Portside

We acknowledge that this was written in June, 2015. However we are posting it because it describes how tangled the lines are when it comes to US and British policy in the Middle East. Unless there is a real turn around in US strategy in the Middle East the only thing that will continue will be more death and destruction, and the repercussions are world wide. This should be a big question for the US presidential debates - but will it?

Buses, trains, bikes, and walking represent more than an efficient means of getting from one place to another. They move us toward a brighter future because of the many social and economic benefits they foster.

TV ratings are generally lower on Friday and Saturday nights, which probably explains why there has never been a general election debate on a Saturday night. On the flip side, Thursday is king when it comes to debates. Of the 100 debates since the 2000 election cycle, 27 of them have been on a Thursday. The three general election debates on Thursdays garnered an average of 66.5 million viewers per event — by far the biggest number.

Albert Einstein's take on this question was surely influenced by the general crisis of 1914 to 1945, which profoundly shook the faith in inexorable progress and the belief in universal schemes of history. The lessons of that crisis still mark our present moment: historical determinism, outside of the academic cloisters of analytic Marxism, has very few adherents today. The question of why socialism remains as pressing for us as it was at the time of Einstein's writing.

While Henry Kissinger is not responsible for the evolution of the U.S. national security state into such a monstrosity, his strategies, the use of bombing as an instrument of “diplomacy” in Southeast Asia, the militarization of the Persian Gulf, and the violation of the sovereignty of neutral countries to destroy so-called enemy “sanctuaries,” has created the conditions for the endless wars started by Bush’s neocons and waged by Obama’s liberal hawks.

John Oliver: Prisoner Re-entry. What the Actual Fact? - Truth and Fiction in the GOP Debate. How To Go To Space (with XKCD!) Demand a 2016 Election Day Holiday! 'Why use a Taser?' The death of Calvon 'Andre' Reid.