Latest articles
by Robert Wilbur and Martha Rosenberg / August 22nd, 2014
As the nation was horrified by another botched execution this summer, a capital defense lawyer in Texas, legal scholar in New York and the former warden of San Quentin work against capital punishment.
There were only three people in the room: Jeanne Woodford, the chaplain and the man strapped to a gurney with tubes coming out of his arms. After hearing the man’s last words, Woodford signaled the corrections officer who was “working the chemicals,” which means in prison argot that he started infusions of lethal chemicals that flowed into the man on the gurney. As warden of California’s San Quentin, …
by Binoy Kampmark / August 21st, 2014
The dominant visual aspect of the story, however, has been the sight of overpowering police forces confronting unarmed protesters who are seen waving signs or just their hands.
Walter Olson, Cato at Liberty, August 13, 2014
A terrible vision of what happens when authority goes wrong. This is Ferguson, Mo. in August 2014. Even if the person killed by police, a certain Michael Brown, was a black man; even given the automatic response by authorities that it was a case of justified armed violence, we are left with the same nasty taste: policing in the US has become a beast of terrifying …
by Robert Hunziker / August 21st, 2014
Sir David Attenborough (b. 1926) has been the face and the voice of natural history for 60 years. Some of his public television specials include: Life in Cold Blood (2008), Life on Earth (1979), The Private Life of Plants (1995), The Life of Mammals (2002), and Planet Earth (2006).
As well, he is more than just the face and the voice of nature because he travels to the locations and endures the rigors of climbing up to the top of the canopy of the Rain Forest and diving to the depths of the sea beds to bring life on Earth, in …
The Limitations of the Capitalist System in a Finite World
by Mark Weiser / August 21st, 2014
Capitalism has always been sold as the best way for the greatest number of people to benefit from their own labor. I would agree that was true enough over most of our U.S. history for men of European decent. The real question today is whether or not our unregulated “capitalistic-democracy” is actually working as we’ve been promised it should. Can we really call it a “democracy” where political candidates are voted in by corporate big buck$ to serve only their own financial interests? Can we really call it a capitalist society if the larger majority who, although ideologically may side …
by Scott Thomas Outlar / August 21st, 2014
Blistering sirens sound off in the night as the hurricane symphony of nuclear intimidation tactics blare boisterously across the airwaves, signaling to all citizens that the war is, indeed, officially hot. Game on. But the strange rules of this situation deem that there shall be no victor, only losers. Total annihilation is what the bat shit crazy elitists are seeking this time. All the marbles have been thrown. All the cards are on the table. They are gambling with house money and our lives. Two things they don’t really give a hot steaming pile about. It’s a filthy mess.
But who’s …
by Paul Haeder / August 21st, 2014
when the language of Nixon, Chicago’s mayor, NFL-ers, Generals works for the 80 Percent — time to take off the play-nice gloves as murderers take to the streets, airwaves, Ivy Tower
There is no compunction to call a mother f-er a mother hucker. You know, PC, clean surface America, never allowed to really use the language of George Carlin to express the outrage of each nanosecond in Amerika. So, for the record, “mother hucker,” well, will replace that other epithet or expletive all great presidents and generals and coaches and cops use all the time. Oh, I know, all those Facebook …
by Jack A. Smith / August 21st, 2014
We are tirelessly dedicated to the Obama Administration’s campaign to stop the fighting between oppressors and oppressed and convince them to accept their present status instead of disturbing the peace and making frightening noises on the streets. This goes not only for our own Ferguson, Mo., but by odd coincidence, in Gaza as well. Funny, but its like both events are taking place in the West Bank.
We’re about to investigate an aspect of these wars. That’s the pros and cons of the decision made by the Ferguson Police Dept. to don the garb, the weapons and other accouterments of warfare …
Things Cannot Stay the Same after Israeli Genocide in Gaza
by Ramzy Baroud / August 21st, 2014
After every bloody episode of violence perpetrated by Israel, media spin doctors are often deployed with one grand mission: to absolve Israel of any responsibility in their acts of carnage.
