General News

The Greatest Show on Earth How Billions of Words, Tweets, Insults, and Polls Blot Out Reality in Campaign 2016

By |

In the last year, untold billions of words have been expended on this “election” and the outsized histories, flaws, and baggage the two personalities now running for president bring with them. Has there ever been this sort of coverage — close to a year of it already — hour after hour, day after day, night after night? Has theNew York Timesever featured stories about the same candidate and his cronies, two at a time, on its front page daily the way it’s recently been highlighting the antics of The Donald? Have there ever been so many “experts” of every stripe jawing away about a single subject on cable TV from the crack of dawn to the witching hour? Has there ever been such a mass of pundits churning out opinions by the hour, or so many polls about the American people’s electoral desires steamrollering each other from dawn to dusk? And, of course, those polls are then covered, discussed, and analyzed endlessly. Years ago, Jonathan Schell suggested that we no longer hadanelection, but (thanks to those polls) “serial elections.” He wrote thatback in the Neolithic Age and we’ve come an awful long way since then. There are now websites, after all, that seem to do little more thanproduce mega-pollsfrom all the polls spewing out.

General News

An interview with African American scholar Adolph Reed on Bernie Sander's Campaign and the New Class Politics

By |

“It would be a mistake to consider all, or even most, of those supporters to be committed leftists or even people embracing sophisticated left critiques of neoliberalism. Many of them are people who are hurting and anxious economically. Motives for supporting the Sanders campaign were various, and, although I think skepticism about parties’ fealty to Wall Street certainly has been a central thread in Sanders’s support, it would be a mistake to try to ventriloquize that broad electorate.
I think the significance of supporters’ acceptance of the “democratic socialism” label is also very much exaggerated. Chatter about it reminds me of the banter that Occupy’s big success was having theNew York Times write about inequality. For two decades or more, it has not made sense to think that the term “socialism,” however modified, carries any particular or coherent meaning or range of meanings for the vast majority of Americans.
I understand why Sanders invoked it as much as he did. It was a label already attached to him, and it was reasonable to assert control of discussion of it as an issue by introducing it himself. His adducing of Denmark to explain it or pacify anxieties about it early on seemed a little wonkish and politically ineffective to me, but I could appreciate why he’d do that as well.
However, enthusiasm for seeing the phrase appear in public discourse, I fear, is a testament to the Left’s marginality and capacities for wish-fulfillment and the dominance, even within the nominal left, of the conceptually thin, soundbite-driven premises of mainstream political discourse. I suppose this is what happens when even the Left embraces ‘branding.'” – Adolph Reed

General News

Patriotic Muslim Dad Hails Dead Son's Participation in US Crime Against Humanity in Muslim Iraq

By |

US criminal media, having promoted and still justifying what Rev. Dr. King called “atrocity wars and covert violence on three continents since 1945,”[3] now fields questions, being asked in recent days by prominent columnists, both liberal and conservative, about the Republican presidential nominee mental health. “Yes, Donald Trump is crazy,” Steven Hayes added last week in the conservative Weekly Standard. David Brooks wrote in the New York Times on July 29. “He is a morally untethered, spiritually vacuous man who appears haunted by multiple personality disorders.” The New York Times would have us believe in wars in much smaller nations that have taken the lives of many millions of children and maimed tens of millions. Dropping twice the total amount of bombs dropped in Europe, Africa and Asia by both sides during WW II on the tiny Buddhist rice farming nation

Politics & Society

The Danger of Excessive Trump Bashing

By |

Amid his incoherence and insults, Trump has raised valid points on several important questions, such as the risks involved in the voracious expansion of NATO up to Russia’s borders and the wisdom of demonizing Russia and its internally popular President Vladimir Putin. ver the past several years, Washington’s neocon-dominated foreign policy establishment has pushed a stunning policy of destabilizing nuclear-armed Russia in pursuit of a “regime change” in Moscow. This existentially risky strategy has taken shape with minimal substantive debate behind a “group think” driven by anti-Russian and anti-Putin propaganda….By lumping Trump’s few reasonable points together with his nonsensical comments – and making anti-Russian propaganda the only basis for any public debate – Democrats and the anti-Trump press are pushing the United States toward a conflict with Russia.

