No Peace at the Border for Pastors: Humanitarian Goods for Cuba Seized in Texas
by C. L. Cook
At approximately 9:30 am local time today, the 19th annual Caravan to Cuba convoy attempted to cross from the United States into Mexico at McAllen, Texas. At this hour, U.S. border authorities are holding up the 'Friendshipment" while agents search for and confiscate all donated computers.

There is so far no indication U.S. authorities will prevent other essential items included on America's broad embargoed materials list passing through the checkpoint, or harass further American and international volunteers en route via Mexico to the Caribbean island nation.

Just Who's Doing the Hoarding? Food Independence and Real Democracy
by Frances Moore Lappe

As about 30 countries scramble to protect their citizens from hunger by limiting food exports, the title of a front-page New York Times article calls out: "Hoarding Nations Drive Food Costs Ever Higher."

But where does responsible government action end and hoarding begin? (If the Irish government had begun a little hoarding instead of exporting grain in 1845, many deaths could have been avoided in the Irish potato famine.) It's not an easy question to answer, suggesting as it does that it might be a perfect time to ask how countries got into this no-win, export-or-not quandary to begin with.

Elimination Round: Hurtling Down History's Dark Roads

by Chris Floyd

With the backing and the blessing of local government and the police, the anti-Semitic organization takes its program into the local schools, to hammer home its stern, unyielding message: Girls, do not give your bodies to the racial enemy! Do not let them seduce and defile your innocence with their devious ways!

The city's own welfare representative heads up the program of the "Anti-Assimilation Department." He shows the schoolgirls a film -- "Sleeping with the Enemy" -- which dramatizes how the filthy Semite worms his way into the affections of an innocent girl then cruelly abandons her. This "abnormal phenomenon" is plaguing several cities in the area, says the police chief; there have already been many cases of racially pure girls "joining with" Semite men. The propaganda efforts of the Anti-Assimilation Department are aimed at eliminating the sexual machinations of the "exploitative" Semites.

How Ignorant Are We?
The Voters Choose… but on the Basis of What?
by Rick Shenkman
[W]at does it mean exactly to say that American voters are stupid? About this there is unfortunately no consensus. Like Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, who confessed not knowing how to define pornography, we are apt simply to throw up our hands in frustration and say: We know it when we see it.

 

But unless we attempt a definition of some sort, we risk incoherence, dooming our investigation of stupidity from the outset. Stupidity cannot mean, as Humpty Dumpty would have it, whatever we say it means.

"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."