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A good propaganda system aims at controlling the public dialogue, and in the marketing of war one technique that has proven very successful in recent years has been to encourage public debate about a proposed war, but to do so within a framework that already assumes the basic dogmas that you are trying to sell.

So, for instance, in preparation for the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, healthy debate was encouraged over the question of whether the ‘liberation of Iraq’ would cost the US too much and whether it would solve all the problems for Iraq and for the …

This city peaked nearly a century ago, when it billed itself as “The World’s Playground.” Hyperboles and false hopes are its currencies. Trudging into glitzy casinos, badly dressed schmucks dream of instant wealth, yet leave with barely enough nickels and dimes for McDonald’s dollar menu. I know of a Chinatown waitress who shows up twice a year. In Philly, she’d hop on the bus in her vermillion blouse, crimson shoes and blazing underwear, all for luck, but by evening, she’d be crumpled outside Bally’s, lamenting her fate, in Cantonese mostly, and even sobbingly demanding a partial refund so she could …

You’re wrong.  I mean what I say and say — I was going to say “what I mean,” but that would be false. I say what grows heavy on my tongue. Like you, I have no mind (to call my own), but plug into the:

All-mind-Every-mind, polity of “us,” invoked in apostrophe, on television, billboards, bumper-stickers, magazines as “we.”

Oh tireless, indomitable “We:”

— rebelled in the sixties, but now that we’ve grown, its time to plan our golden phases of maturity…

— are not getting older, we’re getting better.

— need to conserve — but conservatively, lest we disrupt our way of life.

— need …

Last week, Verizon, the telephone giant, went to court to accuse the Federal Communications Commission of “overstepping its authority” and reverse the authority’s over-step. It’s a legal wrangle that, bottled and distributed, would be a safe substitute for sleeping pills.

Lurking behind the nearly unintelligible and ridiculously referential courtroom arguments, however, is a clear picture of the difference between the corporate vision of the Internet’s future and the way the rest of us want it. At this point, corporations are pouring resources into imposing their vision of the Internet and, if they do, there won’t be an Internet as we know …

In a 2010 alert, “Beyond Hiroshima – The Non-Reporting Of Fallujah’s Cancer Catastrophe”, we noted the almost non-existent media response to the publication of a new study that had found high rates of infant mortality, cancer and leukaemia in the Iraqi city. The dramatic increases in these rates exceeded even those found in survivors of the atomic bombs dropped by the United States on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. The Independent’s Patrick Cockburn was a lone exception in reporting these awful findings.

As many readers will recall, Fallujah was subjected to US military attacks in March 2004 and an …

There was a time when activist groups that focused on helping the Palestinians in Gaza reserved their harshest language and protests for Israel, which long has prohibited both air and sea traffic in and out of Gaza; tightly limited exchanges through its Erez terminal; and banned exports altogether.

While movement in and out of Gaza via the Egyptian terminal at Rafah was restricted as well, it nonetheless was a critical lifeline for Palestinians needing to travel, and for humanitarian aid. Likewise, members of the Egyptian government often played a constructive role in facilitating negotiations between the various Palestinian factions, as well …

One can easily summon the image of him from memory, arrayed in a bisque-colored pheasant hunting jacket, doing his best impression of a rural hayseed, the better to sway Midwest voters likely to stump for illiterate gunslinger George Bush in the 2004 elections. That’s when many of us gave up on John Kerry. He was outed as a man who would do practically anything to be popular. A man bereft of consistent convictions. A Senatorial rogue who had traded on his slightly raffish New Englander mien to accrue his undeserved credibility. That, and a genuinely affecting appearance before the Senate …

The existence of pristine foragers has generated considerable debate and a latent controversy remains associated with this notional category of human subsistence life-ways. Scholars of traditional Siberian forager culture and Russian government officials have not yet reached a consensus for a singular definition to describe these groups. This is a taxonomic task that must be resolved for the benefit of the “numerically small peoples of the North” as they are currently defined by the Russian government and known to scholars who participated in the 1993 Seventh International Conference of Hunting and Gathering Societies. Indigenous peoples’ rights, livelihoods, environment, and physical …

The main theme of a new documentary, Trashed: No Place for Waste , directed by Candida Brady 2013, and narrated by British actor Jeremy Irons, is the major health danger posed by the 7 billion tons of garbage we discard every year. The film focuses primarily on dioxins, PCBs, phthalates, bisphenyl A, and other endocrine disruptors – particularly the role they play in a growing epidemic of cancer, autoimmune disease, infertility, and neuro-degenerative disease. Thanks to a 2005 Center for Disease Control study, there’s growing international awareness that all human beings carry an average of 148 of these toxic chemicals …

Hard as it may be to believe, in 1939, the University of Chicago abruptly dropped its football program, citing as its reason the astonishing fact that (according to school president, the uber-intellectual Robert Maynard Hutchins) the sport had evolved to the point where it was becoming a distraction to both students and faculty.  In Hutchins’ view, the game of football was now detracting from the noble ideals the university had set for itself.

And this was no empty, purely symbolic gesture made by an otherwise ignored and lackluster football school.  This was not the case of some homely, unpopular high school …

President Barack Obama may have drawn his seemingly regretted “red line” around Syria’s chemical weapons, but it was neither he nor the international community that turned the spotlight on their use. That task fell to Israel.

It was an Israeli general who claimed in April that Damascus had used chemical weapons, forcing Obama into an embarrassing demurral on his stated commitment to intervene should that happen.

According to the Israeli media, it was also Israel that provided the intelligence that blamed the Syrian president, Bashar Al Assad, for the latest chemical weapons attack, near Damascus on August 21, triggering the clamour for …

Increased regulation and low interest rates are driving lending from the regulated commercial banking system into the unregulated shadow banking system. The shadow banks, although free of government regulation, are propped up by a hidden government guarantee in the form of safe harbor status under the 2005 Bankruptcy Reform Act pushed through by Wall Street. The result is to create perverse incentives for the financial system to self-destruct.

Five years after the financial collapse precipitated by the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy on September 15, 2008, the risk of another full-blown financial panic is still looming large, despite the Dodd Frank legislation …