I’ll be a speaker at this year’s National Conference on Organized Resistance, in Washington over the weekend. My workshop—Beyond “Representation”: Anti-Authoritarian Alternatives to Democracy, Justice, and Green Capitalism—is part of the Radical Theory Track, and takes place Sunday at 2pm.

Life for one-and-a-half million people in Gaza has been getting dramatically worse in the past two years. The territory has been surrounded by walls, barbed wire, and an electrified fence. Its older residents can look across these lines towards the lands and ruined villages from which they were expelled in 1948 and 1967. Across the border, an armed conflict is asymmetrically raging. Armed Palestinian factions launch small-scale rockets at Israeli coastal cities in hopes of emulating the pressure that led to the 2002 Israeli withdrawal from occupied southern Lebanon. Meanwhile a far greater Israeli arsenal targets Gaza's cities, and periodically pushes in with tanks, armored vehicles and soldiers who raid Palestinian homes. The most recent Israeli push—in response to the death of an Israeli student at Sapir College from rocket fire—is still in progress, although a 2-day "interval" was observed while US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visited the region. "Economic warfare" now extends to restricting electricity and fuel supplies to the Gaza Strip. The result is a new humanitarian crisis. Meanwhile Vanity Fair reports that the U.S. armed Fatah to expel the popularly elected Hamas government from Gaza.

So, my father has been spending a lot of the last five years remembering and retelling the story of his past, especially during World War II. The main result is a self-published memoir, Capers of a Medic, courtesy of some herculean typing and editing work by my mom. It’s been a real pleasure and an [...]

The morning of November 19, 2005, one Marine and 24 Iraqis were killed in the town of Haditha, in occupied Iraq.  Within hours, the Marines had claimed that the improvised explosive device that killed Lance Corporal Miguel Terrazas had also killed 15 civilians, while eight “insurgents” were killed in self-defense.  This description was a lie.  [...]

Once again the U.S.’s now right-shifted Supreme Court has reaffirmed the concept that limiting spending on political ads is limiting speech. They threw out campaign finance regulations that restricted corporations from funding issue-based ads that are parallel equivalents to giving money to candidates. As John Bonifaz of Voter Action puts it: The court continues to equate [...]