As this week’s final presidential debate revealed once again, U.S. conflict with Vladimir Putin and the Soviets seems to be heightening nearly every day. Soon it might be dubbed “Cold War II” or “Superpower Showdown, the Sequel.” While the global stakes may seem smaller than in the original confrontation, it’s worth remembering that both sides…
A class of fifth-graders from Green Acres Elementary in Lebanon, Ore., asked us to find out how pencil lead is made. That quest took us all the way back to the dawn of the universe and then all the way up to a factory in Jersey City, N.J. In the process, we learned that pencil…
In a televised interview with ABC’s Mike Wallace in 1958, author of the seminal classic Brave New World, Aldous Huxley laid out his rather grim vision for the future of the human race in a prescient and timeless warning for us to wake up. After having lived through the bloodbaths of World War I and II…
Here’s a video of an independence advocate ringing the bell on Indian TV: Long story short, there aren’t a lot of useful parallels between East Pakistan and Balochistan. But that’s not going to stop Modi from messing with Pakistan in Balochistan if he really wants to. For that matter, Pakistan has learned a few tricks…
Jean-Paul Pougala’s April 14, 2011 piece in Pambazuka News titled “The Lies Behind the West’s War on Libya” describes how Africa first developed its own transcontinental communications system by purchasing a telecommunications satellite on December 26, 2007: the African Development Bank ponied up $50 million toward the nearly $400 million cost of the orbiter and…
In the early 1950s, the CIA started a program called MK-ULTRA. Fearing that the Soviet Union was getting ahead in espionage, they investigated whether LSD could be used for mind control. The existence of MK-ULTRA is fairly well-known, but most people don’t know just how crazy the details were. CIA agents did some absolutely insane…
