Tomgram: Robert Lipsyte, Cheering Through the Moral Drift

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

What am I a fan of these days? Once upon a time, I would have said the New York Mets (or, far earlier, the Brooklyn Dodgers), or the New York (football) Giants, or the New York (basketball) Knicks. No longer. I can’t tell you why, but since the pandemic began, I’ve simply stopped doing what I had done all my life — listen to “my” team on the radio, then (once a TV read more

Tomgram: John Feffer, Anti-Globalists Unite to Take Over the World

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It’s not that I’ve never had a gun in my hands before. When I was a youngster, I shot .22s at a target range. But guns in the closet, often military-style ones? That’s not been part of my experience as a citizen. Sad to say, though, my gun-less household may, in a distinctly imaginable future, find itself in a minority in this country. After all, read more

Talk World Radio: They’re Privatizing Medicare While Your Eyes Are on a Democracy Summit

Talk World Radio is recorded as audio and video on Riverside.fm. Here is this week’s video and all the videos on Youtube. We’re using only the guest video and not the host this week, because Riverside is getting them out of synch when combining.

This week on Talk World Radio, the sneaky and sleazy bipartisan privatizing of Medicare. Our guest, Kay Tillow, is chair of Kentuckians for Single Payer Health Care and Coordinator of Unions for Single Payer Health Care. She is a retired union read more

Why We Should Oppose the Democracy Summit

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, December 2, 2021

The exclusion of certain countries from the U.S. “democracy summit” is not a side issue. It is the very purpose of the summit. And excluded countries have not been excluded for failing to meet the standards of behavior of those that were invited or the one doing the inviting. Invitees didn’t even have to be countries, as even a U.S. backed failed coup leader from Venezuela has been invited. So have representatives of Israel, Iraq, Pakistan, read more

Pearl Harbor: Don’t Drink the Water or Believe the Myths

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, December 2, 2021

If you live near Pearl Harbor, there’s delicious U.S. Navy jet fuel in your drinking water. Yum! Yum!

And some of the same people who have been warning about that for a long time have also been warning about the deadly threat posed by the stories people tell each other on Pearl Harbor Day.

If you live near a television or a computer, you’re at risk.

One of the holiest days of the year is fast approaching. Are you ready? Remember the read more

Youth from Around the World Contribute to a Book on Peace

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, December 1, 2021

Five members of the World BEYOND War Youth Network (WBWYN) from five continents have contributed, together with WBW’s Education Director, to a chapter in a new book (available free in full as PDF) called Problems, Threats and Challenges for Peace and Conflict Resolution, edited by Joanna Marszałek-Kawa Maria Ochwat.

The book provides a highly informative survey of how people in numerous parts of the world view working for peace, primarily meaning read more

Reflecting on the Dawn of Everything

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, November 30, 2021

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow is, I think, a terrific contribution to human knowledge and guide to pursuing more of the same — as well as a notable accomplishment for the Davids of the world, who have perhaps been falling a bit short lately. A few of the points it documents and persuades of are:

Neither Hobbes nor Rousseau was right, nor ever claimed to be, not in the sense of describing read more