The madness of militarism is a collective madness. Nobody catches it from a single exposure. The repetition that makes anything else unthinkable makes the insane acceptable — and not just acceptable but righteous.

The Poor People’s Campaign sent around an email on Saturday with language that could have been churned out by anyone anywhere on the U.S. political spectrum, from the most extreme rightwing warmongers to the warmongers of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. It was signed read more

Here’s a link to a serious take on why allowing free speech on Twitter is to be feared. I think it should be taken seriously. I’ll quote from that link at length below and intersperse some responses:

“Here are some kinds of content Twitter’s rules now prohibit that could return under Musk:

“Election misinformation

“Twitter’s current rules say, “You may not use Twitter’s services for the purpose of manipulating or interfering in elections or other civic processes. This includes read more

By World BEYOND War, April 29, 2022

From April 21st to 28th, crowds and small groups of people in locations around the world have brought petitions, banners, and protests to the offices of the world’s largest weapons dealer, Lockheed Martin. Details, including photos and videos, of the Global Mobilization to #StopLockheedMartin are still being collected and posted at https://act.worldbeyondwar.org/stoplockheedmartin

The read more

There’s a lot of funny stuff in politics, but the most ludicrous has got to be these holdovers from the 1980s running around warning that we could all die in a nuclear war. The idiots have not realized that nobody cares, that they look like morons, and that they’ll only have seconds in which to point out that they were right. What sort of awards do they expect to be given in the space of a half a minute?

Everybody’s going to be about to die in a matter of seconds. Maybe some people read more

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, April 25, 2022

“Birds Are Not Real” — the theory that all birds are drones — is a prank created for a laugh, supposedly with a few mentally disturbed people actually believing it. “Costa Rica Is Not Real” has never been spoken at all, and yet is treated very seriously by many. I mean, everyone will admit that Costa Rica is sitting there on the map, and in reality, between Nicaragua and Panama, the Pacific and the Caribbean. Yet, a nation’s need read more

By Just World Educational, April 19, 2022

The worst problem is a phony one. That is to say, numerous parties are using the cause of prosecuting Vladimir Putin for “war crimes” as yet another excuse to avoid ending the war — the need for “justice” for war victims as grounds for creating more war victims. This is from The New Republic:

“Inna Sovsun, a Ukrainian parliamentarian from the pro-European Golos Party, believes that the need for justice trumps negotiations to end the war. ‘My understanding read more

An old silent pond

A frog jumps into the pond—

Thud! Dried up last year.

After killing

a spider, how noble I feel

in the TV glow!

I write, erase, rewrite

Erase again, and then

Twitter deletes me

Useless, useless,

the heavy rain

On Arkansas coast

In the moonlight,

The color and scent of the wisteria

Seems so Norwegian

Plum flower temple:

Voices rise

From fallout shelters

Everything I touch

with tenderness, alas,

Has comments beneath

The wren

Earns his living

read more