Like you, I’ve had countless experiences of pointing out a new fact to someone, and seeing them acknowledge it and incorporate it into their thinking and their talking from that point forward. I’ve even had this experience with public petitions pushed on powerful people. But, I’ve also had a different experience. There are some facts that some people just will not accept, and for some of them I have a very hard time understanding why. Can you help me understand?

For example, today read more

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 read more

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Listen here.

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 read more

World BEYOND War has just released an updated 2019 mapping of militarism in the world.

Open the mapping system, check out, and customize the maps here.

Here are some examples of what the map system can show. (You’ll find detailed numbers and sources and dislpay options at the link above.)

Where wars are present that directly and violently killed over 1,000 people in 2018:

Where wars are present and where wars come from are two different questions. If we look at where money is spent on wars and where read more

I don’t know if most people in the United States ever knew what Fallujah meant. It’s hard to believe the U.S. military would still exist if they did. But certainly it has been largely forgotten — a problem that could be remedied if everyone picks up a copy of The Sacking of Fallujah: A People’s History, by Ross Caputi (a U.S. veteran of one of the sieges of Fallujah), Richard Hill, and Donna Mulhearn.

“You’re welcome for the service!”

Fallujah was the “city read more

Go right now and get yourself and the nearest house with a flag in front of it a copy of Roberto Sirvent’s and Danny Haiphong’s American Exceptionalism and American Innocence: A People’s History of Fake News — From the Revolutionary War to the War on Terror.

If this book had existed when I published Curing Exceptionalism, I would have said that reading it was part of the cure. The authors provide a rich survey and analysis of how people in the United States manage read more

Entertainment misinforms. Humans cannot possibly survive into a distant future that includes light-speed travel while simultaneously behaving like feral animals. Torture doesn’t work. Politicians don’t resemble Martin Sheen. The poor little United States is not threatened by irrational evil empires. Violence won’t save us from masked storm troopers, evil wizards, or whomever Boeing and Lockheed Martin armed last year.

But at least we used to pretend there was a dividing line, read more