

Last Friday’s decision by UK Home Secretary Priti Patel to authorise the extradition of Julian Assange to the United States is both deeply shameful and unsurprising. Her action paves the way for Assange to be tried under the 1917 Espionage Act, introduced by the US government shortly after entering World War I, with a sentence of 175 years if found →

‘Damned Fun’ – ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ And The Military-Entertainment Complex
In 1990, Tom Cruise, star of the 1986 blockbuster, ‘Top Gun’, said: ‘Some people felt that “Top Gun” was a right-wing film to promote the Navy. And a lot of kids loved it. But I →

‘There Is No Way To Fool Physics’: Climate Breakdown And State-Corporate Madness
In the terrifying opening to his 2020 novel, ‘The Ministry for the Future’, Kim Stanley Robinson depicts an intense heatwave in India. In an ‘ordinary town’ in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, people are →

The Price Of ‘Selective Inattention’ – Iraq, Ukraine, Libya, And The Climate Apocalypse
Humanity’s great Achilles’ heel, the flaw that may well determine our fate, was summed up in a couple of lines in the classic Simon & Garfunkel song, ‘The Boxer’: ‘Still a man hears what he →

Burying ‘An Atlas Of Human Suffering’: Climate Breakdown And The Tory Chancellor
As the US economist and media analyst Edward Herman rightly noted in the aftermath of the mass slaughter of the first Gulf War: ‘It is the function of defense intellectuals and other experts, and the →