"I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood."
Please read Mind Detox and disseminate it far and wide!
Underscoring CJO's and TPC's unwavering support for animal liberation and radical environmentalism, I am now associate editor for both Cyrano's and for the Institute for Critical Animal Studies, which is positioned at the front lines of the intellectual battle to save non-human animals and the Earth from the twin juggernauts of speciesism and capitalism. Please visit our site at http://www.criticalanimalstudies.org/.
1. “POLITICS AND THE ARTS, INTERNATIONALISM, AND ACTIVISM: AN INTERVIEW WITH GARY CORSERI BY LLOYD ROWSEY
In other words, the arts—aesthetics—are fundamental to our lives, as much a reason that people fight for their country as mom, flag and apple pie. Every time they play the “Star-Spangled Banner” at a ball-game, the political elite are devoting a couple of minutes to the arts. Unfortunately, it’s bad art. In the case of the “Star-Spangled Banner”—the melody is from an old drinking song!–, it’s very bad art. Hardly anyone knows the words, and even fewer can sing the high notes. But, it’s rousing, martial music that gets people in a fighting mood. Add the pageantry of pretty cheerleaders waving the flag, and we can see how the boys get all sentimental and stiff with patriotism! http://www.bestcyrano.org/THOMASPAINE/?p=1350
2. Chomsky on The Election, Economy, War, and Peace
These observations suggest an interesting thought experiment. What would be the content of the “Obama brand” if the public were to become “participants” rather than mere “spectators in action”? It is an experiment well worth undertaking, and there is good reason to suppose that the results might point the way to a saner and more decent world.http://www.bestcyrano.org/cyrano/?p=2270
3. Don’t tell my mother I work at the White House. She thinks I play the piano in a whore house by Bill Blum
The same lack of awareness about superior conditions in other countries extends to health care, working hours, vacation time, maternity leave, child care, unemployment insurance, and a host of other social and economic benefits. In short, amongst the developed nations, the United States is the worst place to be a worker, to be sick, to seek a university education, to be a parent; or, in the land of two million incarcerated, to exercise certain rights or be a defendant in court.http://www.bestcyrano.org/cyrano/?p=1981
4. The War Against Toys and Pharma-ganda by Adam Engel
And every time THE MAN tries to crack down, the network of rebel thrill-seekers grows until Kris - who grows a Che Guevara beard and changes his name to “Claus” after a wanted poster names the clean-shaven Kris Kringle PUBLIC ENEMY NUMBER ONE - is welcome among fellow travelers and creatures of the woods like Che himself among the peasants.http://www.bestcyrano.org/THOMASPAINE/?p=1337
5. How these gibbering numbskulls came to dominate Washington by George Monbiot
This tragedy has been assisted by the American fetishisation of self-education. Though he greatly regretted his lack of formal teaching, Abraham Lincoln’s career is repeatedly cited as evidence that good education, provided by the state, is unnecessary: all that is required to succeed is determination and rugged individualism. This might have served people well when genuine self-education movements, like the one built around the Little Blue Books in the first half of the 20th century, were in vogue. In the age of infotainment, it is a recipe for confusion.http://www.bestcyrano.org/cyrano/?p=1931
6. ‘Sticking it to the Man,’ 21st Century style….. Paul Watson interviewed by Jason Miller
He pulled the trigger and hit the whale at point blank range in the head. The large bull screamed and fell back in the water in a spreading pool of its own hot blood. And as the whale struggled in agony on the surface, rolling and thrashing, I caught his eye and he saw me. Suddenly I saw a trail of bloody bubbles coming swiftly towards us and the whale rose up out of the sea at an angle directly beside us and was about to fall upon our small fragile inflatable boat. And I looked up into that eye, an eye the size of my fist and what I saw there changed my life forever – I saw understanding, I saw awareness. That whale knew what we were doing and with a great effort pulled himself back and sank into the sea and I saw his eye disappear below the surface and he died. He could have taken our lives but in his last moments he spared us and thus I am indebted to that whale for my life.http://www.bestcyrano.org/THOMASPAINE/?p=1142
7. The God That Failed: The 30-Year Lie of the Market Cult by Chris Floyd
This was the cult that captured the governments of the United States and Britain (among others), as well as the Republican and Democratic parties, and the Conservative and Labour parties as well. And for almost thirty years, its ruthless doctrines have been put into practice. Regulation and oversight of financial markets were systematically stripped away or rendered toothless. Essential public services were sold off, for chump change, to corporate interests. Public spending on anything other than making war, threatening war and profiting from war was pared back or eliminated. Such public spending that did remain was forever under threat and derided, like the remnants of some pagan faith surviving in isolated backwaters. http://www.bestcyrano.org/cyrano/?p=1869
