The Dallas Peace Center has just completed its second annual Peace Film
Festival. We were pleased to host Linda Hattendorf, creator of a the documentary film The Cats of Mirikitani. The Dallas audience was clearly moved by this lovingly told story of Jimmy Mirikitani, an American citizen and artist of Japanese ancestry who is stripped of his citizenship and placed in a WWII internment camp. read more »

The loss of human life alone is enough to convince most people of the futility of war. Now consider the environmental costs:

"An oil slick caused by Israeli bombing of the Jiyyeh power station now covers 80km (50 miles) of coast.

Local environmental groups describe the slick as an "environmental disaster".

Almost as much oil may have entered the water as during the 1989 Exxon Valdez tanker incident in Alaska, which led to widespread ecological damage." http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/5233358.stm read more »

By Ted Glick
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Thursday 27 July 2006

As a new front in the Middle East powder keg opens up in Lebanon, as Iraq descends into what can only be called civil war, as the Taliban makes a comeback in Afghanistan and as the US continues to rattle its sabers at Iran and Syria, it might make sense to step back and think more broadly about how the peace movement is ever going to turn this country away from its anti-democratic, dangerous support of repressive regimes in Israel, Egypt, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere in the Middle East. After all, though the war in Iraq has been especially brutal and hideous, the US has been throwing its weight around in this region for a long time, particularly since the end of World War II. read more »

Our crippling addiction to oil is finally starting to creep into the public discourse. President Bush has repeatedly used the "addicted to oil" phrase. Now Ted Koppel has an in-your-face opinion piece in the New York Times that very clearly defines why we're in Iraq. Koppel found this Dick Cheney quote from the Desert Storm era:

"We're there because the fact of the matter is that part of the world controls the world supply of oil, and whoever controls the supply of oil, especially if it were a man like Saddam Hussein, with a large army and sophisticated weapons, would have a stranglehold on the American economy and on â€" indeed on the world economy." read more »

"America is addicted to oil, which is often imported from unstable parts of the world. The best way to break this addiction is through technology."

This, my peace-loving friends, is the most honest utterance our commander-in-chief has made in my memory. At least the part about addiction is true. For every barrel of oil we produce, we consume 3. The American lifestyle is one problem that technology cannot cure, however. read more »

Hello!

It's good to see other peace related sites using CivicSpace to get their message out. I've just installed CivicSpace on my personal site. At this point, my installation is just a trial, a practice session to get my administration skills developed. My goal is to use CivicSpace for the Dallas Peace Center's new interactive web site.

To that end, I'd love to hear what other site administrators have learned about CivicSpace, particularly about security (there seem to be quite a few malicious, pro-Bush hacker types out there!), the taxonomy features, and themes. read more »