I read this whole article: Let History Come to You. And I’m proud that I managed to make it through without just shaking my head in disgust and closing the window. The tenor of the writing, the fact-checking, the mixing of argument, the heavy use of the straw man all perfectly match the picture of the smirking jackass at the top of the page. But, sometimes, you should read something you think you won’t like just to make sure your filters aren’t set too high.

The basic tenet that the government... [More]

There are no paid firefighting services. It makes sense on the surface to have them; whoever puts out the fire gets paid for doing so. Different Companies compete to get there the fastest and put out the fire the quickest, with the least amount of damage. A perfect example of the free market choosing the best solution, no?

Now, the best thing for the populace is to have as few fires as possible and have them put out quickly when they happen. The competing fire companies quickly discover that... [More]

Lawrence Lessig’s speech at the O.Reilly Open Source Conference in 2002 is captured here at the Free Culture part of the Creative Commons. He works for the Electronic Frontier Foundation to fight for copyright freedoms and presents a history of copyright throughout Western history. Over the years, technology has enabled control to be tightened until freedoms we had just a few years ago are gone or are dissappearing. At the beginning of the 21st Century, “Never in the history of the world have fewer... [More]”

The New York Times reports in U.S. Urges Zimbabwe to Accept Corn that Zimbabwe president Mugabe said “We certainly abhor sinister interests, which seek surreptitiously to advance themselves under cover of humanitarian assistance”. Whereas many see this as an ignorant refusal to take tainted GM food, I think the message is more that GM foods have such burdens of intellectual-property rights and patents that they cannot be accepted without spelling out the whole bargain. Many of the seeds from such... [More]

Bush Vs. World On Int’l Treaty On Women’s Rights on Plastic covers a Washington Post article, Senate Panel to Defy Bush, Vote on Women’s Treaty.

“Bush doesn’t really stand alone in his opposition … even though his own State Department supports this treaty. He also has the company of “Afghanistan, Iran, Sudan, Somalia, Syria, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar”; and domestic allies including Attorney General John Ashcroft, Janice Crouse of Concerned Women for America, the Heritage... [More]”

AlterNet has an interview with Gore Vidal called The Last Defender of the American Republic?. The interview covers the publication of his latest book Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: How We Got To Be So Hated and explains the reasoning behind his stance of anti-imperialism and answers the notion that “[s]ome might take that to be a suggestion that America had it coming on September 11.” The answer is logical. The people don’t deserve it, but the government certainly brought it on us. The answer... [More]

The “Corporate Ethics” Red Herring by Matt Vidal on CounterPunch examines in more depth the fallacy of free market capitalism in use today throughout the world, but most fanatically in the U.S. The President’s (and most other legislator’s) pinning of the blame for the latest huge corporate scandals on select individuals is a simplistic interpretation at best, and a deliberately disengenuous one at worst. “This classic bourgeois response—an obsessive focus on individuals and personal... [More]”

…world crashes into sun. Mark Morford of the SF Gate announced in Britain Gets Quietly Stoned… that Britain has indeed joined most of the rest of Europe in that they will no longer “waste all that time and all those resources and moneys on busting casual potheads for no reason”. Of course, his immediate take on it is that it just points up the increasingly puritan, wrongheaded drug policies of the U.S.

The U.S. drug war has more and more the markings of something that the administration is... [More]

Bush acting as imperial president on SeattlePI is an editorial from Helen Thomas, one of the most experienced members of the White House Press Corps. This is the reaction of someone who’s seen a lot of Presidents and senators come and go and she’s scared by the direction we’re headed. It’s not just one thing, but the combination of policies that express an evil intent that isn’t what the U.S. should be. Most of the power in the U.S. is consolidating in the executive branch and “[t]he imperial... [More]”

The Great Florida Ex-Con Game… by Gregory Palast, originally published in Harper’s Magazine, reopens the supposedly settled and recounted case of the 2000 U.S. Presidential election. With all of the talk of President Bush’s financial history and his run-ins with the SEC, which he deems “old news” (Bush: It’s Old News… in the New York Newsday), perhaps this examination of some of the tactics used in Florida will also be consigned to history. There are some interesting bits in here, though,... [More]

US To UN: We Won’t See You In Court on Plastic mentions recent U.S. moves to pull out of U.N. peacekeeping missions if their soldiers are not granted immunity from prosecution. The expressed reason is to avoid “politically motivated prosecutions of its officials or soldiers.” The real reason is probably the oft-mentioned ‘sometimes war just isn’t pretty’ mantra.

