In this excellent article by Greg Grandin, the history of U.S. involvement in decades of 'dirty wars', brutal dictatorships, and false democracies across Latin America is briefly explored in an effort to show that the current atrocities occurring in the global war against terrorism are really nothing new. They may have been refined a bit, to be more palatable for public consumption, but essentially nothing has changed. Just like the cold war and the drug war, the war on terrorism is nothing more than a contrived pretense for the wealthy elite classes of the world to wage unrestrained warfare against self-willed people and planet which stand in the way of their amoral quest for profit.  (continued...)

        "The past is never dead. It's not even past." -- William Faulkner

This week the world learned that the Cold War didn't really 'end', per se, and that the Neolithic revolution isn't quite complete. (continued...)

To science we owe dramatic changes in our smug self-image. Astronomy taught us that our earth isn’t the center of the universe but merely one of billions of heavenly bodies. From biology we learned that we weren’t specially created by God but evolved along with millions of other species. Now archaeology is demolishing another sacred belief: that human history over the past million years has been a long tale of progress. In particular, recent discoveries suggest that the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered. (continued...)