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John Berger dies aged 90 A Moment in Ramallah (an extract) Reproductions Distort’: A Note on the Culture Industry An obituary on the Financial Times
كُلُّ الذين ماتوا نجوا من الحياةِ بأُعْجوبة محمود درويش    — All those who have died have miraculously escaped life. Mamoud Darwish
Perspectives "Though new technologies will not completely erase the benefit of cheap labor, they will reduce the number of opportunities countries have to industrialize, diversify and grow their economies... As advanced, industrialized countries no longer have to rely on low-wage labor in far-off places, they will take advantage of new technologies and start producing low-end goods closer to home. States that have not yet begun to industrialize will have the hardest time; the longer it takes them to develop over the next few decades, the more difficult it will be for them to do so as the growth of advanced manufacturing elsewhere shrinks the opportunities available for emerging manufacturers." One can imagine what the fall-outs are in the "developping" countries: higher unemployment, more erosion of social services, more migration, social unrest, uprisings, coups, wars, etc . The rise of manufacturing marks the fall of globalization
"You sanctimonious philistines, who scoff at me! What has your politics fed on since you've been ruling the world? On butchery and murder!" — Charles de Coster, Till Ulenspiegel
" In relevant part, under the applicable Convention, genocide means "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; or (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part". Each and every one of these sign-posts of genocide has been perpetrated by Israel, seemingly with almost proud boast, and no accountability, for almost 70 unbroken years." Israel's never-ending crimes
" Speaking of the happy new year, I wonder if any year ever had less chance of being happy. It’s as though the whole race were indulging in a kind of species introversion — as though we looked inward on our neuroses. And the thing we see isn’t very pretty… So we go into this happy new year, knowing that our species has learned nothing, can, as a race, learn nothing — that the experience of ten thousand years has made no impression on the instincts of the million years that preceded." — John Steibeck, 01 January 1941 Necessary contradictions of the human nature