by subMedia / March 14th, 2015
In this week’s show an homage to women everywhere, a look at the trolls from the Men’s Rights Movements and how the Gulabi Gang in India are beating down rapists with big ass sticks. On the music break, Bambu with “The Queen is Dead.” Our featured guest is journalist Dawn Paley, talking about her book Drug War Capitalism.
by Paul Craig Roberts / March 14th, 2015
President George W. Bush’s national security advisor, Condi Rice, warned Americans that Saddam Hussein’s (nonexistent) weapons of mass destruction could result in a mushroom cloud going up over an American city. No such threat existed. But today a very real threat exists over all American cities, and the national security advisor does not notice.
The threat issues from Washington and arises from the demonization of Russia and its leadership.
Wolf Blitzer (CNN, March 13) used the cover of a news program to broadcast a propaganda performance straight out of the Third Reich or perhaps from George Orwell’s 1984. The orchestration presented Russia …
by Alton C. Thompson / March 14th, 2015
Scientists recognize that Earth does have a “thermostat” of sorts:
Atmospheric carbon dioxide performs a role similar to that of the house thermostat in setting the equilibrium temperature of the Earth. It differs from the house thermostat, [however], in that carbon dioxide itself is a potent greenhouse gas (GHG) warming the ground [-level atmospheric] surface by means of the greenhouse effect. It is this sustained warming that enables water vapor and clouds to maintain their atmospheric distributions as the so-called feedback effects that amplify the initial warming provided by the non-condensing GHGs, and in the process, account for the bulk
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by Felicity Arbuthnot / March 13th, 2015
Iraq may soon end up with no history.
— Archeologist Joanna Farchakh, quoted in Cultural Cleansing in Iraq, Pluto Press, 2010
In his indispensible book From Sumer to Saddam, Geoff Simons writes:
The region of the world that the ancient Greeks called Mesopotamia (land between the rivers) … was a fount of civilization – a veritable crucible … cradle, womb of cultural progress … Here it was the first cities were born, writing began and the first codified legal systems were established. Here, through such ancient lands as Sumer, Akkad, Babylonia and Assyria that the vital cultural brew was stirred, the quite
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by Elliot Scott / March 13th, 2015
Dardanelle, AR — Adding fire to the controversy of Senator Tom Cotton’s letter to the Leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran, evidence has surfaced that in addition to treason, the senator may also be guilty of self-plagiarism. Spanky Walton, retired principal of Dardanelle High School, read the text of the Senator’s letter yesterday and was beset by an uncomfortable feeling that he had read the letter before.
Reviewing some of his old files, Mr. Walton came across the following letter from a young Tom Cotton:
An Open Letter to the Principal of Dardanelle High School
It has come …
by Ralph Nader / March 13th, 2015
Self-made billionaire (meaning he didn’t inherit it), Nick Hanauer is not one to mince words, especially when they are backed by facts and principles of fairness. The Seattle entrepreneur, author and venture capitalist (he was the first non-family investor in Amazon), is known for vocally championing Seattle’s staggered increase of its minimum wage to $15 an hour as good for workers and the economy. Any contrary corporatist to debate him on this subject would lose big.
Mr. Hanauer is speaking before business and political groups, including the Democratic senators at their recent Baltimore retreat, about a favorite cause of mine—the utterly …
by Binoy Kampmark / March 13th, 2015
The gods destroy those they call promising. In this case, there may well be a firming agenda from various circles of praise that seem to be haloing the new, hip shooting Arkansas Senator. Much of this admiration stems from the simplicity of it all – Tom Cotton, for one, doesn’t want the implications of international diplomacy to be too troubling for US interests. For that reason, he has left his diplomacy text books at home. Embrace the inner brute, and feel more comfortable with things.
Media outlets are feverish with praise, while the sponsors are getting excited about how far Senator …
by Ajamu Nangwaya / March 13th, 2015
As a member of the Afrikan-Canadian community in the city of Toronto, I am quite puzzled by the exuberant display of irrationality and misplaced expectations over the possibility of the appointment of either Deputy Chief Peter Sloly or Deputy Chief Mark Saunders as the next police chief of the Toronto Police Service (TPS). These two cops are both Afrikan-Canadians.
Peter Sloly’s candidacy for the top position on the policing food chain recently received a ringing and enthusiastic endorsement from the Share newspaper, the weekly publication with the highest circulation in Toronto’s Afrikan-Canadian community.
Share’s publisher and senior editor Arnold Auguste makes …
by Eric Walberg / March 13th, 2015
Fans of both musicals and Stephen Harper will find pleasure in Ed Mirvishes “The Heart Of Robin Hood” where the doughty defender of the poor goes after the nasty imperialist interlopers of the legitimate king.
Much as I mourn the unnecessary deaths of Canadian soldiers Richelieu and Doiron last week, I am angered not by Iraqis, who are doing whatever they do to drive the unwelcome guests out of their country. It is Harper, seeing a political fillip in the making that is the cause of their deaths. A beheading would not be inappropriate.
After Canada’s post-invasion Iraqi fiascos, including a NATO …
by Norman Ball / March 13th, 2015
Wealth is on a skyward sprint—to meaninglessness. How good was Sartre with a buck? We’ll soon find out as the entirety of the planet’s wealth is headed for the very deep pocket of the top 0.000000000142857143%. (Odds of winning? 1 in 7 billion.) In short, we’re converging on the Omega Man Wealth Syndrome where one tight bastard will own everything.
