Category: Guest Post

Botswana 1971

by Daniel Gover

Thanks to the War in Vietnam, I became a high school teacher in Botswana, in southern Africa. It’s funny how some of the worst things in the world can lead to detours that turn out well. New York City was the only place in America that I ever heard of that deferred college students and teachers from the military draft. Bless their hearts. With over two million people, my hometown of Brooklyn may have been the largest Draft Board in the country. Several guys who went to college with me became public school teachers in the city. When I was burning out in graduate school, I almost joined the Peace Corps and went to India, but didn’t. Fortunately, the next year I learned of a volunteer teachers’ program in Africa. A guy I knew had taught at a high school in Botswana—Swaneng Hill School. It was started by a South African exile named Patrick van Rensburg who was prohibited from returning to his old country just across the border. His school had become a mecca for anti-apartheid activists, just my kind of place.   I had learned of Apartheid, or racial separation in South Africa, as far back as when we read Cry, the Beloved Country in high school. I wrote a letter, got a job, sent the letter to my draft board and basically dared them to call me back from Botswana. Luckily, they didn’t.

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Literary Agent Querying 101

Allison K. Williams of Brevity Blog on how to manage querying literary agents

You’ve written—or almost written—a book. Time to find a literary agent. Except you should have started the process much sooner, because you might end up querying 100 agents. Read Allison K Williams advice on managing all that in her Brevity Blog post. Look at the resources she lists, and once you’re ready to start querying, go visit querytracker.net.

Yes, But HOW?

 

The Cost of Never-Ending War

Blogging from a weekly newsletter from Open Source Radio at WBUR in Boston, assuming they won’t mind. It’s hard to get your head around the enormity of this, but thankfully some have. Words and images are all theirs. Find original article here.

A conversation with Rosella Cappella-Zielinski, Linda Bilmes, Tulsi Gabbard, Shamiran Mako, and Neta Crawford about the costs of U.S. wars since 2001. Listen today at 2 pm EST or anytime at our site.

As talk of war with Iran escalated in recent weeks, we were reminded of the thinking, or lack of thinking, around other post-2001 military conflicts of almost unimaginable cost. Then we tried to make sense of that cost. Here’s just a summary of the wars since 2001, from Brown University’s Costs of War project: Continue reading “The Cost of Never-Ending War”

Guest Post: How One of America’s Premier Data Monarchs is Funding a Global Information War and Shaping the Media Landscape

Reposted with permission from Mint Press News. Original story here.
MintPress News is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 International License. 

 

Through his purchase of influence over the daily flow of information to American media consumers, a dizzying array of connections to the national security state, and a media empire that shields him from critical scrutiny, Pierre Omidyar has become one of the world’s most politically sophisticated data monarchs.

February 18th, 2019, by Alexander Rubinstein and Max Blumenthal

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Guest Post: Turkey’s war on Kurdistan’s forests

This is a December, 2018 article from their the Kurdish Internationalist Commune that describes Turkey’s immoral, illegal, and ecocidal actions in the mountains of Western Kurdistan (the region known as Rojava). It is being offered as a companion piece to Nicky Reid’s Lessons from Rojava, reblogged here recently.

For several years, during the dry summer season, Turkish military planes repeatedly drop incendiary devices in mountainous Kurdish areas to set forests ablaze. Villagers mobilize to combat the flames and usually manage to contain them, but large areas of mostly pine forest have been denuded, forcing migration of both humans and animals and destroying ecological habitats. If you never knew this is happening, you’re not alone. Search the ‘net as you might, you might doubt this is happening, but it surely is.

Whatever excuses Turkey might give for its relentless incendiary warfare along the Syrian border will not disguise its evilness. And this isn’t the first time such fires were set. When ISIS first occupied that area, Syria firebombed forests to block refugees from leaving the country. All Rojavans want is to be left alone to continue building the kind of egalitarian democracy they have worked so hard—against incredible odds and amid much suffering and deprivation—to create.

