Terracide and the Terrarists: Destroying the Planet for Record Profits
Crossposted from TomDispatchWe have a word for the conscious slaughter of a racial or ethnic group: genocide. And one for the conscious destruction of aspects of the environment: ecocide. But we don’t have a word for the conscious act of destroying the planet we live on, the world as humanity ...
And Then There Was One: Imperial Gigantism and the Decline of Planet Earth
It stretched from the Caspian to the Baltic Sea, from the middle of Europe to the Kurile Islands in the Pacific, from Siberia to Central Asia. Its nuclear arsenal held 45,000 warheads, and its military had five million troops under arms. There had been nothing like it in Eurasia since the Mongols conquered ...
Filling the Empty Battlefield: Jeremy Scahill, Blowback Reporter
Chalmers Johnson’s book Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire was published in March 2000 -- and just about no one noticed. Until then, blowback had been an obscure term of CIA tradecraft, which Johnson defined as “the unintended consequences of policies that were kept secret from the American people.” In ...
The communist enemy, with the “world’s fourth largest military,” has been trundling missiles around and threatening the United States with nuclear obliteration. Guam, Hawaii, Washington: all, it claims, are targetable. The coverage in the media has been hair-raising. The U.S. is rushing an untested missile defense system to Guam, deploying ...
American Anniversaries from Hell: What You Don’t Know Can Hurt You
Crossposted from TomDispatch It’s true that, last week, few in Congress cared to discuss, no less memorialize, the 10th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. Nonetheless, two anniversaries of American disasters and crimes abroad -- the “mission accomplished” debacle of 2003 and the 45th anniversary of the My Lai massacre -- were at least noted ...
Where Is Everybody?: Why It’s So Tough to Get Your Head Around Climate Change
Crossposted from TomDispatch Two Sundays ago, I traveled to the nation’s capital to attend what was billed as “the largest climate rally in history” and I haven’t been able to get the experience -- or a question that haunted me -- out of my mind. Where was everybody? First, though, ...
Dumb and Dumber: A Secret CIA Drone Base, a Blowback World, and Why Washington Has No Learning Curve
Crossposted from TomDispatch You could, of course, sit there, slack-jawed, thinking about how mindlessly repetitive American foreign and military policy is these days. Or you could wield all sorts of fancy analytic words to explain it. Or you could just settle for a few simple, all-American ones. Like dumb. Stupid. ...
Crossposted from TomDispatch Consider Inauguration Day, more than two weeks gone and already part of our distant past. In its wake, President Obama was hailed (or reviled) for his “liberal” second inaugural address. On that day everything from his invocation of women’s rights (“Seneca Falls”), the civil rights movement (“Selma”), and the gay rights ...
The Pentagon as a Global NRA: For Washington, There Is No Arms Control Abroad
Crossposted from TomDispatchGiven these last weeks, who doesn’t know what an AR-15 is? Who hasn’t seen the mind-boggling stats on the way assault rifles have flooded this country, or tabulations of accumulating Newtown-style mass killings, or noted that there are barely more gas stations nationwide than federally licensed firearms dealers, or heard the renewed debates ...
The U.S. Intelligence Community’s New Year’s Wish
Crossposted from TomDispatchThink of it as a simple formula: if you’ve been hired (and paid handsomely) to protect what is, you’re going to be congenitally ill-equipped to imagine what might be. And yet the urge not just to know the contours of the future, but to plant the Stars and ...
Crossposted from TomDispatchPresident Barack Obama The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW Washington, D.C. 20500 Dear President Obama, Nothing you don’t know, but let me just say it: the world’s a weird place. In my younger years, I might have said “crazy,” but that was back when I thought being ...
The Fall of the American Empire (Writ Small): History, Farce, and David Petraeus
Crossposted from TomdispatchHistory, it is said, arrives first as tragedy, then as farce. First as Karl Marx, then as the Marx Brothers. In the case of twenty-first century America, history arrived first as George W. Bush (and Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith and the ...
The Mandate of Hell: How Not to Change the World
Crossposted from TomDispatch In the fall of 1948, Harry Truman barnstormed the country by train, repeatedly bashing a “do-nothing Congress,” and so snatched victory from the jaws of defeat in that year’s presidential campaign. This year, neither presidential candidate focused on blasting a do-nothing Congress or, in Obama’s case, “Republican ...
Democratic Mockpocalypse: How Big Can One Election Get?
Obesity is an American plague -- and no, I’m not talking about overweight Americans. I’m talking about our overweight, supersized presidential campaign. I’m talking about Big Election, the thing that’s moved into our homes and, especially if you live in a “swing state,” is now hogging your television almost 24/7. ...
Overwrought Empire: The Discrediting of U.S. Military Power
Americans lived in a “victory culture” for much of the twentieth century. You could say that we experienced an almost 75-year stretch of triumphalism -- think of it as the real “American Century” -- from World War I to the end of the Cold War, with time off for a ...
Obama Against the World: Forget Mitt Romney, Can the President Make It to November 7th?
Crossposted from TomDispatch Since this is my version of an election piece, I plan to get the usual stuff out of the way fast. So yes, the smartest political odds-givers around believe President Obama has a distinct edge over Mitt Romney coming out of the conventions, the Senate is trending ...
The Best Laid Plans: How Quickly Will the U.S. Leave Afghanistan?
In the wake of several deaths among its contingent of troops in a previously peaceful province in Afghanistan, New Zealand (like France and South Korea) is now expediting the departure of its 140 soldiers. That’s not exactly headline-making news here in the U.S. If you’re an American, you probably didn’t ...
Crossposted from TomDispatchImagine for a moment that almost once a week for the last six months somebody somewhere in this country had burst, well-armed, into a movie theater showing a superhero film and fired into the audience. That would get your attention, wouldn’t it? James Holmes times 21? It would ...
