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America’s drought of political will on climate change

Source: The Guardian Unlimited

As the US faces record drought and an Old Testament-level pestilential heatwave in the midwest, American environmental denialism may be starting to change. The question is: is it too late?

America has led the world in climate change denial, a phenomenon noted with amazement by Europeans, not to mention thinking people around the world. Year after year, the US has failed to sign global treaties or curb emissions, even as our status as a source of a third of the world’s carbon emissions goes unchanged. read more

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How the US uses sexual humiliation as a political tool to control the masses

Source: The Guardian Unlimited

Believe me, you don’t want the state having the power to strip your clothes off. And yet, it’s exactly what is happening

In a five-four ruling [last] week, the supreme court decided that anyone can be strip-searched upon arrest for any offense, however minor, at any time. This horror show ruling joins two recent horror show laws: the NDAA, which lets anyone be arrested forever at any time, and HR 347, the “trespass bill”, which gives you a 10-year sentence for protesting anywhere near someone with secret service protection. These criminalizations of being human follow, of course, the mini-uprising of the Occupy movement. read more

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An Iraqi film hero in America

Source: Al Jazeera

One of Iraq’s only working filmmakers, Oday Rasheed – whose brilliant filmĀ Underexposure (2005) followed a group of characters in Baghdad after the United States-led invasion in 2003, and whose new film Qarantina is now premiering – is in Manhattan. The glamorous settings in which he is now showing Qarantina – a screening at the Museum of Modern Art, for example, and in the private homes of American directors and stars – could not be further removed from the violence-riddled context of his daily life. read more