'…a major destabilizing influence'
I was explaining to my 26-year-old son recently that while I’m continuing to work as a writer, because I waited until age 70 to begin collecting my Social Security benefits, I am now collecting almost $29,000 a year on top of what I earn doing my freelance journalism thing. He said, matter-of-factly, “Well, I …
Now that the flags are back waving from the tops of flagpoles across the country, and the maudlin paeans to the close to 3000 lives lost in the airplane attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, it’s time we gave a thought to the dead who were ignored. According …
My wife, Joyce, and I recently traveled to Vienna for a week, where she had been invited to perform on Austrian state radio. Passing through Heathrow on our way home, we were separated by an automated security gate. The gate, which required you to scan your boarding pass, allowed Joyce through, but when I ran …
Continue reading “Are Terrorist Watch Lists Expanding Under Trump?”
Cambridge, UK, Aug. 6 — Seventy-four years ago today, the US dropped the first ever atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima, a non-military target of several hundred thousand, instantly vaporizing some 70,000 people, mostly civilians, and causing the painful, slower death of another 70,000 who died of burns and radioactive damage to their bodies …
As I set out to fly home from the UK on Monday following a short film project in Cambridge, I found my boarding pass, which I had been blocked from obtaining online the night before, carrying a bold-faced SSSS stamp in the lower right corner. Asking about it I was told by the British employee …
Continue reading “US is a Classic Empire and Is Becoming a Repressive Police State at Home”
Hong Kong — The bipartisan vengeance of the US government and its pervasive intelligence apparatus, on display currently in its rabid hounding of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, appears to know no bounds. But as ugly as the full-court effort to bag Assange, already trapped by US the combined efforts of complicit governments in Britain and …
Continue reading “Sri Lankan Refugee Family That Hid Snowden in Hong Kong Now Trapped in Limbo”
Hong Kong — Here in this ultra-modern city on the coast of southern China, I read in the morning paper that 11 consulates representing most of the nations of Europe, have lodged protests with the city’s chief executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor over a controversial new extradition bill that if passed would allow Hong …
Continue reading “Press Freedom is Under Threat in the Land of its Birth”
The imperialist neocons infesting the Trump administration, and the orange-faced joke of a president himself, may think they can invent their own reality through propaganda, as Bush’s “brain” Karl Rove used to claim about the Bush/Cheney administration, but when it comes to Latin America, they fail to realize how deeply the people of that continent …
Human is inhumane Greed is human Humanism is inhumane Exploitation is human Oppression is human Repression is human Torture is human Murder is human War is human Love of humanity is inhuman There are no more cracks in the wall Leonard Cohen is dead Hope is off the wall — Ron Ridenour …
Update: A kangaroo magistrate’s court in London, moments after hearing Julian Assange plead “not guilty” to the charge of skipping out on a court hearing seven years ago on a Swedish extraditio request seeking to question about allegations (not formal charges) of rape and sexual abuse — a case that had subsequently been dropped by …