For some, even the smallest question can feel threatening. These exclamation marks… towers of certitude… are terrified of this tiny question. They intuitively know that it can completely undermine their dogmatism.
Source: nakedpastor.com
Zuccotti Park Press, a project of Adelante Alliance, a Brooklyn-based immigrant advocacy group, is releasing Occupy, a new book by Noam Chomsky, on May Day.
People seem to know about May Day everywhere except where it began, here in the United States of America. That’s because those in power have done everything they can to erase its real meaning. For example, Ronald Reagan designated what he called “Law Day” — a day of jingoist fanaticism, like an extra twist of the knife in the labor movement. Today, there is a renewed awareness, energized by the Occupy movement’s organizing, around May Day, and its relevance for reform and perhaps eventual revolution.
Source: MoveOn.org
Here are some uncomfortable historical facts that are largely ignored, glossed over, or blatantly suppressed in most American school curricula:
1) The United States government (largely through the CIA and its predecessors) is directly responsible for the overthrow of at least half a dozen democratically elected governments around the world over the past hundred plus years.
[…]
2) The U.S. military is currently deployed in over 150 countries around the world. That’s over three quarters of all the supposedly independent countries on the planet.
[…]
3) The U.S. is single-handedly responsible for the total global prohibition of recreational drugs and the police state that goes hand in hand with efforts to curtail their production, distribution, and use.
[…]
4) While no longer the largest contributor of greenhouse gases thanks to China’s rapid industrialization in recent years, the U.S. continues to be the greatest impediment to concerted global action on addressing anthropogenic climate change.
[…]
Pundits and hyper-patriots love to talk about “American exceptionalism.” In plain terms this translates as, “Don’t mind us. We’re just better than you.” How incredibly arrogant and off-putting to everyone else. It seems to go hand in hand with another favored myth, “Manifest Destiny,” which supposedly justified our genocidal land grab against the native inhabitants of North America. It also ties into “God Bless America,” which implores the all-powerful creator of the entire universe to play favoritism with one particular segment of upright primates, who happen to live within an arbitrarily delineated geographic region of one small planet, circling an ordinary yellow star, in the outer reaches of one of at least a hundred billion galaxies. Wow. Furthermore, if we’re going to talk the talk, we sure as hell better walk the walk to back it up. As related above, our actions continually fall far short of the lofty rhetoric we proclaim to the world (and to ourselves). No wonder there’s so much rampant anti-Americanism on display among the other ninety-five percent of humanity.
The great irony of it all is that I guarantee many people will read this article and consequently brand me a traitor, a naysayer – any number of derogatory, reactionary terms to draw attention away from things they would prefer not to think about and certainly don’t want advertised. While not surprising, it’s profoundly discouraging (not to mention childish, unfair, and counterproductive.) It’s like a monkey throwing poo at his handler for bringing him medicine.
***MUST WATCH***MUST WATCH ***MUST WATCH***MUST WATCH***
In Part One of the April 20th memorial service for Vanity Fair contributing editor Christopher Hitchens, Graydon Carter welcomed attendees and speakers James Fenton, Lawrence Krauss, Edwin Blue, Patrick Cockburn, Max McGuinness, Aimée Bell, Michael Zilkha, Victor Navasky, and Tom Stoppard.
In Part Two of the April 20th memorial service for Vanity Fair contributing editor Christopher Hitchens, Christopher Buckley read from Hitch-22, followed by speeches from Peter Schneider, Thomas Mallon, James Wood, Leslie Cockburn, and Patrick Cockburn.
In Part Three of the April 20th memorial service for Vanity Fair contributing editor Christopher Hitchens, Sean Penn, Salman Rushdie, Olivia Wilde, Douglas Brinkley, Cary Goldstein spoke.
In Part Four of the April 20th memorial service for Vanity Fair contributing editor Christopher Hitchens, John Auchard, Steve Wasserman, Stephen Fry, Ian McEwen, and Francis Collins spoke.
In Part Five of the April 20th memorial service for Vanity Fair contributing editor Christopher Hitchens, members of his family spoke including Edwin Blue, Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens, Peter Hitchens, and Carol Blue.
Always Question Authority 