Noam Chomsky and Epstein

I have long been an admirer, from my college days in Sri Lanka when I first came across his work, of Noam Chomsky, for his tireless support of oppressed people around the world, his deep analyses of the media, and his relentless critiques of the role of the US in creating and perpetuating injustices. He is not just one of the premier public intellectuals, he has been an inspiration of those seeking radical change around the globe.

Hence it came as a shock when the latest release of photographs from the Epstein files showed him flying with him in the latter’s private jet. Noam Chomsky? That Epstein would seek to ingratiate himself with Chomsky was no surprise, since Epstein, when not being an active pedophile, loved to surround himself with renowned intellectuals and used his wealth to buy that access, possible to compensate for the fact that he himself was not one. But what was Chomsky doing with a low-lifelike him? Many former admirers of Chomsky have been quick to to condemn him and Chomsky himself has not responded.

Michale Albert is someone who has known Chomsky well over five decades. Albert and Lydia Sargent founded the progressive magazine Z in 1987 as part of ZCommunications, later changed to ZNetwork. Albert has long been a friend of Chomsky and is possibly the best person to try and explain what happened and he has done so in a long essay that is well worth reading.

The first thing I learned is the reason for Chomsky’s silence. He suffered a devastating stroke in 2023 when he was 95 years old and has been unable to communicate since then. As Albert writes, following the release of the photo of Chomsky with Epstein:
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The new imperialism, just like a very old imperialism

It us becoming more clear what Trump intends with his attack on Venezuela and his abduction of its president Nicolas Maduro and his wife and bringing them to the US. He dismissed what seemed the likely choice to replace Maduro, the Trump-worshipping opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, in favor of Maduro’s vice-president Delcy Rodríguez, someone who had worked with Maduro for years.

Trump is signaling what is going on.

The prospect of the United States seizing direct control of Venezuela appeared to recede on Sunday after the shocking seizure of President Nicolás Maduro – but US officials said Washington was keeping a 15,000-strong force in the Caribbean and might make a fresh military intervention if Venezuela’s interim president, Delcy Rodríguez, did not accommodate their demands.

While Rodríguez kept up a defiant tone in public, the substance of conversations she had had in private with US officials was not clear.

In the aftermath of Maduro’s abduction on Saturday, Donald Trump said the US would “run” the South American country of 30 million people. On Sunday he warned Rodríguez to heed US wishes. “If she doesn’t do what’s right, she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro,” he told the Atlantic.

Rodríguez, 56, had on Saturday pledged fealty to Maduro and condemned his capture as an “atrocity” but the New York Times reported that Trump officials several weeks ago identified the technocrat as a potential successor and business partner partly on the basis of her relationship with Wall Street and oil companies.

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What next in Venezuela?

I have refrained from commenting on the outrageous act of imperialism by the US in Venezuela because the immediate aftermath of such things is confusion and misinformation and it takes a while for a more accurate picture to emerge. What I did expect to see was that after deposing the president Nicolas Maduro, the US would announce that there was an interim president chosen by them and that there would be statements by at least some top military leaders that they supported the new leader. That is usually how these things play out.

But not in this case. For some reason, Trump has been dismissive about the person that I expected that he would announce as the new leader, opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, which is surprising given that she is an ardent Trump supporter. The fact that she had just won the Nobel peace prize would give her some credibility, even if some of us have long dismissed that prize as worthless. But Trump dismissed the idea of her taking over saying that she was not consulted and that she “doesn’t have the support” within Venezuela.

Instead Trump said that the vice-president Delcy Rodríguez would be the new president and would work with the US. She was sworn in as president but denied that she had agreed to work with Trump and said that Maduro was the only president. There have also been no statements from the military leaders either way. Of course, it is possible that secret deals have been made that will trickle out over the coming days but as of now, it looks like the goal of the US attack was to capture Maduro and his wife and there was no real plan for what to do after that, which is really strange.
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Trump attacks Venezuela

He has done what he has been itching to do for some time, and that is have his own war. Given his dropping popularity and troubles at home, he has done what American president have frequently done in such situations and that is attack a smaller country, which tends to rally the jingoists, of whom there are many in this country, around the president. These people do not care about international law or committing war crimes.

This attack should be roundly and instantly condemned by everyone.

Mamdani not backing away from progressive election platform

Candidates after winning an election on a platform that appeals to the progressive base (because that is where the energy lies, especially among young people) often try to move to the center upon taking office because of powerful interests that oppose those measures. Hence they try to tamp down expectations of big changes.

The newly inaugurated mayor of New York City Zohran Mamdani does not seem to be following that path. In his first speech as mayor, he vowed to govern as a democratic socialist, the label he proudly wore in the campaign. His swearing in featured two of the most progressive voices who hold congressional office, senator Bernie Sanders and congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Zohran Mamdani on Thursday vowed to “reinvent” New York City in a speech on his first day as mayor, promising “a new era” for America’s largest city and an ambitious start to his term of office.

The 34-year-old political star and democratic socialist, who a year ago was a virtually unknown state assemblyman, is the city’s first Muslim mayor, first of south Asian descent and the first to be born in Africa. He is also the first to be sworn in using the Qur’an.

Mamdani added that a “moment like this comes rarely and rarer still is it that the people themselves whose hands are upon the levers of change”.

The mayor said that in writing his remarks, he was advised to lower expectations. “I will do no such thing,” he said. “The only expectation I seek to reset is that of small expectations. Beginning today we will govern expansively and audaciously. We may not always succeed but never will we be accused of lacking the courage to try.”

Mamdani did not shy away from his socialist politics. “I was elected as a democratic socialist and I will govern as a democratic socialist. I will not abandon my principles for fear of being called radical,” he said to loud cheers from the gathered crowd.