Not only do these apologists demonize Palestinians, but anyone who dares to take a stand on their behalf. The main staple of this Israeli strategy has been blaming the victim. Such a tactic is nothing new in the way the so-called “Arab-Israeli conflict” has been presented in Western media, whose narrative has been much closer to that of Israeli official and media discourses than that of Palestinians. This continued despite the …
by Walter Brasch / August 21st, 2014
It’s 3 p.m., and you’re cruising down a rural road, doing about 50.
A quarter mile away is a sign, with flashing yellow lights, alerting you to slow down to 15. It’s a school zone.
But, you don’t see any children. Besides, you’re going to be late to your racquetball match. So, you just slide on past.
You’re an independent long-haul trucker. You get paid by the number of miles you drive. If you work just a couple of hours longer every day than the limits set by the federal government—and if you can drive 75 or 80 instead of 65, you can …
From Missouri to Ukraine
by John Stanton / August 19th, 2014
…in what manner does tyranny arise? –that it has a democratic origin is evident…But when [the tyrant] has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty, and there is nothing to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader…Has he not also another object, which is that they may be impoverished by payment of taxes, and thus compelled to devote themselves to their daily wants and therefore less likely to conspire against him?: Clearly….And if any of them are suspected by him of having notions of …
Why not now?
by Paul Larudee / August 19th, 2014
In August, 2008, I and forty-three other participants motored into Gaza by sea in two converted fishing boats, becoming the first to openly succeed in doing so since 1967. The entry stamp in our passports reads “Gaza port” and was created for the occasion. We carried a modest cargo of hearing aids for the children of the Atfaluna Society for Deaf Children.
Israel tried multiple means of preventing us from succeeding, including threats, jamming of communications, and pressure on the Greek and Cypriot governments, but it did not send naval or coast guard vessels to intercept us, and did not attack …
by David Connor / August 19th, 2014
For most of us, being funny, especially extremely so, leaves us looking like a shaded relief map: The funny part juts out, while the rest falls into shadow. When we make another laugh, the catharsis the listener experiences is realized viscerally, like twitching funny bones. Even when comedy takes darkness as a subject (such as Williams’ musings on the Grim Rapper), the listeners see the pain inherent to their lives decontextualized enough to hold close to the heart, and from it, they heartily guffaw, feeling recalibrated. They are healed, if but for a moment. What lies underneath the surface is …
That's all the Gazans want
by Stuart Littlewood / August 19th, 2014
I have just received a very disappointing reply from my true-blue Tory MP to pleas for real government action over the slaughter in Gaza.
A similarly worthless response has been received in other parts of the country so I conclude that the ex-Etonian didn’t pen the twaddle himelf. More likely it was the work, as usual, of a Foreign Office scribbler trained by Mark Regev’s hasbara unit in Tel Aviv.
“Israel has a right to defend itself against indiscriminate rocket attacks”, it said. But no such right can be claimed when Israel is the illegal occupier inflicting collective punishment on its victim …
by Scott Thomas Outlar / August 19th, 2014
Be not deterred by the overall labor of the challenge before us. Seek only to take those actions in this very day that would move us one step further along toward the desired goal we intend.
And what goal is that?
Resistance of tyranny toward a Renaissance of spirituality and complete Revolution of the soul.
To wit: Taking Mad Scientists and Power Bankers to the cleaners to get their souls washed. And while these foes are away, we can go to work on all the Owned Politicians and Kept Media Propagandists. Then move on to the Religious Charlatans and False Idols.
It is not …
Ferguson, Mobilization, and Organizing the Resistance!
by Ajamu Nangwaya / August 19th, 2014
Leaders who do not act dialogically, but insist on imposing their decisions, do not organize the people–they manipulate them. They do not liberate, nor are they liberated: they oppress.
— Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed
The rebellion in Ferguson, Missouri, against the killing of unarmed Afrikan American teenager Michael Brown has inspired me to reflect on the question of the organizing model versus mobilizing or mobilization model in the struggle for Afrikan liberation in North America as well as the broader humanistic fight for liberation from various forms of oppression. Organizing the oppressed for emancipation is the preferred approach …
by Alton C. Thompson / August 18th, 2014
The two major known threats to our continued existence as a species today are global warming ((One should keep in mind that the term “global warming” is not a single phenomenon but, rather, is shorthand for a number of related phenomena: Not only a global trend in atmospheric warming, but also, e.g., (a) an increase in the number of storms, (b) an increase in their severity, and (c) increased variability, at any given location (more at some locations than others, of course), in weather conditions. An implication of this latter fact is that the very concept of “climate” is becoming …
by Michael K. Smith / August 18th, 2014
We are made miserable … not just by the strength of our beliefs, but by the weight of hard and all-too real situations, as they bear downward, robbing us of control … unhappiness treated by clinicians has much more to do with the sufferer’s situation than with anything about themselves, and for those with few privileges, this unhappiness is pretty well beyond the reach of therapeutic or any other conversation.
— Paul Moloney ((“The Therapy Industry – The Irresistible Rise of the Talking Cure, and Why It Doesn’t Work,” (Pluto Press, 2013))
Robin Williams’s body was scarcely cold when liberal commentators …
by Bill Quigley / August 18th, 2014
While the Governor of Missouri is sending in the National Guard to Ferguson, it is worth considering where the real violence is coming from.
One. Hours before the 12 pm Sunday night curfew went into effect, peaceful nonviolent protestors were legally marching in Ferguson. Then without warning the police turned on the marchers. Purvi Shah, a human rights lawyer with the Center for Constitutional Rights, was marching with hundreds of others and reported just after 10 pm: “Just got tear gassed. Eyes burning. No warnings. People running with someone in wheelchair. This is lawlessness. Police fired on peaceful protestors.”
Two. …
by Kathy Kelly / August 18th, 2014
Here in Kabul, Sherri Maurin and I are guests of the Afghan Peace Volunteers recently formed live-in community for young women. Hollyhocks in the garden reach as high as the second floor of our living space. Rose bushes, morning glories and four-o-clocks have bloomed, and each day we eat tomatoes, mint and green onions plucked from the well-cared for garden. The water source is a hose and tank outside, (there’s no indoor plumbing) so that’s where dishes and clothes are cleaned. The latrine is also outside, –and unfortunately we’re sharing it with playful neighbourhood cats, but otherwise Zarghuna, Zahidi and …
Australia Reading the United States
by Binoy Kampmark / August 16th, 2014
There is a thesis in it. Versions of it certainly circulate: smaller, and weaker powers, tend to pre-empt the wishes of their masters or those who would promise to protect them. If performed successfully, rewards might issue from the mighty protector, be it in the form of dispensations and further guarantees of security.
The political environment of a democracy is peculiar in that regard, given that political pre-emption tends to be the internal province of police states. (To be in the dictator’s special invitations list, best try to predict what his wishes might be.) The democratic system adds the complication of …
by Ralph Nader / August 16th, 2014
“Hillary works for Goldman Sachs and likes war, otherwise I like Hillary,” a former Bill Clinton aide told me sardonically. First, he was referring to her cushy relationships with top Wall Street barons and her $200,000 speeches with the criminal enterprise known as Goldman Sachs, which played a part in crashing the U.S. economy in 2008 and burdening taxpayers with costly bailouts. Second, he was calling attention to her war hawkish foreign policy.
Last week, Hillary-The-Hawk emerged, once again, with comments to The Atlantic attacking Obama for being weak and not having an organized foreign policy. She was calling Obama weak …
by James Hoover / August 16th, 2014
We have become blasé about fearsome media images. One such image is police in SWAT gear, assault weapons trained on peaceful demonstrators, and huge armored vehicles with gun turrets at the ready, pointed toward activists. In tiny Ferguson, Missouri, peaceful citizens reacting to the alleged killing of a young, unarmed black teenager by a local police officer, are the enemies, the apparent target of militarized weapons.
What is the outgrowth of such scenes? Most likely, further polarization and thick tension among citizens.
