There are plenty of good occasions to pretend not to know something: an embarrassing secret of a friend, a plan for a surprise party, the punchline of a child’s joke.

There are plenty of good excuses to actually not know something: it would take decades of study, it’s of no interest or value, it would cost so much money to research it that you could have saved millions of lives instead.

There are, I think, fewer good justifications for pretending to yourself (not just to others) not read more

I live in a wealthy country, the U.S., and in a corner of it, a part of Virginia, not yet hit hard by fires or floods or tornados. In fact, until Sunday night, January 2nd, we’d had rather pleasant, almost summerlike weather most of the time since summer. Then, Monday morning, we got several inches of wet, heavy snow.

It’s now Thursday, and trees and branches have been coming down all over the place. We shook branches repeatedly as the snow was first arriving, to get some of it off. read more

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, January 5, 2022

World BEYOND War has long supported efforts to stop noisy, polluting Navy jet flights over state parks in Washington State.

Now a report by Chief United States Magistrate Justice J. Richard Creatura has got the Seattle Times editorial board proposing some sort of “compromise.”

Some choice excerpts:

Here, despite a gargantuan administrative record, covering nearly 200,000 pages of studies, reports, comments, and the like, the Navy selected methods read more

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, January 5, 2022

Propaganda is most impactful when people don’t think it’s propaganda, and most decisive when it’s censorship you never knew happened. When we imagine that the U.S. military only occasionally and slightly influences U.S. movies, we are extremely badly deceived. The actual impact is on thousands of movies made, and thousands of others never made. And television shows of every variety. The military guests and celebrations of the read more

By RootsAction Education Fund, January 5, 2022

RootsAction Education Fund has published a Primer on Foreign Policy for U.S. Congressional Candidates.

Congressional candidates often have little or nothing to say about foreign policy, and a lot of them have a surprising reason when asked: they say that they don’t know anything about it.

Some of them seem to be telling the truth, and others who don’t explain themselves may also lack knowledge of foreign policy.

Even some candidates who do read more

By RT, December 30, 2021

See minute 20:28.

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, December 28, 2021

Thom Hartmann has written an enormous number of great books, and the latest is no exception. It’s called The Hidden History of Big Brother in America: How the Death of Privacy and the Rise of Surveillance Threaten Us and Our Democracy. Thom is not the least bit xenophobic, paranoid, or war-inclined. He dishes out criticism — most of it clearly well-merited — to numerous governments including the one in Washington, D.C. Yet I think read more

An artist in Pakistan attempted to make U.S. drone pilots face the fact that they were killing children.

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, December 21, 2021

Former President Barack Obama recently tweeted that the day of a school shooting was the worst day of his presidency. Well, it certainly shouldn’t have been a good day, but, seriously, what the filibuster? Was it a bad day because children were killed and he didn’t order their killing?

It’s bad enough having a drone murder program, but read more