The military in the United States portrays itself as endowed with the highest virtues—honor, duty, self-sacrifice, courage and patriotism. Politicians, entertainers, sports stars, the media, clerics and academics slavishly bow before the military machine, ignoring its colossal pillaging of state resources, the egregious war crimes it has normalized across the globe, its abject service not to democracy or freedom but …
G7’s Unrelenting Burning of Fossil Fuels Called ‘Weapon of Mass Destruction’ – Jon Queally
As G7 leaders gather in Germany this weekend, Oxfam International was among the scores of groups and thousands of people in the street in protest on Saturday as they slammed the world’s top industrialized nations for continuing to push energy and financial policies that are dooming the planet to climate misery and growing inequality while leading millions of people towards …
Faking It While the World Burns By Emily Schwartz Greco
Rex Tillerson, of all people, just did the climate movement a big favor. He didn’t hand the Sierra Club tens of millions of dollars to fight the coal industry like former New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg. Nor did the chairman and CEO of Exxon Mobil follow former hedge fund investor Tom Steyer‘s lead by giving political candidates with climate cred campaign …
Long-Awaited EPA Study Says Fracking Pollutes Drinking Water – Anastasia Pantsios
In 2010, Congress commissioned the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to study the impact of fracking on drinking water. The U.S. EPA released its long-awaited final draft of its report today, assessing how fracking for oil and gas can impact access to safe drinking water. The report refuted the conclusion arrived at by the U.S. EPA’s 2004 study that fracking poses no threat to drinking water, a conclusion used to exempt the …
State-Mandated Malpractice? Doctors Fight Anti-Choice Law That ‘Would Force Them to Lie’ – Sarah Lazare
A group of Arizona health care providers launched a fight on Thursday to overturn a recently enacted,controversial bill that would require doctors to lie to their patients by telling them it is possible to reverse amedication-induced abortion. In a lawsuit backed by the ACLU and the Center for Reproductive Rights, medical providers—including Planned Parenthood—charge that the new act is a “violation of medical ethics” …
The Dangers of Human Gene Editing – Ulson Gunnar
It is often said that if it can be imagined, it will inevitably be done. And such a sentiment could not be any truer in terms of applying genetic engineering and synthetic biology to the genomes of our planet’s organisms including humans themselves. While the process of synthesizing and arranging genetic code has many processes, perhaps none has been as …
The Yuan vs. the Dollar vs. Gold: One Step forward by China, One Step back for America? By Bill Holter
Each step forward by the Chinese to make a foothold for the yuan is one step backwards for the grip the dollar has held over the globe. This topic has several nuances to it, let’s take a look from several vantage points. As a spoiler, any “steps back” in today’s fiat currency world are steps toward a break in confidence. Call it deflation …
Insane Heat Wave in Alaska Put Temperatures Higher Than in Arizona – Cole Mellino
Alaska, along with the rest of the Arctic, has been warming even faster than other regions of the world due to climate change. That was the findings of a report this spring from the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, which found that the rate of warming will only continue to increase in the coming decades. The signs of rapid warming in Alaska were everywhere this past …
10 Pluses and Minuses of Being an Aging Baby Boomer By Will Durst
Population scientists describe the Baby Boom generation as anybody born between the years 1946 and 1964. Which means the youngest of the Baby Boomers turned 50 last year, and the oldest will turn 70 next year, which is just so wrong. We Boomers are the architects of the youth culture. We invented young people for crum’s sakes. We’re the Pepsi …
The End of Higher Education as We Know It by HENRY A. GIROUX
The academy is entering a dangerous time. Academics now find themselves entering a time when a more comprehensive politics that deals with the rise of authoritarianism through a variety of related fundamentalisms–economic, religious, political, and educational–is being overlooked as a result of an emerging limited and depoliticizing politics of civility and trauma. This is not meant to suggest that dehumanizing …