Monthly Archives: May 2016

Guardian: “Stupidity is the American disease,” said Norman Mailer, though maybe it’s not so much stupidity as fantasy, a determinedly infantile notion of what it means to go to war.

Just read this and other pages on United Flight 23, which is not mentioned in the 9/11 Commission report. Interesting stuff.

“You know, Mr. Speaker, you and I have a lot in common,” Kean said. “You were a high school history teacher?” “Yes,” Hastert replied. “And so was I,” Kean said, reminiscing about his two-year stint as a teacher at St. … Continue reading →

It occurred to Kean that this might be the commission’s most frightening discovery of all: The emperors of espionage had no clothes. Perhaps the reason the White House had fought so hard to block the commission’s access to the PDBs … Continue reading →

Der Spiegel has an interesting article on Günther Rüdel’s grandson and one’s civic responsibility in a criminal state.

The Council on Foreign Relations: Mansur’s potential death provides a real-world, real-time ability to test two hypotheses about the policy of killing terrorist leaders. These are based upon the objectives of the strike, according to the Pentagon press release, as … Continue reading →

The Guardian: “If people want to stand in the way of peace and continue to threaten and kill and blow people up, we have no recourse but to respond, and I think we responded appropriately.” —John Kerry, explaining a US … Continue reading →

Just had this strange exchange with someone I used to play Chess with in high school: The extent to which it is difficult to conduct political discussions without degeneration into slinging invective disappoints.

In the paranoid nightmare as reality department, KPIX is running this story saying FBI agents hid microphones inside light fixtures and at a bus stop outside the Oakland Courthouse without a warrant to record conversations, between March 2010 and January 2011.

The fact remains that meaning, and its perception, as seen from the logotherapeutic angle, is completely down to earth rather than afloat in the air or resident in an ivory tower….the perception of meaning, as I see it, more specifically … Continue reading →

Guardian: A North Carolina man has pleaded guilty to a federal misdemeanor charge after authorities say he grabbed a Muslim woman’s hijab on a Southwest Airlines flight in December and pulled it off. Federal authorities say 37-year-old Gill Parker Payne, … Continue reading →

From CounterPunch: Illiteracy is now a scourge and a political tool designed primarily to make war on language, meaning, thinking, and the capacity for critical thought. Chris Hedges is right in stating that “the emptiness of language is a gift … Continue reading →