Salon.com offers a review of Mike Davis' distressing new book: "Planet of Slums." According to Davis, most of Earth's growth "is occurring in shantytowns and tenements stretching from Karachi, Pakistan, to Lima, Peru, where people live crowded together in densities that sometime dwarf those of such notorious 19th century human…
Three years ago, my 96-year-old grandfather was dying and he was upset. But he wasn’t upset about dying. He approached his own death with great inner strength. What made him upset was that his government had needlessly invaded Iraq. Because Iraq was not a threat, he said, we were squandering precious resources better used at home. The Iraq invasion was an alien idea to my grandfather’s conservative values. Until his death in May of 2004, he lamented that the invasion would result in an intractable mess with no palatable solution.
His assessment has proven correct. Every day, we are paying 200 million more dollars to prolong this bloody occupation. That’s $100,000 per minute. That’s a lot of money. St. Louis baseball fans who revel at the near completion of the new stadium for the St. Louis Cardinals might appreciate that this war effort is the financial equivalent of buying a new major league baseball stadium every two days. The cost of the Iraq war so far could have paid for 32 million children to attend a year of Head Start.
The $350 billion we will have spent on this war (by the end of 2006) amounts to more than $3,500 for each American household. There is also a more precious resource to consider; the occupation is killing more than sixty American soldiers every month, almost 2,400 troops killed to date. This is the equivalent of crashing a packed airliner every other month. Nor must we forget that this …
On March 19, 2006, 900 demonstrators converged on Forest Park in St. Louis to make the following statement: "Stop the War-Feed the People." The demonstrators set up a cemetery with 2000 tombstones honoring people killed in the Iraq war (each tombstone contained the name of one American and one Iraqi citizen):…
Let’s see . . . We attacked Iraq because “they killed 3,000 Americans.” Besides being racist (it assumes that all people from the Middle East are the same, when we’ve always known that Iraq had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks), this war cry has proven to be a grossly irrational wasting of lives and national resources.
We’ve now killed more than 30,000 Iraq civilians to “right” this wrong of 9/11. And we’ve spent $300 billion to get the job done. And we’ve proudly employed torture. And we lie that we are trying to establish “democracies” when we are actually trying to empower thugs who will be friendly to U.S. business interests–witness the Palestinian elections and our constant meddling in Iraqi politics. In the process of waging this war in Iraq, we are enraging millions of middle-eastern people who are making the destruction of America their lives’ work.…
The following is a letter I wrote to an acquaintance who asked me to contribute to a “Pregnancy Resource Center” in order to assist them to do their “important work.” As you can see, my investigation revealed that Pregnancy Resource Centers are unwilling to plainly admit their real agenda.
Dear ____:
I was intrigued when you invited me to contribute to the “Walk4Life” to support the Missouri “Pregnancy Resource Center.” I took your invitation as an excuse to learn more about the PRC. The more I learned, however, the more I disagreed with its work. I decided to respond at length. Though this email might seem out of proportion to your short request, it is commensurate with my strong feelings on these topics.
I applaud the efforts of the PRC to offer free pregnancy tests and ultrasounds to women. Assisting women who really want to give birth to a baby is great. Making parenting assistance available to pregnant women is laudable. And I certainly agree that adoption is a genuine worthy alternative to abortion, for those who freely choose this option.
The web site of the Missouri PRC (like the sites of many of the numerous “Pregnancy Resource Centers”) says very little about what PRC actually does when a pregnant woman walks through the door. Clicking on the topic buttons of the PRC website brings up only blank email forms (see http://www.prcmo.net/ ). I thought it quite odd that the Missouri PRC wouldn’t clearly state its true mission on its …