Top 10 Things People Pretend They Don’t Know

There are plenty of good occasions to pretend not to know something: an embarrassing secret of a friend, a plan for a surprise party, the punchline of a child’s joke.

There are plenty of good excuses to actually not know something: it would take decades of study, it’s of no interest or value, it would cost so much money to research it that you could have saved millions of lives instead.

There are, I think, fewer good justifications for pretending to yourself (not just to others) not to know read more

The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons and the World’s Future

Late January of this year will mark the first anniversary of the entry into force of the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.  This momentous international agreement, the result of a lengthy struggle by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) and by many non-nuclear nations, bans developing, testing, producing, acquiring, possessing, stockpiling, and threatening to use nuclear weapons.  Adopted by read more

Tomgram: Engelhardt, A Nation Coming Apart at the Seams

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

What Will We Remember of 2022? Nation (Un)Building and Planet (Un)Building, American-Style By

Let me start 2022 by heading back — way, way back — for a moment.

It’s easy to forget just how long this world has been a dangerous place for human beings. I thought about this recently when I stumbled upon a little memoir my Aunt Hilda scrawled, decades ago, in a small notebook. In it, she commented in passing: “I was graduated during that horrible flu epidemic of 1919 read more

There Will Be Many Acts of Kindness on the Way Down

I live in a wealthy country, the U.S., and in a corner of it, a part of Virginia, not yet hit hard by fires or floods or tornados. In fact, until Sunday night, January 2nd, we’d had rather pleasant, almost summerlike weather most of the time since summer. Then, Monday morning, we got several inches of wet, heavy snow.

It’s now Thursday, and trees and branches have been coming down all over the place. We shook branches repeatedly as the snow was first arriving, to get some of it off. We still read more

Magistrate Takes U.S. Navy to Task for Its Jets, Lies, and Secrecy

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, January 5, 2022

World BEYOND War has long supported efforts to stop noisy, polluting Navy jet flights over state parks in Washington State.

Now a report by Chief United States Magistrate Justice J. Richard Creatura has got the Seattle Times editorial board proposing some sort of “compromise.”

Some choice excerpts:

Here, despite a gargantuan administrative record, covering nearly 200,000 pages of studies, reports, comments, and the like, the Navy selected methods read more

The Pentagon and CIA Have Shaped Thousands of Hollywood Movies into Super Effective Propaganda

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, January 5, 2022

Propaganda is most impactful when people don’t think it’s propaganda, and most decisive when it’s censorship you never knew happened. When we imagine that the U.S. military only occasionally and slightly influences U.S. movies, we are extremely badly deceived. The actual impact is on thousands of movies made, and thousands of others never made. And television shows of every variety. The military guests and celebrations of the read more

Primer on Foreign Policy for Candidates Published

By RootsAction Education Fund, January 5, 2022

RootsAction Education Fund has published a Primer on Foreign Policy for U.S. Congressional Candidates.

Congressional candidates often have little or nothing to say about foreign policy, and a lot of them have a surprising reason when asked: they say that they don’t know anything about it.

Some of them seem to be telling the truth, and others who don’t explain themselves may also lack knowledge of foreign policy.

Even some candidates who do read more

Talk World Radio: Charles Lenchner on Refusing Military “Service”

AUDIO:

Talk World Radio is recorded as audio and video on Riverside.fm. Here is this week’s video and all the videos on Youtube.

VIDEO:

This week on Talk World Radio we’re talking about refusing military “service.” Our guest Charles Lenchner is a veteran peace activist, organizer, and political campaigner. Born in the United States, he grew up in Israel where he became an anti-occupation activist at a young age. In 1987, he was drafted into the Israeli Army and subsequently read more

Tomgram: Nick Turse, A Blank Check for Endless War

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

Here’s the question that comes to my mind as 2022 begins: If soon after the global war on terror began — with no special sources of inside information, nothing — I could see perfectly well that it was going to be a disaster, why couldn’t the people who mattered? It’s not like it was magic or something. It was obvious as hell.

And yet the crew running our government read more

The Washington money pit: FLASH! Pentagon Fails Audit! (Again!)

By Dave Lindorff

That’s what should have been the biggest news of 2021.  

Instead, the story, which broke on November 17, was largely ignored or buried. The nations two main newspapers, the Washington Post and the New York Times, have simply ignored it. Other news organizations stenographically quoted Pentagon officials as admitting that they failed again” but saw progress,” and as promising that they would achieve a clean” audit by… get this … 2027.

read more