The horrible attack on the Westgate Mall in Nairobi by members of the Alshabab terrorist group from neighboring Somalia is the act of a declining political movement that has lost enormous ground in recent years. When we see this sort of naked terror, it is important to know if an ascendant group is announcing itself […]
Archives for September 2013
Top Five Wind Energy Successes Today
Wind energy at the moment is by the apparent numbers less expensive than solar, and huge wind farms are being opened throughout the world. There is good news on this front from Denmark, Germany, and some other places. 1. Denmark has just opened its largest wind farm. Denmark gets a third of its electricity from […]
Americans Drawing the Line on Day of Action against Keystone XL (Lazare)
Sarah Lazare writes at Commondreams.org: In towns and cities across the U.S., demonstrators are 'drawing the line' Saturday demanding that President Obama protect people and the environment by rejecting the Keystone XL Pipeline. Billed a national day of action, and spearheaded by the climate campaign 350.org, over 200 rallies will take place in all 50 […]
Israeli Troops attack European Diplomats on Aid Mission
First the Israelis again erased a Palestinian population, ruling that the 120 Bedouin inhabitants of Khirbet Makhul in the Occupied Palestinian West Bank did not have proper “building permits” for the huts in which they lived. These people have lived in Palestine since forever, and they are not in Israel. It is the Israelis who […]
I lived to See the Day when the Pope and the President of Iran are more doctrinally Flexible than the GOP
The United States has all along been a society dominated by the wealthy, and more especially by the business classes. But businesspeople are not all cut from the same cloth. You had high-minded responsible businessmen like Benjamin Franklin and you had mean-spirited businessmen, including the plantation slave-owners. In recent months we have been bombarded by […]
Top 5 Ways to Get a more Equal America (Reich @ Moyers)
Bill Moyers interviews former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich on the ways Americans could effect a more equal society: Reich wants to cap the size of the too-big-to-fail banks, reestablish the wall between commercial and financial banks, increase the size of the earned income tax subsidey, have a $15 minimum wage, and have more equitable […]
Iran’s President Rouhani and the New Hopes for Diplomacy (Sternfeld)
Something about hope Since coming to office in August, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has done everything to spell out the profound difference between his administration and the previous one. No, Iran is still not a liberal democracy, but what we are witnessing today is an amazing journey of a struggling country with barriers, obstacles, and […]
Can we have a Military-Green Energy Complex Instead, Please? (Kramer & Pemberton)
Mattea Kramer and Miriam Pemberton write at Tomdispatch.com A trillion dollars. It’s a lot of money. In a year it could send 127 million college students to school, provide health insurance for 206 million people, or pay the salaries of seven million schoolteachers and seven million police officers. A trillion dollars could do a lot […]
Iran’s Rouhani: Not Seeking the Bomb, Willing to show Flexibility
Ann Curry of NBC News gets a scoop, with an interview with Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani, in which he restates Iran’s position that it is not seeking, and will never seek, a nuclear weapon. He said that Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, had recently stressed ‘heroic flexibility.’ US economic sanctions are severely affecting the Iranian […]