The express purpose of the ICC is a noble enough goal:

“…to help put an end to the past century’s cycle of impunity for the most... [More]”

It becomes increasingly obvious that the current state of the U.S. economy is so bad largely because the sensibilities of the average U.S. citizen, though previously thought infinitely malleable, have finally been stretched to the breaking point. Even satire and comedic places of refuge that ordinarily hide their opinions behind jokes are applying a thinner veneer to their feelings these days.

Two articles by some oft-quoted (at least here) satire sites come extremely close to simply... [More]

There’s a lot of it about these days, as top administrations officials fall, predictably, under the mildly scrutinous eye of a vaguely interested press. There’s plenty of it from two different directions: one is spreading it around about attacking Iraq, which is apparently a gateway to Hell, and the other is spreading more rumors of terrorist attacks that never happen and/or are completely made up, with no facts to support them, but which a pretty large part of the American populace still lends... [More]

I just read “True Cause of World Hunger”, an interview with Anuradha Mittal of Food First. http://www.foodfirst.org/media/interviews/2002/amittalsun.html

Why do people go hungry? Because they don’t have food. Why don’t they have food? Because they cant afford it. “Hunger is a social disease linked to poverty, and thus any discussion of hunger is incomplete without a discussion of economics.” It is estimated that 830 million go hungry. Yet, the world food supply produces an adundant and more... [More]

AIDS Will Cut Life Expectancy Below 40 In 11 African Countries is a discussion on Plastic about the article Africans ‘faced with extinction’… on the National Post (Canada). One comment in the discussion, But How Many Of Them Actually Have AIDS??? points out that the World Health Organization’s definition of AIDS is the “Bangui definition”, which can often diagnose AIDS where it is probably, in fact, Dysentary, Turburculosis, Malaria, generalized Kaposi sarcoma or cryptococcal meningitis.
... [More]

Chris Floyd, on Counterpunch, recently wrote Global Eye — Jungle Fever that the “Bush Regime is paying — lock, stock and barrel — for a band of local mercenaries taking part in Bolivia’s campaign to eradicate coca production in the jungle region of Chapare”. This was reported in the Washington Post in US Role in Coca War Draws Fire at the end of June.

This “Expeditionary Task Force” is just another feature of the last unending war the U.S. engaged in, the Drug War. The Drug War started in... [More]

Another blow for corporate America on the Christian Science Monitor has an overview of the recent explosion of bad accounting and fraud in large American corporations.

“More broadly, it threatens to undermine the fragile economic recovery and is further eroding public confidence in corporate America. It is calling into question some of the most sacred principles of American capitalism. If last decade was the Roaring ‘90s, this one is starting out as the Odious OOs.”

Worldcom is only the latest... [More]

AlterNet has an article about religious fundamentalism right here in the good ‘ol US of A called Pledging Allegiance To Fundamentalism about the recent Pledge of Allegiance uproar. The pledge has been used as a fundamentalist ploy before, when the words ‘under God’:

“… were added in 1954, when Congress, reacting to a campaign by the Knights of Columbus, inserted those two words and turned the pledge into a public prayer of sorts. (The point was to contrast the godly United States of America... [More]”

When I was younger and still in middle school, as it’s called these days, I began to wonder about the Pledge of Allegiance. I didn’t have well-worked out ideological reasoning for disliking it, it just rubbed my rebellious nature the wrong way. What was this pledge I was forced to take every day in a supposedly free nation? It smacked of a fanatic level of control, though that too was only vaguely expressed or felt at the time, to be honest. Regardless of the vague and unsubstantiated nature of... [More]

Common Dreams has a very ironic article by Rahul Mahajan called Arafat Calls for Democratic Elections in the United States. In it, he notes that “Arafat, who was elected with 87% of the vote in 1996 elections…[which were] declared to be free and fair by international observers” actually has far more of a mandate than a President elected by a “majority of the Supreme Court”.

