No sentient being is safe when “radicals” and “activists” are lining up in the name of making the fast food industry a more agreeable place to work. Of course the workers stuck at these jobs need help, but is anyone willing to think long-term? What kind of vision for the future are we promoting when we make it more palatable for humans to give their daily energy as a cog in an ecocidal machine?
Radical Islam is the last refuge of the Muslim poor. The mandated five prayers a day give the only real structure to the lives of impoverished believers. The careful rituals of washing before prayers in the mosque, the strict moral code, along with the understanding that life has an ultimate purpose and meaning, keep hundreds of millions of destitute Muslims from despair.
Local groups are the frontline of resistance to unconventional gas across the country. On Sunday 18 August they will be coming together from all four corners of the UK to join with the people of Balcombe to show the world that we stand united in rejection of unconventional gas in our communities.
The Egyptian crucible has broken. The “unity” of Egypt – that all-embracing, patriotic, essential glue that has bound the nation together since the overthrow of the monarchy in 1952 and the rule of Nasser – has melted amid the massacres, gun battles and fury of yesterday’s suppression of the Muslim Brotherhood. A hundred dead – 200, 300 “martyrs” – makes no difference to the outcome: for millions of Egyptians, the path of democracy has been torn up amid live fire and brutality. What Muslim seeking a state based on his or her religion will ever trust the ballot box again?
Like ‘terrorism’, it turns out that ‘advocacy journalism’ is a sin committed only by opponents of established power. The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – quintessential terrorist acts – are not described as ‘US nuclear terror’. Similarly, reporters and commentators who endlessly obscure and even celebrate their government’s crimes are not described as ‘advocacy journalists’.
We all remember President Obama’s smiling face, full of hope and trust, when he repeatedly delivered the motto of his first campaign, “Yes, we can!”—we can get rid of the cynicism of the Bush era and bring justice and welfare to the American people. Now that the United States continues with covert operations and expands its intelligence network, spying even on their allies, we can imagine protesters shouting at Obama: “How can you use drones for killing? How can you spy even our allies?” Obama looks back at them and murmurs with a mockingly evil smile: “Yes we can…”
It turns out that the NSA’s domestic and world-wide surveillance apparatus is even more extensive than we thought. Bluntly: The government has commandeered the Internet. Most of the largest Internet companies provide information to the NSA, betraying their users. Some, as we’ve learned, fight and lose. Others cooperate, either out of patriotism or because they believe it’s easier that way.
That Wikileaks represents journalism in its purest form is clear from the aggressive reaction of the establishment. Any story about Wikileaks or its editor-in-chief attracts large numbers of reader comments. While astroturfers are attracted to the fray like sharks to blood, countless misconceptions and outright lies are regurgitated by large numbers of other posters for public display. Given that the propaganda playbook (focus public attention on the messenger to distract from the story) has been thrown at Wikileaks and Julian Assange in particular, this is hardly a surprise. Every article must contain the obligatory ‘rape allegations’ line and even respected newspapers like the Guardian, which produces so much fine reporting on other issues, churns out error-strewn pieces which are often outright smears.
The goal of these laws, it would appear, is to keep consumers from seeing where modern meat really comes from. Considering that 94 percent of the American public believes that animals raised for food should be free from abuse and cruelty, the modern meat industry has some good reasons to fear the public finding out that Old MacDonald’s farm isn’t so happy these days.
“How easy is it for you to shift your belief system from ‘I totally believe in my government’ to ‘Oh My God! What’s going on?’ That’s exactly where I went in all of this.” – Albert N. Stubblebine III
Readers outside the UK may not be aware of what’s been going on in this country in the past few weeks. In a nutshell, our politicians have taken advantage of the long hot lazy days of summer, with lots of people away, to allow in the energy companies to begin exploratory drilling work for shale gas… otherwise known as fracking.
In this sense, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are more accurately perceived as the opening salvos of the Cold War, rather than the final shots fired in the Second World War – the Cold War was, after all, defined essentially as a balance of nuclear powers; realpolitik and the primacy of power where the arms race and military insanity took supremacy over diplomacy.
