“Wealth, Culture and the Education Gap” by Joseph Natoli

by Joseph Natoli
Guest Writer
Dandelion Salad
http://readersupportednews.org, February 14, 2012
February 26, 2012

Image by sarabeephoto via Flickr

“When the economy recovers, you’ll still see all these problems persisting for reasons that have nothing to do with money and everything to do with culture.” — Charles Murray, American Enterprise Institute

“`The problem is a puzzle,’ he said. `No one has the slightest idea what will work,’ he said. `The cupboard is bare.’” — Sabrina Tavernise, “Rich and Poor Further Apart in Education,” The New York Times, February 10, 2010

Ch. 9: Comparing Evils by William T. Hathaway

by William T. Hathaway
Guest Writer
Dandelion Salad
February 22, 2012

Image by Dandelion Salad via Flickr

Comparing Evils

From the book
RADICAL PEACE: People Refusing War
By William T. Hathaway
Published by Trine Day

Jamal Khan is an Afghan journalist who fled his country because of Taliban persecution and now lives in Germany. We met in the apartment of a mutual friend from the Deutsche Friedensgesellschaft, the German Peace Society. Jamal is mid-forties, thin, with curly brown hair, tan skin, and clear green eyes that take everything in. We spoke in German, then later reworked the interview from my English translation.

Foreign Policy’s Irresponsible Reporting on Iran’s Nuclear Program by Jeremy R. Hammond

by Jeremy R. Hammond
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Foreign Policy Journal
February 25, 2012

David Makovsky writes in Foreign Policy that “Iranian leaders have struck an increasingly aggressive note. They have threatened a preemptive strike against their foes….” This is shameful. Makovsky knows perfectly well that any sensible reader would interpret “preemptive strike” to mean a military attack, but uses the phrase anyway, even though he knows the implication is false. He links to a New York Times article containing the lead (emphasis added):

Canadian Man Freed From Jail Nightmare, while Hundreds of others Continue to Languish in Prison by Finian Cunningham

by Finian Cunningham
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
East Africa
17 February 2012

The nightmare is over for Canadian man Naser Al Raas after he gained his freedom from a five-year prison sentence in Bahrain.

Family and supporters were jubilant after an appeal court in the Persian Gulf Kingdom acquitted Naser of all charges on Wednesday.

Their relief over the ruling was made all the more emphatic because the 29-year-old Canadian citizen suffers from a congenital heart condition. Nearly a year of illegal detention, torture and military court hearings had taken a severe toll on his health. He was even denied access by the Bahraini regime to the prescription medicine to treat his pulmonary embolism.

Holly Barker: The Consequential Damages of Nuclear War

Image via Wikipedia

Dandelion Salad

talkingsticktv on Feb 23, 2012

Interview with Holly Barker author of “Bravo for the Marshallese: Regaining Control in a Post-Nuclear, Post-Colonial World” and “The Consequential Damages of Nuclear War: The Rongelap Report”.

“The 15% Solution,” Serialization, 22nd Installment: Chapter Twenty 2048: The Self-Destructiveness of the Society of the Old U.S., Part 2

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
February 22, 2012

This is the twenty-second installment of the serialization of a book entitled The 15% Solution: A Political History of American Fascism, 2001-2022. Herein you will find “Part 2” 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.

Punishing the Population: The American Occupations of Haiti and the Dominican Republic by Andrew Gavin Marshall

by Andrew Gavin Marshall
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
http://andrewgavinmarshall.com
February 21, 2012

The following is a research sample from The People’s Book Project, extracted from an unedited chapter on the American Empire in Latin America.

Please help spread the word about the Project and the book by joining the Facebook Page.

A brief glance at the early 20^th century American occupation of Haiti and the Dominican Republic tell us a great deal about America’s role in the world today. The Dominican Republic is the Western nation on the island that was named Hispaniola by Christopher Columbus, and was later split between Spanish and French rule: Santo Domingo in the west and Saint Domingue in the east.

Iran Holds Up Access to Parchin for Better IAEA Deal by Gareth Porter

by Gareth Porter
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
crossposted at IPS
Feb. 26, 2012

WASHINGTON, Feb 23, 2012 (IPS) – The failure of a mission by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to get Iranian permission to visit a military testing site mentioned in its latest report has been interpreted in media coverage as a stall to avoid the discovery of confirming evidence of past work on nuclear weapons.

