occur at all.

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Mantiq al-Tayr

1. No, I am not talking about legalizing Marijuana – that would upset the Islamofascists who own all the liquor companies in the US and its suburb, Canada. And I am certainly not talking about legalizing gay marriage, I wouldn’t want to piss off Donald Trump.

Let me digress for a second. So Miss California gets sacked for believing what any good Torah following Zionist Palestinian-hating Rabbi would believe about marriage and she’s stripped (pun intended) of her crown by Islamofascist Donald Trump. But it is perfectly okay for her to appear in beauty pageants walking up and down a long isle in a bikini while every single male looking at her is thinking long and hard about only one thing. Well, not every male, since lots of gays were probably just trying to see if they could imitate the way she walks, but every straight male who she believes should only marry a woman is looking at her and is thinking only one thing – and he isn’t thinking about his wife, I’ll tell you that. Anyway, that’s all perfectly okay. Speaking what you believe in is not. Is this a great country or what? But I digress. (I bet some you guys are pissed I didn’t link to photos of her, aren’t you.:-)

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