He ended by saying: “The work has only just begun.”
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Hope for the New Year

2025 was a no good, very bad year. I would like to think that the coming year will be better but since nearly all the things that made this year awful are all pretty much still in place, the likelihood of that happening is slight.

But despite that, I would like to hope that at least in your personal lives, the coming year brings good things. It is admittedly a very modest hope but it is all that I can genuinely summon up.

Thanks all who took the trouble to come here and read and comment.

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Good riddance to 2025

The end of the year seems like when many take the time to take stock of the status of life in general. I try not to do that because it seems a bit pointless (like new year resolutions – why not start good habits at other times?) but since one cannot avoid that because the media is full of such articles, one might as well give in. One thing that I find helpful at this time of years are lists of good films released during the year in which I occasionally find something I missed and can mark for future viewing.

The biggest contributor to this horrible year is of course the ongoing carnage in Gaza, a tragedy of immense proportions carried out by Israel with the overt support of the US and the acquiescence of Canada and many countries in Western Europe, all of whom could do something to stop it if they chose. Then we have the ongoing war in Ukraine plus lesser known conflicts in Somalia and Yemen which are taking a terrible toll on civilian lives, as all military conflicts do. The massacre in Bondi Beach and the continued mass shootings in the US all add to the sense of a general lack of a sense of a common humanity. It has been such a bad year that there may well be other major awful things that I have forgotten to list.

Adding to all this and making things worse is of course the pestilence known as Donald Trump. As Susan Glasser writes, “In the future, historians will struggle to describe that feeling, particular to this Trump era, of being prepared for the bad, crazy, and disruptive things that he would do, and yet also totally, utterly shocked by them.” He seems to be stoking the flames for more conflict by attacking Venezuela, clearly laying the groundwork for a full-fledged military assault or fomenting a coup. He also seems to have this weird desire to promote himself as the protector of Christianity and white people worldwide, as seen by his bombing of Nigeria, his preferential treatment of white Afrikaners in South Africa, and his tirades and attacks on immigrants of color in the US. And then we have his use of the department of justice and the FBI as his personal organizations for seeking revenge, and the conversion of ICE and CBP agents into heavily armed paramilitary secret forces equipped with masks and unmarked vehicle to terrorize people like the death squads did in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile during the heyday of military juntas in those countries.
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The pleasures of being alone and staying home

I knew most of this stuff but it was presented entertainingly.

I am never bored when I am at home alone because there are so many things enjoyable things that I can choose to do. While I greatly enjoy being in the company of a few people such as close friends or others whose company I find enjoyable, the times when I have been most bored is when I have been in large gatherings, such as parties, where one has a series of superficial conversations with many different people. If I am lucky, I may find a kindred soul with whom to sit in a corner and have more meaningful exchanges. It is even worse when the ambient noise is so loud that you cannot even hear anyone else and conversation just stops and you just sit there unable to read or even think. This can happen in bars and wedding receptions.
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Film review: Cover-Up (2025)

This gripping documentary directed by Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus, about the work of legendary reporter Seymour M. Hersh has just been released on Netflix. It is must-see viewing for anyone who wishes to know more about the murder, war crimes, rape, torture, and other abuses committed by the US government and its military, many of which were revealed because of the dogged work of Hersh. I have written about Hersh and his work multiple times before but if you have time to read just one of them, I would recommend my review of his memoir Reporter published in 2018. He is also scathing about the complicity of the mainstream media in enabling so many cover-ups, while patting themselves on the back for being courageous truth-seekers.

What made him distinctive was that he did not suck up to the top people, as so many ‘star’ reporters do in the effort to get what they consider ‘scoops’ but which in actuality made them conduits for government and military propaganda. The New York Times and Washington Post are particularly guilty of this. What Hersh did was to seek out lower level people who had principles and consciences and also had access to important information but were not careerists desperately seeking to climb the ladder by acquiescing to their superiors. He would go to great lengths to protect their identities, often speaking to many people whom he knew knew nothing about the story he was reporting, just so that his source could not be singled out. As a result, word got around that he could be trusted and more people would come to him with information and copies of secret documents.
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Encyclopedia wars

There is an enduring appeal to encyclopedias.The ability to look up information that has been prepared by credible sources on a huge range of topics, is invaluable, especially for someone like me whose curiosity takes me in many different directions, triggered by random events in my life. As a result, I bought a complete set of the Encyclopedia Brittanica back around the early 1980s. I was not wealthy and it cost a lot but it was the one luxury that I felt justified in indulging in. Sadly I then had to part with it when I came to the US, because the massive multi-volume set was too expensive to ship and I expected that I would be moving around a lot in my first few years here as I struggled to gain a foothold in my career. So I gifted it to a friend. Then later in the US when my children were little and we were settled, I bought another multivolume encyclopedia set, ostensibly to help them look up stuff for their homework and for general interest though I think that secretly it was for my own benefit and I ended up being the main user.

What is nice about a physical encyclopedia is the serendipity that it enables, that you often start out looking up something specific but as you turn the pages to get to that entry, you stumble across unrelated items that are interesting and read about them too. It is like walking along library stacks looking for a particular book and finding other books that look interesting and checking them out as well. The difference is that with library stacks, books are arranged according to subject categories so you will likely be in the same general area while in an encyclopedia the entries are sorted alphabetically, so with the latter one can end up very far from the starting point.

But this was before the internet and Wikipedia, which has become the go-to source for people looking for information on anything. Now one is less likely to end up on a random topic, just as doing online searches for library books means that one can miss out on serendipitous discoveries. The same is true for journals and magazines. When you have hard copies, you tend to look at the table of contents and that can result in finding new articles of interest. But with online sources, you often get sent directly to the article you are looking for and do not scan the content titles. This saves time but also results in loss.
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