HERE we go again, watching New Orleans get hammered by a catastrophic hurricane. There will be headlines tomorrow and for days to come about how many people drowned in their houses, because a storm surge and a city that’s mostly below sea level are not a safe combination. Officials told the people of New Orleans […]
Ophelia Benson
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There is no vaccine for stupidity
Between the Delta variant and vaccine refusal and the near lurch into civil war, I feel as if the US is swaying back and forth in the wind like an old decaying barn, ready to collapse in the next stiff breeze. The New York Times reported a few days ago: After an all too brief […]
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Op-ed: Sawing off the branch we’re sitting on
THING are exciting right now in Seattle, where I live. By ‘exciting’ I mean life-threatening and horrible. The most severe heat wave that the Pacific Northwest has ever endured is underway. Predicted to be “historic, dangerous, prolonged and unprecedented,” according to the National Weather Service, it’s already rewriting the record books. On Sunday, Portland […]
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Op-ed: From Tuam to Kamloops
WE’VE seen this story before, all too many times. A mass grave containing the remains of 215 children has been found in Canada at a former residential school set up to assimilate indigenous people. The children were students at the Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia that closed in 1978. What does that mean, […]
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Op-ed: Good for the match trade
A NEWS outlet in Pakistan reports another one of those routine torture-murders of women that go with living in a brutal misogynist theocracy: One Shahabuddin along with his sister Seemab and niece Mahnoor allegedly set his wife Muneeba on fire in Akbarpura’s Khandar village, Nowshera on April 24. Muneeba was rushed to the burn ward […]
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Op-ed: My beliefs shall be your beliefs, like it or not
The US Senate has been working on a voting rights bill – that is, the Democrats have been working on it and the Republicans have been trying to kneecap it. Last week Mississippi Republican Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith felt called to bring Daddy God into it. “I can speak for Mississippi,” she says, “on why we […]
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Op-ed: Oh, how they laughed when Ted Cruz joked about Cancún
A winter storm with below freezing temperatures killed more than a few people in Texas last week. The failure of the state’s electrical grid during the weeklong cold snap left more than four million Texans without electricity and heat, many for days on end in subfreezing temperatures. Many residents also lost access to water, and 14.6 million were ordered […]
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Op-ed: A bit of a kerfuffle
So that was fun. I love watching as the large and unruly country I live in comes way too close to a violent coup, and all the way up to and into a violent insurrection. I especially love it after four years of the most evil corrupt malevolent narcissistic president in our history. What can […]
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Op-ed: Defending the Honour of Mr God
DONALD Trump has been very friendly to Saudi Arabia during his stint as US President. Just this week he announced he’s pushing through a massive arms deal with the Saudis even though everyone else thinks it’s a bad move. He likes to be a zany madcap rebel that way. Meanwhile The Guardian reports: Loujain al-Hathloul, […]
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Op-ed: Barr’s final revenge
THERE’S just no end to it. Austin Sarat at Slate reports: Last week, the Trump administration announced that it would continue to carry out executions in the days and weeks leading up to the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden, with the last one now scheduled just five days before Biden takes office on Jan. 20, 2021. This […]