Today I listened to the audio book of Entangled Empathy: An Alternative Ethic for Our Relationship With Animals by Lori Gruen while reading the hardcopy of From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds by Daniel Dennett. As a result I have been better able to empathize with Dennett’s obsession with the uniqueness of human consciousness, and I have been better able to marvel at the complex precision of Gruen’s theorizing. But I don’t seem to be any better off than
Tomgram: John Feffer, The Invisible Monster of Climate Change
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If you’re looking for fairy tales that are on the grim (not Grimm) side, things that once might only have been in dystopian fiction, look no further than our present planet at our present moment. What about, for instance, that trillion-metric-ton iceberg —
Reflections on Rivers of Blood Action: We All Must Come Together to Stop War
We are in some difficult times right now. There are too many people living in poverty and too many suffering from racism. We don’t have a system of health care or education that supports the citizens of this country. We are polluting the earth and this could lead to the end of us all.
We have a madman in the White House, but as S. Brian Willson posts to Facebook, “focusing on Trump is a distraction…. Trump is an avatar (or caricature), an undisguised buffoon serving as a mirror revealing
Tomgram: Alfred McCoy, Trumping the Empire
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I was 12. It was 1956. I lived in New York City and was a youthful history buff. (I should have kept my collection of American Heritage magazines!) Undoubtedly, I was also some kind of classic nerd. In any case, at some point during the Suez crisis of that year, I can remember going to the U.N. by myself and sitting in the gallery of the General Assembly, where
How Much is a Boss Worth?
An awful lot of Americans are skeptical about the value of their nation’s corporate executives.
As a 2016 nationwide survey reveals, 74 percent of Americans believe that top corporate executives are overpaid. This public dismay with CEO compensation exists despite the fact that Americans drastically underestimate what top corporate executives are paid every
Pentagon Recruiting Playbook Revealed
Ominous developments in three states this summer – Oregon, Texas, New Jersey, and one city – Chicago, provide a glimpse into the Pentagon’s new playbook to recruit soldiers from high schools across the country. In brief, the military has been engaged in a robust lobbying campaign to lower academic standards to make it easier to recruit youth.
New recruits have long been required to hold a high school diploma or a GED certificate. This requirement is a major impediment to finding enough
Tomgram: William Astore, Returning to Cheyenne Mountain
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My childhood was a nuclear one and I’m not talking about the nuclear family. I’m thinking of those duck-and-cover moments when, with air raid sirens screaming outside, we went under our school desks, hands
Focus: Raqqa – July 12, 2017
House Panel Votes to Debate Post-9/11 Blank Check for War
Tomgram: Frida Berrigan, Resistance is Fertile (Not Futile)
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Dystopian, yes. Unimaginable, no. In fact, a version of our present moment was imagined more than eight decades ago by novelist Sinclair Lewis who wrote a still readable (if now fictionally clunky) novel, It Can’t Happen Here. Its focus: the election as president of a man we might