Nile Stanton Back in the age when slavery was deemed acceptable by many people, it was no doubt more widely and readily accepted by slave owners and those in the numerous businesses that financially profited from it. I imagine that shipping businesses that profited from transporting slaves were deemed vital and in the national interest,…
James Keye The power/economic elite want to know the mood and movements of society just as meteorologists want to examine the measurements of weather systems. But rather than preparing for a tornado or hurricane, the elite wish to prepare for and prevent challenges to their impunity. Massive surveillance is their primary method of prediction. Together…
W.J. Astore Back in 2010, I wrote the following article on American sports for Huffington Post. With the end of “March Madness” and the beginning of baseball season, the time seems right to revive it. I love watching my hometown teams and experiencing the vicarious thrill of victory (as well as the agony of defeat),…
b. traven In the run up to the Iraq war in 2002-03, Prime Minister Tony Blair of Great Britain worked so hard to get American approval that he was widely labelled as George W. Bush’s “poodle.” But who today yelps loudest when the kings of Saudi Arabia (that poor excuse for a nation) say “bark”?…
P. J. Sullivan There is a wireless revolution going on. From “smart” phones to “smart” grids to Wi-Fi to unmanned drones to driverless cars, everything seems to be going wireless, with little or no consideration of the consequences to human health. There are red flags linking wireless radiation to serious disorders: leukemia, brain tumors, heart arrhythmias,…
Michael Gallagher Thanks to my Irish heritage, I have my fair share of the melancholy of the bogs. It’s true we Irish joke a lot, but that doesn’t mean we’re optimistic. Our best jokes are invariably ironic—e.g. when a priest becomes a bishop, he’s never thereafter served a bad meal or told the truth—and so…
W.J. Astore America’s nuclear triad of land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), sub-launched ballistic missiles (Ohio-class nuclear submarines), and nuclear-capable bombers is a relic of the Cold War. The triad may have made some sense in a MAD (as in mutually assured destruction) way in the 1960s and 1970s, at the height of the Cold War with…
Michael Gallagher If we can believe the N.Y. Times—and if we can’t believe the N.Y. Times, whom can we believe?—the American Catholic bishops meeting in Baltimore last month led to professions of confusion about what course to follow in the wake of the recent synod in Rome devoted to the family. Most of the bishops…
Steve Naidamast In my last two pieces (“Why Nothing Works – Parts I & II”), I discussed the failure of software development to support the transactions in daily life dominated by current software foundations. Further, the misuse of modern software capabilities is having deleterious effects sociologically across a wide spectrum of users, especially here in…
Dennis Showalter. Introduction by William Astore. Over the next four years, historians around the world will grapple with the meaning and legacies of the “Great War” fought one hundred years ago (1914-1918). An epochal event in world history, World War I has as many meanings as it has had historians. Among those historians, Dennis Showalter…
The Contrary Perspective 