(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 crisis […]

Over at IA Stan has posted link to a video about abuses in the US meat industry. Here’s a thread to discuss it…

It’s common knowledge that the Israeli occupation, and Israel in general, are Third Rails in US public discourse — touch them and die (politically, anyway). Through a peculiar combination of (1) commemoration (some would say exploitation) of the Nazi epoch, (2) down-n-dirty realpolitik in DC, and (3) the strong Biblical literalist strain in American […]

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 of […]

When I was discharged from the army, one of the many things I was relieved about was that I would never again, as the lone female in my unit, have to share transportation with the rest of the guys when we were on travel. I would never again have to listen to Howard Stern on […]

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 […]

Dedicated to three American combat veterans: John Brown, Harriet Tubman and Crazy Horse. They disobeyed.
When I was approached about doing this commentary, it was because I am a veteran.
In fact, I made a career of the military. That career took me from the cynical and genocidal invasion of Vietnam to the equally cynical invasion of […]

…is the opening section of the third chapter of Maria Mies’ canonical Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale - Women in the International Divison of Labor (Zed Books, 1986, 1998). It is a theoretical treatment of the whole business of the male-conquest theme, and how that theme maps onto the “civilized-backward” episteme that […]

A few closing thoughts for the evening… on immigration. The Republican chiefs — beholden to the same business interests as Democratic chiefs for big chunks of campaign cash — are now being hoisted on their own petard by the demands of capital accumulation. One of those demands is cheap, throwaway labor inside the […]

I just posted a thingy on Huffingtonpost about the USS Liberty, the American intelligence vessel that was attacked 40 years ago June 8th in international waters by the Israeli Air Force. I lke Huffpo, and I’m grateful they allow me to blog. They get bajillions of hits each day; and the comments that […]