I usually don’t follow closely stories about massive manhunts for killers and initially largely ignored the story of Christopher Dorner, the former Los Angeles Police Department policemen who killed three people all connected in some way to the LAPD and then went on the run. It seemed on the surface to be yet another case of a person snapping under the stresses of life and lashing out at those around him. [Read more…]
Once in a while a story comes along that reminds me to be careful about making sweeping generalizations about people. Take Appalachia, the rural and mountainous region that spans many states in the southeastern United States. While a place of great natural beauty, it has long been poor and rural. But ever since the hit 1972 film Deliverance came out, the people of that region have also suffered under the impression that they are uneducated, narrow-minded, inbred, hillbillies. Who can forget the famous dueling banjos scene from the film that cemented this impression?
The Daily Show had two good segments on the US policy of using drones to kill people. It looks at the so-called legal rationale that the Obama administration created to justify its own actions and how the language in it is designed to deceive rather than clarify. The memo is a deliberate exercise in the cynical use of language and reveals the utter hypocrisy of the Obama administration on this issue. [Read more…]
We already heard of the killing of people carrying out polio vaccinations in Pakistan because of alarmist fears raised by the Taliban that vaccination was part of a western plot, fears that were fuelled by the horrendous decision by the US government to use a fake vaccination scheme to try and unearth Osama bin Laden. [Read more…]
Immigrants are in the news with the last election catapulting them into prominence as people began to realize that they are a significant voting bloc and are projected to grow larger as a percentage of the population. The Pew research organization released on Thursday the results of a survey they have done on the views of second-generation Hispanics and Asians as compared to their parents and there are hopeful signs for how social views will evolve in the future. [Read more…]
News reports have emerged that the US has been using a base in Saudi Arabia to launch its drone attacks in the region. What is most interesting is that big media outlets like the New York Times and the Washington Post have known about this for more than a year but rrefrained from publishing it at the request of the government. [Read more…]
Readers may recall my earlier post on the efforts by the Israel lobby to interfere in the running of an event scheduled for today at Brooklyn College in New York City. [Read more…]
The Irish government has finally admitted that it colluded with the Catholic Church in sending young girls to laundry sweatshops run by the Magdalene sisters, where they suffered shocking abuse at the hands of the nuns and priests. [Read more…]
While some of us are appalled at the trend of US president’s arrogating to themselves increasing powers so that they approach that of imperial leaders, with president Obama’s preposterous claim of having the legal authority to murder anyone anywhere in the world being the most extreme manifestation of this tendency, there is a country whose leader is moving in the opposite direction. [Read more…]
The drone campaigns in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and who knows where else have resulted in the deaths of many innocent people who just happened to be there and of these many were children. Robert Dreyfuss writes about the remarkably callous attitude some in the military take towards these deaths. [Read more…]