From the author: I wrote the following in a letter-to-the-editor to the Times the day after they published their horrendously dishonest endorsement of a ‘No’ vote on Measure B. I’ve waited a couple weeks in case they decided to print it, but they haven’t, so I’m posting it here so others can reference it. It’s a couple weeks old now, but I think it’s worth showing that we asked them to air some fraction of our point of view, to no avail. LA Times has printed their ballot recommendations and […]

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– Looking back over these long six years to the heady days of Occupy Wall Street can cause a little whiplash. – I remember standing in front of Los Angeles city hall with a crowd of weekend warriors watching Tom Morello sing ‘This Land is Your Land’ arm-in-arm with Danny Glover and feeling like maybe a grassroots anti-finance movement could truly take hold. I also remember standing in that same spot, a few weeks later, as police beat my journalist friend in the face while telling him to stop fighting. And […]

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– Democrats mounted an admirable effort to stop the confirmation of Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education. – The vote finally passed today with Vice President Mike Pence casting the tie-breaking vote.  This was a historic near-win for the Democrats and shows promise for the millions of people who have spent their own time pressuring their representatives to reject DeVos. It is a heartening defeat. But when you look at the track record of Democrats who occupy seats in the House and Senate, there is clear evidence that many of […]

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The Economist released this opinion piece (with no byline, so I guess it’s an editorial?) describing how the failure of the US to directly intervene with air support, and potentially troops on the ground, in Syria led to the current situation in Aleppo.  Similar pieces have been flooding well-meaning blogs like Upworthy, mainstream news sites, and saturating the pages of left-leaning commentary like the Atlantic and Salon.  All of them express the same regret – that Western nations and their militaries failed to “do something” to prevent the horrors in […]

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As protests ramp up in coastal cities, police prepare to quell them, by looking the other way.   People unsatisfied and angry at the outcome of the election have been staging daily protests in metropolitan areas with varying levels of success.  This has not gone unnoticed by the national press and the President Elect himself, ranging from between disdain and calls to crush the protests with police powers.  And while organizers against an authoritarian president expect the police to fight back, hard, they also know that one of the strongest weapons […]

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Well, not really. (Although our constant output of lolita pop-stars and homo-design shows may be why they don’t want the Internet.) But America did!  And as the military establishment starts to make their case for ongoing war in central Asia, I thought it appropriate to shine a light on how the Taliban came to be and how attitudes about Islam and Afghanistan have changed since the Eighties.

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