Let's Try Democracy

Link.

Listen to “Trump Sanctions Ayatollah Khamenei, Now What?” on Spreaker.

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. read more

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

If you’re free, if you’re not locked behind bars (and I do realize that this is true of a smaller percentage of people in the so-called Land of the Free than anywhere else on earth), be grateful. One thing you can do is get your hands on important new books. I recommend this one: The Meaning of Life: The Case for Abolishing Life Sentences by Marc Mauer and Ashley Nellis, Featuring Six Portraits of Lifers.

This book does include powerful portraits of people sentenced to life in prison. read more

Jeffrey Ostler’s Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas, tells a complex, honest, and nuanced story of what overall and in many particular parts fits the UN definition of and the popular conception of genocide. So, of course, it is primarily a story of not surviving genocide, though I guess that would have been too much of a “Dog Bites Man” headline for any publisher.

But parts of the story are of surviving. Some read more

UPDATE: He has been confirmed as a veteran.

The latest mass shooter in the United States (in Dallas this morning) has a video on his Facebook page [UPDATE: The video has been removed] in which he claims to have been in the U.S. Army. Statistically, that’s likely to be true. Disproportionately, mass shooters have been trained as mass shooters by the U.S. military.

In researching that finding, however, I also found that another large percentage of mass shooters imagined themselves in read more

Scientists not employed by ExxonMobil or named Neil DeGrasse Tyson have reached a universal consensus. Wanting the United States to attack Iran is the single stupidest idea yet recorded in a human brain. In the words of one, “It isn’t even close.”

In a peer-reviewed report on a controlled laboratory experiment, sample humans were presented with the following 12 items of information.

1. Iran is nowhere near the United States, has no ability to attack the United States, has not threatened to attack the United States, has not started a war in literally centuries, and spends less than 2 percent what the United States does on war preparations. Defending the United States and its “interests” from Iran just means defending the other disastrous wars that are already underway and near Iran.
2. Iran has no nuclear weapons program, yet agreed to extreme inspections never agreed to by any other country, and complied with the agreement, but Donald Trump tore the agreement up in between his morning pop tarts and viewing Fox News encouragement of separating children from their parents and locking them in cages.
3. The United States has taken countless steps to threaten and provoke Iran, including the extreme crime of threatening war.
4. A war on Iran could involve attacks on nuclear energy facilities, the use of nuclear weapons, the creation of a nuclear winter, and global human starvation, and is certain to involve large numbers of people killed, injured, traumatized, and made homeless — for which they would be blamed by those eager to spin the vicious cycle of hatred, war, and hatred forward.
5. Other benefits of a war on Iran would likely include: massive environmental and climate destruction, erosion of rights in the United States, major defunding of human needs, increased racism and xenophobia, and deadly blowback against people you’re supposed to care about in the United States, Israel, and Europe — well, that and making all the other recent wars look less catastrophic by comparison.
6. Every moment the United States spends pursuing this barbaric madness is a moment spent allowing the earth’s climate to lock in greater catastrophe in the years to come.
7. War, like threatening war, is a crime. It is the greatest crime.
8. The fact that Iran has a deeply flawed government is a truly insane thing to imagine is relevant here. Almost every nation on earth has a deeply flawed government, and the United States arms and trains most of them. The United States *is* a deeply flawed government, and few people there believe they would benefit from being bombed. None of the nations the United States has previously bombed, supposedly for having bad governments, has benefitted.
9. Speaking of Germany and Japan — which your mind has just leaped to in order to avoid thinking about Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Pakistan, Yemen, the Philippines, Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Panama, Granada, and so forth — the millions killed cannot speak, but the current governments of Germany and Japan — voluntarily occupied nations devoid of self-respect, backing wars in violation of their Constitutions, and licking the shoes of Emperor Trump — Germany and Japan say attacking Iran would be too crazy for them.
10. We can’t believe we’re having to inform you of this, but . . . excuses for wars are not actually justifications. If Iraq had really had weapons, or Vietnam had really returned fire off its coast, or Gadaffi had really threatened a massacre and handed out Viagra, or babies had really been taken out of incubators, and so forth, exactly zero instances of mass bombings of human beings would have been actually justified. The degree of incompetence in the forming of an excuse is not the interesting question that corporate communications companies pretend. Dubya was a hack, Obama was quite skilled, Trump doesn’t even bother trying, and you and I should not care. You can’t blow up a shopping mall because someone shoplifted. And if you do, nobody is going to think all the media attention should focus on evidence of the shoplifting.
11. The following is irrelevant (see #10 above), but we accept that you have been brainwashed way past the point of being able to grasp that. The Iran-attacked-a-boat excuse is
    A) Not a justification for a war, but for a criminal investigation.
    B) Laughably incompetent, almost as bad as if they weren’t really concerned with fooling anyone. First they claimed to know Iran was guilty because of the type of mine used, and then it became clear that no mines were used — rather as in the U.S.S. Maine incident in 1898, which somebody may possibly have taken a bet he couldn’t reproduce.
12. John Bolton’s primary qualification for his job is the lies he told about Iraq. Mike Pompeo openly brags about lying as central to his career experience. Donald Trump may never have knowingly and intentionally told the truth in his life. Every past war has been based on lies, and creative lies to start a war on Iran have been generated for decades.

In certain humans, presented with these items of information, scientists were able to record, not read more

#ImpeachmentInquiryNow #Impeach #ImpeachTrump #IMPEACHMENT