Posts tagged United States
Can internet activism turn into a real political movement?
There is a direct line between the attacks on September 11, 2001 — the most significant instance of blowback in the history of the CIA — and the events of 1979. In that year, revolutionaries threw both the Shah and the Americans out of Iran, and the CIA, with full presidential authority, began its largest ever clandestine operation: the secret arming of Afghan freedom fighters to wage a proxy war against the Soviet Union, which involved the recruitment and training of militants from all over the Islamic world. Steve Coll’s book is a classic study of blowback and is a better, fuller reconstruction of this history than the Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States (the “9/11 Commission Report” published by Norton in July).
Voting for Romney is like hooking up with the last single person at the bar at 4 a.m.
Field of Angels
Angeles City is known to many as one of the country’s food capitals for its exotic Kapampangan delicacies. People flock to the province for the food-adventure it offers, particularly the curious, the daring and the fearless. But little would we, even us Filipinos, know that it’s also thriving on another delicacy: strip clubs.
When Israelis in the occupied territories now claim that they have to defend themselves, they are defending themselves in the sense that any military occupier has to defend itself against the population they are crushing… You can’t defend yourself when you’re militarily occupying someone else’s land. That’s not defense. Call it what you like, it’s not defense. —Noam Chomsky
(Image a re-post.)
The Movie was Fake. The Mission was Real.
Argo (2012)—a heart-stopping political epic of how CIA operatives extracted six US diplomats out of Iran when the Revolutionary Guards seized the US Embassy in Tehran and held dozes more of the embassy’s staff as hostage. Ben Affleck stars and directs the gripping story of how the Canadian government, though its ambassador to Tehran, also took the risk to secretly house the six who had escaped the siege and gambled diplomatic tiff with Iran—which resulted in the closing of its embassy there. Superb screenplay, photography, cinematography and scoring! Unfortunately, the timing of the release of the film couldn’t be any more blatant—when the West wrestles with the imagined evils it has against Iran and hypes up some of the most dangerous steps in geo-politics along with other issues in the region.
Just kidding. —Mitt Romney
For my American friends and followers—I am not American, but today I hope you will vote wisely and, indeed, vote for progress. Believe it or not, your vote has—in many direct and indirect ways—a huge effect on the lives even of non-Americans.
This is deplorable! GOP robocalls give false voting locations to Democrats.
We’re tracking this right now on our voting-problems map.
America could do better than Barack Obama; sadly, Mitt Romney does not fit the bill.
Let me make a very simple proposition: rape is rape. It is a crime. So these various distinctions of rape don’t make very much sense to me. This is why you don’t want a bunch of politicians, mostly male, making decisions about women’s health care.
Daily chart: who’s arming the developing world? Arms deliveries to developing countries last year were the highest since 2004, totalling $28 billion, or around 60% of global sales. America and Russia, the world’s leading arms suppliers, accounted for around two-thirds of the deliveries. —The Economist
Honduras Gone Wrong: How Playing Tegucigalpa as a Proxy is Undercutting U.S. Influence
Since the June 2009 military coup, violence and human rights abuses have spiked in Honduras. In some ways Washington is responsible for this dismal turn by backing the country’s new leaders and sending more military aid. Fixing the problem will be tough, but it is possible. Dana Frank is Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Republican Vice-Presidential candidate Paul Ryan pretending to wash (CLEAN!!!) dishes at an Ohio soup kitchen. Desperate attempt at gaining positive publicity from the media. But in truth, who else in the United States will ever preach this out other than FOX News?
YouTube user: Do you honestly think he’d be doing this shit if he was elected […]? This is all framed and mass propaganda…but, it was an epic failure.
Out January 2013. Wouldn’t mind getting it for a late-Christmas present, though.
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