re: oppressor

** Progressive Response Vol. 7 No. 13 - Weekly newsletter from Foreign Policy in Focus. Usually sound critical analysis of US foreign policy.


** Condoleeza disputes Syria action

"UPI's report, published Friday afternoon, quoted unidentified administration officials as saying that a combination of Pentagon hawks and senior Israeli officials had been pressing the United States to expand the ground war to Syria. The officials spoke to UPI on condition of anonymity."


** Nukes - The whole idea was to have them, not to use them. NYT article on arms-control regimes.


re: oppressed

** The road to 1984 - George Orwell's final novel was seen as an anticommunist tract and many have claimed its grim vision of state control proved prophetic. But, argues Thomas Pynchon, Orwell - whose centenary is marked this year - had other targets in his sights and drew an unexpectedly optimistic conclusion.


** Ed Herman confirming that our instincts are correct - "I also mentioned the foreign press. On something like the Afghanistan war, even Britain-which is a close ally of the United States-even in Britain, you can read the Guardian, The Independent, The Mirror, or even the Daily Herald, which are all better than the New York Times. The U.S. media system has become so closed to alternative materials on issues where the government has strong positions and where lobbies are important, like in the Middle East, that even mainstream media in our allied countries provide a real option.

There are some really strong dissident media. Probably the best journal in the world is a journal called Le Monde diplomatique, not the Le Mode newspaper, which is a mediocre French newspaper, but Le Monde diplomatique. It's a monthly that's very good. It comes out in French, but it's now available in English on-line. If you subscribe to the Manchester Guardian, you'll get a weekly dose of Le Monde diplomatique."


** U.S. warns Canada against easing pot laws - "A top White House drug policy official is threatening retaliation from the U.S. if Canada relaxes its laws against marijuana possession. Murray said Canada's reputation in the global community would be forever altered if it decided to decriminalize pot. "It's not just Canada's relationship with the United States that would change; it's Canada's relationship with the world," he said."

[...]

""You can't wall this off saying, 'We're only talking about a little cannabis.' Our experience is they come together like the Four Horsemen," he said."

Always that same silly argument, a terrible inability to think. It would be just a little bit odd would it not, if every crack and smack addict didn't use cannabis? Cannabis invariably leading to hard drugs, is like saying that masturbation necessarily leads to child molesting. I suppose it requires some intelligence to logically differentiate between causality and correlation.