A blog about a criminal enterprise
By unanimous vote, the City Council of Charlottesville, Va., on Monday evening voted to ban militarized policing. Specifically, the City Council resolved that “the Charlottesville Police Department shall not acquire weaponry from the United States armed forces,” and “shall not receive military-style or ‘warrior’ training by the United States armed forces, a foreign military or police, or any private company.”
The wording of the resolution came directly from a
Remarks at Peacestock 2020
Imagine you’re stranded on a barren rock in the middle of the ocean, nothing in sight but the endless sea. And you’ve got a basket of apples, nothing else. It’s a huge basket, a thousand apples. There are various things you could do.
You could allow yourself a few apples a day and try to make them last. You could work on creating a patch of soil where apple seeds could be planted. You could work on starting a fire in order to have some cooked apples for a change.
Covid-19, you have done a number on me as a poet!
For that I am cautiously grateful.
I don’t think I can ever get back to
My old pre-Covid relationship to poetry
Even if I wanted to,
Which I’m not sure I do.
The pandemic hasn’t made me a better poet,
However that might be defined.
I’m starting from scratch.
I’m like someone who was laid off
From a twenty-year stint as a machine operator.
I used to turn out poems that meant
By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, July 16, 2020
Nicholson Baker’s new book, Baseless: My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act, is staggeringly good. If I point out any minor complaints with it, while ignoring, for example, the entirety of Trump’s latest press conference, this is because flaws stand out in a masterpiece while making up the uniform entirety of a Trumpandemic Talk.
Baker begins as if he has an unanswered and possibly unanswerable question: Did the
Americans who grew up with nightmares of nuclear weapons explosions should get ready for some terrifying flashbacks, for the Trump administration appears to be preparing to resume U.S. nuclear weapons tests.
The U.S. government stopped its atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons in 1962, shortly before signing the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963. And it halted its underground nuclear tests in 1992, signing
This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.
“The Bleeding Wound”
Osama bin Laden Won (Twice)
By Tom Engelhardt
It’s July 2020 and I’m about to turn 76, which, as far as I’m concerned, officially makes me an old man. So put up with my aging, wandering brain here, since (I swear) I wasn’t going to start this piece with Donald J. Trump, no matter his latest wild claims or bizarre statements, increasingly white
“Good Morning! Would you mind staying a safe distance away?”
“Hi! Nice mask! Could you please wear it on your face instead of your chin?”
Helping people reduce the risk of spreading a deadly disease requires being willing to offend them.
And as they long for a return to normalcy, you should be preparing to be a lot more offensive.
“That sounds delicious. Does it have any dead animals in it?”
“How’s it going? Could you please not carry a gun around here?”
These are comments of the same
This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.
A century ago, on a less populated planet, a pandemic disease took out an estimated 50 million to 100 million people, 675,000 in the United States alone, leaving the casualties of World War I (some caused by that very virus) in
This week on Talk Nation Radio: massive, shameless, and endlessly expanding war profiteering by weapons dealers. Our guest is Heidi Peltier, author of a new report called “The Growth of the ‘Camo Economy’ and the Commercialization of the Post 9/11 Wars.” Heidi Peltier is the Director of the “20
This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.
Here’s one thing you can say about America’s “war on terror,” which has morphed into a set of forever wars across the Greater Middle East and Africa: those conflicts falter, they flop, they fade (only to resurge), but they never truly seem to end. In the case of the Afghan War, for instance, the Bush administration invaded that country in the wake of the 9/11 attacks