These links are 99 9/10% pure. Don’t ask about the .1%

• Police Reform is Impossible in America.
• Why Do We Look? On Gazing at Dead Black Bodies.
• The Road to Garissa.
• The Garissa Massacre Show Us it is Time to Abandon the War on Terror.
• Why al Shabaab Kills: The Role of the U.S. and Its Kenyan and Ethiopian Allies:

Al-Shabaab fighters can’t reach the United States, but they can reach Kenya, with which it shares a border. Kenyans shopping in a mall or attending university run the risk of being victimized too. That is the point which Al-Shabaab makes implicitly and explicitly with each attack. If their people can be killed, then the citizens of an occupying nation can be killed too.

Once again we see painful and heart rending images of victims and grieving families. The corporate media tells Americans little if anything about Somalia’s road to ruin which the United States directed. They don’t reveal the American violence directed at Somalis or present images of starving people or bodies left by war and drone strikes.

In the American mind Al-Shabaab is just another group of crazed foreigners who have bizarre grievances. In fact their grievances are justly held and if there were true justice in this world the United States and its puppets would not only have to leave that country but make restitution as well.

• The Citadel of Aleppo, on war in the Syrian city’s past and present.
• Maintaining Timbuktu’s Djinguereber Mosque.
• Kurdish Women on the Frontline.
• The Rich Get Government Handouts Too.
• “I Don’t Know Why We Come”: Inside the UN’s Commission on the Status of Women.
• Working the Harvest, and then Moving On:

These days, Crystal Sugar hires or subcontracts 2,200 seasonal workers, 1,700 of them for only two to four weeks in October. The short season poses a different sort of hiring challenge and draws, as one might expect, a different sort of laborer. I would meet three kinds: unemployed and underemployed locals; retirees, bored or lacking pensions, who drove RVs from one temporary job to another; and travelers, like the ones I knew from Rock Creek. It was an odd assembly, a carnival of exiles, and it struck me that this was the new proletariat, unfaithful but adaptable and eternally adrift. If the American dream had not abandoned my fellow workers, they had abandoned it. They would not buy houses. They would not open bank accounts. They would move on to the next job, and the next, because the nation needed its hoboes.

• The Hidden Hand behind the Islamic State? Saddam Hussein’s.
• How the Cartels Were Born.
• Self-Portrait of the Artist as Ungrateful Black Writer.
• Bar Fight Insults as Academic Papers.
• Can the Somali Speak? #CadaanStudies & The Audacity of Somali Studies.
• Is Iran Totalitarian?
• Past Politics and Present Preservation of the Gacaca Files in Rwanda.
• On Simultaneity, on ethnography and capitalism.