Film review: Dirty Wars (2013)

The excellent book Dirty Wars that I reviewed yesterday is about 530 pages but is so well written that it was not hard to get through. What made it hard to take were the things the book described. For those who do not have the time to read it, the documentary of the same name covers the main points. But even those who have read the book will find the film well worth watching. It is one thing to read about the people and events described in the book, it is quite another to actually see the people and places involved and to hear from them first hand. [Read more…]

NASA ban on Chinese scientists lifted

In a startling display of good sense, the ban on Chinese scientists attending a conference on the Kepler space telescope program at a NASA site has been reversed, after many non-Chinese scientists started talking about boycotting the event altogether, since even Chinese graduate students and post docs working in the US with US scientists would be barred. [Read more…]

Medicaid expansion passed in Ohio

Ohio governor John Kasich managed to get the Medicaid expansion policy passed in Ohio yesterday by doing an end run around the Republican-dominated state legislature that had opposed the move because they oppose anything to do with the Affordable Care Act even if it benefits those who are too poor to benefit from the new health care exchange and even if the federal government fully funds it for the first three years and at 90% thereafter. [Read more…]

How times have changed

Yesterday, as a result of a court ruling, same-sex couples were able to get married in New Jersey, making it the 14th state to do so, along with the District of Columbia. This is of course an important step forward for equality but I thought it a telling sign of how same-sex marriage has become normalized, at least in the major media, that the story they seemed to focus on was governor Chris Christie’s decision to not appeal the lower court decision to the New Jersey Supreme Court and what impact that move would have on his chances to win the 2016 Republican nomination for president, assuming that he decides to run. [Read more…]

Book review: Dirty Wars (2013) by Jeremy Scahill

The book came out earlier this year and a documentary film with the same name was released in June and is available on demand on Netflix. Both cover the same ground but in different ways and are invaluable for anyone who wants to understand how the war of terror has evolved and where it is heading. In short, it is headed in the direction in which ‘the world is a battlefield’ (the subtitle of the book) and the US is now engaged in fighting eruptions of what it sees as terrorism in over 70 countries around the globe. [Read more…]

The appalling death toll of the Iraq war

When it comes to war, we tend to count only those who are directly killed by weaponry. But wars kill many more than that because there are the deaths that occur indirectly as well, because of the destruction of the infrastructure, hospitals, water and electricity supplies, transportation, etc. A group of academics from University of Washington, Johns Hopkins University, Simon Fraser University, and Mustansiriya University joined to try and estimate the total number and they come up with the appalling total of 504,000. [Read more…]

Will the shut down be repeated?

Now that the US government has re-opened and the debt ceiling raised leaving untouched the Affordable Care Act, the ostensible trigger for the crisis, the nature of the settlement has prompted speculation as to whether we are going to have a repeat of this in a few months. The deal involves three deadlines: December 13 is when a bipartisan group of legislators from both the House of Representative and the Senate are supposed to come up with a new budget plan; January 15 is when the most recent continuing resolution ends; and February 7 is when the debt ceiling will need to be raised again. [Read more…]

Abusive behavior by Israeli airport security

I have been writing regularly about the abusive behavior of TSA agents at US airports. But other countries are not exempt from this kind of behavior. This account is by a young woman who was subjected to humiliating and degrading treatment by the Israeli equivalent of the TSA at Ben Gurion airport, to the extent of having her breast and genital areas swabbed and having to give them her underwear because her bra was a ‘security threat’, all in the vicinity of a male security guard who smirked at her whenever he came into her direct presence. [Read more…]