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Guest Post: Lessons from Rojava

For hundreds if not thousands of years, Kurdistan, home to Kurdish minorities in present-day Iraq, Syria and Turkey, has been a pawn in regional and imperial power plays. And now, the Trump administration is about to sacrifice it yet again on the alter of hegemonic aspirations.

We’ve posted several times on the Syrian democratic anarcho-syndicalist revolution that over the past 3-4 years has birthed autonomous democratic and egalitarian  cantons in northern Syria. Formerly calling their polity Rojava but now the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria, they rely on US forces to protect them from Assad, ISIS, and Turkey. But not, it appears, for long. I urge you to read Comrade Hermit’s analysis and to protest the impending betrayal of Rojava’s hard-won self-determination. Continue reading “Guest Post: Lessons from Rojava”

Guest Post: The Revolution’s Here, Please Excuse Me While I Laugh

Today’s guest post, again lifted from CounterPunch, is full of astute political analysis by rising rhetorician Nick Pemberton as he recaps the fate of progressives in the midterm elections, which, Nick says,

“…are mostly decided before they get started. We all know this. The issue is not so much that the progressives are losing, for the deck is stacked against them. The more troubling issue is that the sheepdog effect is working. Progressives may get a few (well-deserved!) crumbs from establishment Democrats as a result of Sanders and co., but by no means are progressives being given a shot in 2018.”

Find the read embedded below or click here to enjoy it at counterpunch.org.

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Guest post: How Cambridge Analytica wants to bend your mind

If you are upset that in behalf of Trump’s campaign, Cambridge Analytica siphoned  personally identifying information on 50 million Americans from Facebook to microtarget voters, chances are that you may be missing the point about what they do and what it signifies. They are involved in psy-op electioneering on at least five continents similar to their efforts for Trump. Their data revelations are consulted in military and intelligence operations around the planet and their gluttony for personal data knows no bounds.

To get a handle on how these machinations play out, take a look at Roberto Gonzales’ (chair of the anthropology department at San José State University) recent article in CounterPunch, which shines a light on how CA and its parent company operate; by no means a complete accounting of the technologies or aims involved but enough to make you lose a few hours of sleep.

The Mind-Benders: How to Harvest Facebook Data, Brainwash Voters, and Swing Elections

by Roberto J. González

Read it, and let me know how happy you are now to expose yourself to social media. The task ahead for the citizenry, as I see it, is to immunize ourselves to behavioral manipulations, regardless of source or intent.

Guest Post: We the Sheeple

The Ohio State University, Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum

Even if you’re already convinced that the United States of America is a rogue nation under financial-military-industrial overlords, it’s well worth reading Jason Hirthler’s article in this weekend’s edition of CounterPunch, We the Sheeple: the Blind Reading the Blind, if only for the revealing quotation in its opening paragraph:

Shortly after the fall of Communism in the Soviet Union, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell, made a candid confession to the Army Times, “I’m running out of demons, I’m running out of villains. I’m down to Castro and Kim Il Sung.” Amid the general bonhomie of the military interview, Powell nicely encapsulated a central truth of empire: it doesn’t want peace. Never did. Imperialism, the monopoly stage of capitalism, is based on conquest. Peace is little more than an aftermath in the imperialist vision. It is the dusty rubble-strewn silence that descends on Aleppo when the jihadists have been bussed out. It is the silent pollution of the Danube when the NATO jets have flown. It is the quiet that settles on the Libyan square once the slave auction has concluded. Peace is an interlude between the birth of avarice and the advent of aggression. Little else.

Read the rest on CounterPunch.

One must also appreciate his spot-on assessment of the function that corporate media serve in legitimizing suspicions of uncooperative regimes and aggression on them, papering over the devastation created by US aggression, and fear-mongering terrorism while pretending it isn’t blowback. Depressingly few Americans understand how our empire works. It takes a while for it to sink in because we the people have been systematically deceived about America’s role in the world since the founding of the Republic. Hirthler’s superbly written diatribe is a badly needed civics lesson in how that works today. Read and share widely.