by Henry Pelifian The endless political indulgence of American Presidential elections is an arena devoid of reality like a crowing rooster with his cock-a-doodle-doo. The presidential campaign crowing seeks to mold a new reality proposed by presidential roosters and now hens. Oh, for a political election process lasting 90 to 120 days with debates costing…
W.J. Astore Over the last ten years in the United States. more than 280,000 Americans have died because of guns. Over that same period, roughly 350,000 Americans have died on the roads in vehicular accidents. That’s roughly 630,000 Americans dying every decade either in road accidents or by gunshots, which is roughly the number of…
W.J. Astore The year was 1915. Europe, indeed much of the world, was embroiled in the devastating Great (or World) War. Under President Woodrow Wilson, the United States was proud to have stayed out of the war, the massive bloodletting of which seemed peculiarly European, an “Old World” form of militarized madness that most Americans…
Nile Stanton In a thought-provoking article by Dominic Johnson, Richard Wrangham, and Stephen Rosen of Harvard, the authors observe that “Human decision-making has been shown to violate rational choice theory in a variety of contexts….” “[S]ome of the most intriguing and important examples concern how people perceive and react to risk. Most notably, people appear…
W.J. Astore Here are a few excerpts from my latest article at TomDispatch.com. I urge you to read the entire article here. Thank you! War on drugs. War on poverty. War in Afghanistan. War in Iraq. War on terror. The biggest mistake in American policy, foreign and domestic, is looking at everything as war. When a war…
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,…
Daniel N. White Aggie jokes are the Texas version of Polack jokes, jokes about the students at Texas A&M University as rural yokels lost at sea in modern life. The foil in Aggie jokes are graduates of UT Austin, referred to by Aggies as T-sips. Everyone everywhere in the world tells similar jokes about their…
Richard Sahn Driving us ever closer to the brink of World War III and possible nuclear annihilation is the bi-partisan, seemingly all-American political position that we “never negotiate with terrorists.” That means having no diplomatic relations with the “bad guys.” “Terrorists,” we’re taught to believe, must be followers of Satan himself. (Witness Joe Biden’s “Gates…
Richard Sahn Recently, I came across a post on Facebook that reminded me of the Cold War era in the 1960s. The caption read: “Biggest question I ask people who say bad things about this country. Why are you still living here?” I dare say there are millions of Americans who share this FB “friend’s”…
By the Editors On June 6, 1944, seventy years ago today, allied forces attacked the Germans at Normandy in France in an immense cross-channel invasion. Omaha Beach was an especially nasty kill zone for American troops, as re-created in Steven Spielberg’s film, “Saving Private Ryan.” After that long and deadly first day, an allied beachhead…
The Contrary Perspective 