No, Bush the Elder and Trump Are Not Opposites

I’m scheduled to do an interview on the topic of why George H.W. Bush pardoning the Iran-Contra gang wasn’t treated with the outrage that Trump pardoning any of his cronies would be. So, I’m looking at some of the swill that passes for journalism around here.

CNN’s Chris Cillizza tells us that Bush and Trump are “exact opposites.” He starts off with read more

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The Ancient Mythical Rites of Pearl Harbor Day

Last week I spoke at a high school. As I often do, I told them I’d perform a magic trick. I only know one, but I know it will almost always work with no skill required. I scribbled on a piece of paper and folded it up. I asked someone to name a war that was justified. They of course said “World War II” and I opened up the paper, which read “World War II.” Magic!

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Earth Over the Brink

Glacier National Park is drip drip dripping into a puddle.

People and companies and governments are cutting down trees to burn them to save the planet from global warming, mixing the sacrificial trees with oh-so-clean coal, and in Detroit with tires, and in North Carolina with chicken shit.

Others are hacking down old forests to grow marijuana where it’s least likely to be found: another great benefit of drug prohibition.

Over 95% of California’s wild game was mercilessly slaughtered read more

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Talk Nation Radio: Dave Lindorff on the Pentagon’s Fictional Budget

Dave Lindorff is an investigative reporter who writes for the Nation, London Review of Books, Salon and Tarbell.org. He is founder of the collectively run journalists’ news site thiscantbehappening.net.

Lindorff has just published an articled called “Exclusive: The Pentagon’s Massive Accounting Fraud Exposed.” See:
https://www.thenation.com/article/pentagon-audit-budget-fraud

Total run time: 29:00
Host: David Swanson.
Producer: David Swanson.
Music by Duke Ellington.

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Are Genes Pseudo-Science Driven by Racist Patriarchal Plutocrats?

A new film called A Dangerous Idea argues that the concept of the gene will be looked back on (if humanity lives long enough) in the way that we look back on claims of “royal blood” and skull size as justifications for power and social status. The film makes the case that eugenics and (its more recent name) genetics has been driven by the same interests as those past claims.

It’s very strange to me that the most unequal nation among wealthy nations contains so many people who read more

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Yemen, Poisoned Water, and a Green New Deal

While U.N. figures suggest that it would take 1% of U.S. military spending to provide the world with clean drinking water, the United States could end the worst cholera epidemic in recorded history (in Yemen) for far less than that and far less than what it is spending to create the epidemic through the U.S.-Saudi war on Yemen. And what may turn out to be the most widespread poisoning of water sources around the read more

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Open Letter to Senator Bernie Sanders

On Wednesday, November 28, 2018, over 100 U.S. scholars, intellectuals, and activists published the open letter to Senator Bernie Sanders below and invited others to add their names to it. Sanders was working to force a new Senate vote on ending, or at least reducing, U.S. participation in the war on Yemen. Signers of the letter below wished to encourage such steps and, in fact, to urge Sanders toward far greater opposition to militarism and support for peace.

On Tuesday, Senator Sanders had published read more

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