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The Watertrough Children’s Alliance (WCA)–mainly mothers with students at schools near where yet another apple orchard is being converted into a chemical vineyard–filed a lawsuit on the afternoon of November 25 against the Paul Hobbs Winery. The next day Hobbs struck back with a press release, promising he “will aggressively fight.”

Hobbs is famous for being aggressive, fighting neighbors, and abusing land. Called “the wine industry’s bad boy,” he regularly breaks the rules and then pays paltry fines—“business as usual” for him. He plans to use toxic pesticides next to five schools with over 500 students, which would also hurt family …

In his recent book Harvard and the Unabomber, Alston Chase describes how Theodore Kaczynski, a 16-year-old Harvard student in 1958, suffered traumatizing abuse as an unwitting test-subject in a CIA-connected psychology experiment designed to manipulate human behavior under intensive isolation and harsh interrogation (and also ultimately: LSD and torture).  This humiliating, formative experience, Chase argues, shaped Kaczynski’s dislike for the techno-scientific manipulation and control of human beings.  But Chase also maintains that the Harvard Gen Ed. Curriculum itself—which included moral philosophy as well as critiques of modern civilization (Mumford, Veblen, etc.)—could only exacerbate despair about the state of the modern, …

Following the interim agreement with Iran the next six months will tell us whether or not the American-led Zionist lobby and Zionism itself has played its last card and lost. If it does lose President Obama will be free to use the leverage he has to try to cause Israel to be serious about peace on terms almost all Palestinians and most other Arabs and Muslims everywhere could accept (and which would not pose any threat to the wellbeing and security of those Jews now living in Palestine that became Israel and who wanted to stay). The stakes could not …

Anyone who clings to the belief that serving time in prison constitutes “paying one’s debt to society” has obviously never done time or tried to get a job after being released.  Even if your crime was non-violent and non-invasive (e.g., drug possession) and your time in prison was relatively short, when you get out and apply for a job, you quickly learn (if you didn’t already suspect) that you now carry an ineradicable stigma.

There are simply too many people out of work, too many people without prison records, for an employer to take a chance on ex-cons.  People with prison …

What’s Going on at UAardvark? (Solidarity Press, 2013) is in some respects within the tradition of satire on a political and social issue that goes back to Aristophanes, the Roman writings of Juvenal and Petronius, through Gulliver’s Travels to Catch-22. But Lawrence Wittner’s stinging critique of what is happening to the “Corpaversity” plunges the novel into farce. Although it has the bite of satire, the author goes over the top, or so it initially seemed to me, with a Marxist (Groucho) sense of the ridiculous. The plot hinges on a scheme by UAardvark President Dwight Hopkins III …

Captive by the relentless train wreck called establishment politics, let us pause and consider potential breakthroughs. Scoff at my optimism, even fantasies, but doesn’t every epic calamity beget a perk or two, eventually? I trust the “gift in the wound” learned from poet Robert Bly. And my father’s best lesson, “If you don’t learn from failure, you suffer a double loss.”

Just for balance, isn’t it high time someone took on the gloom and doomsters? Compare the odds, over the next 100-500 years, of a new progressive era breaking out vs. the likelihood the world explodes, or implodes, with a bang …

What is the worst Mother Agnes could have done to the anti-war conference? 

Here’s what it looks like when a respected reporter tweets about his blackmail note to an established anti-war organization regarding the organization’s upcoming conference in a tweet on November 15:

<!–[if !vml]–><!–[endif]–>”jeremy scahillVerified account?@jeremyscahill

“I’ve informed organizers of @STWuk that I will not participate in their conference if Mother Agnes is on the platform.”

The reporter is Jeremy Scahill, who was booked as the keynote speaker and to show his film Dirty Wars (based on his book Dirty Wars) at the November 30 International Anti-War …

The devastation wreaked by Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines has led to heart-wrenching scenes of human suffering, with the death toll now put at over 5,000 and likely to rise still further. Yeb Sano, the head of the Philippines climate delegation, gave a moving speech at the UN climate talks in Warsaw, Poland, linking the typhoon to global warming, and then went on a hunger strike which would last, he said, ‘until we stop this madness’.

