| Old Articles | | There isn't content right now for this block. | |
 | |
War and Terror: Threats: Real and Imagined
Friday, October 13 @ 11:18:22 UTC |  by Mickey Z.,mickeyz.net
September 19, 2006
The terrorists want to kill us. Our government wants to tap our phones. The CIA wants to haul us away to secret prisons. Corporations want to poison our water, our air, and our food. You've got hurricanes, moody loners, e. coli, undocumented immigrants, drug dealers, shoe bombers, Mad Cow Disease, child molesters, welfare cheats, reality show contestants; if we were to believe the hype, there is much to fear in our daily lives.
Here's the rub: Distinguishing the genuine threats from the fabrications is often difficult in a society so dependent on media imagery. It's no wonder so few people went to see "Snakes on a Plane" this summer. We already have liquids on a plane to deal with. Who needs cinematic frights and shocks when reality-or at least our perception of reality-is enough to leave us quivering in the fetal position?
| | (Read More... | 3710 bytes more | War and Terror | Score: 0) |
|
Inside U.S.A.: America's Fundamentalists Finally Press The Self Destruct Button
Thursday, September 01 @ 10:02:12 UTC | by Angelique van Engelen, www.contentClix.com
Amsterdam 25 August 2005 - It's official. America now has its first Christian cleric using the A word. A not being the Atom bomb but Assassination. The top televangelist employed a style much used by his Islamic colleagues when he called for the assassination of President Hugo Chavez of Venezuala, speaking these astounding words: "We have the ability to take him out, and I think the time has come that we exercise that ability. [....] We do not need another 200 billion dollar war to get rid of one, you know, strong-arm dictator. It is a whole lot easier to have some of the covert operatives do the job and then get it over with." Is fundamentalism, which steered the US administration only two years ago toward condoning the Israeli killings of top Hamaz leaders finally showing its true colors?
Robertson who heads the Christian Broadcast Network's The 700 Club, which has an audience of around 7 million, shocked many, but nevertheless it appears his opinions aren't all that alien to the mindset in the US, where politics are largely attuned to the taste of fundamentalist christianity or the Christian Right. Rather than dismissing the comments outright, the US secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld, said: "Our department doesn't do that kind of thing. It's against the law." Rumsfeld, who works for a government that officially prohibited political assassination in the 1970s, also said he knew of no consideration ever having been given to assassinating Chavez. "Not to my knowledge and I would think I would have knowledge," Rumsfeld was quoted as saying.
| | (Read More... | 8619 bytes more | Inside U.S.A. | Score: 0) |
|
World Focus: No offence, but why are all white men so aggressive?
Wednesday, December 01 @ 18:07:19 UTC | Turn round the questions asked of black people and you may get the point
By Gary Younge, The Guardian UK
Sometimes it takes so long to figure out what's wrong with a question that you never quite get to the answer. At the forum on being British and Muslim organised by the Guardian last week, participants argued that some of the questions and issues being raised would never be put to white Christians, for example. These included: "do you have a duty to vote and/or participate in British political life?"; "do you have a responsibility to inform on political or religious groups who use violence to achieve political ends?"; and "do you want integration into British society or parallel lives? Why?"
The reluctance to confront these particular questions didn't stifle debate, but it raises broader issue of how and when to withdraw from problematic dialogues.
| | (Read More... | 7775 bytes more | World Focus | Score: 0) |
|
Latin America: Venezuela: Global Emancipation versus Mental Holocaust
Monday, November 15 @ 13:52:12 UTC |
By Franz J. T. Lee
Seeing that we here are now celebrating "150 Years after the Abolition of Slavery in Venezuela", within the context of the "Revolution In The Revolution", it is imperative to bring to our attention the fact, that the social and mental emancipation of wage-slaves across the globe, has yet never ever been accomplished. In reality, the European Mental Holocaust since centuries implanted into our very "souls" is still haunting our daily existence.
Hence, an intrinsic part of the current "deepening of the revolution" concerns precisely the annihilation of all forms of a slave mentality, of mental slavery, of dissocialization and "maleducation" for barbarism. Only as such the Bolivarian Revolution will be able to create real, true, emancipatory scientific práxis and philosophic theory. Not only Marx stated it, the very bourgeois, capitalist thinkers of the Enlightenment, all of them, began with religious critique, before they launched their social philosophy, the political theory of the French Revolution. We have no substitute for this, no alternative, we have to do likewise.
| | (Read More... | 18548 bytes more | Latin America | Score: 5) |
|
Satire: Bush misspeaks, or talks the truth for the first time?
Thursday, August 05 @ 21:42:18 UTC | 
Feel free to reproduce this graphic.
Bush misspeaks, says his administration seeking 'new ways to harm our country'
Bush misspoke as he delivered a speech at the signing ceremony for a $417 billion defense spending bill.
"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we," Bush said. "They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we."
No one in Bush's audience of military brass or Pentagon chiefs reacted.
| | (Read More... | 1303 bytes more | Satire | Score: 5) |
|
MANKIND ON THE PRECIPICE
Friday, February 06 @ 08:03:26 UTC |
In the last two hundred years or so, the world has been so pre-occupied with machines and all the attendant products such that little or no time is left to discuss the fall-out of these man-made machines on human thought and human activities. The machine, advisedly used in place of technologies, has almost taken over the human mind and the human conduct.
Mankind has literally submitted its life to robots and robotic manipulations. And when matters come up which require deep thought, reflection and reassessment, the machine in our lives takes over, and rather than apply humanistic solution, we allow the machine to dominate our world-view.
| | (Read More... | 8983 bytes more | Score: 5) |
|
Invasion of Iraq: ''We Got Him'' Give Me A Break!
