Most of you don’t know war. I certainly do not know what war is. Nick Turse reports on it, but like reporters, can leave and return to the relative safety of home. But an Libyan citizen nails down what its like in just a few short sentences: “I drive by
Continue readingTag: International Affairs
Dead Wild Roses: That Can’t Happen In America…
How quickly we slip in barbarity. From Normalizing Atrocity, Ken Orphan writes on Counterpunch: “Thousands of socialists and leftists were marched into stadiums in Chile in the 1970s and gunned down, tortured, or disappeared in a country with a much smaller military than the US. Between 1965 and 1966,
Continue readingDead Wild Roses: Chennai’s Water Shortage and Our Hierarchical Structured Society
“New Delhi — Millions of people in the South Indian city of Chennai, the country’s sixth largest metropolis, are facing an acute water shortage as the main reservoirs have dried up after a poor monsoon season. Some schools in the city have cut working hours and dozens of hotels and
Continue readingDead Wild Roses: Electoral Politics in the United States – Rob Urie
Why would people vote against their own interests? Why do so many people choose not to vote at all? Some of the answers lie with the very structure of the American political system and the ideological rules that are currently being followed. Noam Chomsky has always said that the
Continue readingDead Wild Roses: Venezuela – Update
This from Counterpunch shedding some light onto what is happening in South America, without being filtered through the corporate press. “Over the last year reports about Venezuela in the corporate media have been depicting a country undergoing a “humanitarian crisis.” What they described was not consistent with what I know
Continue readingDead Wild Roses: Damn the Torpedoes! – US Democrats Stopping Socialism in the US
Political theatre is interesting to observe. Not so much when the strongest nation on earth continues to dable with proto-fascist notions and leaders. The Democrats in the US will shortly (again) be showing their allegiance to the corporate interests that support them. Let’s hope they can’t obstruct Sanders this time
Continue readingDead Wild Roses: The Town Hall on Fox Featuring Bernie Sanders
In the second part, start at 10:05 for that, if Bernie actually means this, then he should be the next President of the United States. If he has an actual commitment to justice, and this isn’t just rhetoric… this may indeed be me looking to the east by light of
Continue readingDead Wild Roses: On Leaving the US Military – Danny Sjursen
A soldiers exit essay on leaving the US war machine. What I Won’t Be Missing “It’s time to wave goodbye to a litany of absurdity that I witnessed in the institution to which I dedicated my adult life. Some peers, even friends, may call this heresy — a disgruntled
Continue readingDead Wild Roses: Catastrophic Climate Change Just Isn’t Profitable
Paul Street writing for Counterpunch illustrates the problems humanity faces as a whole and how completely useless our insular elites and mainstream media would rather madly fiddle for short term profit that tackle the larger issues of the human habitability of the earth. “The 2020 elections and their aftermath (including
Continue readingDead Wild Roses: Venezuela – Causes of Chaos
The US has a funny notion of what is in its ‘backyard’. It would be really wonderful if the citizens of the US would decry the economic terrorism being carried out on their behalf. “The success of Chávez and Maduro’s governments in reducing poverty and inequality in Venezuela and
Continue readingDead Wild Roses: Venezuela and the American Body Politic
American foreign policy seems to be carefully insulated from the majority of the American population. I’m thinking that, outside the respective frenzied political bases, the general populace has little or no taste for international misadventures and the inevitable blowback that accompanies imperial meddling in the affairs of other states. Yet
Continue readingAkaash Maharaj - Practical Idealism: The Mosaic Institute and the Arc of History
While the arc of history may bend towards justice, there is nothing inevitable about progress. Societies can and do regress, as well as progress; they can be pulled backwards by their lowest fears, as well impelled forward by their highest ideals.
Continue readingDead Wild Roses: France – The Blue Collar Revolt – Gilets Jaunes
Paul Street writing at Counterpunch: “Yellow vest-wearers demand real democracy – popular self-rule. They have called for a popular referendum whereby 700,000 citizen signatories would force the French Parliament to debate and vote on a law within one year. There have been calls (evoking memories of the great French Revolution
Continue readingDead Wild Roses: Prostitution, Slavery, and Men who Don’t Want to Change a Thing.
Not really impressed with the whole ‘this is empowering’ crowd. http://sespursongles.tumblr.com/post/179082857723/some-highlights-from-this-video-where-lydia-cacho
Continue readingDead Wild Roses: The US Military – Winning by Not Losing – Nick Turse
The need for security actions and endless wars is a self-justifying feature of the US economic and political landscape. The military industrial complex (MIC) is invested in all levels of American society and within the political realm. The MIC is not only good for business, but often it *is* the
Continue readingDead Wild Roses: The Rule of Law and American Exceptionalism
Much of the talk about the rule of law, at least in international politics seems to be but a mere convenience to be followed when international law happens to be in favour of a countries policies. When it becomes inconvenient to the national policy or doctrine, then the rule of
Continue readingAlberta Politics: As Edmonton and Ottawa awake to Jason Kenney’s (un)diplomatic funny business, stuff starts hitting the fan
Alberta Opposition Leader Jason Kenney and two of his MLAs are running around India again today acting as if they are representatives of the governments of both Canada and Alberta. Officials of the provincial government in Edmonton and the federal government in Ottawa appear to have been so nonplussed by
Continue readingDead Wild Roses: Our Common Apocalypse – Our Common Problem – The Elites
We have a NIMBY problem here. The bad news is that said NIMBY problem is on a planetary scale and my backyard is really everyone’s back yard so to speak. The doom of our time is coming, human driven climate change, and we merrily continue to do that very things
Continue readingDead Wild Roses: Vox – The F-35
What happens when you integrate your military into the fabric of the economy? Why the F-35 debacle of course.
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