W.J. Astore A great book on the brutality of war and its aftershocks is Scott Anderson’s Triage (Scribner, 1998). Anderson, a war journalist and author, captures the inhumanity of war as well as its lingering effects on war veterans themselves and the people in their lives. One particular passage in Triage captures the intrinsic nature…
W.J. Astore The United States spends nearly a trillion dollars a year on national defense, to include wars, homeland security, a bewildering array of intelligence agencies, and the maintenance of nuclear weapons. Are we buying greater security with all this money? Consider the following fact. A private contractor hired to vet security clearances for US…
W.J. Astore I can’t remember where exactly, but I stumbled across this apothegm of Karl Marx: “In every era, the ideas of the rulers are the ruling ideas.” Striving for even more brevity, I truncated it to rulers’ ideas rule. Contrarians of the world should unite to identify and challenge these ruling ideas. When they…
By Don Rose. Introduction by William Astore. Charter schools, in theory, offer advantages to public schools. They’re advertised as offering “choice” to concerned parents, who shop for the “best” schools as measured by test scores and related data. They promise to hold teachers accountable. They say they offer novelty in pedagogy. But in practice…
W.J. Astore A concern I have about the new borderless digital world is its ephemeral nature. Even though I keep a blog and write a lot online, I still prefer books and hardcopy. I clip newspaper articles. I file them away and then occasionally resuscitate them and use them in class when I teach. Hardcopy…
b. traven When will we learn that the shell game is the only game Obama knows well? He wants us to believe that allowing a private company to collect all of our private conversations, and saving them for later access by the government, is not abridging our Fourth Amendment rights to privacy. He hopes we…
Also at Huffington Post In his non-apology about “bridgegate,” Governor Chris Christie lost my vote. In his “mistakes were clearly made” pabulum, Christie failed the test of leadership. It doesn’t matter whether you think Christie is a bully. It doesn’t matter how much Christie knew about the bridge lane closures and when he knew it.…
Daniel N. White. Introduction by William Astore. Unbeknownst to most Americans, the U.S. military has embraced special forces (SEALs, Green Berets, and the like) and has been deploying them globally to at least eighty different countries. There’s an allure to special forces and the special ops community captured in the country’s admiration of SEAL Team…
Richard Sahn In the tradition of Jonathan Swift, I have a modest proposal to improve voter ID laws: a “stand your ground” law outside of the polls. You know: the same law in Florida which helped to exonerate George Zimmerman from the charge of murdering Trayvon Martin. With a “stand your ground” law at the…
Stuart Lyle Freed former Pussy Riot members, Maria Alyokhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, have unveiled a plan to start a new organization, Zone of Law. The name, according to a Rolling Stone report, is a play on the Russian word “zone,” which can refer to prison camps. It seems that outrage in the West over their…
The Contrary Perspective 