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

Tomgram: Nick Turse, Some Notes on War Watching

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

Of all the things I don’t remember anymore, here’s one I do. As a boy, I dreamt about being a foreign correspondent, a war reporter in particular — and I think that Bob Shaplen must have been the reason why. He was a friend of my family’s, perhaps because, in the 1950s and 1960s, he was the New Yorker’s Far East correspondent and my mother drew for that 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

Soldiers Without Guns

By David Swanson, Executive Director of World BEYOND War, June 21, 2019

A new film by Will Watson, called Soldiers Without Guns, ought to shock a great many people — not because it utilizes a yet more gruesome form of violence or bizarre form of sex (the usual shockers in movie reviews), but because it recounts and shows us a true story that contradicts the most basic assumptions of politics, foreign policy, and popular sociology.

Bougainville Island was a paradise for millennia, inhabited read more

Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, The Fake News of D-Day

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

Yes, they’re now known as the “greatest generation,” while the generation that followed them is sometimes referred to as the “silent” one. In my own limited experience, however, those World War II vets, the ones I knew anyway, were remarkably silent about their wartime lives. My dad was one of them. Yes, read more