Tuesday, December 16 @ 12:49:18 UTC | By Ayinde
December 16, 2003
What is wrong with many supposedly critical writers on the Internet? Are they suffering from analytical paralysis?
Let me spell it out as simply as possible:
| | (Read More... | 5817 bytes more | Invasion of Iraq | Score: 5) |
|
World Focus: Global Eye -- Blood Kin
Saturday, December 06 @ 17:37:54 UTC | by Chris Floyd, www.themoscowtimes.com
Imagine these banner headlines, circa, say, 1998: President's Brother in Biz With Red Chinese! President's Brother Beds Prostitutes as Corporate Perk! President's Brother Hip-Deep in War Profiteering: The More Blood His White House Sibling Spills, the Fatter the Family Coffers!
Hoo-boy! There would've been a hot time in the old media town with all that, eh? Wall-to-wall coverage, 24/7, Fox News frothing, Washington Post pounding, tabloids screaming -- "Oval Evil: Reds, Beds and Milking the Dead!" Earnest clucking in the halls of Congress: "We must get to the bottom of these unsavory connections." Late-night comics cracking wise: "Hey, when the president's brother orders Chinese, he ain't just talking chow mein: 'Yeah, I'll have the rice, the won ton, two blondes and a bag of unmarked bills, please.'"
| | (Read More... | 9381 bytes more | World Focus | Score: 5) |
|
Invasion of Iraq: Iraqi history is back
Tuesday, September 02 @ 07:24:17 UTC | By Martin Sieff, UPI
WASHINGTON (UPI) -- The devastating bomb attack that took the lives of Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim and at least 74 other people at the Ali Imam mosque in Najaf, Iraq, on Friday grimly confirmed warnings and themes we have been sounding over the past year in UPI Analysis columns. First and foremost, it teaches that Iraq history is back.
The Pentagon civilian hawks and their neo-conservative media allies who preached the necessity for toppling Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and building a shining monument to American democracy never referred much to Iraqi history and they seem to have known little or any of it, which is not surprising, as few of them had ever visited Iraq.
| | (Read More... | 6736 bytes more | Invasion of Iraq | Score: 0) |
|
War and Terror: 'Embedded Journalists': There's A Name for People Like Them
Tuesday, April 08 @ 23:33:30 UTC | by Ben Roberts
The Bush Administration sides must be hurting from laughter at the joke they
have played on mainstream American and Western media. There was a big run
up to the use of 'embedded journalists' in this war. Everywhere you turned it was
discussed. On TV. On radio talk shows. The Bush cabal had front men Donald
Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, and military 'analysts' of every rank gushing over the
concept. A fresh faced Peter Jennings, waiting for the fireworks to begin, took
great pains to explain to his audience that the journalists would be 'embedded'
with the US military, and not 'in bed with.' What a laugh. One was unsure
whether his attempt at clarification was a weak joke that bombed, or a serious
explanation. The 'embedded journalists' were described as novel, unheard of in
the history of armed conflict, revolutionary, unprecedented access to information,
and having real-time access to what was unfolding on the battlefield.
| | (Read More... | 10105 bytes more | War and Terror | Score: 5) |
|
War and Terror: Even in battle, blondes get all the attention
Saturday, April 05 @ 01:14:34 UTC | by Deborah Orr
04 April 2003, Independent UK
If a Hollywood screenwriter made up Ms Lynch's story, it would be condemned as cheesy, clichéd and racist
As heart-warming human interest stories go, "Saving Private Jessica" is hard to beat. Around the world, headlines made reference to Steven Spielberg's film of the US Army's mission to rescue a soldier whose three brothers had all been killed in combat. Private Lynch's story may not have quite the mythic power of Private Ryan's, but in these terrible times it's wondrous enough.
And part of the wonder must be that Ms Lynch is so much an archetype of what an all-American girl is always portrayed as being. She's blonde and pretty and fair. The photograph of herself in fatigues, the stars and stripes behind her, could easily be mistaken for a Hollywood publicity shot, rather than an army mugshot.
| | (Read More... | 5508 bytes more | War and Terror | Score: 0) |
|
War and Terror: The dangers caused by a policy of preemption
Thursday, February 27 @ 00:55:07 UTC | By Ash Pulcifer, YellowTimes.org
Soon after September 11, the Bush administration labeled North Korea as a member of an "axis of evil." Then, in September of 2002, the Bush administration released the National Security Strategy of the United States of America. In this policy paper, the administration wrote, "To forestall or prevent such hostile acts by our adversaries, the United States will, if necessary, act preemptively." Due to this policy, North Korea became concerned over the increasing militarism of the Bush administration. The strategy that North Korea devised to counter this perceived threat highlights the danger of preemption.
| | (Read More... | 5664 bytes more | War and Terror | Score: 0) |
|
Zimbabwe: Mugabe absent from Commonwealth talks
Monday, September 23 @ 04:54:36 UTC | BBC - Zimbabwe's President, Robert Mugabe, has decided to boycott talks about his country's suspension from the Commonwealth, apparently because he objected to the tone of his invitation.
Mr Mugabe had, until the last minute, been expected to attend Monday's meeting in the Nigerian capital, Abuja, to review Zimbabwe's response to its exclusion from the organisation.
| | (Read More... | 6184 bytes more | Zimbabwe | Score: 3) |
|
| |
| Facebook & Twitter | 
 | |
| Big Story of Today | | There isn't a Biggest Story for Today, yet. | |
|
