“One of the most remarkable aspects of Mamdani’s rise is the long shadow of his father’s intellectual project. Mahmood Mamdani is a world-famous antinationalist academic at Columbia University, who argues that every sovereign country is built on exclusion and sustained by domination and violence. He has called for a political future in which every nation state including the United States would be ‘deconstructed.’ Nationalism is the dominant political form of the modern world. Nation states set the rules for citizenship, command armies, print money, and provide the legal frameworks within which our lives unfold. Yet this has not always been the case, and there is no guarantee that it will always remain so. For that reason alone, it is worth engaging seriously with the case against nationalism — a case that has been pressed by both the Right and the Left.” (09/02/25)
“CNN’s investigation features several photographs and videos of the journalists Israel killed this week working on the balcony and stairwell …. When they targeted a ‘Hamas camera,’ they knew that, in reality, that camera was being used by a Reuters journalist, Hussam Al-Masri. … And when Israel struck 10 minutes later with two coordinated missiles, it knew that the main victims would be the emergency workers who went to rescue survivors from the first strike and journalists – al-Masri’s friends – who were nearby and rushed to the scene. Nothing was a ‘mishap.’ It was planned down to the minutest detail. But here is where we get to the main problem with CNN’s coverage. In picking apart Israel’s patently bogus claims, the investigation treats those claims with a seriousness they in no way merit.” (09/02/25)
“On August 5, Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston decreed a $25,000 fine for anyone walking in the woods or otherwise violating a new prohibition that covered both government and private lands. The prohibition will continue until October. Houston declared, ‘Most wildfires are caused by human activity, so to reduce the risk, we’re keeping people out of the woods until conditions improve. I’m asking everyone to do the right thing — don’t light that campfire, stay out of the woods and protect our people and communities.’ Canadian politicians are exploiting wildfires the same way that former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau exploited COVID to lockdown the entire nation.” (09/01/25)
“The unhinged hostility to Donald Trump’s successful [sic] crime [sic] crackdown in Washington, DC, puts Democrats inexplicably on the wrong side of their own voters. What on earth are they thinking? Law and order is quite literally an 80-20 issue. You don’t need a pollster to say so, but 81% of Americans of all political persuasions say crime is ‘a major problem,’ according to a new AP-NORC poll released last week. The other 19% must be either criminals or blue-city politicians — or both.” [editor’s note: At least the occupation troops picked up some litter and raked some leaves in between abducting drunk sandwich throwers and marching around tourist areas to be seen – TLK] (08/31/25)
“You can now eat a steak grown from cow cells that never saw a pasture, taste cheese made with whey protein brewed by microbes that have never passed through an udder, wear a diamond formed from lab-coaxed carbon, and shake hands with someone who has an ear 3D printed from her own cartilage cells. For a couple of decades now, we’ve been replacing bladders and tracheas and sections of burned flesh with living tissue that started in a sterile lab and ended up integrated into someone’s body, pumping blood, producing mucus, or just sitting there looking pretty and unscarred. There’s always a backlash. Words such as unnatural, fake, Frankenfood, and synthetic get thrown around like accusations. The assumption is that anything born in a lab must be lesser, or at least deeply suspicious.” (for publication 10/25)
“One common criticism of capitalism is that it has sparked an epidemic of loneliness. This is often attributed to the individualistic nature of capitalism, and to the fact that markets have replaced a variety of more personal and communal connections with commercial activities. Karl Marx indeed expected that this trend will go as far as replacing even family relations and friendships with commercial interactions. How could that not make people more lonely? And yet, the reason why markets have been expanding into personal life is that markets provide a certain convenience.” (09/02/25)
“This week’s Air Canada flight attendants’ strike brought the country’s largest airline to a halt with picket lines set up at airports across the country. After the federal government attempted to send the attendants, represented by Canadian Union of Public Employees’ (CUPE) Air Canada Component, back to their jobs, the workers refused, becoming the first union to resist this kind of order from the federal government, which has issued a spate of them in the past year. The union’s refusal to back down led to new negotiations with Air Canada, and a tentative agreement was announced the following day. Alison Braley-Rattai, a professor of labor studies at Brock University, told PressProgress the government’s pattern of sending workers back to their jobs, combined with the particularities of the flight attendants’ struggle, created ‘a perfect storm.'” (09/01/25)
“It appears that the free global internet, such as it was, which many of us loved and grew up with, is nearly dead. Long gone are the days of anonymous IRC chats or where only paranoiacs thought their emails were monitored. The growing standard is the government demanding websites know who you are all the time to ‘protect’ you from a myriad of trivial things such as ‘hate speech’ or videos of people eating too much. As has become common, it is not any of the ‘authoritarian’ states we hear about leading the way to the end of internet freedom, but instead the ethnic European parts of the former British Empire.” (09/01/25)
“Disappointed prosecutors often find other charges to file, or hand the same facts over to other levels of government for different framing (‘he was found not guilty of murder, but now we’re charging him with violating the civil rights of the person he murdered’). And unfortunately, as noted above, prosecutors can bring the same case before a grand jury (or more than one grand jury) over and over until they finally find enough servile citizens in one place to get the indictment they want … or just ‘re-charge’ the same allegation as a misdemeanor if grand jurors won’t indict for it as a felony. That seems to me to violate the Fifth Amendment’s prohibition on ‘any person be[ing] subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb.'” (08/29/25)
