The American obsession with guns and violence is not unique, but it is distinctive. The US ranks 12th in the world for rate of firearm-related deaths. El Salvador, Colombia, Swaziland, Brazil, South Africa, the Philippines and some others are worse. But that is the company the US is in– not, say, relatively peaceful places like […]
What Happens in Langley Doesn’t Stay in Langley Anymore: How our Spies Came out of the Shadows (Engelhardt)
Tom Engelhardt writes at Tomdispatch.com: Weren’t those the greatest of days if you were in the American spy game? Governments went down in Guatemala and Iran thanks to you. In distant Indonesia, Laos, and Vietnam, what a role you played! And even that botch-up of an invasion in Cuba was nothing to sneeze at. In […]
Let’s also Remember the 176 children Killed by US Drones
The US government continues to rain drones down on the tribal belt of Pakistan. While the Washington narrative is that these drones are precision machines that only kill terrorists, this story is not true. The drone program is classified, and so it cannot be publicly debated. It cannot even be acknowledged by President Obama and […]
Top Ten Threats to the Legitimacy of Egypt’s new Constitution
Early returns from the Egyptian provinces that voted in a two-stage referendum on Saturday suggest that the draft constitution garnered some 56% of the vote. It was rejected in the capital, Cairo, and in the Delta province of Gharbiya, but won in the 8 other provinces where voting took place on Saturday, including Alexandria and […]
European Human Rights Court finds CIA Guilty of Torture
For the first time, the European Court of Human Rights has found the US Central Intelligence Agency guilty of torturing and sodomizing an innocent man. German national Khalid El-Masry (of Lebanese ancestry) was kidnapped (“rendered”) from Macedonia and taken to Afghanistan and placed in the “salt pit.” He was beaten, sodomized and tortured until 2004, […]
Firearms used in 300,000 crimes a year in US (Poster)
reprint edn. Some 300,000 violent crimes are committed each year in the US with the aid of a firearm.. One of the arguments for not banning the sale of military weapons to any old civilian (crazy ones included) in the US that one often hears from gun rights fundamentalists is that they need the guns […]
Semi-Automatic firearms are Military Weapons: Lets at least Limit the Magazines
One of the two guns the Connecticut shooter used to murder 20 children and 6 adults was a Glock semi-automatic. This datum is not surprising. The Glock is among the more popular pistols sold in the United States. The Glock semi-automatic was developed in 1982 for the Austrian army. It was not envisioned that it […]
NASA: Portrait of a Polluted Atmosphere
From NASA: portrait of global aerosols (particulate matter in the atmosphere, including pollution): Note that the image is a simulation created with high-powered software to make the aerosols we (and sometimes nature) put into the atmosphere clear. hat tip Extreme Tech
Questions I ask myself about Connecticut School Shooting
I ask myself, “Why?” Why do US cable news networks intensively cover these mass shootings, making it the only story for a day or two and prying into every detail of them, when they aren’t interested in preventing them from happening again through banning semi-automatic weapons? Is it just, like, a natural disaster to them? […]
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