Sadly, the madness looks set to continue if we recognise that the corporate media is an integral part of the problem: pulverising us …

“Are you the guy who hates Thanksgiving?”

The man posing that question on my voicemail continued with a sharply critical comment about one of the essays I have written in recent years about the holocaust-denial that is at the heart of that U.S. holiday. My first reaction was not to argue but to amend: “I don’t hate Thanksgiving—I just think it’s appropriate to critique a celebration that obscures the reality of the European conquest of the Americas.”

That description is accurate, at one level—my rejection of Thanksgiving is more intellectual than emotional, a political decision to reject that distortion of history. Whatever …

Step one for everyone trying to make the world a better place should be listening to those they wish to help.

This is certainly true in the case of Haiti, a longtime target of Canadian ‘aid’. But, while Haitians continue to criticize Ottawa’s role in their country, few Canadians bother to pay attention.

After Uruguay announced it was withdrawing its 950 troops from the United Nations Mission to Stabilize Haiti last month, Moise Jean-Charles, took aim at the countries he considers most responsible for undermining Haitian sovereignty. The popular senator from Haiti’s north recently told Haiti Liberté:

Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay are not …

(Full article …)

Segued into a 10-second afterthought, smothered by 60-second Christmas commercials, is the media acknowledgement of Thanksgiving, which nudges us into a realization of all we are thankful for.

But the usual litany, even with the omnipresent pictures of the less fortunate being fed by the more fortunate, doesn’t list well this year. Our thanks seem to be at best half-hearted or at least insensitive and shallow.

All of us might be thankful for peace if America still hadn’t been involved in two recent wars. The Iraq war lasted almost nine years; the other, in Afghanistan, has lasted more than 12 years and …

Brain Busting Bombs — News (faux, sic, err, persona non grata)

This is an experiment. Quickly, in tsunami like fashion, riffing with the junk of the day, picked up from mainstream madness newspaper news, and from the feeds on NPR, National Pediatric News. Other polluted pipelines from the crapper, like HuffPost, all the junk on line, etc. etc.

Alas, the experiment failed. My goal was to get the detritus out of my head, quickly, stream of consciousness-style, any way, cathartic, with some fugue of heavy rumbling. Some process to eviscerate the pain of so much wrong news, wrong reporting, wrong people getting …

When Barack Obama became president, there were 32,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan.  He escalated to over 100,000 troops, plus contractors. Now there are 47,000 troops these five years later.  Measured in financial cost, or death and destruction, Afghanistan is more President Obama’s war than President Bush’s.  Now the White House is trying to keep troops in Afghanistan until “2024 and beyond.”

Afghan President Hamid Karzai is refusing to sign the deal. Here is his list of concerns. He’d like the U.S. to stop killing civilians and stop kicking in people’s doors at night.  He’d like the U.S. to engage in peace …

“We will put pressure on America, and our protest will continue if drone attacks are not stopped,” said an angry Imran Khan, leader of Pakistan’s third largest political party, the PTI (the Pakistan Tehrik-i-Insaaf). He was speaking on Saturday, November 23, to a crowd of over 10,000 protesters who blocked the highway used by NATO supply trucks taking goods in and out of Afghanistan. The latest protests in Pakistan show that even when the US hits its mark, as in the case of the last two strikes in Pakistan that killed key leaders of two extremist cells, they’re still counterproductive.

Most …

Single Florida male, 30, wants to meet caring female.  Must like guns — a new Zimmerman ad?

Ladies — do you recognize this guy? He is volatile, possessive, moody and prone to adult temper tantrums. He plays the tough guy but reserves his ire for women, children and even pets. When you’re through with his huffing and puffing and bullying and try to leave him — he turns violent and you need to get an order of protection.

George Zimmerman is the classic domestic batterer whose brushes with the law become more frequent and extreme until he is stopped. Partners of batterers …