The controlling image of Jackson Browne's dark anti-militarist song "Casino Nation," written as the Bush administration embarked on its so-called "War on Terror," is "the way the hammer shapes the hand."  --  "Casino Nation" appeared on Browne's 2002 album, "The Naked Ride Home."  --  Andrew Thomas calls his video tribute to the song an "animated editorial."  --  With striking and cleverly presented images, he illustrates the themes of the song, whose lyrics are posted below the YouTube version.[1,2]  --   The video also appears on Jackson Browne's web site....


If the world consisted of 100 people... only three would have an internet connection....


The famous essay retranslated here, written sixty-one years ago this month but still timely, was published by Albert Camus on August 8, 1945, a day after news was received of the destruction of Hiroshima by an atomic bomb.  --  In it, Camus seems to foresee the rise of doctrines like those of the neoconservatives who dominate U.S. foreign policy in the administration of George W. Bush.  --  He warns:  “But we refuse to draw from such grave news anything other than the determination to plead even more energetically for a real international society, in which . . . war, a scourge that has become definitive through human intelligence alone, will not depend on the appetites or doctrines of this or that State.”  --  Camus concludes:  “Faced with the terrifying prospects that are opening up before humanity, we see even more clearly than before that peace is the only fight worth engaging in.  This isn’t a plea any more, but an order that has to rise up from peoples to governments, the order to choose once and for all between hell and reason.” ...