This is in response to U.S. President Bush’s speech on Monday in which he called for the Palestinian people to have new... [More]

Rhetoric Distorts Realities… by Robert Jensen on Common Dreams takes Bush to task on recent statements he’s made, many of which contradict the facts of history. Whether they do so through ignorance (which is inexcusable in a leader with that much power) or through deception is still at issue. The truth about U.S. history would certainly not serve the administration (the current one or any recent one, for that matter) well.

Ignoring the truth lets Bush say, “Targeting innocent civilians for... [More]”

Ben Cohen has published Enemy Wanted on AlterNet which talks about more government obfuscation, this time with a specific example involving the U.S. military. The Pentagon’s budget next year is expected to top $400 Billion. The money is being spent solely to fund defense contracting companies. All of the hardware provided can’t possibly help in the war on terrorism. Seriously, why does the U.S. need more submarines?

“Even Lawrence Korb, a top defense official under Ronald Reagan, says we’re... [More]”

The New York Newsday published a letter to the editor today in response to an article by Robert Jensen, published on May 29, 2002, called Journalism Should Never Yield to ‘Patriotism’ (reprinted here at Common Dreams). The letter is excerpted below:

“To be an American is the height of being a human being. This does not mean we are better than other people, it does not mean we have no humility. It means that we have led the way. Through our economic system, we have shown others how to live free... [More]”

The New York Newsday today had a headline on their front page which noted “Bush Expands Order To Topple Hussein”. On pages 2 and 3, the article Bush: Get Saddam… had more details of a planned U.S. coup attempt. Under that article was another, In Congress, Support for the President, which dispelled any notions that this coup attempt was just the unsanctioned idea of the President and his administration, bent on revenge.

So, here we have a very blatant example of the complicity of the U.S. media... [More]

The Register has published Dubya calls for US Gestapo, covering Bush’s speech late last week. He called for a new cabinet-level position to be created, effectively legitimizing the Office of Homeland Security. “The stated purpose here is to provide a second layer of insurance against the intelligence and communications failures affecting both the CIA and FBI, which Congress is now investigating.” But, the proposal calls for the CIA and FBI to create reports of information and hand it over to the... [More]

U.S. Is Icing Our Warming Report from the New York Newsday talks about a recent report issued by the U.S. federal government about its stance on global warming, the Climate Action Report 2002. In it, the U.S. government finally admits “what every other important institution in the world has long insisted: that global warming will wreak massive damage on every corner of the planet.”

However, the logic of the U.S. empire being what it is, this does not lead to a call for curtailing of activity... [More]

Democracy − Who is she when she’s at home? on ZNet by Arundhati Roy from April 28 is a long article about recent racist riots in India’s state of Gujarat between Hindus and Muslims. Ever since “Muslim ‘terrorists’ who burned alive 58 Hindu passengers on the Sabarmati Express in Godhra…”, though no claim to the terror has been laid or evidence shown, Muslims have been persecuted in the Gujarat.

“Officially the number of dead is 800. Independent reports put the figure at well over 2,000. More... [More]”

Just recently, I had the pleasure of hearing a discussion laced with mystification at the rest of the world’s displeasure with the wonderful United States. These opinions are espoused in an information vacuum lovingly prepared by U.S. media and a will to believe. I was able to offer that “they hate us for our freedoms”, which was swallowed whole and agreed with enthusiastically. There is no individual effort to determine whether there may be reason behind the mystifying dissatisfaction with the... [More]

The Washington Post published Against Depression, a Sugar Pill Is Hard to Beat recently, covering an “…analysis [of] the majority of trials conducted by drug companies in recent decades…”. It seems positive thinking, or believing that you’re taking a pill to make you feel better, is more likely to cure your depression than actually taking an anti-depressant, many of which have terrible side-effects.

“… new research suggests that the placebo may play an extraordinary role in the treatment of... [More]”

ZNet published Chomsky’s Dýyarbikar Speech on March 25th. He discusses several interesting topics, mostly giving a fascinating history and framework on which to hang U.S. and British behavior in the last century (and into this one). In all cases, he goes out of his way to mention that the U.S. is simply behaving like any other empire would and the repression and conquering outside its borders should be lamented, but not come as a surprise.

The history runs from British terrorism in the... [More]