Rob Wallace’s timely new book Dead Epidemiologists: On the Origins of COVID-19 has officially circumambulated the globe, from Canada and India, to Greece and Italy, to Basque country and onward. | more…
In this moment of what a philologist or scholar of poetry might call correctio, Michael performs the self-reflexive, intertextual move of being in conversation with his own text as a form of revision…. | more…
Angus recounts the history of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). First developed in the late 1920s, by 1970 more than 750,000 tons of CFCs had been pumped into the earth’s atmosphere. In the mid-1970s, scientists began to discover the link between CFCs and ozone depletion, and the chemical industry went into full denial mode, arguing that scientists’ arguments were ‘just theories’….As it turns out, the British Antarctic Survey had been measuring ozone levels since 1957…. | more…
“This is a complex array of themes to pursue, particularly given that the scientific and social dimensions of sexual politics in the lives of many of these figures is highly relevant as well. Bellamy Foster rightly emphasises the importance of such issues within the overall picture, as a genuinely dialectical understanding of society and nature could hardly avoid confronting the alienated character of gender relations in class societies….” | more…
“…this is the problem that has actually plagued the entire attitude to vaccine development and production in this pandemic. A few companies have got the rights, and they are holding onto those rights, and they are only producing themselves. They must share this knowledge, and they must allow other producers, because that’s the only way we’re going to confront the crisis…” | more…
Recall “The Hanoi Hilton,” where captured U.S. soldiers were held during the war in Vietnam? If you do recall, no doubt, you’re recalling the Official Story. So what really happened? Watch! | more…
Among the cast of characters making cameo appearances are scores of attorneys, judges, and justices (including Justice Brennan, who eventually became Tigar’s friend and admirer), Bill Kunstler, cowboy Roy Rogers (a family acquaintance), Simone Signoret, James Baldwin, Jeremy Corbyn, Peggy Seeger, the great Scots poet Hugh MacDiarmid, Donald Sutherland, and Otto Preminger…. | more…
What they found was surprising: It wasn’t simply that some POWs were for the war and others against it, nor was it an officers-versus-enlisted-men standoff. Rather, it was the class backgrounds of the captives and their pre-captive experience that drew the lines…. | more…
“According to Wilber, and Lembcke, a Vietnam veteran and anti-war activist himself, what distinguished the dissenters from their accusers was their ‘disparate socioeconomic backgrounds.’ As the authors note, the senior ranking officers shot down over North Vietnam, like Stockdale, tended to be service academy graduates, from privileged circumstances which stood “in sharp contrast with the modest origins of war resisters.” U.S. soldiers captured in the South ‘were mostly enlisted personnel, younger and with less formal education.’ And those who joined the controversial ‘Peace Committee,’ during their imprisonment, were also more racially diverse….” | more…
The oscar-nominated “The Trial of the Chicago Seven,” has renewed interest in a particular flashpoint during the trials, when Bobby Seale demanded to represent himself. Judge Julius Hoffman ordered him bound and gagged. Seale was removed from the courtroom and thrown in jail. But in Director Aaron Sorkin’s reinvention of the events of 1968, a really good, but perhaps over-complicated story got “airbrushed” out: A lawyer was imposed on Bobby Seale against his will, and that lawyer was then arrested. The lawyer that was assigned to Bobby Seale was…..Michael Tigar. | more…
“‘Why do we go back?’ she asked sardonically, ‘because they go back,’ the pro-war hawks and military establishment. The ‘patriarchy,’ as she put it, ruminates the defeat in Vietnam like a bad sandwich growling in its stomach through a night that will not end. The defeat in Vietnam struck at a pillar of American manhood. Vietnam veterans would sometimes be chided by older veterans: they had won their war; Vietnam veterans had lost—what kind of men were they?” | more…
“He is currently working on another book focusing on the underlying drivers that cause human society to conflict with nature and create rifts in the metabolic cycles of the planet.” | more…
“The federal courts should be a sanctuary in the jungle,” said Clarence Darrow, the famous lawyer in the “Scopes” Monkey Trial. Legendary lawyer Michael Tigar took those words to heart. He hunted the jungle’s predators — the likes of Pinochet. He defended its prey — the likes of Lynne Stewart and Julian Assange. He gave counsel to Panthers like Angela Davis, and, as you just learned, briefly shared a cell with the likes of Bobby Seale. | more…