Such warlike demonstrations seem to mock the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law … abridging … the right …
by Ron Jacobs / August 16th, 2014
What is clear about the murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri is that the cop murdered Michael Brown pretty much in cold blood. What is also clear is that if Michael Brown was a suspect in this shoplifting case and regular procedures were followed, then he should have been arrested and gone to court. What is less clear is whether or not this killer cop will ever see justice. Indeed, whether he will even go to court. I bet many people reading this have shoplifted. I bet some have even been arrested for shoplifting. …
by Gary G. Kohls / August 16th, 2014
The Big Oil cartels have, for decades, been poisoning the Gulf of Mexico, the Persian Gulf and many other ocean floors with millions of gallons of toxic crude oil via their risky, and very leaky deep water oil wells. It wasn’t just the crime against the planet that British Petroleum and Dick Cheney’s Halliburton perpetrated in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. There are many other things that have contributed to the mortal wounding of the Gulf. A good example of the damage done to the Gulf by corporate entities includes the Mississippi River delta’s massive dead zone that has …
How liberal media shape reality to fit a preferred narrative
by Jason Hirthler / August 15th, 2014
Few groups can massage a dubious forecast into a decidedly optimistic one more readily than liberal Democrats, whose role in the American doctrinal system is to play the lesser of two dire and terminal evils. This banal, tepid, pulseless kind of faux-activism is perfectly suited to the habitués of this giant demographic, many of who exhausted their political passions cheering civil rights and picketing Vietnam in the Sixties. But they inhabit a curious and inviting place along the register of U.S. politics. Liberals know they will always be marginally better than the Republican right, which is caught in a nasty, …
by Walter Brasch / August 15th, 2014
The House Select Committee on Intelligence, following almost a two-year intense investigation, unanimously determined there is no basis for what has become known as the Benghazi Scandal.
The Committee consists of 12 Republicans and 9 Democrats.
The pretend-scandal began Sept. 11, 2012, when terrorists raided the U.S. consulate, and killed the ambassador and three others.
Although there was confusion, and the Obama administration didn’t have all the facts when it began to inform the American people about the events and the causes, there was no evidence of anything even remotely linked to a scandal. However, as expected, the blathering mouths …
If Shoe Were on the Other Foot
by Rick Sterling / August 15th, 2014
The Palestinian enclave known as Gaza is approximately 25 miles long by 5 miles wide. It is about the same area as the East Bay from Oakland in the north to Fremont in the south. To the west is open water; to the east are the hills (heavily-reinforced razor wire fence for Gaza).
What would life be like if the East Bay of San Francisco was Gaza?
Imagine that is where you were born, where you will spend all your years, where you will die. Your world will be confined to that narrow …
Forgetting Cypherpunk History
by William A. Blunden / August 15th, 2014
Ed Snowden recently gave fellow NSA whistleblower James Bamford an “extended cut” interview in Moscow. ((Jame Bamford, “The Most Wanted Man In The World,” Wired, August 13, 2014.)) While Snowden offered up a few morsels of headline-worthy information, like how he purposefully left forensic artifacts for investigators or details on the NSA’s automated cyber-attack system called MonsterMind, Bamford’s piece ends with Snowden describing what he views as the answer to the NSA’s global surveillance program:
We have the means and we have the technology to end mass surveillance without any legislative action at all, without any policy changes… By basically …
by Scott Thomas Outlar / August 15th, 2014
Two hundred pounds dropped from the artillery plane. A beast of a bomb calcified in the heart with naught but devastation roaring through its ugly mind. Nuclear holocaust teetering on the brink of apocalypse in the form of a hair point trigger. Too many maniacs with itchy fingers. Sweaty palms and ravaged agendas. Ready and overly willing to release the poisonous payload. How soon before it smashes? How many will be left standing? Mutation city. Radiation break away. Don’t take the candy when the stranger offers a sweet taste of …
by William Manson / August 14th, 2014
Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood clean from my hand?
— Macbeth
I heard an odd story the other day. It’s about a man down in Texas, and I’d like to share it with you. It seems this fellow is retired, not very active, and was looking for a hobby to pass the time. After a day spent pondering the sun-drenched, desolate landscape around him, he found that he enjoyed relaxing in a hot bath. And, as he reclined soaking, he developed the habit of scribbling on a sketchpad, making drawings of his legs and feet and so forth. He …
