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What to Ask Candidates

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A reporter asked me what to ask candidates re military. I suggested:

In the analysis of National Priorities Project military spending is 54% of U.S. federal discretionary spending. In 2001, U.S. military spending was $397 billion, from which it soared to a peak of $720 billion in 2010, and is now at $610 billion in 2015. These figures from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (in constant 2011 dollars) exclude debt payments, veterans costs, and civil defense, which raise the figure read more

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Call for Sanity on Sixtieth Anniversary of the Russell-Einstein Manifesto

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Sixty years after Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell issued their manifesto about the growing threat of world war, the globe continues to face the prospect of nuclear annihilation — coupled with the looming threat of climate change.

Sign the new manifesto today at http://diy.rootsaction.org/p/man

By ,

It was exactly 60 years ago that Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein gathered together with a group of leading intellectuals in London to read more

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Peace Lessons

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I just read what may be the best introduction to peace studies I’ve ever seen. It’s called Peace Lessons, and is a new book by Timothy Braatz. It’s not too fast or too slow, neither obscure nor boring. It does not drive the reader away from activism toward meditation and “inner peace,” but begins with and maintains a focus on activism and effective strategy for revolutionary change in the world on the scale that is needed. As you may be gathering, I’ve read some similar books read more

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Public Didn't See Last Two World Wars Coming Either

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Books about how World War I started, and to a lesser degree how World War II started, have tended in recent years to explain that these wars didn’t actually come as a surprise, because top government officials saw them coming for years. But these revised histories admit that the general public was pretty much clueless and shocked.

The fact is that anyone in the know or diligently seeking out the facts could see, in rough outline, the danger of World War I or World War II coming years ahead, just read more

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The Coup

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The Coup: 1953, the CIA, and the Roots of Modern U.S.-Iranian Relations deals with such an engaging topic that even this new book can’t really make it boring, hard as it seems to try. When asked what historical figure I would most like to bring back to life and have a talk with I tend to think of Mossadeq, the complex, Gandhian, elected leader, denounced as both Hitler and a communist (as would become part of the standard procedure) and overthrown in an early CIA coup (1953) — read more

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Senator Pushes Edge of Skin-Tight Envelope

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Democratic-Party-based activist groups are urging each other to praise and support Senator Chris Murphy (Democrat, Connecticut) for laying out a better-than-average foreign policy and setting up a website at http://chanceforpeace.org.

Murphy’s position would be considered militarist in the extreme outside of the United States, but advocates point out how much worse most other U.S. senators’ are. 

This is in the context, of course, of Democratic activists having failed to nominate read more

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The Bravery of Vince Bugliosi

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Vincent Bugliosi, generally noted as the prosecutor of Charles Manson and author of Helter Skelter, is dead.

Vince had a remarkable skill as a prosecutor and a public speaker. He could be very persuasive. He could set aside everything but the most critical piece of information and then hammer at that piece like a sculptor. In doing so he could reach a wide audience in a persuasive manner without unnecessarily putting anyone off.

Bugliosi fit the profile of a whistleblower. He had long been part read more

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A View From the Other 96%

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Exposing Lies of Empire by Andre Vltchek is an 800-page tour of the world between 2012 and 2015 without a Western tour guide. It ought to make you spitting-mad furious, then grateful for the enlightenment, and then ready to get to work.

The 4% of us humans who have grown up in the United States are taught that our government means well and does good. As we begin to grasp that this isn’t always so, we’re duly admonished that all governments do evil — as if we were being simplistic read more

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The Decline and Fall of the United States

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Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
–Robert Frost

After a speech I gave this past weekend, a young woman asked me whether a failure by the United States to properly surround and intimidate China might result in instability. I explained why I thought the opposite was true. Imagine if China read more

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Oh Hell, Hillary

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I just did a radio show in South Africa on the topic of Hillary Clinton. Perhaps they won’t air it since I told them it was a non-story about something long since underway being “launched,” but a story the U.S. media likes because it’s substance-free. Yet in South Africa it seems to be a story. They really didn’t know she was running until now, and they wanted to know if John McCain was her opponent. And yet they had the sense to ask if she would cause more wars and read more

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