You are browsing the archives of 2008 February.

The San Francisco Chronicle reported that “California State University East Bay has fired a math teacher after six weeks on the job because she inserted the word ‘nonviolently’ in her state-required Oath of Allegiance form.”
Because the state requires public employees to sign this oath to the Constitution, you might be thinking that this is just [...]

If you’ve ever wondered why it costs so much more to eat a salad than a burger from McDonalds–even though more resources go into producing the McDonalds meal–this graph on government subsidies makes the answer quite clear.

A blog called Celcias gives more of a detailed analysis, should you be interested.

Imagine you are on Jeopardy and you’ve selected US Military History for 1,000. Alex Trebeck reads the answer: “This war was forged without UN approval on false intelligence estimates, feigned diplomacy, and a brutal bombing campaign that killed thousands of civilians, but led to the installation of a puppet government, the construction of the World’s [...]

The Bush administration has proposed a $614 billion military budget–which does not include the cost of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Not only is that the most we’ve spent since WWII, but it’s also more than the rest of the world is spending on defense combined. All this, as Defense Spending critic and analyst William [...]

A People’s History of the United States is on the very short list of books that changed my life. And I know many people who would say the same. That’s why it’s very exciting to see it’s vindicative story of social change in America–told by the outcasts and radicals high school history books either leave [...]

The ever increasing amount of greenhouse gases pumped into the atmosphere will completely devour our independent–yet still noble–efforts to be eco-friendly consumers. That’s why, as Johan Hari of Britain’s The Independent writes, “The only way [to prevent catastrophic climate change] is by governments legislating to force us all - green and anti-green - to shift towards cleaner behaviour.”

In my last post I brought up an article I wrote two years ago about Canada’s burgeoning oil industry and a new report that calls it the most destructive project on the planet. Surprisingly, there’s more new information worth noting in regards to that old story.

Just over a year ago, I wrote an article about Canada’s failure to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Instead of upholding the Kyoto Protocol, which the liberal government had ratified in 2002, Canada’s newly elected conservative administration abandoned emissions regulations to help the country’s burgeoning oil industry. In what is still a surprising fact to many, [...]

The above video is not a Werther’s Originals commercial, nor is this grandfatherly-looking man about to trick you into listening to his stories about the good old days with the lure of caramel candies. He’s Chalmers Johnson–former professor of political science at UC Berkeley and all-around intellectual bad-ass–and he’s dropping major science on the subject [...]

A recent investigation by 10 major animal charities revealed that “millions of animals are suffering unnecessarily at the hands of meat traders by enduring cruel, drawn-out journeys across the world to be slaughtered on arrival.”
The gruesome accounts were captured on video. Here’s a description of what they observed:
Pigs
Crammed together in the dark, the animals are [...]