I’m normally not victimized, particularly not by pop culture. But I’m feeling more than a bit victimized by Game of Thrones (the books) and was separately asked this week by a buddy for an explanation as to why the series has become a mass phenomenon. That question is more important than my frustration, but I’ll address both and hope that readers will also give their perspective on what the series says about the zeitgeist.
Read more...A Real News Network interview with Chris Hedges precipitated a lively, thoughtful discussion of the mess we are in as a civilization and whether we can pull ourselves out of what looks like a nosedive.
I thought readers might enjoy continuing the exchange, and the latest release in this Real News Network series should provide ample grist for debate.
Read more...Yves here. The high social cost of inequality – the fact that it shortens the lives of people at the top of the pecking order along with the lower orders – has long been excluded from discussion in polite company in the US.
Read more...Yves here. Chris Hedges opens a new series on Real News Network by discussing how dire our current situation is, particularly from an ecological perspective, and the reluctance to acknowledge it and take corrective measures.
Read more...Yves here. I wonder if the pattern described in this article, which is basically a brain drain of inventors to the US, is playing a meaningful role in the degradation of public education in the US. Why do the elites need to care about home-grown “talent” if they exploit the investments in schooling made by other countries?
Read more...Sadly, we’ve entered into a world where the word “corruption” has become inadequate to describe the many and varied practices of profitable abuse by the powerful and connected of their inferiors. Like the popular (and sadly apocryphal) accounts Inuit with their numerous words for “snow,” we need more refined and granular terminology to describe various types of corruption. Hugh uses “kleptocracy” but that’s a name for a system of governance, not particular behaviors within that system.
Read more...Yves here. The latest post at TomDispatch, Creating a Military-Industrial-Immigration Complex, How to Turn the U.S.-Mexican Border into a War Zone by Todd Miller, describes how the US border with Mexico, which is being defined more and more generously, has become an R&D lab for US security operations, as well as a new profit opportunity for defense contractors, who are looking for ways to repurpose combat equipment for domestic use. To put none too fine a point on its, the police state will be perfected on illegal immigrants or in-the-wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time Americans mainly of color, and then deployed on the rest of us. The 17 city paramilatary crackdown on Occupy was just the warm-up act.
Read more...The Guardian presented this video by Human Rights organisation Reprieve and Bafta award-winning director Asif Kapadia, US actor and rapper Yasiin Bey (formerly known as Mos Def), which is based on leaked military documents describing the standard operating procedures for these force-feedings.
Read more...By Andrew Dittmer, who recently finished his PhD in mathematics at Harvard and is currently continuing work on his thesis topic. He also taught mathematics at a local elementary school. Andrew enjoys explaining the recent history of the financial sector to a popular audience
Although the incident occurred several days ago, the responses among French readers were so extraordinary that they merit further attention. For many, the incident represented an unmistakable turning point:
There is a certain concept of the world that is disappearing definitively.
And so I have selected a representative sample of these responses, both from Le Figaro (center right) and Le Monde (center left), and formed them into a conversation:
Read more...This Real News Network report discusses two human rights violations against Palestinian children that were first publicized by an Israeli organization and have since been investigated by the UN: abusive confinement and prosecution, and using them as human shields.
Read more...Higher education used to be free for millions of Americans. A transaction tax on the financial houses could help make it free again
Read more...If you think Independence Day came to be a national holiday as an organic expression of pride in our successful rebellion against England, you need to think twice.
Read more...Average national income is a notoriously imperfect measure of the average person’s well-being.
Read more...Inquality.org, which is a portal for news and data about income inequality, has published a particularly well-presented paper, The Political History of American Inequality, by Colin Gordon, a professor of history at the University of Iowa who has focused on 20th century American public policy and political economy. I’ve sampled it, and it’s clear and engagingly written and has great interactive chart porn,
Read more...Joe Firestone reviews the state of play on the Social Security/Medicare “reform” debate.
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