Obviously many of us are both. I have zero use for either empire or war. But I’m using those tags as shorthand for two groups that sometimes unite and sometimes do not in their advocacy efforts.

One speaks against empire and war with the emphasis on empire, tends to avoid advocating nonviolence, has little to say about alternative means of conflict resolution without war, usually likes the term “revolution,” and sometimes advocates for violent revolution or revolution by any means read more

Charlottesville, Virginia, has yet to take down its racist statues (the ones all the fuss has been about or any of the other ones). Charlottesville has yet to ban guns from public events. It blames the state legislature in both of those and many other topics. But the City of Charlottesville has our public dollars invested in weapons, and it is perfectly capable of changing that.

read more

See http://DivestCville.org

WVIR NBC29 Charlottesville News, Sports, and Weather

A choice must now be made. It is officially unconstitutional to discriminate against 18-year-old women by not forcing them to sign up to be forced against their will to kill and die for Venezuela’s oil or some other noble cause.

Yes, the fine U.S. judiciary has declared for-men-only Selective Service registration to be verboten.

That’s not to say there isn’t debate on the matter. One side holds that women should be treasured as the delicate witless pieces of property they are because read more

I’ve written before about the pseudo-science of genetics, which is almost as crazy as the popular understanding of it. Our culture has long proposed that Oliver Twist could grow up middle-class in the slums because of his inherited traits. But in the age when the scientific gurus in popular films are geneticists, things have gotten nuttier.

A book and movie called The Time Traveler’s Wife presents a handy depiction of roughly the way that many people think of genes. A character read more

By David Swanson, Director of World BEYOND War

When I was a kid there was a local basketball team called the Washington Bullets. The team changed its name when “bullets” became offensive due to the high rate of gun murders in Washington, D.C. This is the same city that to this day has a football team called the Washington Redskins. What offends is not, perhaps, violence, but violence directed at people who matter. (Compare: tens of thousands of Yemenis vs. one Washington Post reporter.)

The read more

By David Swanson, Director of World BEYOND War

The U.S. State Department uses public funds and public employees to market private products designed for mass killing to foreign governments. Few corporations have benefitted more from this socialism for the oligarchs than Boeing. In one recent example, the U.S. government has persuaded the New Zealand government to buy four “Poseidon” planes from Boeing that are designed for working with submarines, of which New Zealand possesses zero.

The purchase read more

By David Swanson, Director of World BEYOND War

The New York Times and the people it gives voice to are very worried that Donald Trump may be too much in favor of peace in Korea, more in favor of peace than of disarming North Korea prior to peace — a sure recipe, of course, for never arriving at peace.

North Korea has disarmed in the past when there were real steps toward peace from both sides.

North Korea is no threat to the United States — the actual United States, not its mission of global read more