Former UN human rights chief and critic of Israeli genocide wins Nobel Peace Prize

The Nobel Peace Prize has always had a political dimension to it and in the past has been awarded to people who were utterly undeserving (Barack Obama) and to outright war criminals (Henry Kissinger). It is sometimes a reflection of the political zeitgeist and that seems to be the case this year when it awarded it to Navi Pillay.

Navi Pillay, a South African-born jurist and former U.N. human rights chief whose career has spanned from defending the rights of an imprisoned Nelson Mandela to leading a panel that found that Israel committed genocide in Gaza, won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for her efforts to promote international law as it comes under attack.

Her win is sure to be seen as a high-profile rebuke to U.S. President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who have both rejected the findings of the U.N. commission she led on Gaza. The leaders also have been highly critical of the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court. Pillay has worked at both.

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Why not bring back public hangings and the guillotine as well?

Having the death penalty is barbaric enough. Now the defense secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered that the execution Nidal Hasan, the former army psychiatrist who killed 13 people at Fort Hood in 2009, be by firing squad and livestreamed to the public.

“It was a radical Islamist attack in uniform inside the ranks, and so he’s going to get a firing squad of soldiers, as it should be, and we’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public, because people need to understand there’s serious consequences for these types of things,” Hegseth said.

People like Hegseth have this sick belief that seeing someone gunned down in public will somehow deter potential killers. Hegseth thinks that he is being tough. But no person with any scruples or sensitivity will want to watch such a sickening thing. I suspect that the only people who will watch are fans of horror and the macabre and such people actually get a thrill from seeing it. It might actually increase their bloodlust rather than reduce it.

The US is in dubious company when it comes to countries that still have firing squads: Afghanistan, China, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Taiwan, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen.

The US sinks deeper and deeper into depravity.

I’m sick of election coverage

There comes a time in every election cycle when I get sick of the coverage and can’t wait for election day to come around because we reach the point where there is breathless reporting of polls, who’s up and who’s down, and endless speculation of which party will do well and what that means for the next two years.

I reached that stage of fed-upness yesterday, four weeks before election day on November 3.

I suspect that most people are also probably sick to death of the endless repetition of ads and have already voted or have decided whom and what to vote for so that all this blather has little tangible effect unless there is some spectacular new development or revelation, something that has been given the name of ‘October Surprise’ but which rarely happens.

So from now on, I will just pay casual attention to the election coverage, mostly for amusing trivia to take my mind off the seriousness of the situation.

The rise of BRICS and the decline of SWIFT

One of Trump’s legacies will be the rearranging of global trade and alliances. Because of its powerful military and economic clout, the US has long been the guiding force in global affairs, able to dominate world trade and commerce and forming stable trade relationships and alliances with other major capitalist nations such as Canada, the European Union, Japan, South Korea, and other nations. Trump has undermined that with his unilateral actions.

There was a time when the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) threatened US hegemony by creating an alternative power bloc comprised of developing countries (of which China was then one) that was broadly socialist in outlook and sought to be independent of the then two superpower blocs of the US and the Soviet Union. The US always disliked it, seeing any kind of independence as anti-US, and while that movement still exists, the US-backed coups in Indonesia and Ghana that overthrew their leaders Sukarno and Kwame Nkrumah (two of the five founders of the NAM) considerably weakened it. The deaths of the other three founders (Jawaharlal Nehru in India, Josef Tito of Yugoslavia, and Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt) further reduced its influence.

But a new bloc known as BRICS (named after the five countries Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) has arisen to try and find new ways to counter US hegemony. It has since expanded to include Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates. As can be seen from its composition, unlike the NAM, it is all over the map politically, ranging from communist nations to right wing dictatorships to oil-rich oligarchies. What unites them is not politics but economics, the need to achieve some level of independence from US hegemony in trade and commerce.
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The battle over California’s billionaire tax

If you live in California, you will have been inundated with a barrage of ads over several propositions that are on the ballot in the upcoming elections. The main ones are Propositions 40, 41, and 42 and all relate directly or indirectly to a proposed wealth tax on billionaires. While Proposition 40 deals directly with this tax, the other two have been thrown in in an effort to confuse voters and stymie implementation of 40 even if it passes.

