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…
W.J. Astore Yes, I know it’s a harsh claim that Members of Congress don’t care about sending your son or daughter off to war. Partly that’s because more than half of them are millionaires. And if they’re not millionaires now, they will be when they leave office and cash in as lobbyists and similar Beltway…
b. traven In his new “memoir” Robert Gates bites the hand of President Obama, who foolishly let him stay on as Secretary of Defense from the incompetent administration of George W. Bush. In Gates’s book, which lavishes praise on the steadfastness and intelligence of Bush in pushing war, Gates faults his new boss Barack Obama…
W.J. Astore At TomDispatch.com, Tom Engelhardt has an especially fine exposé of the National Security State as a religion with its own priesthood, holy books, dogma, and true believers/followers. I recommend reading the entire article, but I do want to highlight some implications of his argument. Like the Catholic Church (and I’m Catholic), the National…
b. traven I am not a New Yorker but I do like that city. I have lived, at one time or another, in all three of the great cities in our country, New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. Each has its virtues and its downsides and all now seem to be in the hands of…
“War is like love; it always finds a way.” So wrote Bertolt Brecht, and when it comes to American politics and foreign policy in 2014, you can bet on Brecht being right. There is no major anti-war party in the USA today. Despite claims to fiscal austerity, Democrats and Republicans fall over themselves to fully…
W.J. Astore President Obama’s recent ten-year commitment to Afghanistan (until 2024 and beyond) put me to mind of a line from The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), the classic Western starring Clint Eastwood. Eastwood plays the “outlaw” who just wants to be left alone in the aftermath of a brutal civil war. But another character, the vicious…
W.J. Astore If you’re in education, you’ve heard the acronym STEM. It stands for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. As a country, the USA is behind in STEM, so there are lots of calls (and lots of federal money available) for improvements in STEM. Usually the stated agenda is competitiveness. If the US wants to…
b. traven As a repentant psychologist with some experience in aberrant and self-delusional human behavior, I was recently struck by what passes for meaningful and heartfelt discourse in American conservative circles. The subject: Nelson Mandela. The conversants: the smarmy conservative Rick Santorum and the bullying Bill O’Reilly. Their conversation would be ludicrous if it wasn’t…
W.J. Astore As a college professor, I’m in the education business, a word that repels me but which nowadays is undeniably true. One of the marketing slogans where I teach is “A degree is measured by its success in the workplace.” In other words, if a college degree leads to a decent salary in the…
The Contrary Perspective 