On August 7th, President Obama announced his authorization of targeted strikes over Iraq in order to quell the ongoing Islamic State offensive. Just as important are the statements his administration has made through the actions that followed. The bombs actually started to fall on Friday, announcing without words that the US government’s policy of actively managing Iraqi affairs from afar…

U.S. bombs fall on Iraq yet again, in strikes authorized by Barack Obama against the militant Islamist group Islamic State, which has taken over a chunk of the country. Between this and the deployment of US military “advisers,” the memory of Obama’s campaign criticizing war in Iraq on his way to office has grown a…

According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s recently released long-term predictions for the global economy through 2060 (Paul Mason, “The best of capitalism is over for rich countries — and for the poor ones it will be over by 2060,” The Guardian, July 7), economic growth will stagnate to something like two-thirds its present level…

According to a recent story at Shareable by Kelly McCartney and Sarah Baird (“Pennsylvania Seed Library Investigated by Department of Agriculture,” August 7), the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture is investigating an heirloom seed library as a possible vector of attack by “agricultural terrorists.” Libraries for sharing traditional and heirloom seed varieties are a growing phenomenon nationwide, intended…

Convicted in 1994 of sexually assaulting a young boy, John Henry Skillern of Texas once again finds himself incarcerated and awaiting trial, this time for possession and production of child pornography. Skillern’s arrest comes courtesy of Google. Few, I expect, will shed tears for Skillern with respect to his alleged sexual predations. Nonetheless his case once more…

“Anti-government types” are often accused of not caring about poor people because we suggest that communities and charities can help them better than government can. This claim seems vindicated when considering the numerous ways governments both create poverty and harm the poor. The homeless are especially victimized by government laws. According to the most recent findings, on a…

It is easy to see moral irony in the arguments of those who support Argentina’s President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner’s government in the ongoing dispute against a group of so-called vulture funds, led by the highly litigious Elliot Associates. Anyone even slightly familiar with the corrupt shenanigans of Fernandez, her late husband — former president Nestor Kirchner — and their…

Another water crisis is making national headlines. This time ground zero is in the mid-west. More than 400,000 people in and around Toledo, Ohio cannot drink water from their taps due to high levels of the dangerous toxin microcystin in the public drinking supply. The cause of this disaster is particularly concerning, however, as it is not the…

In the ongoing debate over the crony capitalist “Export-Import” bank, job statistics get thrown around a lot. On its website, the bank boasts that “Ex-Im Bank’s mission is American jobs,” claiming to have “supported 1.2 million private-sector, American jobs since 2009, supporting 205,000 jobs in 2013 alone.” Economist Veronique de Rugy points out that these job numbers…

A man, an American citizen, sits in his car as a U.S. Border Patrol agent insists that he roll down his window. He refuses. Agents use battering rams to smash the windows. Still, the driver refuses to leave his car, so he is hit with a Taser from two sides. He screams. It would be…

The gender identity of a large part of the population is not very surprising in social interactions, since it, for the most part, corresponds to their genders assigned at birth. But we should not forget that transgender communities continue to fight for self-determination of their own genders. Gender identity is not always correspondent to gender assigned…

Over-35s seem to love nothing more than being told that the Internet — and the rapid cultural developments that have paralleled it — have been a terrible mistake with huge downsides that will surely doom us. And there’s no end to the opportunistic hacks lining up to dress this generational reactionary spasm as the contrarian…

A story I missed back in April just came to my attention today. It seems Fatah (the secular nationalist guerrilla organization that formed the single largest component of the PLO) and Hamas announced their reconciliation and plans to form a unity government — “a development that could see the Palestinian territories under a unified leadership for the…

Franz Kafka‘s The Trial follows the tribulations of Joseph K., a white-collar bank employee who finds himself amidst an incomprehensible penal system. He cannot figure out what he’s accused of, nor the steps of the trial, and his possibilities of defense are limited. A murky bureaucracy permeates everything and secrets reinforce the uncertainties of Joseph K.’s condition….

Perhaps the most rewarding experience of education is self-direction. Here, the individual fully enjoys his or her own labor. Whatever one’s interests are, self-direction is achieved on one’s own terms. Self-directed education promotes initiative, creativity, co-operative/mutual labor and healthy academic competition in one’s field to cultivate a learning network. This is the very basis of the…

One fact that gets little attention in the debate over Israel’s attack on Gaza is Israel’s role in the rise of Hamas. That’s right. Never mind that the rockets fired out of Gaza are amateurish things that could be crafted from hobby shop supplies, causing barely one percent as many casualties as Israeli reprisals. Never mind…

The extraordinary success of Reading Rainbow‘s Kickstarter campaign — with a record-breaking hundred thousand donors chipping in over $5 million for distributing Reading Rainbow‘s literacy material as widely as possible to children, particularly those in greatest financial need — demonstrates how crowdfunding may shape up as something more than what The New Republic dubs “the world’s No. 1 solver of…

Just about every week another story comes to my attention confirming the complete and total government-dependency of fracking — beloved of so many self-proclaimed “free market” advocates on the libertarian right. Something about eminent domain to build the pipelines, or liability caps for spills, or regulatory approval of unsafe pipelines superseding tort liability for negligence, and…

In mid-July, US Treasury Secretary Jack Lew proposed that Congress prohibit US-based companies from moving offshore in search of more favorable tax climates, citing an ostensible need for a “new sense of economic patriotism.” The resort to “patriotism” theater stands out as the most egregious aspect of legislation whose retroactive status would blatantly violate the…

Last month, in a tone which might best be called unlikely insistence, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair reassured the public that “we” — the UK and United States — “have to liberate ourselves from the notion that we caused” the destabilization of Iraq by the ISIS insurgency. Well, actually you did. Let’s go back…