The US abolished direct military conscription, but has replaced it with an indirect system of economic conscription: young people from poor backgrounds often see no opportunity to get ahead except through the army.

The article is mistaken on a couple of important points. First, Nixon did damp down the movement to end the Vietnam War, by pulling the US army out of Vietnam, but that was not the permanent effect that the article presents. The US antiwar movement was quite strong for the first few years of the occupation of Iraq.

It also omits another, deeper blindness about thanking troops for "serving their country" -- for the most part, that's not what they are doing. And, in Iraq, many of them figured that out; (then) Bradley Manning was far from alone. A soldier wrote to me, responding to what he saw in stallman.org, saying that the troops in his unit felt that they were in Iraq to support an empire.

I think we should offer troops condolences rather than thanks. Many of them joined up intending to serve their country, and they were cheated of the opportunity.

I am looking for people to write a recipe for how to connect to the WiFi in a New York City subway station without running its nonfree Javascript code. The recipe could include a free Javascript program I could run, or it could consist of instructions for what I would type into IceCat (our variant of Firefox). It doesn't have't be super convenient, it just has to work.

US citizens: phone your senators to oppose Resolution 6, which would condemn the recent UN resolution rebuking Israel for colonizing Palestinian territory.

The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.

US citizens: join rallies on Sunday Jan 15 against Republican cuts to medical care and Planned Parenthood.

Al Qa'ida is slowly growing by seeking support locally and being less bloody.

Perhaps it will morph into something we could make peace with.

Any Islamist group advocates oppressive Shari'a law, and thus aims to violate people's human rights. But it's not usually necessary or legitimate to respond to every such regime with war. The US has not started drone attacks in Poland and Hungary, let alone Belarus, Thailand, and Malaysia, nor even in Bahrain, Egypt, and Salafi Arabia, for their violations of human rights.