Portside

A recently released secret U.S. Strategic Air Command (SAC) file can be justifiably termed “Stranger than Strangelove”, the 1964 film that satirically captured the madness of the Cold War. It reveals for the first time the scale of the holocaust that would have been unleashed in a nuclear war. The U.S. planned to attack more than 1,200 “Soviet bloc” cities, killing an estimated 520 million people. Even “friendly forces and people” would be radiated.

That’s what’s provocative to me—that we can victimize people, we can torture and traumatize people with no consciousness that it is a shameful thing to do. And it’s not the first time we’ve done it. The greatest evil of American slavery was not involuntary servitude but rather the narrative of racial differences we created to legitimate slavery. Because we never dealt with that evil, I don’t think slavery ended in 1865, it just evolved.

He first became a target of government snoops merely because he was upset about a racist and unconstitutional idea and, as a private citizen, wrote a letter about it.

My grandparents were just people who were hated because of their religion and the assumption that, because they were Jewish, they were probably communists, or at least socialist sympathizers.

Despite the political pressure to prosecute cops in cases like Tamir Rice’s, the current system grants enormous leeway to officers who employ lethal force.

That palpable feeling of separation helped inspire his latest work for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, “Untitled America: First Movement.” The piece is the first of a three-part modern dance series that will explore the impact of prison on families.

Unhappy end; Lesson from Ukraine; Brass fears Trump; Mansplaining Lolita; I$I$; BSUs cut off private prisons; Suing the school system for science; NOLA dethrones the Confederacy; Yannis Behrakis

Since Obama took office in 2009, Pentagon officials have been throwing up bureaucratic obstacles to thwart the president's plan to close Guantanamo. Negotiating prisoner releases with the Pentagon was like "punching a pillow," said James Dobbins, the State Department special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan from 2013 to 2014. Defense Department officials "would come to a meeting, they would not make a counter-argument," he said. "And then nothing would happen.

 On Monday, the Cuyahoga County prosecutor’s office announced that Timothy Loehmann, the Cleveland police officer who killed Tamir Rice last year, would face no state criminal charges.

A budget approach cloaked in science and technical jargon became a tool to crush the people.