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In times of crisis people strive for easy answers to complex situations. In Egypt this has resulted in absurdly digestible sound bites, where one side is labeled “good”(the Muslim Brotherhood), the other “bad” (the army), and the revolution as a whole is condemned as an atrocity. But the situation in Egypt is especially contradictory, and untying the social-political knots of the revolution requires avoiding pre-packaged catchphrases.

Contrary to the claims of many, reports of the revolution’s death are greatly exaggerated. Those who predict that Egypt will inevitably enter a long period of military dictatorship forget that the Egyptian revolution destroyed …

Absurd—“wildly illogical; nonsensical, preposterous”—Oxford Desk Dictionary

The individual human mind, with its inherent capacity for critical analysis of received “truths,” remains the final, not yet entirely colonized, frontier. I remain convinced that this capacity, if resistant to the flood of unremitting propaganda, can still find its way to real understanding of perplexing, camouflaged governmental policies and crimes. It is not that the average U.S. citizen is incapable of critical thinking, but that there is little incentive to exercise it. Everywhere she turns, she feels boxed-in, blocked from the free exercise of her principles and values. From …

Glacier outburst floods may be broadly defined as the sudden release of water stored either within a glacier or dammed by a glacier (Fountain and Walder, 1998). Outburst floods have been reported in all glaciated regions of the world and may be triggered by:

The sudden drainage of an ice-dammed lake below or through an ice dam;

Lake water overflow and rapid fluvial incision of ice, bedrock or sediment barriers; or

The growth and collapse of subsurface reservoirs (Benn and Evans, 1998).

Due to their high and rapid discharge, the outburst floods originating from high mountain/alpine glaciers have devastating impacts on …

This Example of Rightwing Intellectual Dishonesty Starts With a Death

The story began, according to news reports and arrest warrants, after 1 a.m. on Sunday, June 30, when Joshua Chellew, 36, an unmarried, redheaded white man stopped at a Chevron station in Mableton, Georgia, where he lives. According to the 19-year-old woman who was waiting in Chellew’s car, he went into the gas station to get something. When he came out he met up with four young black men, ages 18 and 19, the witness said:

“He was coming outside of the store talking to himself like …

Tom Swanky is the author of The Great Darkening: The True Story of Canada’s “War” of Extermination on the Pacific plus The Tsilhquot’in and Other First Nations Resistance, ((See review.)) an investigative account that includes the First Nations narrative. The First Nations narrative is one that includes knowledge passed on by oral tradition, knowledge that had long been dismissed by the western narrative bound more so to the written record. However, the oral culture has its own disciplines that help to preserve the validity of the narrative, ((Marlene Brant Castellano, “Updating Aboriginal Traditions of Knowledge” in Indigenous …

It is a pity that an Attorney General with the surname of Dreyfus has decided that history, notably one of injustice, is something for other people. The Dreyfus Affair, France’s divisive scandal involving Captain Alfred Dreyfus’ alleged communication of French military secrets to the German embassy in Paris, plagued France from 1894 to 1906.

The point of it was that Dreyfus was framed and made an example of, banished to Devil’s Island.  He was convicted – twice.  He was exonerated only in 1906.  The military establishment, with its baubles and pleasantries, had been keen to keep evidence coming to light that …

I don’t know if the Guinness Book of World Records has a special section for “Chutzpah.”

If it does not, it should. That’s the one competition where we might take home a few gold medals.

The first one would surely go to Binyamin Netanyahu.

This week, on the eve of the first round of serious negotiations between the Israeli Government and the Palestinian Authority, Netanyahu did two interesting things: he announced plans for several large new settlement projects and he accused the Palestinians of grievous incitement against Israel.

Let’s take the settlements first. As explained by Israeli diplomats to their American colleagues, and …

In its weekend supplement devoted to geopolitics French daily Le Monde published 8 March, 2013 a report entitled “Syrie : à Atmé, entre révolution et désenchantement” – “Syria: Atme, between revolution and disenchantment”- Christophe Ayad, a regular embedded journalist with NATO’s mercenary forces in Syria, reports on the mixture of despair and chaos that reigns in rebel controlled territory.  One of the rebels tells the French reporter that “three former soldiers of the Irish military elite” provided training to Syrian rebels. It is claimed the Irish soldiers were acting as “independent mercenaries”.  These “former soldiers of the Irish military …

Canadian columnist and political author Greg Felton believes that the new round of peace talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority will ultimately fail and lead to nowhere as the Israeli regime is continuing to insist on its illegitimate demands and also is not ready to engage in talks on equal footing.

According to Greg Felton, the Palestinian Authority, headed by Mahmoud Abbas, is the sole loser of the talks as he already knows that he is “in the pay of Israel.”

“He [Mahmoud Abbas] and his cronies go through this moronic peace charade to give the illusion they are important and …

The one-sided extremism of the Conservative government’s support for Israel just keeps growing.

The latest example is Ottawa helping convince the European Union to list Hezbollah’s military wing as a “terrorist” organization. After that decision was taken, Foreign Minister John Baird declared, “We are thrilled that the European Union unanimously has agreed to designate Hezbollah as a terrorist organization. We’ve been pushing for this.”

The National Post detailed Canada’s behind the scenes effort to get the EU to list Hezbollah as a “terrorist” organization. Despite opposition from the Lebanese government, a Foreign Affairs official told the paper that this was “a clear …

Vieques is a small Caribbean island that boasts some of the most beautiful beaches in the world. It is home to generations of men and women, who survive from the bounty of the ocean and the land. It is also the stomping ground to thousands of feral horses. Vieques is a municipality of what is now known as Puerto Rico, a colony of the United States of America.

In the 1940?s the US Navy forcibly evicted the people of Vieques out of the east and west sides of the island and installed naval bases and used its pristine beaches, as heavy …

It is about time that the Australian Parliament consider having a viable foreign affairs department or abolish it altogether.  Affairs might as well be relocated to Washington, D.C. The libertarians would have a point were they to assert that claim.  A government that does nothing for its citizens, yet demands everything of them, including following a monastic code of staying out of trouble, is an unnecessary task master.

This situation became painfully apparent when Australia’s current and one might hope brief foreign affairs minister Bob Carr made the astonishing claim that too many resources were being provided to Australians oversees as …

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden’s volcanic revelations of ubiquitous US surveillance are in their third month. The aftershocks felt around the world continue. As Russia granted Snowden temporary asylum, the White House fell into anger and dismay.

Computer scientist Nadia Heninger argued that leaking information is now becoming the “civil disobedience of our age”. The late historian and activist Howard Zinn described the act of civil disobedience as “the deliberate, discriminate, violation of law for a vital social purpose”. He advocated it saying that such an act “becomes not only justifiable but necessary when …

Representative democracies and autocratic dictatorships respond to profound internal crises in very distinctive ways: the former attempts to reason with citizens, explaining the causes, consequences and alternatives; dictatorships attempt to terrorize, intimidate and distract the public by evoking bogus external threats, to perpetuate and justify rule by police state methods and avoid facing up to the self-inflicted crises.

Such a bogus fabrication is evident in the Obama regime’s current announcements of an imminent global “terrorist threat.” …

Society used to get married, have kids, and then, happy or not, stay married their entire lives rather than suffer the stigma of divorce.  Then society gradually began getting divorced without the fear of stigma, which was liberating.  But despite this liberalization, kids born out of wedlock continued to be stigmatized.  Being born out of wedlock was still pretty much frowned upon.  In fact, we called these offspring “bastards.”

But, thankfully, all that has changed.  Today there are not only no stigmas or labels or penalties or bastards, there is a growing number of women who’ve made the decision to become …