Unlike some, I do not bemoan the passage of time. True, I am of that generation known as ‘the baby boomers,’ but while I am at times mildly bemused about certain things (‘How can it be 50 years since the Beatles first played in Toronto?’), I was never beguiled by
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Accidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
Assorted content for your Sunday reading. – The Tyee’s recent series on important sources of inequality is well worth a read, as Emily Fister interviews Andrew Longhurst about precarious work and Sylvia Fuller about the role of motherhood. – David Cole asks just how corrupt U.S. politics have become, while
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
This and that for your weekend reading. – Andrew Jackson writes that public investment is needed as part of a healthy economy, particularly when it’s clear that the private sector isn’t going to put massive accumulated savings to use. Bob McDonald notes that we’d be far better off using public
Continue readingPolitics and its Discontents: The Murky Lessons Of History
Blindingly clear for some, obscure and ambiguous for others, the lessons of history need to be given close scrutiny these days, especially by our chickenhawk prime minister. Like so much else that his regime brays and sputters about, Stephen Harper’s recent tough talk about the Ukraine and the Middle East
Continue readingThe Disaffected Lib: The Washington Post Asks – Was Putin Right?
It was last September when Vladimir Putin penned an op-ed about Syria that ran in The New York Times. The West rejected Putin’s views then but now The Washington Post asks whether Putin was right all along. Putin argued against American airstrikes on the Assad regime. “A strike would increase
Continue readingDead Wild Roses: Middle East Backgrounder – Mission Accomplished…
The chickens of western colonialism are coming home to roost. Excerpt from “The Guns of August” – by Matthew Stevenson via Counterpunch “Doubts about the sincerity of Americans in Iraq probably began when President Ronald Reagan dispatched his former national security advisor Robert C. “Bud” McFarlane to Tehran in
Continue readingLibya—another dictator replaced with chaos
Political use of the term “blowback” first appeared in the CIA’s internal history of the 1953 Iranian coup. Orchestrated by Britain and the U.S., the coup replaced the democratically-elected Mosaddegh government with the Shah. The term proved most appropriate as the big power mischief ultimately led to the Iranian Revolution
Continue readingPushed to the Left and Loving It: More Government Propaganda While Canada Once Again Stands Alone
A very strange Oped piece appeared in the Globe and Mail on the weekend, written by none other than Stephen Harper. It was a follow up to a government announcement that we would be giving the Ukrainian military another 220 million dollars, on top of the 300 million already provided,
Continue readingPolitics and its Discontents: Avoiding Another Imbroglio: A Mound Of Sound Guest Post
This note from the Mound of Sound accompanied the post that follows: Some of the course material I’ve been going through lately got me thinking about the conflicts raging in Syria and Iraq. I got thinking about them in the context of water and food security as well as climate
Continue readingAlberta Diary: On the centenary of Gavrilo Princip’s fateful shot in Sarajevo, let’s learn the right lessons from history
Gavrilo Princip under arrest. Below: Princip and the Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Today is the centenary of the day Gavrilo Princip took his little Belgian pistol to Sarajevo and blew the heir presumptive to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian empire into history. As is well known, not long after young Princip
Continue readingThe Cracked Crystal Ball II: That Was Predictable
Way back in 2003 when the United States invaded Iraq (long before the Afghanistan mess had been anything close to resolved), I remember having a conversation in which I said that within 5 years of the US withdrawal from Iraq, that the country would founder in civil war. (I believe
Continue readingThe Scott Ross: Why Russia’s Crimea is different from America’s Iraq
Today President Obama said America’s invasion of Iraq is nothing compared to Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Coffin makers agree. In 2003 the United States invaded Iraq, a stable country, claiming Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. The UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said the US invasion was illegal and
Continue readingThe Scott Ross: Why Russia’s Crimea is different from America’s Iraq
Today President Obama said America’s invasion of Iraq is nothing compared to Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Coffin makers agree. In 2003 the United States invaded Iraq, a stable country, claiming Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. The UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said the US invasion was illegal and
Continue readingThe Scott Ross: Why Russia’s Crimea is different from America’s Iraq
Today President Obama said America’s invasion of Iraq is nothing compared to Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Coffin makers agree.In 2003 the United States invaded Iraq, a stable country, claiming Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. The UN Se…
Continue readingThe Disaffected Lib: Aghhh. My Head Is Going to Explode!
“You just don’t invade another country on phony pretext in order to assert your interest.” That pearl of wisdom yesterday from the secretary of state of the United States of America, John Kerry. Yes, that United States, the very same one that invaded Iraq on a completely bogus,
Continue readingdrive-by planet: RT’s Breaking the Set: George Galloway on ‘Killing of Tony Blair’, Yemen drone attack and the death of Abbas Khan
In this RT interview British Respect Party MP, George Galloway, talks about his upcoming documentary film The Killing of Tony Blair. He also gives his views on the harassment of The Guardian by British authorities and the strange death of Dr Abbas Khan in a Syria prison. British citizen Khan
Continue readingIraq—an Al-Qaeda playground
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. The U.S. and its coalition of the willing invaded Iraq with the justification that it had weapons of mass destruction and Saddam was conspiring with al-Qaeda to use them. The country had to be cleansed of both. But of course there were neither
Continue readingWritings of J. Todd Ring: The deeper reasons for the “war on drugs”
There is a deeper reason for the war on drugs, which is the central reason for the policy, even outweighing profits from private prisons and seizure of property by law enforcement officers, both of which no doubt are also significant and strong motivations for keeping the “war on drugs” going.
Continue readingPolitics and its Discontents: And Speaking Of Weapons Of Mass Destruction …
Laurence O’Donnell offers a vital history lesson on the United States’ use of napalm: Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy H/t The Raw Story Recommend this Post
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