8. Divide and Deceive By Rowan Wolf
The language of division is meant to inflame. It is meant to make targets of certain populations for random and mass attack, It is meant to create fear on the part of the targeted and drive them back to their places of invisibility and second-class citizenship (or no citizenship). It was what drove the witch trials of the early United States, the horrors of lynching, the brutality of the reservations, the disenfranchisement of Japanese and Mexican Americans, and the incarceration, beatings, and murders of gays and lesbians from the twentieth century to today.http://www.bestcyrano.org/avenger212/?p=453
9. The Killing Fields of South Africa: Eco-Wars, Species Apartheid, and Total Liberation by Steve Best
This essay supports the rights of elephants to live and thrive in suitable natural environments and opposes all justifications for culling elephants and exploiting African wildlife in general.[3] My purview is much broader than elephants, hunting, and the ivory trade, however, as I see the human-elephant “conflict” as a microcosm of the global social and ecological crisis that involves phenomena such as transnational corporate power, state totalitarianism, militarism, chronic conflict and warfare, terrorism, global warming, species extinction, air and water pollution, and resource scarcity. The approach of the South African government and people toward the “elephant problem” has global significance and is an indicator of whether or not humankind as a whole can steer itself away from immanent disaster and learn to harmonize its existence with the natural world.http://www.bestcyrano.org/THOMASPAINE/?p=1201
10. Over the River and through the Woods by David Irving
At the sight of pork chops you sometimes wince. You can’t quite forget the brutality of the worker who slammed the little piglets from over his head, bashing them down on the concrete floor and then throwing them on a heap of other dying, mortally wounded piglets all writhing in a suffering mass of cruelty and pain. You wish you’d never seen the video. But that’s what PETA does, investigative reporting no one can deny. You even mentioned the video to the guys at work, how a supervisor shoved a cane up a sow’s vagina, how the workers beat the pigs with metal gate rods, how another supervisor kicked a pig in the genitals and face and said: “You gotta beat on the bitch. Make her cry.”http://www.bestcyrano.org/THOMASPAINE/?p=1320
11. JESUS FREAK FASCISM by John Steppling
It is a teaching of moral absolutes, and a reinforcement of not just racial ideology, but also Capitalist ideology. Hard work, self improvement, and a fixed sexual identity that are described as the bedrock of western family and hence western values. They also, from the start, believed in government as an enforcer of these moral absolutes. Government was to stay out of the marketplace, but should, must, invade the home.http://www.bestcyrano.org/THOMASPAINE/?p=1066
12. Stacks of dead presidents or flesh and blood companions? Robert Turnbull interviews Jason Miller
Yet 58 million people voted for this troglodyte. That’s pretty disturbing. Does that mean that she is indeed a reflection of our collective selves? That we Americans are as petty, mean-spirited, narcissistic, obtuse, and belligerent (in a “socially acceptable” way) as Caribou Barbie? That we are but a thin, flexible veneer of respectability super-glued over a decaying, putrefied core that, were it fully exposed, would not even be “decent” enough to make the cut for Jerry Springer’ show?http://www.bestcyrano.org/avenger212/?p=457
13. Dr. J.’s Commentary: U.S. Energy Policy: A Brief History by Steve Jonas
Yes indeed, the U.S. does have an energy policy. It is to make us as oil-dependant as possible, thereby producing the largest possible profits for the oil companies. Those profits are almost entirely dependent on the use of foreign oil, because there is so little left here (unless the state of Colorado is totally destroyed by oil shale mining, as parts of Western Canada are being currently, of course). And so, the President-elect has announced a policy to make the U.S. independent of foreign oil in 10 years (without raping Colorado and blowing the tops off every coal mountain that that gentle industry can find). And you think that the oil industry, and their other extractive-industry relatives, coal and natural gas, are going to take this lying down? Well my friend, you’ve got another think coming.http://www.bestcyrano.org/cyrano/?p=2264
14. Industrial capitalism is a given and the natural world is secondary Derrick Jensen interviewed by Melissa Gragg and Jason Miller
But that’s the level of thought crime that they’re talking about, and my point is that, that the above ground work is absolutely necessary, and the below ground work is absolutely necessary, and the important thing is to leverage our power, and the longest lever that I can find right now is writing, and that doesn’t alter the fact that every time I cross the Klamath I don’t feel like a failure, because the Klamath River salmon are still getting hammered for many reasons including the dams. http://www.bestcyrano.org/THOMASPAINE/?p=1229
No comments:
Post a Comment