Technocrats or Humanists?
In his 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...
View ArticleVideo Games Normalize Animal Cruelty
Animal exploitation is all pervasive in video games. Not in itself a problem, this virtual exploitation is a reflection of speciesist reality. But by presenting exploitation uncritically, interactive...
View ArticleWalmarting the Rivers and Oceans
Walmart has been in the headlines in recent weeks after the retailer announced plans to keep its stores open this Thanksgiving, forcing Walmart employees to cancel many of their holiday plans. Numerous...
View ArticleThe World According to Gap
Gap has managed two marketing scoops within a short period. It got a Sikh model, Waris Ahluwalia, to be the face of its Holiday 2013 campaign, and when one of the hoardings was defaced it scored by...
View ArticleInterpreting Pakistan, Changing the World
Stop all the clocks … let the mourners come. – WH Auden December 1, marks the tenth death anniversary of the late Hamza Alavi. My reflections for this piece will chiefly consist of my memories of my...
View ArticleThe Greatest Danger to Israel is the Stupidity of Its Leaders
The greatest danger to Israel is not the putative Iranian nuclear bomb. The greatest danger is the stupidity of our leaders. This is not a uniquely Israeli phenomenon. A great many of the world’s...
View ArticleBoosting Profits While Wages Sag
Abenomics is based on the idea that if you give rich people a lot of money, they’ll spend it and the economy will get better. There are a few minor flaws to the theory, however, like the fact that it...
View ArticleAn Interview With Muqtada al-Sadr
The future of Iraq as a united and independent country is endangered by sectarian Shia-Sunni hostility says Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia religious leader whose Mehdi Army militia fought the US and...
View ArticleFear of the People’s History
England is two countries. One is dominated by London, the other remains in its shadow. When I first arrived from Australia, it seemed no one went north of Watford and those who had emigrated from the...
View ArticleThe Dogs of War Still Growl
I’m getting a real kick out of all the Monday morning quarterbacking about the Geneva nuclear talks agreement between the P5+1 and Iran. Almost everyone has weighed in with varying opinions, from MSM...
View ArticleTravels With Leila
I was sitting on a plane catching up on editions of my favorite BBC program, From Our Own Correspondent, and caught one about a reporter’s experience with trying to travel with her toddler, while...
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The Real Cost of GM Animal Feed?
At first glance the frozen bundles could be mistaken for conventional joints of meat. But as Ib Pedersen, a Danish pig farmer, lifts them carefully out of the freezer it becomes apparent they are in...
View ArticleThe Killing Floor
The other day we were forced to listen to an NPR interview, by Terry Gross, presumably, with some fellow talking about his garden, about which he had evidently written a silly-sounding book. After...
View ArticleWomen, War, and the Working Class
In the previous installment in the Political Poetry series, Afaa Weaver described his urge, as an African American poet, “to touch the proletarian vernacular at its deepest point.” A few days after the...
View ArticleThe Other Police State
On November 20th, the Center for Corporate Policy, a Washington, DC, good-government group, issued a revealing study, “Spooky Business: A New Report on Corporate Espionage Against Non-profits.”...
View ArticleBest Military in the World, Really?
In response to regular reports of atrocities by US soldiers, drone controllers, pilots and interrogators, the White House routinely tries to help. Every president promises to honor our armed forces and...
View ArticleThe Sorry State of East Asia in the 21st Century
In what may be the final blow for Thomas Friedman’s absurd and rather boring theory known as “The Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention,” the latest developments in the unfortunate island...
View ArticleFrance’s Tax Revolt
France is in revolt over tax. In recent weeks the protagonists have ranged from drivers of heavy goods vehicles, wealthy cereal farmers, and even the equestrian lobby . And, almost everybody in the...
View ArticleSalafist Crimes Against Islam in Syria
Damascus Reports from across Syria, and increasing coming in from many areas including Aleppo, Qalamoun and Reqaa lay bare massive crimes being perpetrated against the Syrian people in the name of...
View ArticleA Fight in San Joaquin Valley
As the affluence of society depends increasingly on the uninterrupted production and consumption of waste, gadgets, planned obsolescence, and means of destruction, the individuals have to be adapted to...
View ArticleThanksgiving Day to Mourn
On Thanksgiving Day this year we will need to mourn not celebrate this insane day of genocide the Pilgrims against the Pequot Indians in 1637 carried out the most gruesome manner, thus making a day...
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Play This Film Loud!
It remains one of the most exquisite concerts ever filmed. My friend Rich and I fantasized about buying tickets when sales were announced in the early fall of 1976. We sat in his apartment near the...
View ArticleChina’s Air Defence Identification Zone
The Chinese are certainly getting cocky in the cockpit, though they are doing so with occasional moments of refrain. Beijing claimed on Thursday that there was “no question” of an air defence...
View ArticleCommerce or Community
Because the history of the United States is comprised of contradictions (proclamations of liberty, for instance, are coupled with the practice of slavery), it should come as little surprise to find...
View ArticleAnother Thanksgiving
All week, I’ve said, “Have a wonderful Thanksgiving,” to friends and strangers, while being conflicted by disparate considerations and visuals. Here’s something that’s renting storage space in my head,...
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Inside the Largest Fracked Oil Spill Ever
Tesoro Logistics — the company whose pipeline spilled more than 800,000 gallons of fracked Bakken Shale oil in rural North Dakota in September — has hired infamous contractor Witt O’Brien’s to oversee...
View ArticleSaving Africans from African Savagery
The hunt for the infamous Joseph Kony and his Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) are back in the news. Some even say Kony’s sick, and might surrender. Nevertheless, leading humanitarian militarist John...
View ArticleDiplomacy via B52s
China’s air defense identification zone is all the rage in US national-security discussions and planning, a true godsend because furnishing pretext for heightening and accelerating the American...
View ArticleHealth Care in India
To speak of growth is to allude to one thing only: economic development, GDP and GNP figures, which of course should be increasing for the world to stay on track to become a global shopping emporium....
View ArticleBurning History in San Salvador
At the crack of dawn on Thursday, Nov. 14, three armed men broke into the offices of Pro-Búsqueda, a non-profit in San Salvador that reunites families with children who went missing during El...
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