Burger King to go public for second time

  BURGER KING is going public. Again. Just 18 months after being taken private in a leveraged buyout, Burger King Worldwide Holdings, one of the world’s largest fast-food chains, plans to list its shares on…

Just an Illusion: Economic Recovery

It is easy for the few to influence and create an illusion for the many. With the economic crisis, many governments are eager to project a sense of recovery- a fake confidence. Bob Chapman examines…

Murder Which Happens Every Day in Afghanistan Is Not an Anomaly in War

The war in Afghanistan—where the enemy is elusive and rarely seen, where the cultural and linguistic disconnect makes every trip outside the wire a visit to hostile territory, where it is clear that you are losing despite the vast industrial killing machine at your disposal—feeds the culture of atrocity. The fear and stress, the anger and hatred, reduce all Afghans to the enemy, and this includes women, children and the elderly. Civilians and combatants merge into one detested nameless, faceless mass. The psychological leap to murder is short. And murder happens every day in Afghanistan. It happens in drone strikes, artillery bombardments, airstrikes, missile attacks and the withering suppressing fire unleashed in villages from belt-fed machine guns.

Brian Willson: THE PRETEND SOCIETY

I was once a young man, very much like the young men and women who have gone to Iraq and Afghanistan as US military soldiers. I grew up believing in the red, white and blue. I believed that the United States had a sacred mission to spread democracy around the world. Viet Nam was my generation’s war. I did not volunteer, but when I was drafted, I answered the call. It was in Viet Nam that my journey toward a different kind of knowledge began. One hot sunny morning in April 1969 I found myself in a small Mekong Vietnamese fishing village that had just been bombed, burned bodies lying everywhere. My job in that moment was to assess the success of bombing missions of so-called military targets. In my naivete, it never occurred to me that the countless targets, systematically being bombed, were undefended, inhabited rice farming and fishing villages. In effect, all that mattered was the creation of “enemy” body counts – lots of them – Washington’s demonic criteria for defining “success.”

The Politics of Imagined Opinion

Where do you locate yourself on the political spectrum? Are you liberal or conservative? On “the left”, “the right”, or perhaps you’re a bit of both (“moderate”). It is no secret that American mass culture…

In Climate Wars, Advocacy By Some Researchers Brings Risks

Everybody talks about the weather, Mark Twain famously wrote, but nobody does anything about it. Many climate researchers are no longer following Twain’s adage, noted Michael McPhaden, president of the American Geophysical Union. “Scientists today,…