Lies, Damn Lies, and What We’ve Been Told About Afghanistan

It’s far from the longest U.S. war. There was no peace before or after it. There is no after it until they end it — and bombing has always been most of what it is. It has had nothing to do with opposing terrorism. It has been a one-sided slaughter, a mass killing over two decades by a single invading army and air force dragging along token mascots from dozens of vassal states. After 20 years Afghanistan was one of the worst places to be on Earth, and the Earth as a whole was a worse place read more

Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, Is Higher Education a Pyramid Scheme?

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

My parents certainly had college dreams for me. After all, they wanted me to move up in life, big time. Where exactly “up” was seemed less than clear to me then. But after a great fight — I wanted to go to Cornell (girls!) — I lost and, in 1962, ended up just where they wanted me to be, at Yale. Even in those days, it cost a significant pile of dough to go there, a read more

20 years of war finally end in Kabul without a bang: Biden Could Have Spared Afghanistan and US 6 Months of Pointless War by Just Ending It

By Dave Lindorff

There are two things I suppose everyone would agree are true about the remarkable events of the past several weeks in Afghanistan.

One is that we are witnessing the latest  major loss in a string of wars and incursions” that the US has lost since the end of World War II. The other is that the entire  two-decade-long, $2.3-trillion US invasion, war and occupation of  one of the poorest countries in the world, was an abject failure from the beginning.

Officially, read more

Talk World Radio: Daniel Sherrell on Warmth

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: Living through the dying of the Earth. Our guest Daniel Sherrell is the author of a powerful new book called Warmth: Coming of Age at the End of Our World. Daniel Sherrell is an organizer born in 1990. He helped lead the campaign to pass landmark climate justice legislation in New York and is the recipient of a Fulbright grant in read more

Baby Teeth, Collected Decades Ago, Can Show the Damage to Human Health of Nuclear Tests

By Lawrence Wittner and Joseph Mangano

In 2020, Harvard University’s T. C. Chan School of Public Health began a five-year study, funded by the National Institutes of Health, that will examine the connection between early life exposure to toxic metals and later-life risk of neurological disease. A collaborator with Harvard, the Radiation and Public Health Project, will analyze the relationship of strontium-90 (a radioactive element in nuclear weapons explosions) and disease risk in later life.

The read more

Afghanistan: So What Do the Filthy Commie Peaceniks Say Now?

Afghan villagers stand over bodies of civilians during a protest in the city of Ghazni, west of Kabul, Afghanistan, Sept. 29, 2019. An airstrike by U.S.-led forces in eastern Afghanistan killed at least five civilians. (AP Photo/Rahmatullah Nikzad)

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, August 15, 2021

So, people get hurt when you stop waging wars, and peace is dangerous, and . . . and . . . well, women’s rights!

What do the stupid peace lovers say now?

Well, here’s what this one says:

On September read more

Petulance as foreign policy: Bomber Biden Sends in B-52 Bombers in a Tantrum over Taliban Advance

By Dave Lindorff

In what can only be called a criminal and murderous tantrum by a loser, the United States, on the order of President Joe Biden, has begun dispatching B-52 Stratofortress bombers and AC-130 fixed-wing gunships equipped with large Gatling machine guns and a cannon to carpet-bomb and perpetrate mass killing on Taliban forces surging to victory across Afghanistan.

The bloody attack by unchallengeable  air power in a country that Biden has already withdrawn read more

Tomgram: Engelhardt, Our Not-So-Slow-Motion Apocalypse

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

My Extreme World
And (Un)Welcome to It

By

Admittedly, I hadn’t been there for 46 years, but old friends of mine still live (or at least lived) in the town of Greenville, California, and now… well, it’s more or less gone, though they survived.  The Dixie Fire, one of those devastating West Coast blazes, had already “blackened” 504 square miles of Northern California in read more

​Might Congress Actually Do Something Right?

To take recent news reports seriously, it seems just possible that sometime this year the U.S. Congress might pass a pair of pieces of legislation that combine to do more good than harm.

Not only that, but this might happen because the better members of the House of (Mis-?)Representatives take a stand by refusing to vote for something unless they get what they say they want. Should that actually happen, the precedent might be at least as valuable as the particular legislation.

This idea depends read more