Will Smith did dystopian-chic proud in I Am Legend. However old-timers will fondly recall Charlton Heston’s off-handed abandonment of snazzy late-year models whenever the gas gauge hit ‘E’. There’s nothing like a post-apocalyptic landscape to crater the Peak Oil thesis and …
by Ramzy Baroud / March 13th, 2015
This is not my geography teacher, or, more accurately it is not at all how I remember him. A series of APA images published by the British Daily Mail and other newspapers showed Hamad al-Hasanat lying dead in a mosque, surrounded by a group of Hamas fighters. On top of his lifeless body, as worshipers came to offer a final prayer before burial, rested an assault rifle.
Hasanat was buried among the refugees of the Nuseirat Refugee Camp, in the central Gaza Strip. He died on March 2nd, at the age of 80.
“Hammad al-Hasanat co-founded the terrorist group (Hamas) on …
The GOP, Iran, and Diplomatic Sabotage
by Binoy Kampmark / March 12th, 2015
They’re [the Republicans] contacting a foreign power in the middle of a war. It’s a damn bad mistake.
— President Lyndon B. Johnson, 1968
War is addictive. It is also sweet to those who do not know it. There is always someone else who fights it on their behalves. The GOP is better at that than most – their desperation to keep seats in Congress and win others has propelled them to lunatic belligerence. Middle Eastern states have been removable furniture for some time – at least when it comes to their regimes – and the GOP strategists seem …
by Medea Benjamin / March 11th, 2015
Early in the morning of March 3, on AIPAC’s national lobby day and just hours before Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu was set to address the joint session of Congress, AIPAC President Robert Cohen, along with the group’s Policy Director and two associates, briskly approached the Congressional office of Speaker of the House John Boehner. To their horror, they found the office locked and surrounded by crowd of CODEPINK activists staging a sit-in to protest the Netanyahu speech. After trying unsuccessfully to get in a side door, the AIPAC officials scurried away. But a CODEPINK swarm followed through the maze of …
by T.P. Wilkinson / March 11th, 2015
Since American Sniper has become one of the “top grossing films of all time”, garnering a few Academy Award nominations and at least one, if trivial, award, there have been even more reviews written about this insidious and insipid strip of celluloid. Unsurprisingly all of them contain the same swill. I had to return to my own review just to see if I had perhaps omitted anything essential or if anyone might have thought in an at least similar direction.
The defensive focus of vocal support for the film is equally and unsurprisingly the condition of “veterans”. In fact, this …
Police-state challenge could nurture democracy and an American Spring
by William Boardman / March 11th, 2015
Chicago’s mayoral election may look like a local event, and the media mostly cover it as a local event, but the presence of a large, diverse, and energized opposition demanding change on basic issues of fairness and justice gives the city’s local result a potentially important, totemic meaning for the country. The winner of the April 7 runoff election may signify whether peaceful change is possible, or whether the suffocating status quo will grow more stifling.
There is another way of gauging the April vote: is Chicago yet ready to reject the police state practices of its local government? …
by Syria Solidarity Movement / March 11th, 2015
Putting its hypocritical and biased nature on full display once again, the alleged human rights organization, Human Rights Watch, was recently caught in an attempt to fabricate “evidence” of Assad’s use of barrel bombs in civilian areas for the purposes of further demonizing the secular Syrian government.
On February 25, HRW posted a photo of a devastated civilian area in Syria with the tagline “Syria dropped barrel bombs despite ban.” The “ban” HRW is referring to is the ban on bombing civilian areas that applies to both sides in Aleppo after the …
How Central Banks Harness Governments
by Ellen Hodgson Brown / March 11th, 2015
Remember when the infamous Goldman Sachs delivered a thinly-veiled threat to the Greek Parliament in December, warning them to elect a pro-austerity prime minister or risk having central bank liquidity cut off to their banks? (See January 6th post here.) It seems the European Central Bank (headed by Mario Draghi, former managing director of Goldman Sachs International) has now made good on the threat.
The week after the leftwing Syriza candidate Alexis Tsipras was sworn in as prime minister, the ECB announced that it would no longer accept Greek government bonds and government-guaranteed debts as collateral for central bank loans …
by Kathy Kelly / March 11th, 2015
That is also us, the possibility of us, if the wonderful accident of our birth had taken place elsewhere: you could be the refugee, I could be the torturer. To face that truth is also our burden. After all, each of us has been the bystander, the reasonable person who just happens not to hear, not to speak, not to see those people, the invisible ones, those who live on the other side of the border.
— Karen Connelly, The Lizard Cage
It was a little over two weeks ago that Marlo entered Atwood Hall, here in Lexington federal prison. Nearly …
by Mateo Pimentel / March 10th, 2015
Rage Against the Machine!
Why does the American government continue to ignore the popular plight at home, to decimate the country’s marginalized, to etch away at liberties and withhold them, to amplify its fascism abroad, to hemorrhage public funds for the sake of corporate welfare, and to lay waste to one geopolitically “strategic” land after another?
In 1991, a band of musicians by the name of Rage Against the Machine (RATM) put out their self-titled album. Track six of the album, entitled “Know Your Enemy”, featured a strong message for listeners. Almost twenty-five years ago, in fact, this song lyricized the hypocritical …
by William T. Hathaway / March 10th, 2015
This new Stanford video series investigates consciousness as the source of not only the human mind but also of all energy and matter. Consciousness is seen as the essence of the universe, a unified field which gives rise to and pervades all manifest phenomena. Five scientists from different disciplines describe how we can contact this field and use it to improve our lives. The series, designed by Michael Heinrich, is now available free on YouTube.•
The intellectual background of the series is a fascinating conflict affecting all of us that is now going on in science and philosophy, centering on …
