A cluster of news stories, whiffing slightly of hope, crossed my virtual desk over the last couple of days. Their scope varies from the global (UN) to the regional (U of Guelph, ON) to the very local (town of Sedgwick Maine). But their conclusions are harmonious: food sovereignty is a hot issue, agribusiness propaganda is [...]

Politics, said Bismarck, is the art of the possible. Yet we are living in a time when politics as widely practised is quite the reverse: the art and worship of the Impossible, namely of the impossible dream of fostering infinite greed, infinite accumulation, infinite “growth,” on a finite planet; of fighting infinite war to control [...]

We’re all familiar with the myth: we learned it in school. It goes something like this: Once Upon a Time, in the 1960′s, a crew of brilliant whitefellas in lab coats Saved the World by revolutionising farming and eliminating world hunger. Their new, advanced mechanical/chemical farming methods — vast areas of monocrop, heavy tractors, giant [...]

Stan Cox is on a roll over at CommonDreams.org; in a percipient and timely essay he reminds us that simply cultivating our back (or front, in defiance of the HOA) yard is not enough to fix the corporate version of agriculture. Our dependence on staple “commodity” crops like grain and oil-seeds (hard to grow on [...]

By reader request a rant of DeAnander’s from Stan’s Man on Fire review thread has been promoted to a frontpage article. I believe Stan posted this review in headbanging frustration at the liberal idiocy of this recent “fair and balanced” discussion of porn at Alternet. The two “debating opponents” — neither of whom, of course, [...]

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 [...]

by Audrey I received an email from the mother of one of my students last week, directing me to a news story involving her son. He and two other area youth created a mural in downtown Mount Clemens, in a public space by a fountain. They used sidewalk chalk – the chunky kind that you’d [...]

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

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 [...]