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

It began with fire. It ended with ice. In between, there were the storms and floods. And the extremity of it all should have caught anyone’s attention.

First, of course, there was that burning season that set staggering records across read more

NATO and various columnists employed by major U.S. newspapers and “think” tanks believe that military spending levels should be measured in comparison to nations’ financial economies. If you have more money, you should spend more money on wars and war preparations. I’m not sure if this is based on opinion polls in Afghanistan and Libya expressing gratitude for war as a public service or some other source of data less imaginary.

The view that gets less promotion from institutions funded read more

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

Imagine that, as January 2020 began, I had whispered in your ear that a pandemic would soon sweep the planet and, of any country on Earth, the wealthiest and most powerful, the United States of America, would be hit hardest. If I had then told you that there would be by far more read more

Talk Nation Radio is becoming Talk World Radio and can now be found at https://talkworldradio.org

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

This week on Talk World Radio: Why hasn’t Trump been prosecuted in court yet? Our guest Paul Jay is a journalist and filmmaker. He’s the founder and publisher of theAnalysis.news. He is past chair of the Documentary Organization of Canada, and was the founding Chair read more

Why should rich people get pandemic survival checks? Why shouldn’t descendants of enslaved people get reparations payments? Why should someone who doesn’t go to college pay taxes to make college free? Why should smokers get health coverage? Why should someone get out of their student debt when I didn’t?

I don’t claim to have a universal answer to all such questions. There are some questions that I would certainly answer differently if they stood alone. If the rotten U.S. political system read more

By World BEYOND War, February 21, 2021

The governments of Albania, Armenia, Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belgium, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Mongolia, Netherlands, North Macedonia, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, Ukraine, UK, and US all still have troops in Afghanistan and need to remove them.

These troops range in number from Slovenia’s read more

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

The American Century Ends Early
How the USS Enterprise Was Transformed into the USS Roach

By Tom Engelhardt

Like Gregor Samsa, the never-to-be-forgotten character in Franz Kafka’s story “The Metamorphosis,” we awoke on January 7th to discover read more

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

We’ll soon pass 500,000 American deaths from Covid-19 — half a million people deprived of life, or more than a fifth of the counted pandemic dead on this planet. Imagine that. And clearly that figure will, in turn, be but a way station on the read more

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