Eternal “Wartime” in America
Tom Engelhardt
I recently dug my mother’s childhood photo album out of the depths of my bedroom closet. When I opened it, I found that the glue she had used as a girl to paste her life in place had given way, and on many pages the photos were now in a jumble. My mother was born early in the last century. Today, for most of that ancient collection of photos and memorabilia — drawings (undoubtedly hers), a Caruthers School of Piano program, a Camp Weewan-Eeta brochure, a Hyde Park High School junior prom “senior ticket,” and photos of unknown boys, girls, and adults — there’s no one left to tell me who was who or what was what. In some of them, I can still recognize my mother’s youthful face, and that of her brother who died so long ago but remains quite recognizable (even so many decades before I knew […]
The Unyielding Grip of Fossil Fuels on Global Life
Michael Klare
Here’s the good news: wind power, solar power, and other renewable forms of energy are expanding far more quickly than anyone expected, ensuring that these systems will provide an ever-increasing share of our future energy supply. According to the most recent projections from the Energy Information Administration (EIA) of the U.S. Department of Energy, global consumption of wind, solar, hydropower, and other renewables will double between now and 2040, jumping from 64 to 131 quadrillion British thermal units (BTUs). And here’s the bad news: the consumption of oil, coal, and natural gas is also growing, making it likely that, whatever the advances of renewable energy, fossil fuels will continue to dominate the global landscape for decades to come, accelerating the pace of global warming and ensuring the intensification of climate-change catastrophes. The rapid growth of renewable energy has given us much to cheer about. Not so long ago, energy analysts […]
Life on an Increasingly Improbable Planet
Tom Engelhardt
Vladimir Putin recently manned up and admitted it. The United States remains the planet’s sole superpower, as it has been since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. “America,” the Russian president said, “is a great power. Today, probably, the only superpower. We accept that.” Think of us, in fact, as the default superpower in an ever more recalcitrant world. Seventy-five years ago, at the edge of a global conflagration among rival great powers and empires, Henry Luce first suggested that the next century could be ours. In February 1941, in his magazine LIFE, he wrote a famous essay entitled “The American Century.” In it, he proclaimed that if only Americans would think internationally, surge into the world, and accept that they were already at war, the next hundred years would be theirs. Just over nine months later, the Japanese attacked the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor, plunging the country into […]
American Empire Project
The New York Times featured a profile of Viggo Mortensen who stars in the new movie ‘Captain Fantastic.’ His character Ben Cash “a former college professor raising his six children in a yurt somewhere in the woodsy Pacific Northwest… For transportation, they have an old hippie school bus, and instead of Christmas they celebrate Noam Chomsky Day… It’s hard to imagine a part tapping more deeply into the inner Viggo. Mr. Mortensen is himself not a back-to-the woods survivalist, exactly, but he knows his Chomsky and lives about as far off the grid as a major movie star can and still get work.” In 2008, Viggo Mortensen, narrated the trailer for the graphic novel edition of Howard Zinn’s ‘A People’s History of American Empire’: Watch the trailer for ‘Captain Fantastic’: Learn more about “Gnome” Chomsky’s! (this photo of “Gnome” Chomsky is courtesy of Sara Bershtel, publisher of Metropolitan Books).
The Charmed Life of David Petraeus
Nick Turse
I ran into David Petraeus the other night. Or rather, I ran after him. It’s been more than a year since I first tried to connect with the retired four-star general and ex-CIA director — and no luck yet. On a recent evening, as the sky was turning from a crisp ice blue into a host of Easter-egg hues, I missed him again. Led from a curtained “backstage” area where he had retreated after a midtown Manhattan event, Petraeus moved briskly to a staff-only room, then into a tightly packed elevator, and momentarily out onto the street before being quickly ushered into a waiting late-model, black Mercedes S550. And then he was gone, whisked into the warm New York night, companions in tow. For the previous hour, Petraeus had been in conversation with Peter Bergen, a journalist, CNN analyst, and vice president at New America, the think tank sponsoring the […]