HIROYUKI HAMADA—People sometimes ask me what religion Japanese people practice. I usually end up saying that Japanese people aren’t very religious at all. But paradoxically, if you go to Japan, you encounter huge shrines at tourists’ spots and there are numerous smaller ones across the country in many forms. You visit a Japanese household, you might also find a shrine, a box shaped prayer spot, called butsudan.
July 2018
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PATRICK WALKER—With Noam Chomsky, I feel that whatever comparatively insignificant interference Russia may or may not have plotted against our election, it pales in comparison with the nuclear war risk and wasteful spending of a New Cold War. Especially when unprecedented government and private spending—and equally unprecedented international good will—are essential to addressing humanity’s climate emergency.
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JIMMIE MOGLIA—”Zionist Judaism functions as a Federal Reserve Bank of sorts, but applied to the mass-psychology of Jewish Americans…”
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P. GREAVILLE—In reality people like these should have been called to account long ago, not for these sex etiquette transgressions, serious as they may be, but for the much broader and graver crime of promoting wars “of choice”, which the American empire has turned into an ugly habit in the last quarter century and for which we hanged media barons at Nuremberg. With wars still raging in the Middle East—the destruction of Iraq alone has claimed over a million victims, and Libya’s and Syria’s at least half a million, and others planned, plus a rampant and highly dangerous and hypocritical russophobia (matched by its obverse, the revolting coddling of Israel), the punishment for their behaviour should be far more severe than mere slaps on the wrist and some passing humiliation. After all, who cares, America is a culture with an attention span measured in the microseconds.
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SERGIO WEIGEL—First, a few words about America’s track. The imperialists of the US regime desperately cling to their empire, that’s a classic, that’s what imperialists do. The Nazis clung to their short-lived empire until Germany was in ruins, the Romans clung to theirs until defeated, and the British struggle during WW2 was far more about preserving theirs than it was about defeating Nazi Germany. Empires usually don’t dismantle themselves. But it’s also the American people, serfs to the empire, who are desperately clinging. That’s what I found so appalling about the Occupy movement.