The Last Death in a War is 90% Backwash

They say the last sip of a drink is mostly backwash. The last understanding of a war should be that every speck of it is backwash in the sense used by Ellen N. La Motte in her 1916 book The Backwash of War. La Motte was a U.S. nurse who worked at a French hospital in Belgium not far from a semi-permanent front line at which men slaughtered each other for no discernable purpose for months on end, and the mangled bodies from one side, plus the occasional civilian, were brought into the read more

Tomgram: Beverly Gologorsky, Health Care That Makes Us Ill

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Recently, at a rally in Wisconsin, President Trump implicitly attacked the late Senator John McCain over Obamacare: “We should’ve had health care, but one man decided to vote against it.” He was referring to the Republican Senate’s 2017 attempt at a “skinny repeal” of the Affordable read more

Humanitarian Aid Blocked from Entering Venezuelan Embassy in Washington D.C.

Two months ago, I heard a story. You heard it too, if you went anywhere near a television or a newspaper in the United States. The government of Venezuela needed to be overthrown because it wouldn’t allow in humanitarian aid.

The story was false, of course. The United States had imposed brutal sanctions on Venezuela for years, resulting in 40,000 deaths (with more being added every day) and sought to read more

The Line Between U.S. Prisons and Death Camps

Ethics classes in U.S. philosophy departments are pathologically obsessed with imaginary scenarios, often involving trollies, that purport to demonstrate some people’s greater acceptance of causing death or suffering if they don’t have to physically, directly, immediately cause it. Some people would supposedly pull a switch so that a trolley killed one person rather than staying on another track and killing five people, but wouldn’t push one person onto a track to save five people.

I say read more

Why we need alternative media and FAIR: Failed ‘Coup’ a Fake Corporate News Story Designed to Trick Venezuelan Soldiers — and the Public

By Dave Lindorff

After days of breathless reporting in the US media about public and military support for Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro collapsing, and about an April 30 coup by presidential poseur Juan Guaidó, we now know the truth:  The whole thing was a fraud, staged at the instigation of Washington in hopes that the Venezuelan people and rank-and-file troops would fall for the trick and there was an actual coup.

We also know, from an excellent  read more

Tomgram: Hartung and Smithberger, A Dollar-by-Dollar Tour of the National Security State

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

As the guy whose book, The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of America, was published in 1995, not long after the implosion of the Soviet Union and what looked like the greatest victory in history, let me just say that I was ahead of my time. I was then taking read more

Talk Nation Radio: Mike Gravel on Why He’s Running for President

Mike Gravel is a former U.S. Senator who opposed the war on Vietnam and entered the Penatgon Papers into the Congressional Record. He has been an activist and advocate for democracy and peace for decades. He is a current candidate for U.S. President in the Democratic Party primaries. See mikegravel.org

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

Download from LetsTryDemocracy or Archive.

Pacifica stations can also download from Audioport.

Syndicated read more

Vote for What?

Joshua Douglas’ new book, Vote for Us: How to Take Back Our Elections and Change the Future of Voting, does not explain when it was that we had our elections or what we can vote for other than “us,” but it does provide a great survey of election reform efforts, who’s working on them, and what’s working, with a list of organizations at the back that you can engage with.

While voter ID laws have spread, the racist stripping of names from polls goes unmentioned, threats and intimidation read more