"war is over if you want it..."

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blood for oil

Independent journalist Greg Palast writes : The Bush administration made plans for war and for Iraq's oil before the 9/11 attacks, sparking a policy battle between neo-cons and Big Oil, BBC's Newsnight has revealed. Two years ago today - when President George Bush announced US, British and Allied forces would begin to bomb Baghdad - protestors claimed the US had a secret plan for Iraq's oil once Saddam had been conquered. In fact there were two conflicting plans, setting off a hidden policy war between neo-conservatives at the Pentagon, on one side, versus a combination of "Big Oil" executives and US State Department "pragmatists." "Big Oil" appears to have won. The latest plan, obtained by Newsnight from the US State Department was, we learned, drafted with the help of American oil industry consultants. Insiders told Newsnight that planning began "within weeks" of Bush's first taking office in 2001, long before the September 11th...
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the limits of empathy, part 2

When I was a kid, I used to fantasize about a magic potion that would change me into a different person. Not because I was trying to escape my own life, but so I could truly know what it was like to be someone else, from inside their skin. The potion would turn me into that other person for a set amount of time, then wear off and I'd be me again, but I'd remember everything I experienced and felt. I didn't dream of being specific people, just people essentially different from me, or with extremely different lives. A man. A black person. A coal miner. A rock star. Often these mental exercises revolved around someone who had suffered great hardship. A slave. An abducted child. I still do this to some extent - and you probably do, too - just without the hocus pocus. We imagine what it's like to be an Iraqi. Or a stranded tsunami survivor. While walking my dogs this morning, watching them sniff a bit of brick wall as if it contained the Secret Of Life, I remembered this chi...
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the great weed of 2015?

You will not be surprised to learn that Allan and I own a lot of books. And CDs. And even LPs! Many, many hundreds of each. We have culled our collection a bit over the years, out of necessity, but living in houses for the past 10 years, we expanded again without much thought. Now here we are in an apartment. It's a large apartment, to be sure, but we no longer have extra rooms where we can stash as much stuff as we like. And neither of us wants to fill up every inch of wall and floor space with books and music.    Thus we are contemplating weeding our own library. And this is very strange.  Books are us. Or are they? When I was in my 20s, I wanted to own every book I'd ever read. I was one of those people who believed that my personal library was a statement about myself. I needed to proudly display my politics and my tastes through my bookshelves and records. I loved seeing other people's libraries, and loved when people perused mine. I can recall that when we found our...
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