Новости за 26.03.2018

Under the regime of Donald Trump, the role of education in producing the formative cultures in and out of schools necessary to support critical thinking, civic courage, and critically engaged citizens appears to be disappearing. Words that speak to the truth and hold power accountable are in retreat as lies become normalized and the relationship between the truth and the citizen is treated either with disdain or simply ignored. The democratization of information has given way to the democratization... Читать дальше...

Early in Richard Nixon’s presidency, he told his chief of staff Bob Haldeman that his secret strategy for ending the Vietnam War was to threaten the use of nuclear weapons.  Nixon opined that President Eisenhower’s nuclear threats in 1953 brought a quick end to the Korean War, and that he planned to use the same principle of threatening maximum force.  Nixon called it the “madman theory,” getting the North Vietnamese to “believe…I might do anything to stop the war.” More

Today, the inevitable arrived. With Trump’s declaration of trade war on China – which POTUS seems to relish – Washington has initiated the first head-on confrontation between itself and Beijing. For more than two decades, the US Empire had watched with growing alarm as China steadily and persistently closed the gap between them in terms More

In scenes reminiscent of Mussolini’s black shirts, a dozen or so militants dressed in black, some wearing ski masks, brutally beat peaceful protesters who were participating in a general assembly while occupying the School of Law and Political Science in Montpellier, France. Armed with Tasers, cudgels with nails, and reinforced punching gloves, the assailants unleashed More

Today’s debunkers of climate change and evolution seem cut of the same cloth, and part of a long tradition traceable at least back to the days of Copernicus and Galileo. Whether it be the structure of the universe, human evolution, or the more recent reality of a climate changed by human combustion of fossil fuels More

This past week two events occurred simultaneously with seemingly no awareness of each other. The Iraq War marked its 15th anniversary. And millions of people joined in the “March For Our Lives” protests on gun violence. USA Today counted 800,000 marching in Washington D.C. alone. This would be the largest number of people to march More

Watching local Boston TV. Gosh, students from Somerville High School are much present in the anti-gun violence demo. (My daughter went there and organized at least one demo as a 17-year-old, against hate-crimes. There are some very politically sophisticated kids at that school. I feel so strangely proud.) Everyone except the NRA and Donald Jr. More

“Students need to understand the gravity of the current local and global situation, but only talking about doom and gloom is disempowering for youth. Asking them to have hope isn’t enough, either. It’s necessary to give them skills, information and knowledge so that they can have active hope and actually do stuff.” – Marika Ramsden More

Years ago, when I was president of a fairly militant labor union that represented 700 industrial workers at a Fortune 500 facility, our Executive Board was faced with a classic dilemma: Whether to do what we clearly recognized as the “right” thing, or to open ourselves to charges of cynicism and hypocrisy by doing the More

It might have made a bit more than a whimper had the US political scene not found itself in yet another paroxysm of the drama known as the Trump White House. Fifteen years before, governments aligning with the dogs of war decided, in defiance of millions of protestors globally, to invade a sovereign state. Papers More

Capitalism does not permit an even flow of economic resources. With this system, a small privileged few are enriched beyond conscience, and almost all others are doomed to be poor at some level. That’s the way the system works. And since we know that the system will not change, we are going to have to More

US president Donald Trump signed yet another massive government spending bill — $1.3 trillion — on March 23, after threatening a veto. Why did he threaten a veto? Because the bill doesn’t fund his cherished US-Mexico border wall idea, and because it doesn’t address the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that he’s threatened to More

In his groundbreaking work, Humanity: The World Before Religion, War, and Inequality, author Barry Brown has managed to definitively prove humankind’s natural tendencies to be peaceful, cooperative, and egalitarian. Brown’s work is the first ever to document the history of humankind before and after the advent of warfare. Barry takes the reader on a tour More