To understand the need for a wealth tax, we have to understand that while most people pay taxes on income, the very wealthy pay almost no tax. How do they do it? Because they do not receive any taxable income. For example, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin receive salaries of just one dollar per year. They receive their massive compensation in the form of stock that become taxable only when they sell any of it, and even then they pay only the capital gains rate which is a maximum of 20%, much lower than the top income tax bracket of 37%. But they do not pay even that. What they do is keep their stock intact without selling and take out loans with the stock as collateral. Since these are loans, they are not taxed at all. So these people have access to huge amounts of money to spend lavishly without incurring any tax liability.
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TV review: Scammed (2026)

The investigative TV series Frontline that broadcasts on PBS has released a new documentary on the way that internet scams have exploded in recent years. It is now estimated to have swindled billions of dollars from people all over the world. The major scamming operations are huge with the people behind them creating small cities in the remote jungles of Cambodia and Myanmar where they build massive compounds that house ten of thousands of workers in barracks-like conditions to carry out the frauds.

These workers from all over Asia have been tricked into thinking that they were being hired to work in legitimate jobs, usually in the hospitality industry, but and upon arriving find their passports taken and made to work under horrendous conditions. They are given highly detailed fake profiles and scripts to follow when they contact a target victim, so that they can be induced into parting with their money. The workers often do not speak English but they work off scripts in their own language which are then translated into English. They are severely punished with beatings if they do not perform to expectations. The governments of Cambodia and Myanmar seem to turn a blind eye to these abuses unless there is a global outcry upon which they raid some facilities, release the prisoners, and destroy the compound. But the criminals then simply move to a different location and build new small cities within a short time, usually a couple of months.

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How could AI kill everyone?

Recently we have been inundated with alarming stories based on what Jacob Coxon, a mathematician and software engineer who resigned from his research job at Anthropic last week, said, that “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.” 

As Tyler Foggett writes, these kinds of warnings are not new.

In 2018, the Anthropic C.E.O. Dario Amodei, then a research scientist at OpenAI, raised the concern that a superintelligence “could destroy humanity,” adding, “I can’t see any reason and principle why that couldn’t happen.” Earlier, in 2015, Sam Altman, just before he co-founded OpenAI, said, “I think A.I. will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there’ll be great companies created with serious machine learning.” Elon Musk, in 2014: “I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I were to guess at what our biggest existential threat is, it’s probably that.”

Those earlier warnings were shrugged off but for some reason, Coxon’s has broken through the public and media consciousness and generated a greater sense of danger. It has also raised the question of exactly how AI could kill all eight billion people within a decade. This article looks at the various possibilities. One is to create a deadly pathogen and release it into the wild. Since researchers are using AI in their work, the AI might be able to trick a human user into doing this. Others argue that AI may not need a human intermediary but could synthesize a virus by itself in an autonomous biological laboratory.
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When a state execution goes wrong

The death penalty is a barbaric practice that no civilized society should countenance. Yet the US is one of the countries that seems to take delight in executing people even though it sometimes botches the process.

The latest case involves the first woman to be executed in Tennessee in 200 years but she failed to die even after receiving the two lethal injections. What the observing journalists present described was macabre.

The lone woman on Tennessee’s death row was still alive after she was administered two lethal injections, her lawyer said in a motion seeking to halt her execution Wednesday night, a stunning development after the Supreme Court had stepped in to allow the state to put her to death.

At 8:26 p.m. local time, witnesses said “executioners had injected both syringes of lethal injection chemicals” and Christa Pike was “still alive and snoring,” her lawyers said in a federal court filing.

They said Pike “has not lost consciousness and still has a heartbeat” and that curtains to the death chamber “have gone down twice.”

Journalists who witnessed the attempted execution described snoring and complaints from Pike about pain, as well as her kicking her feet so often that she knocked off the sheets laid on her. At times, the curtain was closed and journalists could only hear sounds.
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