I felt a little frisson of interest and anticipation when I saw an article at Energy Bulletin entitled “Gender Issues”. I thought it might be a long-overdue discussion of gender and technocracy, gender and industrial technology, gender and power and recklessness, risk discounting, and other interesting issues. I thought it might address the dysfunctionality of [...]

(excerpted from Sex & War, 2005 which is slightly cheating, but we haven’t had a FFR for a while) On September 24, 2004, CNN reported charges brought against three US Navy SEALS in the death of an Iraqi detainee, part of a much larger damage control investigation in the wake of the Abu Ghraib photo [...]

What do you think of when you hear the words “Viet Nam AntiWar Movement” or “AntiWar Movement of the Sixties”? The odds are that you think of a peaceful, colourful, noisy demonstration of hippies and college kids confronting the uniformed forces of State power — peace signs and tie-dye, protesters placing flowers into the barrels [...]

I have been working as a stone mason’s apprentice for a few months now… necessity, more than anything else. Believe me, as the highs go daily into the nineties and my aching, approaching-56-year hands wake me every night with aching, this is not some weird attempt to recapture my lost youth. Just haven’t found a [...]

Open thread for discussion (if any) of Insurgent American article. Something to be Enthusiastic About: thinking about Demand Reduction

(From a diary at European Tribune:) We may have to pack light to make it through the next century, or indeed the next millennium. If we have to pack light, what do we really need to preserve that essential ability to feel enthusiasm, a genuine pleasure in life? Most of what I own I don’t really need or am not truly attached to; this is something you find out not only when packing for a journey, but when packing to move (which I’m doing now, and that’s another story). Is it worth packing and paying for the larger size of truck and toting the heavy boxes? Maybe not. Maybe I can live just fine without it. I suspect that the same applies to us (affluent Westerners) as a culture; much of what we have isn’t really all that wonderful — not worth throwing away a perfectly good planet or killing people for, anyway — and we could be quite happy with a lot less material cruft and a much lower energy budget.

So I’m proposing the question — to myself and to us all: suppose you’re packing light for a long journey; suppose you don’t have infinite energy to haul heavy baggage around; suppose you don’t have infinite suitcases to pack tons of junk into; what would you stuff into the backpack and take on the train, and what would you leave behind and hardly miss as soon as the journey started?

We’d like to see anything of interest, when and how people can, that examines the inter-phenomenal dynamics of environmental degradation — starting with the Mediterranean deforestation, military expansionism, and the political consolidations of so-called “barbarians,” during the fall of the Roman Empire. Anything on the entry of “barbarians” into Roman military service is also interesting. [...]

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Hezbollah’s big challenge By Pepe Escobar BEIRUT – “You are in heaven and those who killed you will go to hell,” reads a poster in a middle-class, predominantly Sunni neighborhood in north Beirut. Those depicted in heaven include Saddam Hussein, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, former Lebanese prime minister Rafik al-Hariri (killed in a car bombing [...]

Not his words, mine. A suicide bombing in the Parliamentary cafeteria of the Green Zone means, basically, the most secure perimeter in Iraq was penetrated. That is a shift. Quantum. The United States military, oxidized by four years of occupation, has crossed the event horizon for a tactical defeat in Iraq, more humiliating perhaps than [...]