War is a self-perpetuating habit that harms its users and can provide a certain momentary high. At a peace conference in Canada recently I heard a number of people refer to themselves as “recovering Americans.” The degree to which many people imagine wars are launched and continued for rational reasons is a major misunderstanding; war cannot be explained without irrationality.

But any metaphor can be taken in a misleading direction, and I think that has been done with war and alcohol.

What? read more

Read this headline: “To Avoid Repeating Catastrophic Mistake of Iraq Invasion, Senate Bill Would Forbid Attack on Iran Without Congressional Approval.”

Consider these facts:

The Senate voted to let Bush attack Iraq.

So did the House.

The pair of them continue to fund the U.S. military occupation of Iraq to this day.

The pair of them have repeated the same catastrophic mistake — on different scales but indisputably catastrophic — in, among other places, Libya, Yemen, Syria, Somalia, read more

We expect 17-year-olds to have learned a great deal starting from infancy, and yet full-grown adults have proven incapable of knowing anything about Afghanistan during the course of 17 years of U.S.-NATO war. Despite war famously being the means of Americans learning geography, few can even identify Afghanistan on a map. What else have we failed to learn?

The war has not ended.

There are, as far as I know, no polls on the percentage of people in the United States who know that the war is still read more

I confess that the idea of fighting for “the soul of the Democratic Party” has always sounded as sensible to my ear as fighting for the soul of a cow plop, and plans to improve the world through the Democratic Party about as strategic as a preemptive compromise. The following statement from the Democratic Party has given me second thoughts:

“We declare again that all governments instituted among men derive their just powers from the consent of the governed; that any government read more

September 28, 2018, marks 100 years since the stupidest parade I’ve ever heard of. And this is a world awash in stupid. Donald Trump wanted to hold an insane weapons parade in Washington this November. That was dumb. But so was, on a far lesser scale, the move by various peace groups to de-prioritize going ahead with a massive celebration of having helped get the parade cancelled. I suppose the thinking is that we have got just too many victories for peace to be bothered with inspiring people read more

The majority of dictatorships on planet earth — by the U.S. government’s designation of which countries are dictatorships — are sold U.S. weapons. And most of their militaries are trained by the U.S. military.

If I had to pick a dictatorship to object to the U.S. government’s position on, it would be one of these many, and probably it would be Saudi Arabia. But, then, I’m not a Progressive Senator. If I were, then I would read more

In a recent interview on National Pentagon Radio, Neil deGrasse Tyson discussed the interactions between (1) the U.S. military and (2) astrophysics. The former is an enterprise that I consider evil and Tyson seems to consider mildly worthy of discomfort but the necessary producer of the research for which he lives. The latter is a field of human endeavor that Tyson read more

Do we need new laws or adherence to the old ones?

Yes.

Both.

The United States has an ancient Constitution. It doesn’t ban slavery as punishment. It doesn’t ban bribery as campaign funding. It doesn’t protect the natural world. It doesn’t guarantee basic human rights to food, shelter, education, healthcare. Its system of “representative” government doesn’t fairly represent. New laws are needed.

On the other hand, the United States has numerous laws on the read more