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Folks, the internet has been won.
Background: Something Awful commentators react to recently-released footage of then 16-year-old Omar Khadr being cruelly interrogated by Canadian officials at Guantanamo. Their reactions range from sympathetic to death threats—these soft children of privilege who never leave the comfort of their parents’ basement, let alone face unending hell in an illegal [...]

JOSÉ ROSENDO DE JESÚS from the State of Guerrero works as a union organizer in New York.
He Sends 700 a month.
Check out this amazing photo-essay by Dulce Pinzón:
After September 11, the notion of the “hero” began to rear its head in the public consciousness more and more frequently. The notion served a necessity in a [...]

Whatever side one falls on in the gun control debate, most people agree that handguns should not be in schools. It’s just a bad mix—volatile, trapped kids and deadly firearms. Any sane person ought to feel a bit uncomfortable at the thought of guns in a high school.
Unfortunately, sane people aren’t in charge in my [...]

The AP is in the running for best headline of the year:
Everything seemingly is spinning out of control
WASHINGTON (AP) — Is everything spinning out of control? Midwestern levees are bursting. Polar bears are adrift. Gas prices are skyrocketing. Home values are abysmal. Air fares, college tuition and health care border on unaffordable. Wars without end [...]

What Americans do half-heartedly, the Russians will attempt with gusto.
Russian lawmakers are weird.
Parliamentary hearings were held yesterday at which the “Concept for a State Policy in the Area of Spiritual and Moral Education of the Children of the Russian Federation and Protection of Their Morals” was discussed.
Really weird:
The draft law “On Children’s Toys” would ban [...]

Just completely gross.
Short version: Sarasota Planned Parenthood and Habitat for Humanity team up with a plan that will help Planned Parenthood with some zoning issues and help Habitat get some almost-free land. For their altruism, they’re repaid with the nastiest of the nasty anti-choice contingent:
“We could have put up any building we wanted,” said [...]

I wonder at what point a country accumulates enough of the markers—surveillance, botched elections, out-of-control law enforcement, and so on—that citizens and government alike can just shrug their shoulders and say, “Yep, we’re living in a police state. Can someone please liberate us now?”
The U.S. is pretty well there, I think. Check out this story [...]

As some of you may know, Utah Phillips, the great storyteller, musician, hobo, and Wobbly, passed away last weekend. I posted a bit about him here, but since then, the tributes from friends and Fellow Workers have been pouring in, and I thought I’d share one of the more inspiring with the PunkAss crew.
This is [...]

I don’t like bananas, but even if I did, I wouldn’t eat them. United Fruit, the reason that we have the bananas that we have today, is basically the template for ruthless, evil corporations, pursuing unimaginable profits as the cost of human rights and the environment.
Within the next few decades, short of a scientific miracle, [...]

I admit to being slightly obsessed with Omar Khadr’s story. Many of us here in Soviet Canuckistan, the one major U.S. ally unwilling to say a peep about America’s human rights violations in Guantanamo Bay, are slightly obsessed with Omar Khadr’s story. I’m not sure if the Khadr family—”Canada’s First Family of Terrorism”—gets as much [...]