Tomgram: Juan Cole, An Inflection Point in the Battle over Climate Change?

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If you want to be convinced that we now live on a different planet, just focus for a moment on those Canadian wildfires. Yep, them! You remember, right? Back in early June, more than 400 of them were burning out of control across that country and their smoke had drifted over read more

Tomgram: William Hartung, The Future of Techno-War

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Uh… gulp… you thought it was bad when that experienced pilot ejected from one of the Air Force’s hottest “new” planes, the F-35 combat fighter, near — no, not China or somewhere in the Middle East — but Charleston, South Carolina. The plane then flew on its own for another 60 miles before crashing into an empty field. And that was without an enemy in sight.

Perhaps read more

Tomgram: Engelhardt, Whose Planet Are We On?

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The Slow-Motion Equivalent of a Nuclear War?
A “New Cold War” on an Ever-Hotter Planet

By

Tell me, what planet are we actually on? All these decades later, are we really involved in a “second” or “new” Cold War? It’s certainly true that, as late as the 1980s, the superpowers (or so they then liked to think of themselves), the United States and the Soviet Union, read more

Tomgram: William Astore, Imagining a Progressive Pentagon

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In September 2007, retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and historian William Astore emailed me out of the blue. He’d been reading TomDispatch articles on this country’s Global War on Terror, especially the invasion of, and never-ending conflict in, Iraq. And as a former military man, something struck him: the staggering rows of medals and ribbons our military read more

Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, Consider the Alternative

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Yes, I know, I know. There are all-too-modern ways to keep your friends’ addresses, phone numbers, and emails, but this old guy still uses an address book. Unfortunately, the pages of the one I’d kept for endless years finally grew so worn, so tattered, that I bought a new one and, name by name, copied my contacts, my friends, my family from one to the other.

That, however, read more