Posted at Huffingtonpost June 28 * Outside of the direct actors, we don’t know exactly what just happened in Honduras. But the spinning will start soon; and neither President Obama nor Secretary of State Clinton have called for the return of President Zelaya to his rightful office. They have made tepid statements of opposition to [...]

The link forwarded by NLK in the Iran elections thread was to a recent essay by Alf Hornborg. In that author’s own words, this paper serves as a fine summary of his thinking on the nature-culture-personhood triad, the fetishism of the machine, the progression of accumulation by dispossession, the devastation of the biosphere, and the [...]

Despite protests from other countries, the United States is expanding a top-secret effort to kill suspected terrorists with drone-fired missiles as it pursues an increasingly decentralized Al Qaeda, U.S. officials say. FULL For a systems development account of this, see Manuel De Landa’s War in the Age of Intelligent Machines. For an apologetic account, listen [...]

The election results in Iran may reflect the will of the Iranian people. Many experts are claiming that the margin of victory of incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was the result of fraud or manipulation, but our nationwide public opinion survey of Iranians three weeks before the vote showed Ahmadinejad leading by a more than 2 [...]

Anybody who was around through Crashlist, A-List, the exterminism discussions, the pre-crash analyses and reflections about the world system entering a chaotic out-cycle, you probably ran across stuff about the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. My own two cents in all that were The Bear, India Takes the Stage, The End Begins, and a few others. We’ve [...]

The iresistible, if not totally accurate, comparisons of Obama’s administration with that of the lionized FDR ought to include the decisive masterstroke of the cunning patrician Franklin Roosevelt to leave behind the Great Depression once and for all: war. We always hear about the Works Progress Administration and other quasi-socialist measures taken by Roosevelt’s government, [...]

Gene insertion is a major problem. You cannot direct where the splicing of the genetic construct will happen. It is well known that when you insert a genetic construct into the DNA network of a plant, you create changes in that network. As a result, you will get changes in the functionality of the plant’s [...]

The television show “Deadliest Catch” depicts commercial crab fishermen in the Bering Sea. Another, “Dirty Jobs,” shows all kinds of grueling work; one episode featured a guy who inseminates turkeys for a living. The weird fascination of these shows must lie partly in the fact that such confrontations with material reality have become exotically unfamiliar. [...]

Avnery on Israel’s impending law: How lucky we are to have the extreme Right standing guard over our democracy. This week, the Knesset voted by a large majority (47 to 34) for a law that threatens imprisonment for anyone who dares to deny that Israel is a Jewish and Democratic State. The private member’s bill, [...]