Official Secrets: Best Movie So Far This Year

The true story of British whistleblower Katharine Gun is public. The new movie dramatizing that story, with Keira Knightley in the starring role is called a thriller. And that it is.

How can a known event be made into a suspenseful thriller? In part this is possible because the story is a complex one that few know the details of, and in part because most people don’t know anything about anything. There’s too much information in the world, and most of it is useless or worse. The story read more

Patriotism Is Too Small For My Family

By David Swanson, Executive Director, World BEYOND War, July 3, 2019

Ending bigotry has gone mainstream among the enlightened people of the developed world.

Did you spot the acceptable bigotry in that sentence?

We’re against racism, sexism, and more kinds of bigotry than I could ever list.

But the 96 percent of humanity that’s not within the United States is hardly worthy of concern.

Millions of lives in Yemen lack the value of one Washington Post reporter dismembered with a bone saw. read more

Talk Nation Radio: Marc Mauer on Life in Prison and Felony Disenfranchisement

Marc Mauer is the executive director of The Sentencing Project, a national organization based in Washington, D.C. that promotes criminal justice reform. His books include The Meaning of Life: The Case for Abolishing Life Sentences, coauthored with Ashley Nellis. The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has just released a report that draws on testimony by Marc Mauer on the impact of felony disenfranchisement.

Total run time: 29:00
Host: David Swanson.
Producer: David Swanson.
Music by Duke Ellington.

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New Report: Worst Monument in Charlottesville Can Be Removed

A new report released July 1, 2019, concludes that a major monument in Charlottesville, Virginia, can be legally removed.

The monument, which depicts George Rogers Clark threatening Native American men and a woman holding an infant, is not covered by a Virginia state law that forbids removing war monuments, due to the date of the monument’s erection and its ownership by the University of Virginia rather than the County of Albemarle.

George Rogers Clark said that he would have liked to “see the read more

Meritocracy Mythologizing

You’d think a publisher with this many names could check for glaring errors in its books: “Currency, Crown Publishing Group, Penguin Random House LLC.” And you’d be right. So this isn’t an error. It’s a lie accepted as a desirable myth:

“Today it’s widely accepted that meritocracy and aristocracy have become one and the same. The lords of the universe are not sitting on trust funds. . . . [M]ost of the new lords achieved perfect or near-perfect scores on their SATs at age sixteen read more

This Is Really Not a Drill

On Wednesday, the first 10 of the 20 Democrats whom the corporate media is permitting into what they call debates were asked what the greatest threat to the United States is. A worthy and funny answer would have been “MSNBC.” Another worthy and funny answer would have been “Donald Trump,” which was in fact Jay Inslee’s answer — and he made clear elsewhere in the event that climate collapse is also his answer. A worthy answer, though nobody would have understood it, would have been read more

Talk Nation Radio: Thom Hartmann on Guns and the Second Amendment

Thom Hartmann is a progressive national and internationally syndicated talk show host and the author of The Hidden History of Guns and the Second Amendment. Talkers magazine named him America’s most important progressive host and has named his show one of the top ten talk radio shows in the country every year for over a decade. A four-time recipient of the Project Censored Award, Hartmann is also a New York Times bestselling author of twenty-five books, translated into multiple languages.

Total read more

Protecting Children from Police

Donald E. McInnis’s book, She’s So Cold, is painful to read. McInnis was the defense attorney for one of three boys falsely accused of killing one of the boys’ sister. Much of the book is recreation of police interrogations that were videotaped, and of a court hearing.

This was one of those cases the mass media love and for which they effectively convict the accused in the minds of the public. This was in 1998 in San Diego, and the original victim’s name was Stephanie Crowe. But there were read more