click photo for larger image photo by Bob Parker © 2008 Quote by Italo Calvino from Invisible Cities, p145 Thanks to the ACLU and the Freedom of Information Act, recent confirmations have come to light that top Bush administration aides, actively overseen by the Vice-President and fully sanctioned by the President, drafted the legal opinions […]

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Language and power

April 10, 2008 — 2 Comments

© Bob Parker 2008 (Quote on propaganda is adapted from The Complete Works of W. H. Auden: Prose, Volume III, 1949-1955, edited by Edward Mendelson, pub. Princeton University Press 1/08 as quoted in Harpers Magazine, December 2007 p. 21). (Bottom photo: Veterans for Peace Arlington Northwest memorial cemetery, Renton WA 2005 . The American death […]

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The US Mission and Auden

March 31, 2008 — 3 Comments

While visiting New York City last fall, I noticed a foreboding edifice being constructed across the street from the United Nations. © 2008 Bob Parker This high-rise bunker, which lacks any discernible windows in its hulking mass, will house the U.S. Mission to the UN. Its design reflects a disturbing duality: the inability of occupants […]

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Who is Safe?

February 23, 2008 — 1 Comment

As I’ve been thinking recently about our democratically elected government’s refusal to ban all methods of torture in it’s “War on Freedom”, and the American Psychological Association’s readiness to collaborate (with some “ethical” qualifications) under the professed belief of making interrogations safe for persons detained without benefit of civil and human rights, my mind drift’s […]

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© Bob Parker 2008 I have been wanting to post a piece related to Orwell’s 1946 essay “ Politics and the English Language”  for some time. I admired how Orwell understood the relationship between language and how it affects quality of thought, and influences behavior in the political sphere (and this is true in the […]

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