Noam Chomsky: Education For Whom and For What? (2012)

Image by thelastminute via Flickr

Dandelion Salad

Arizona on Feb 17, 2012

Noam Chomsky, a world-renowned linguist, intellectual and political activist, spoke at the University of Arizona on Feb. 8, 2012. His lecture, “Education: For Whom and For What?” featured a talk on the state of higher education, followed by a question-and-answer session.

Exclusive: Blowback and the Religious Right by Shawn S. Grandstaff

by Shawn S. Grandstaff
Guest Writer
Dandelion Salad
February 24, 2012

Image by Dandelion Salad via Flickr

I really do care about the direction this country is heading and the way the church is trying to fix it.

These are just some thoughts to think on and issues that should be of concern to us as believers when dealing with a world that is rapidly growing with a scientific mentality denying all things pertaining to God while the church continues preaching to the choir, especially in the self help department. I don’t see the methods of Jesus’ teachings being applied in the religious right’s mentality. I think in many ways it is doing more damage than good and the blowback it could cause is making Jesus look like something He is not. 

The sheep look down By William Bowles

by William Bowles
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
williambowles.info
crossposted on Strategic Culture Foundation
22 February 2012

The Sheep Look Up, John Brunner’s remarkably prescient ‘science fiction’ novel, first published in 1972 concerns the destruction of the entire environment in the US and the rise of a ‘corporately sponsored government’ leading to the eventual total breakdown of US society.

“No one except possibly the late John Brunner…has ever described anything in science fiction that is remotely like the reality of 2007 as we know it.” William Gibson

Sibel Edmonds: Obama administration charges a record number for espionage + White House Hypocrisy On ‘Aggressive Journalism’

with Sibel Edmonds
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Feb. 22, 2012

Image by dreamwhile via Flickr

RTAmerica on Feb 22, 2012

From Thomas Drake to Bradley Manning, many whistleblowers have faced retaliation for revealing controversial government information. Last week the House Subcommittee on Capital Markets and Government-Sponsored Enterprises passed a bill that weakens the protection for whistleblowers.

Moyers and Company: Poet Christian Wiman on Love, Faith, and Cancer

Dandelion Salad

Image by jakebouma via Flickr

BillMoyers.com
February 24, 2012

Bill Moyers has a moving conversation with acclaimed poet and Poetry Magazine editor Christian Wiman about how finding true love and being diagnosed with a rare and incurable blood cancer reignited his religious passion as well as his creative expression.

“When we think of our memories, they’re moments of intensity. Whether they were sorrowful or happy, moments of great loneliness or moments of great communion — we live for these moments in our life.

The Demise of the Ogallala Aquifer: A Looming Catastrophe by Cameron Salisbury

by Cameron Salisbury
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Opedinfo.com, February 12, 2012
February 26, 2012

Image via Wikipedia

I drive across I-70 periodically between St. Louis and Denver. Something unnerving is happening to the farmland that I pass in Kansas. Sinkholes are opening, only yards from the highway.

The massive Ogallala Aquifer, an ancient underground fresh water lake that made the Plains cornucopia possible after the 1930s Dust Bowl, is located below 8 states in the High Plains, including Kansas. It stretches, at depths ranging from a few feet to 1000 feet, from Texas to South Dakota, and covers roughly 175,000 square miles. Widely exploited only since the 1940s, it has been depleted at an alarming rate since, almost entirely for farming. The problem is causing increasing concern in a number of states including Oklahoma and Texas.

What Iran Can Do for Lebanon’s Palestinians by Franklin Lamb

by Franklin Lamb
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Beirut, Lebanon
February 18, 2012

“My friends and I like Iran. Maybe they will ask their friends in Lebanon to help baba (daddy) to be allowed to work and our family allowed to own a home outside the camps.” Hanadi, a precocious youngster at Shatila Camp’s Shabiba center on learning last week from her teacher that Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khameneiand President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad warmly welcomed Palestinian leaders to Tehran during the33^rdanniversary celebrations of the 1979 Islamic Revolution and that both committed Iran to a “religious and moral duty to alleviate the effects on Palestinian refugees of the Nakba’s ethnic cleansing.”