Christianity

Pope Francis and the Changing Catholic Church

By |

Pope Francis said on July 31 that he would never call terrorism “Islamic terrorism” since all religions contain fundamentalist group, and with these comments he once again appeared to revolutionize the church. The statement came following his call in June for the Catholic Church to apologize to the LGBT community for centuries of discrimination. In his effort to move the church towards a new era of culture acceptance we should view Pope Francis with as much scrutiny as we would any politically savvy public figure running a public image campaign. And whether or not you believe that the Pope is doing his best with a centuries-old system or that he is not moving fast enough on certain issues, we can all agree at least he is moving. Then the question becomes: how sustainable is this movement after Pope Francis resigns or passes away?

Politics & Society

Did the Bomb End the War?

By |

August 6 marks the destruction of Hiroshima and the annual op-ed obeisance to civic mythology. Serious men will echo the conclusion of prominent mainstream historians such as John Gaddis: “Having acquired this awesome weapon, the United States used it against Japan for a simple and straightforward reason: achieve victory, as quickly, as decisively, as economically as possible.” Once again, post hoc arguments will be received wisdom: The Japanese surrendered six days after the bomb destroyed Nagasaki; therefore, the bomb ended the war. Not only that, the bomb was a blessing in disguise: It avoided the need for Operation Olympic — the invasion of Japan that would have taken untold numbers of American and Japanese lives. Revisionist historians — if they’re cited— will reject such reasoning and stress a fact hidden in plain sight: The defeat of Japan was a foregone conclusion prior to August. 67 firebombed cities lay in ruins, and American forces had decimated the Japanese military.

art

The Box: Solitary Confinement Takes Center Stage

By |

One of six characters in The Box, a new play that debuted at Z Space theater in San Francisco on July 6, Jake Juchau (played by Clive Worsley) presents one image of life in long-term solitary confinement. The play was written by Sarah Shourd, an American journalist who spent 410 days in solitary in Iran after being accused of espionage, and then returned to the U.S. and began conducting research about the domestic uses of solitary confinement.

General News

Trumped

By |

This article was originally published atdavidswanson.org

Why would it be that 8 years ago you couldn’t win a Democratic presidential primary if you’d voted for a war on Iraq afterpushingall the Bush White House lies about it, and yet now you can? Back then the war looked closer to ending, the death count was lower, and ISIS was only in the planning stages. Reports on the fraud, criminality, and knowingly self-destructive nature of the war launch — reports like the Chilcot report — hadn’t yet been produced. How can you drag this albatross across the finish line at this late date in 2016? Well, you can’t, in fact.

General News

But, Mr. Putin, You Just Don't Understand

By |

This article was originally published here

Once in a while one of the videos somebody emails me a link to turns out to be well worth watching. Such is this one. In it a former U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union tries to explain to Vladimir Putin why new U.S. missile bases near the border of Russia should not be understood as threatening. He explains that the motivation in Washington, D.C., is not to threaten Russia but to create jobs. Putin responds that, in that case, the United States could have created jobs in peaceful industries rather than in war.

General News

“Pow, Pow, Yous Are Dead!” Children, Toy Guns, and the Real Thing By

By |

[From our ally TomDispatch.com]
 
It was a beautiful evening and the kids — Madeline, two; Seamus, almost four; and Rosena, nine — were running across a well-tended town green. Seamus pointed his rainbow flag with the feather handle at his sisters and “pow-powed” them, calling out, “Yous are dead now, guys. I shot yous.” Madeline and Rosena laughed and just kept on running, with Seamus at their heels. I hid my face in my hands.