September 18, 2008 – 02:01 pm
From NY Time’s American Exception: “‘Most justices of the United States Supreme Court do not cite foreign case law in their judgments,’ Aharon Barak, then the chief justice of the Supreme Court of Israel, wrote in the Harvard Law Review in 2002. ‘They fail to make use of an important source of inspiration, one that [...]
September 11, 2008 – 01:34 pm
From Mother Jones’s Mission Creep: America’s Unwelcome Advances: “According to the Pentagon’s 2008 ‘Base Structure Report,’…the United States maintains 761 active military ’sites’ in foreign countries…Counting domestic military bases and those on US territories, the total is 5,429….[G]iven that there are only 192 countries in the United Nations, 761 foreign bases is a remarkable example [...]
Can We End the American Empire Before It Ends Us?, by Chalmers Johnson: “I believe that there is only one solution to the crisis we face. The American people must make the decision to dismantle both the empire that has been created in their name and the huge (still growing) military establishment that undergirds it. [...]
April 20, 2007 – 12:42 pm
From Imperial Sunset?: “A variety of factors have contributed to the question [of America's steady decline]: the military debacle of the U.S. in Iraq and of Israel, its only 100 per cent ally, in Lebanon, which precipitated comprehensive domestic crises of confidence inside both countries; the immensity of U.S. deficits and instability of the dollar [...]
March 21, 2007 – 12:13 pm
Harold Pinter won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005. I just finished reading one of his plays as part of my grad school work. To find out more about him, I watched his Nobel Lecture which was shown on video December 7, 2005, in Börssalen at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm. It’s 46 minutes [...]
February 8, 2007 – 09:32 pm
From Republic or Empire: “The fate of previous democratic empires suggests that such a conflict is unsustainable and will be resolved in one of two ways. Rome attempted to keep its empire and lost its democracy. Britain chose to remain democratic and in the process let go its empire. Intentionally or not, the people of [...]
February 1, 2007 – 10:54 am
From The Collapse of the American Empire: “All empires collapse eventually: Akkad, Sumeria, Babylonia, Ninevah, Assyria, Persia, Macedonia, Greece, Carthage, Rome, Mali, Songhai, Mongonl, Tokugawaw, Gupta, Khmer, Hapbsburg, Inca, Aztec, Spanish, Dutch, Ottoman, Austrian, French, British, Soviet, you name them, they all fell, and most within a few hundred years. The reasons are not really [...]
“Ye olde times are here again” is a ridiculously rich article from the Financial Review that argues rather convincingly that we are headed for a rerun of the pseudo-governmental systems of the Middle Ages: “People everywhere, finally, are leaving behind national symbols and cultures and turning to local and global hybrids…the coexistence of local and [...]
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