[PJ: & this applies just as well to the US than to Israel/Gaza] June 9, 2018 IT’S FRIGHTENING. Unprincipled psychologists, in the service of a malignant regime, use sophisticated techniques in order to control the mind of a person from afar. The term “brainwashing” was born in 1950. It is a Chinese word (“xinao”, literally wash brain). Originally it served to describe a technique used – so it was … Read more Uri Avnery: Are You Brainwashed?
… oh well, I guess that’s true and I can verify it by the fact that there are reasonable people who believe that white people are more intelligent than other people, that the earth is or was at some time flat, that the place of women is in the kitchen because they are obviously less intelligent than men, that Darwin was obviously wrong as man cannot descend from a monkey, … Read more TOP STORIES “In his debut as a Times Op-Ed columnist, Bret Stephens says reasonable people can be skeptical about the dangers of climate change”
New New York Times hire Bret Stephens (cc photo: Christopher Michel) Outraged by the NYT hiring a straight-ahead climate denier (which at this point in the game is exactly as inane as hiring a flat-earthler as resident geography specialist) I posted on this & on our cancelling the NYT because of this a few days ago — oddly enough, this post has attracted more viewers than nearly all other … Read more More on Bret Stephens, the NYT’s New Hire: from Climate Denial to Racism
Régis Debray — as those who know me will be well aware — has been a writer, thinker & activist I have greatly admired & have kept reading & rereading for 40+ years. Gathering work for a book of essays, I came across my review of a book of journalistic articles by Debray called L’espérance au Purgatoire, or Hope in Purgatory — published back in 1980 by The New Statesman in London. … Read more Régis Debray “Chez Lui”
Heute hier, morgen da Eineinhalb Stunden verfliegen wie zehn Minuten, und selbst der Automatenkaffee schmeckt irgendwie nach Zaubertrank. Ein wenig high verlässt man das Theater schon – nach einem Gespräch mit Pierre Joris. Die Droge? Na, die Sprache. Er wohnt nicht in Luxemburg, sondern in New York. Und er ist eigentlich kein Theatermensch, sondern in erster Linie Dichter. Der diesjährige „auteur en résidence“ des TNL ist schon etwas ganz … Read more Tageblatt Article on PJ @ Luxembourg National Theater
We flew to New Orleans in the first week of November 2005, i.e. two months after Katrina had struck, for readings & meeting with friends. From notes I took while there I put together the following poem when we returned East. Here it is again, 10 years later, in memory of that disaster, of those who perished, of the friends we found devastated — but already energetically rebuilding Nola. A great city … Read more Remembering Nola 2005
via The Electronic Intifada: The New York Times agrees to be gagged by Israel Submitted by Ali Abunimah on Fri, 04/18/2014 – 15:17 Majd Kayyal was arrested and held incommunicado by Israel’s Shin Bet. Margaret Sullivan, The New York Times’ public editor, has written a thoughtful and important piece criticizing the way the newspaper complied with an Israeli-imposed gag order on the case of Majd Kayyal. But it leaves some important questions unanswered about … Read more The NYT & Israel’s Gag Order
This is a very insightful piece of investigative journalism — in an area unhappily too recondite for the major media to do much about (unless those major media, being all owned by big corporations who are in bed with the banks, purposefully stay away from such matters? A tripartite conspiracy between banks, industrial corporations & media corporations? Call me paranoid — but, as William Burroughs used to say: “A … Read more Matt Taibbi: The Vampire Squid Strikes Again
The Tunisian poet & scholar Abdelwahab Meddeb forwarded me the following letter by his daughter Hind Meddeb, a cinematographer & journalist. It goes to the heart of the matter of how in Tunisia, the country where it started, the Arab Spring is being shunted toward yet another authoritarian police regime. This Monday, June 17, I didn’t show up at the police summons… Yesterday I left Tunisia because I lost … Read more Letter on (In)Justice in Tunisia by Hind Meddeb
The Guardian, as so often, has interesting material on dead poets & live languages. The first concerns Keats as opium addict (vide new biography by Nicholas Roe) & the second, Nigeria’s strong, very alive & quickly evolving pidgin: John Keats was an opium addict, claims a new biography of the poet The author of Ode to a Nightingale wrote his greatest poems with the aid of opium, believes Prof Nicholas Roe … Read more Dead Poets & Live Language: scatter my brain yet ginger my swagger