CULTURE & CRITICISM

JM—Iran also damaged an oil refinery in Haifa. Israel has only two and Haifa is its largest. You might think that this benefits the US LNG industry. Maybe yes. Also less than you think.

For example, Japan is hugely dependent on LNG. If it can’t get it from the ME, it must get it elsewhere . It already gets some from Russia. And has contracts with the US, but it has shifted its focus to Canada.

The LNG Canada Project in British Columbia in Kitimat, is partially funded by Mitsubishi Corporation (15% stake) shipping 2.1 million metric tons of LNG annually to Japan since 2025. The project aims to add 14 million tons of capacity annually, expanding over time. And there are other projects under construction. Japan and other Asian countries prefer Canadian LNG because it offers a shorter transit time (approx. 10 days) compared to Middle Eastern or US Gulf routes. This makes its economically competitive, despite higher production costs than, say, Qatar or even the US.

DL—In the early morning of March 20, 2026, Dimitri Lascaris crossed the Turkey-Iran border by land. He then entered the Iranian province of West Azerbaijan. From there, Dimitri and the foreign journalists travelling with him drove by car to the Iranian city of Tabriz. Tabriz is one of Iran’s largest cities. The U.S. and Israel have bombed it repeatedly since the start of the war on February 28. In this report (his first report from Iran during the ongoing war), Dimitri describes what he has seen and experienced during his journey to Tabriz.

GG—The video presents a comprehensive, critical, and highly detailed discussion centered on the escalating geopolitical tensions involving the United States, Iran, Israel, China, and Taiwan, framed within the context of an ongoing war that the U.S. under Donald Trump has entered with Iran. The host, George Galloway, along with expert guests such as VJ Prashad and Pulitzer Prize winner Chris Hedges, unpacks the unfolding military, political, and economic crises with a clear focus on the failures of American foreign policy, the resilience and strategic acumen of Iran, and the broader implications for global power shifts, particularly the decline of Western hegemonic dominance.

Key issues covered include China’s military posturing around Taiwan, the questionable credibility of Israeli leadership amid relentless Iranian missile strikes, the disastrous nature of the U.S.-led war on Iran, and the strategic and political consequences of this conflict for the Middle East and the world.

BL—When Marx and Engels proclaimed that the first human societies practiced ”primitive communism” they hardly had much company. In the first half of the 20th century two exceptions were the archeologist V. Gordon Childe and later on the anthropologist Leslie White. It was only in the 1960s and 1970s that empirical confirmation of hunter-gatherers came forth to be seen in the works of Marshall Sahlins’ Stone Age Economics, Morton Fried’s The Evolution of Political Society and Elman Service’s Primitive Social Organization.
———————————-

In the 1980s, evolutionary psychology was born as a discipline devoted to not throwing the Darwinian baby out with the Social Darwinian and Sociobiology bathwater. However, all too often, Darwinian evolutionary psychologists played fast and loose with the term “hierarchy”. They find hierarchies among the apes, breezily survey different types of human societies, and then conclude that hierarchy is a cross-species and universal phenomenon.

BL—Iran’s mosaic defense strategy continues to enable regional long-range missile and drone strikes on US and proxy military and now economic infrastructure;
Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz also indicates that initial US decapitation strikes have failed to disrupt well-prepared mosaic defense operations;
The US is now bombing internal security facilities in Iran hoping to shape the ground ahead of US-backed terrorism inside Iran aimed at toppling the Iranian government. However, Iran also has organized internal security against this threat into a mosaic defense strategy, only time will tell if it will overcome US plans in the hours, days, and weeks ahead.

China is not intervening in the US war on Iran for realistic logistical and military limitations and has, instead, supported Iran in a number of other important and more effective ways economically, industrially, and in terms of military support.