Pages: << 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 ... 1271 >>
By Sally Dugman
Feeding 9 Billion | National Geographic
“Picture of (a) pig farm in Mato Grosso, Brazil, with sows confined …” (Presumably, they can’t stand, nor move. Stuck in one position, they are forced to lie on one side to nurse after being artificially inseminated. They do so day after day, week after week and month after month despite the discomfort of being heavy in weight and forced to retain one single position for so long. Then they are either used to breed a new set of piglets, which will be used the same way in the future if females or brought to the slaughterhouse, as are the males of their offspring except for the few that look like top breeders for desired traits, that will be milked for sperm. … Are these creatures considered intelligent animals – animals as smart as dogs? No, they are simply commodities to make ever higher profits. … Do you imagine that the farm workers are paid fairly for their hard work or do you imagine the farm owners garnering the brunt of the earnings regardless of whatever they may or may not do work-wise to support the farm from which lavish wealth can be gained for them? … This is my understanding, wholly correct or not, when I see such a photo as this one. – S. D.)
Robert David
Image courtesy https://asktheman.xyz/
The Cold Arithmetic of Cyber Execution
In the age of digital dominion, where death can be calculated by an algorithm and accountability buried beneath code, a new species of warfare has quietly emerged—faceless, data-driven, and morally anesthetized. It does not march on the battlefield with banners or tanks but instead pulses through fiber-optic veins and GPU clusters, making life-or-death decisions at the speed of light. This is the Lavender Protocol.
What began as an obscure node within Israel’s vast military-tech nexus—reportedly used to identify and execute human targets in Gaza based on algorithmic profiling—has metastasized into something more insidious: a global doctrine of proxy killing, developed and deployed not just by nation-states, but by the corporate and academic aristocracy of our time. Lavender is not just a system. It is a theology of technical omnipotence. And it is spreading.
By Sally Dugman
Quite some years ago, I overheard some theology students in a hot debate. Some of them were claiming that God could only be two of three traits — a triad — assigned to him. It went like this:
If God were all seeing, all powerful and all loving — he, she, it or they wouldn’t allow evil (brutality, murder and related “bad” behaviors) to take place. However and if God were all seeing and all powerful, but not all loving, he wouldn’t care about whom were getting brutalized and killed off prematurely.
Likewise if God were all seeing and all loving, but not all powerful — God might not be able to fix about wrongful actions taking place. So the world could still be vicious and God would not address it as such.
By Lucas Leiroz
Apparently, American strategists are concerned about the future of US-Russian relations in a post-Ukrainian conflict scenario. In a recent report, one of the most important US think tanks stated that Washington's implementation of a "hardline" policy in Europe could lead to a direct war with Russia, encouraging American decision-makers to rethink the country's European policy.
The document was published by the Rand Corporation. According to the think tank’s analysts, if the US tightens its policies in Europe after the conflict, a situation of war with Russia will become very likely. Experts do not believe that Washington is capable of deterring Russia through the militarization of Europe, with all policies in the region becoming forms of provocation against Moscow.
Tracy Turner
Weather lies. Climate kills.
It begins with a misunderstanding. Weather is moody; climate is a movement. Weather shifts like the temperament of a sick king—day to day, tempest to calm, fog to flame. Climate, on the other hand, is the dynasty behind the throne, grinding empires to dust over centuries or—more recently—decades. Mistake one for the other and you might bring an umbrella to a mass extinction.
As the world fixates on momentary heatwaves or polar vortex novelties, a planetary contraction is underway—a slow-motion implosion of water, soil, food, shelter, and trust. Drought is not merely an agricultural inconvenience. It is a planetary verdict. It is not local; it is global. It is not temporary; it is systemic.
Chris Spencer
They promised progress. What we got was a digital leash, many dangerous genetic gambles, and a ruling class without a conscience.
THE TRIAD OF CONTROL
Beneath the sheen of innovation and the rhetoric of progress, a deeper architecture of influence is emerging—quietly, systemically, and without democratic consent. It is built on three converging pillars: artificial intelligence, biotechnological power, and a global elite increasingly unmoored from accountability.
What binds these forces is not conspiracy in the cartoonish sense, but convergence—a mutual reinforcement of systems that limit transparency, consolidate decision-making, and reduce human agency to a variable in a larger, opaque equation. AI no longer simply processes data; it determines visibility, enforces digital orthodoxy, and obscures its own logic behind proprietary firewalls. Biotechnology, armed with unprecedented tools for genomic manipulation, is evolving faster than the ethical frameworks meant to constrain it. And threading through both is a transnational class of policymakers, financiers, and technocrats—unelected yet influential, philanthropic yet profit-motivated, visible yet untouchable.
By Dr. Althea Mentes
A Diagnostic Guide for the Late-Stage Empire (Satire)
The Empire's Mirror-When Power Becomes a Clinical Condition
By the dusk of the American republic's moral standing, its leadership's pathology no longer attempts to masquerade itself as statesmanship. It is now a clinical syndrome that manifests in the obsessive-compulsive need to dominate, the narcissistic disdain for dissent, and the paranoid surveillance of friends and foes alike. The ruling elites-presidents, Pentagon technocrats, and intelligence operatives have a collective psychology more worthy of a diagnostic manual than a democratic polity.
Consider the recent actions of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who has placed unprecedented restrictions on media access within the Pentagon. Journalists are now confined to secured areas and must request escorted tours to venture elsewhere, a move justified under the guise of protecting sensitive information. This expresses a fundamental authoritarian urge, an outcropping of what might be labeled Institutional Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, in which the imperative to govern information flow trumps democratic standards.
By Sally Dugman
Ahmed, a Rohingya refugee man cries as he holds his 40-day-old son, who died as a boat capsized in the shore of Shah Porir Dwip while crossing ...
One of my friends has lived his whole life in Bangladesh. He was in the middle of having a shock to his soul or his sensibilities (if one doesn't believe in a soul) due to having been invited to write an assessment for "ROHINGYA: Bangladesh Mission Report."
Yes, it is hard to bear witness. It is hard to endure suffering and loss on behalf of others. One has to brace oneself and toughly steel up so as to not disassemble at having to bear witness at the extreme pain experienced by others. So he pulled himself forward, and was trying to stay whole and focused on his task while at Cox's Bazaar, southeast Bangladesh, near the border with Myanmar.
Part of the way that he kept himself intact was to simply focus on interviews of people and report writing. He tried to keep himself at bay from an overwhelming emotional response to the deep and abidingly relentless pain of these others, the refugees, surrounding him.
Paul Craig Roberts
American judges appointed by Democrats have stopped the Trump administration from deporting illegal entrants into the US
Ned Lud
Foreword: A Mirror Without Distortion
We are not living through a war. We are living through a ritual sacrifice of children. One where civilization itself-its memory, its institutions, its ethical spine-is being sacrificed on the altar of technological power and theological delusion. The razing of Gaza is not a tactical campaign but a civilizational indictment: a mirror without distortion, in which the world stares, hypnotized, at its own inversion.
Think of Gaza as a Hormel or Armour slaughterhouse, with cattle prods and cruel devices to dispatch the prey, only substitute little children being pushed through the chutes.
This is not a religious critique, nor a racial tirade. It is a forensic dissection of a global psychosis, wherein the very concepts that once defined human progress-science, ethics, reason, philosophy-have been turned inside out and redeployed as instruments of annihilation. Lavender AI does not merely kill; it categorizes souls by algorithm, delegitimizes innocence by code, and automates genocide with the sterile detachment of a Silicon Messiah.