You are browsing the Blog for Juan Cole.
Syria’s Neighbors Have Rising Anxiety about Crisis (Three Aljazeera Videos)
Turkey is strategizing how to limit the impact of the Syria war on Turkey. Ankara is particularly concerned by the emergence of a relatively autonomous Kurdish area in northern Syria, fearing that PKK guerrillas might find refuge there. Turkey is also deeply worried about chemical weapons falling into hands of various sorts of guerrillas. Turkey [...]
The Afghan Sk8ter Girrls of Kabul – (Female Literacy has Tripled in Afghanistan)
Skateistan is a skateboard NGO in Kabul, which maintains a facility for skateboarding and gets as many as 300 youth to attend as spectators at competitions. The organization maintains that 40% of skateboarders in Kabul are girls and young women, and that it is one of few relatively gender-integrated sports. Although in the 1990s under [...]
Abraham Lincoln on the Purpose of Government (Or He Wouldn’t be in GOP Today)
From Abraham Lincoln: Complete Works, Comprising His Speeches, Letters …, Volume 1, p. 92: “If we except the light and the air of heaven, no good thing has been or can be enjoyed by us without having first cost labor. And inasmuch as most good things are produced by labor, it follows that all such [...]
Greenpeace’s Naidoo: Doha Climate Conference Failed: The Youth Must Mobilize
Greenpeace: Doha climate conference a failure, youth have been sold down the river. Executive Director Kumi Naidoo says that the youth must organize to avoid a “four degree world,” i.e. one 7 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than in 1850. Naidoo, who hails from South Africa, points out that trillions of dollars were found for bank bailouts [...]
Top Ten True Costs of BP Gulf Oil Spill
BP yesterday agreed to pay a fine of some $4.5 billion dollars from the US Department of Justice for malfeasance in the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the largest fine paid in US history. There are also manslaughter and obstruction of justice charges against individual executives. BP also was forced by President Obama to pay [...]
NASA Scientist: We face a Planetary Climate Emergency
NASA scientist James Hansen explains that we are facing a planetary emergency and that the public is still largely unaware of how menacing it is. The danger is that we could pass tipping points, such as melting of ice sheets, which could lead to rapid increases in sea level. —– Cole: If the public understood [...]
Romney Ridiculed ‘Rising of Seas,’ Pledged Deep Cuts to FEMA
Mitt Romney makes fun of President Obama’s pledge to slow the rising of the world’s oceans, caused by climate change, and his Republican audience tittered. Instead, Romney pledged to “help you and your families.” In general, more moisture in the air and higher ocean temperatures, both of which help hurricanes be more damaging, result from [...]
Top Ten Ways Corporate Food is Making us Fat and threatening our Food Supplies
While it is much better than the fascisms of the Right and the Left, one of the big drawbacks of corporate democracy is that the people are often outgunned. Large corporations account for half of the national economy and pay more for lobbyists to write and pass laws in Congress favorable to themselves than they [...]
58 Murders a year by Firearms in Britain, 8,775 in US
Updated Number of Murders, United States, 2010: 12,996 Number of Murders by Firearms, US, 2010: 8,775 Number of Murders, Britain, 2011*: 638 (Since Britain’s population is 1/5 that of US, this is equivalent to 3,095 US murders) Number of Murders by firearms, Britain, 2011*: 58 (equivalent to 290 US murders) Number of Murders by crossbow [...]
World’s 1.6 Billion Poor Going Green
Renewable energy is often thought of as an initiative of advanced, sane countries such as Portugal and Germany. But there is another arena where green energy is making an impact– on the lives of the world’s poorest populations, in the global South. For them, it is not a luxury or prudent planning for the future [...]
