Returning from the ragged edge — where people become few and trees many — to the urbanscape — where people are many and trees are few — has been a tad jarring. Various good, bad, scary, wonderful, interesting things happen in two months of cruising. I don’t have time even to summarise them right now. [...]

I’ll be lazy and just grab three feature articles from a mainstream “left” site for now. I figure most readers know the outline of the story, but wanted to acknowledge it publicly anyway. The consensus is true enough: the death toll in Haiti’s recent severe earthquake was far higher than it would have been in [...]

(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 [...]

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 culture [...]

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 [...]

…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 comes [...]

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 US to [...]

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 one can [...]

By YIFAT SUSSKIND Indigenous activists are putting up a fight ­ against violence. At the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, activists are focused on passing a declaration that recognizes the right of Indigenous Peoples to their lands, territories, and resources. This organizing drive is seeking international legal protection from the violence done to Indigenous [...]