"Fauna"
chinaSMACK

Guangxi 6-year-old AIDS orphan lives alone, eats rice and vegetables without oil or salt yet still eats with relish

In your childhood, what were you doing? Begging daddy to buy a toy, being pressed by mommy to learn a foreign language, taking the pocket change that grandma secretly gave you, sharing the bubblegum you just bought with your friends… When you couldn’t get what you wanted, did you sigh like a little adult: “It sucks being a child!” However, A-Long wouldn’t. By himself, he washes his laundry and makes his meals. Alone, he feeds the chickens and raises the dog. Alone, he studies and learns to read. Alone, he goes to sleep. A-Long never feels it sucks being himself, even though he is only 6-years-old this year.

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Stephen Lendman

A personal note.

It's no way to begin a Sunday or any day. An email explained. My first thought was: damn, we lost another good one when we urgently need him and many others, given the state of today's America - out-of-control militarism, imperial arrogance, and homeland repression at a time of economic crisis for millions. Johnson knew the threat, challenging it brilliantly in his important writings and outspokenness. Now he's gone. ~ SL

A former cold warrior, Chal, as friends called him, turned activist critic of US foreign policy, an imperial agenda doomed to fail. When the Cold War ended, he saw no further logic to US global bases, continued heightened militarism, and occupation of Japan, South Korea, Germany and elsewhere.

Peace breaking out was glorious. "Give Peace A Chance," wrote John Lennon, his Rock and Roll Hall of Fame song predated it by a decade.

In a March 2006 Tom Engelhardt interview, Johnson said:

"I was a cold warrior. There's no doubt about that. I believed the Soviet Union was a genuine menace. I still think so....As I saw it, the only justification for our monster military apparatus, its size, the amounts spent on it, the growth of the Military-Industrial Complex....was the existence of the Soviet Union and its determination to match us."

After it imploded, he thought:

"What an incredible vindication for the United States. Now it's over, and the time has come for a real victory dividend, a genuine peace dividend. The question was: Would the US behave as it had in the past when big wars came to an end?" Instead, we "began to seek an alternative enemy. Our leaders simply could not contemplate dismantling the apparatus of the Cold War. That was, I thought, shocking....I was flabbergasted and felt the need to understand what had happened."

Maintaining heightened militarism

"suggest(ed) that the Cold War was, in fact, a cover for something else; that something else being an American empire intentionally created during World War II as the successor to the British Empire. The Cold War was not the clean-cut conflict between totalitarian and democratic values that we had claimed it to be."

Most ominous about US imperialism is that

"militarism is so central to ours....not (for) national defense....but as a way of life, as a way of getting rich or getting comfortable. (Yet it's) bankrupting the country...This is not free enterprise. (It's) state socialism," heading us for ruin. "And the precedents for this should really terrify us."

Johnson ended the interview quoting Pogo's observation, saying: "We have met the enemy and he is us."

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Uri Avnery
Uri Avnery's Column

“A DISASTER!” the courtiers of the King of Hanover cried, “Seven renowned professors at Göttingen University have published a declaration of protest against you!”

That was 173 years ago. The king had suspended the liberal constitution enacted by his predecessor.

“So what,” the king replied, “Tarts, dancers and professors I can always buy.”

This story was told me by Yeshayahu Leibowitz, who was himself a professor of half a dozen vastly different disciplines, from bio-chemistry to the philosophy of science. He held many of his colleagues in profound contempt.

He told me this story when we were talking about one professor in particular: Shlomo Avineri, who had just agreed to serve as Director General of the Foreign Office under Minister Yigal Alon. Alon was the author of the “Alon Plan”, which provided for the annexation of wide stretches of occupied territory.

This week, Avineri published an article under the headline “Fascism? You make me laugh!”

What made him laugh? The ridiculous (for him) argument that there exist fascist tendencies in Israel. He reminded us that fascism means the Gestapo, concentration camps and genocide. How could we forget.

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Ismail Patel
Patrick Mac Manus

"An open-air prison camp where people die from treatable illnesses and suffer malnutrition while living besides openly running sewage – this is Gaza’s reality, and it is man-made by Israel."

The siege on Gaza enters its fourth year this year. The consequences have been catastrophic, but the images of this catastrophe are for the most part kept away from the world and its media.

With Israel controlling all borders, the only lifelines available to Gazans have been a maze of underground tunnels along the border with Egypt. This forced black-market has claimed lives and is being continually challenged by Israeli bombings and Egyptian reinforcement of the border with an underground steel wall.

For the needs of Gaza’s 1.5 million people to be met, there needs to be 1,300 containers of merchandise and foods passing across the Karni Crossing every day. The supplies that do manage to pass fail to meet even 20 pert cents of the populations’ needs. The result has been 80 per cent poverty, dependency on aid for even their daily meals and hundreds of deaths from lack of medical equipment and supplies.

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The Economic Collapse Blog

Full Spectrum Dominance: 8 Examples Of How The Government Is Attempting To Take Total Control Of Our Food, Our Health, Our Money And Even Our Dignity

Over the past several decades, no matter which political party has been in power the government has continued to become a larger part of our lives. These days many people are speaking of the "nanny state" that we have created, but the reality is far worse than that. The truth is that the government has become a gluttonous, out of control behemoth that is gobbling up everything in sight and that is attempting to exert full spectrum dominance over our lives. Today, the government seems to have an insatiable hunger to watch us, track us and control us. Now they even want to feel our private parts before we get on an airplane. No matter what politicians we send to Washington D.C., it just seems to get worse and worse. Anyone who still believes that we live in "the land of the free" is completely and totally delusional.

It isn't just in one particular area that all of this government intrusion into our lives is so offensive. What we are witnessing is the government slowly digging its fingers even deeper into our lives in a thousand different ways. Sadly, most Americans see the government as the one who is supposed to take care of them from the cradle to the grave, as the one who is supposed to fix all of the problems in society and as the one who is their ultimate authority.

This is in direct contradiction to the concept of a "limited government" that our Founding Fathers tried so desperately to enshrine in our founding documents. The American people need a big-time wake up call. The following are 8 examples of how the U.S. government is attempting to take even more control over our lives....

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