It Isn’t Just the War, It’s Us – Peter Van Buren’s We Meant Well by Daniel N. White

by Daniel N. White
Guest Writer
Dandelion Salad
January 20, 2012

Generally always I never get my hands on a new book in time to get a review of it out while the book is still in play in circles print and intellectual, but for once I did, with Peter Van Buren’s We Meant Well, and for once via the local library no less. Unfortunately, I have failed in getting this review out in the very narrow time slot the book world allows for reviews to see the light of day in a first tier publication; perhaps I may yet get it somewhere significant on the web. Perhaps still my efforts will get some people to read it, as this book is dreadfully necessary and overdue both. And I am personally obligated, as an American patriot concerned about us and our times, to put my voice and my reputation in Mr. Van Buren’s service with this review, and by whatever other means I have, as his employer, the United States Department of State, is well on its way to firing him for writing this book and telling the truth about the abject failure of our occupation, governance, and reconstruction efforts in Iraq, and more, the failure of US policy in the war in achieving any worthwhile results for the Iraqi people or the United States government from our war efforts.

“The 15% Solution,” Serialization, 21st Installment: Chapter Twenty, 2048: What Might Have Been Done, Part 1

Note: The Preface and Chapters One through Nineteen can be found here: The 15% Solution

by Jonathan Westminster, Ph.D. aka Steven Jonas, MD, MPH
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
crossposted on TPJmagazine.us
January 22, 2012

This is the twenty-first installment of the serialization of a book entitled The 15% Solution: A Political History of American Fascism, 2001-2022. Herein you will find “Part 1” of Chapter 20. (This chapter is very long, and so it will be presented in four parts.) From the perspective of the 25^th Anniversary of the Restoration of U.S. Constitutional Democracy in 2048, this chapter discusses “what might have been done” to prevent the fall of the old United States into fascism. If present readers find that the warnings from that far-off time have relevance for today’s, that is precisely the intent. For it was the Republicans of the 1990s and what they told us back then they would do if they ever got full power (e.g., see “Gingrich” and “Armey” on p. 3), with the complicity/acquiescence/meek “opposition” of the “center-right” Democratic Party of the time, that got the nation to where it eventually got to.

Jefferson Bethke: Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus

Image via Wikipedia

Dandelion Salad

bball1989 on Jan 10, 2012

A poem I wrote to highlight the difference between Jesus and false religion. In the scriptures Jesus received the most opposition from the most religious people of his day. At it’s core Jesus’ gospel and the good news of the Cross is in pure opposition to self-righteousness/self-justification. Religion is man centered, Jesus is God-centered. This poem highlights my journey to discover this truth. Religion either ends in pride or despair. Pride because you make a list and can do it and act better than everyone, or despair because you can’t do your own list of rules and feel “not good enough” for God.

Moyers & Company: On Winner-Take-All Politics

Image by Helen Cox, used with permission via Flickr

Dandelion Salad

With Bill Moyers
Moyers & Company | BillMoyers.com
January 13, 2012

Bill Moyers explores how America’s vast inequality didn’t just happen, it’s been politically engineered.

Welcome to Amerika, the ‘Obedience Factory‘ by Philip A. Farruggio

by Philip A. Farruggio
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
January 18, 2012

All you baby boomers and 50 somethings out there must remember the ‘air raid drills ‘of our youth. How we were pounded with that alarm gong, and then hurried either beneath our desks or out in the hallways of our schools. They taught us how to ‘assume the position‘  under those desks or against the hallway walls while the alarm rang through our ears. We obeyed, because our very lives could be at stake. Then, a few short years later, I can remember our Catholic church being filled to capacity in late October 1962. We attended an emergency Novena for a peaceful conclusion of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Many among us were in tears of fear for the possible nuclear war that was brewing. We obeyed the priest and prayed to God for salvation from the coming Apocalypse.

Hunger Is a ‘Weapon of Mass Destruction’, says Jean Ziegler by Siv O’Neall

by Siv O’Neall
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Axisoflogic.com
Lyon, France
Jan. 19, 2012

Image by Dandelion Salad via Flickr

“Every five seconds, a child under 10 dies of hunger.  – Thirty-five million people die each year from hunger or its immediate aftermath. – One billion people are permanently and severely malnourished and the situation is becoming increasingly catastrophic.” (Jean Ziegler)

In his latest book Mass Destruction – the Geopolitics of Hunger, Jean Ziegler[1] talks about the current state of the world and the neoliberal politics of starvation of the poor, which has led to a crisis situation amounting to calculated murder. What we are witnessing today is the worst hunger crisis in human history is. And it is all because of human greed, colossal mismanagement for profit.

The World War on Democracy by John Pilger

Dandelion Salad

by John Pilger
www.globalresearch.ca
www.johnpilger.com
Jan. 19, 2012

Lisette Talate died the other day. I remember a wiry, fiercely intelligent woman who masked her grief with a determination that was a presence. She was the embodiment of people’s resistance to the war on democracy. I first glimpsed her in a 1950s Colonial Office film about the Chagos islanders, a tiny creole nation living midway between Africa and Asia in the Indian Ocean. The camera panned across thriving villages, a church, a school, a hospital, set in a phenomenon of natural beauty and peace. Lisette remembers the producer saying to her and her teenage friends, “Keep smiling girls!”

Andrew Gavin Marshall on the High-Tech Police State + Power, Propaganda, and Purpose in American Democracy

by Andrew Gavin Marshall
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
http://andrewgavinmarshall.com
January 16, 2012

Image by Dandelion Salad via Flickr

The following is an interview with James Corbett of The Corbett Report:

Writer, researcher and podcast host Andrew Gavin Marshall joins us to discuss the police state, the technologies that undergird it, and how the police state spreads across borders to become an international phenomenon. We talk about methods and techniques of control, and how they serve the interests of the social engineers.