A blog about a criminal enterprise
Remarks at Student Peace Awards of Fairfax County, Va., March 10, 2019
By David Swanson, Director, World BEYOND War
Thank you for inviting me here. I’m honored. And I’m reminded of lots of happy memories of Herndon High School, class of 87. If there was encouragement back then to take on the sort of projects that our honorees today have taken on, I missed it. I suspect that some improvements have been made in high school education since my day. Yet I did manage to learn a lot at Herndon, and
U.S. military spending eight years ago was at $1.2 trillion per year, when one added in the nukes in the Energy Department, the Homeland Security Department, the CIA, interest on debt, veterans’ care, etc. Now it’s at $1.3 trillion. In the years since military spending has been dramatically increased, the United States has been made less safe, less
Despite claims by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to have defeated its own troops using Facebook (and, really, what plot to take over a high school hasn’t done that?), the biggest challenge NATO will face this year will probably not be nefarious Russian social media posts.
Nor will it be the dreaded Russian military, now sucking down 6 percent as many dollars each year as the war machines of the NATO nations.
Nor is NATO terribly threatened by a U.S. president who demands that its
Roy Eidelson, PhD,is the former executive director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Solomon Asch Center for Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict and a past president of Psychologists for Social Responsibility. His work focuses on applying psychological knowledge to issues of social justice and political change. His writing has appeared in a variety of scholarly peer-reviewed journals and other outlets including the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times. He
About four months ago, I organized over 100 scholars, intellectuals, and activists to publish an open letter to Senator Bernie Sanders, which was then signed by over 10,000 more people, several of whom volunteered to deliver it to Senator Sanders. So, we know he received it.
Before publishing the letter, I only changed the text slightly from my original draft of it. The change was that, as published, it didn’t indicate that we had all refused to support his campaign last time around, or promise
Obviously many of us are both. I have zero use for either empire or war. But I’m using those tags as shorthand for two groups that sometimes unite and sometimes do not in their advocacy efforts.
One speaks against empire and war with the emphasis on empire, tends to avoid advocating nonviolence, has little to say about alternative means of conflict resolution without war, usually likes the term “revolution,” and sometimes advocates for violent revolution or revolution by any means available
Charlottesville, Virginia, has yet to take down its racist statues (the ones all the fuss has been about or any of the other ones). Charlottesville has yet to ban guns from public events. It blames the state legislature in both of those and many other topics. But the City of Charlottesville has our public dollars invested in weapons, and it is perfectly capable of changing that.
Liz Remmerswaal Hughes is a member of the Coordinating Committee of World BEYOND War. She is the Country Coordinator for World BEYOND War in New Zealand / Aotearoa where she works with a number of peace organizations. In 2017 she was awarded the Sonia Davies Peace Award which enabled her to study Peace Literacy with the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation in Santa Barbara, attend the WILPF triennial Congress in Chicago, and a workshop on Peace and Conscience in Ann Arbor. We discuss opposition in New
A choice must now be made. It is officially unconstitutional to discriminate against 18-year-old women by not forcing them to sign up to be forced against their will to kill and die for Venezuela’s oil or some other noble cause.
Yes, the fine U.S. judiciary has declared for-men-only Selective Service registration to be verboten.
That’s not to say there isn’t debate on the matter. One side holds that women should be treasured as the delicate witless pieces of property they are because the Bible
I’ve written before about the pseudo-science of genetics, which is almost as crazy as the popular understanding of it. Our culture has long proposed that Oliver Twist could grow up middle-class in the slums because of his inherited traits. But in the age when the scientific gurus in popular films are geneticists, things have gotten nuttier.
A book and movie called The Time Traveler’s Wife presents a handy depiction of roughly the way that many people think of genes. A character has
