Petition asks Charlottesville to keep weapons out of rallies

A new petition, signed by over 8,000 people and just sent to Charlottesville’s City Council, asks Charlottesville to keep weapons out of rallies. The petition, found at https://diy.rootsaction.org/p/cville , reads:

“Make clear that in permits for any rallies in public spaces in Charlottesville, guns, knives, and sticks shall not be allowed.”

Activists, including nonviolent peace activists, are often forbidden to carry posters on sticks, having to use hollow carboard tubes, at events around read more

My letter to Larry Flynt on Trump Impeachment

Larry Flynt,

Your grounds for impeachment #s 2 through 6 (plus that of the paragraph that follows them) are already documented by overwhelming, incontrovertible evidence. What is required is to recognize that and to remove from the list the impediment of the ground you have placed as #1 which helps create the illusion of requiring more information, which risks increased militarism, and which could derail this entire impeachment project due to the lack of evidence for any of its central claims.

That’s read more

The Secure, the Dispossessed, and the Mentally Deranged Dotards

In The Secure and the Dispossessed, Nick Buxton and Ben Hayes have collected an unflinching survey of a species gone mad. The book’s subtitle is “How the Military and Corporations Are Shaping a Climate-Changed World.” In short, the Authoritarian Exceptionalist Military Corporate Complex is flamboyantly recognizing the hole it is in, and exponentially increasing the rate of digging, while hiring PR firms to redefine “digging” as “robust engagement in advanced resilient green read more

What About Weinstein’s Public Offenses?

Harvey Weinstein, I’ve just read, is “the disgraced Pulp Fiction producer.” But isn’t someone who encourages millions of people to think of murder and torture as super cool and fun already pre-disgraced? Doesn’t he arrive in the locked office with the actress cowering in the corner already publicly disgraced and intent on disgracing himself in private?

This is a man whom we have to thank for Reservoir Dogs, Gangs of New York, Kill Bill, Rambo, Inglorious Basterds, Django read more

PBS’s Vietnam Acknowledges Nixon’s Treason

After reading and hearing wildly contradictory accounts of Ken Burns & Lynn Novick’s Vietnam War documentary on PBS, I decided I had to watch the thing. I agree with some of the criticism and some of the praise.

The documentary begins with the ludicrous idea that the U.S. government had good intentions. It ends with praise for the memorial in DC and its tragic list of names, without mention of the greater number of U.S. veterans of that war who have since died from suicide, much less the read more

Talk Nation Radio: US Provides Military Assistance to 73 Percent of World’s Dictatorships

This week on Talk Nation Radio we discuss the United States provision of weapons to dictatorships. We’re joined by Rich Whitney, who is an attorney from Carbondale, Illinois, now working as an appellate public defender. He is one of the founding members of the Illinois Green Party, currently serves on its Executive Committee, and in 2006 served as that party’s first-ever candidate for governor, winning over 360,000 votes, about 10.5 percent of the total. He is currently serving as read more

As U.S. Pounds Seven Nations, Congressional Committee Warns of Running Out of Bombs

Here’s an email you don’t see every day:

From: LOSING TIME <HASC.Drumbeat@mail.house.gov>
Date: Tue, Oct 10, 2017 at 7:32 AM
Subject: LOSING TIME: We Are Running Out of Bombs

Home  |  About  |  News  |  Contact
For Immediate Release:
October 10, 2017
Contact:
HASC Communications (202)-225-2539
LOSING TIME
“Every day we live under a continuing resolution is a day we do damage to our military.”  – Mac Thornberry, Chairman, House Armed Services Committee

WE ARE RUNNING OUT OF BOMBS

THE PROBLEM:

General Dunford said it best this spring, “Key precision guided munitions shortfalls are exacerbated by ongoing operations and may impact potential contingency response. Additionally, our current global inventories are insufficient for theater missile defense (TMD), standoff, read more

Slim Pickings for Charlottesville City Council

Thus far I’m underwhelmed by the candidates seeking to join Charlottesville’s City Council this year, as well as, of course, by the current members. In the wake of the fascist rallies, the electoral system does not seem to be responding particularly well.

I don’t go in for the usual moronic popularity contest wherein we’re supposed to figure out which candidate we’d most like to be friends with. Instead, I try to approximate direct democracy by figuring out which candidate will do the read more

Vietghanistan’s New Year, War Lies’ New Millennium

 The Afghanistan War documentary by Ken Burns III may someday be set for release in Spring 2074.

Or maybe not. The peace movement in the U.S. made Vietnam, rather than Korea, a topic for Burns. The peace movement is struggling to make people in the United States aware that the war on Afghanistan even exists, much less that it is entering its 17th year — making it something that people who still don’t recognize Native Americans as full humans call “the longest U.S. war.”

If there ever is such a PBS account of Vietghanistan, it will no doubt steer clear of the illegality, the lasting read more