That Makes No Sense!: Your Security’s a Joke (and You’re the Butt of It)
When my daughter was little and I read to her regularly, one illustrated book was a favorite of ours. In a series of scenes, it described frustrating incidents in the life of a young girl, each ending with the line -- which my tiny daughter would boom out with remarkable ...
The Military Solution: The Lessons Washington Can't Draw From the Failure of the Military Option
Crossposted from TomDispatchAmericans may feel more distant from war than at any time since World War II began. Certainly, a smaller percentage of us -- less than 1% -- serves in the military in this all-volunteer era of ours and, on the face of it, Washington’s constant warring in distant ...
And You Thought It Would Be Easy?: Graduating the Class of 2012 Onto Our Overheated Planet
Crossposted from TomDispatch[Note: No one invited me to give this graduation speech. It was concocted freely in the campus of my mind and it’s meant for the rest of us in the class of 2012.] Class of 2012, greetings! It’s a deceptively glorious day, even under this tent in the ...
It Couldn’t Happen Here, It Does Happen There: The Value of American – and Afghan – Lives
Crossposted from TomDispatch"Do you do this in the United States? There is police action every day in the United States... They don't call in airplanes to bomb the place." -- Afghan President Hamid Karzai denouncing U.S. air strikes on homes in his country, June 12, 2012 It was almost closing ...
Praying at the Church of St. Drone: The President and His Apostles
Crossposted from TomDispatchBe assured of one thing: whichever candidate you choose at the polls in November, you aren’t just electing a president of the United States; you are also electing an assassin-in-chief. The last two presidents may not have been emperors or kings, but they -- and the vast national-security ...
How to Forget on Memorial Day: Whistling Past the Graveyard of Empires
Crossposted from TomDispatchIt’s the saddest reading around: the little announcements that dribble out of the Pentagon every day or two -- those terse, relatively uninformative death notices: rank; name; age; small town, suburb, or second-level city of origin; means of death (“small arms fire,” “improvised explosive device,” “the result of ...
America as a Shining Drone Upon a Hill: On Staring Death in the Face and Not Noticing
Crossposted from TomDispatchHere’s the essence of it: you can trust America’s crème de la crème, the most elevated, responsible people, no matter what weapons, what powers, you put in their hands. No need to constantly look over their shoulders. Placed in the hands of evildoers, those weapons and powers could ...
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May 23rd, 2013
Terracide and the Terrarists: Destroying the Planet for Record Profits
Crossposted from TomDispatchWe have a word for the conscious slaughter of a racial or ethnic group: genocide. And one for the conscious destruction of aspects ...
May 7th, 2013
And Then There Was One: Imperial Gigantism and the Decline of Planet Earth
It stretched from the Caspian to the Baltic Sea, from the middle of Europe to the Kurile Islands in the Pacific, from Siberia to Central ...
April 24th, 2013
Filling the Empty Battlefield: Jeremy Scahill, Blowback Reporter
Chalmers Johnson’s book Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire was published in March 2000 -- and just about no one noticed. Until then, blowback had ...
April 14th, 2013
The communist enemy, with the “world’s fourth largest military,” has been trundling missiles around and threatening the United States with nuclear obliteration. Guam, Hawaii, Washington: ...
April 2nd, 2013
American Anniversaries from Hell: What You Don’t Know Can Hurt You
Crossposted from TomDispatch It’s true that, last week, few in Congress cared to discuss, no less memorialize, the 10th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. Nonetheless, ...
March 10th, 2013
Where Is Everybody?: Why It’s So Tough to Get Your Head Around Climate Change
Crossposted from TomDispatch Two Sundays ago, I traveled to the nation’s capital to attend what was billed as “the largest climate rally in history” and ...
February 12th, 2013
Dumb and Dumber: A Secret CIA Drone Base, a Blowback World, and Why Washington Has No Learning Curve
Crossposted from TomDispatch You could, of course, sit there, slack-jawed, thinking about how mindlessly repetitive American foreign and military policy is these days. Or you ...
June 30th, 2011
The Militarized Surrealism of Barack Obama
Crossposted from TomDispatchIt’s already gone, having barely outlasted its moment -- just long enough for the media to suggest that no one thought it added ...
July 12th, 2011
Crossposted from TomDispatchGeorge W. who? I mean, the guy is so over. He turned the big six-five the other day and it was barely a ...
February 7th, 2013
Crossposted from TomDispatch Consider Inauguration Day, more than two weeks gone and already part of our distant past. In its wake, President Obama was hailed (or reviled) for ...
May 7th, 2013
And Then There Was One: Imperial Gigantism and the Decline of Planet Earth
It stretched from the Caspian to the Baltic Sea, from the middle of Europe to the Kurile Islands in the Pacific, from Siberia to Central ...
May 31st, 2011
Dumb Question of the Twenty-first Century: Is It Legal?
Is the Libyan war legal? Was Bin Laden’s killing legal? Is it legal for the president of the United States to target an American citizen ...
August 3rd, 2011
Lowering America’s War Ceiling?
By now, it seems as if everybody and his brother has joined the debt-ceiling imbroglio in Washington, perhaps the strangest homespun drama of our time. ...
August 11th, 2011
Could the Pentagon Be Responsible for Your Death?
Crossposted from TomdispatchPut what follows in the category of paragraphs no one noticed that should have made the nation’s hair stand on end. This particular ...
'The East'
Why have you started a comedy festival in northern Michigan in the middle of winter?
Because if you were here in the dead of winter in the middle of nowhere (which is actually somewhere to us), you'd need a few laughs too ... Continue Reading
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