Culture and Society

A New Jefferson Bible

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Thomas Jefferson created his own Bible, and the Humanist Press has just republished it together with selections from what Jefferson left out, and selections labeled the best and worst from the Old Testament, the Koran, the Bhagavadgita, the Buddhist Sutras, and the Book of Mormon.

Jefferson created his Bible using two copies of the King James Bible and a razor blade.  He cut what he liked out of the New Testament, and left the rest.  What he chose to include was supposed to tell the story read more

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A Way to Stop the Violence

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The troubled souls (generally known in the media as “monsters” and “lunatics”) who keep shooting up schools and shopping centers, believe they are solving deeper problems.  We all know, of course, that in reality they are making things dramatically worse.

This is not an easy problem for us to solve.  We could make it harder to obtain guns, and especially guns designed specifically for mass killings.  We could take on the problem with our entertainment: we read more

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About People Who Are Wrong

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Don’t people who are wrong annoy you?  I just read a very interesting book called “Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error,” by Kathryn Schulz.  Of course I read it with an eye toward figuring out how better to correct those other people who are so dangerously and aggravatingly wrong.  And of course the book ended up telling me that I myself am essentially a creature of wrongness.

But if we’re all wrong, I can live with that.  It’s being read more

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Backward Ho!

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A few thoughts in praise of backwardness.

“We don’t look backward,” says President Obama in reference to imposing justice on powerful large-scale criminal suspects.  Of course, as we don’t prosecute future crimes but only crimes of the past, “not looking backward” is a euphemism for immunity — an immunity not granted to those accused of small-scale crimes or crimes with no victims at all.

“Forward!” says President Obama, making that seemingly read more

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Davids Oppose Israel’s Use of King David

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One tool being employed by the government of Israel to evict Palestinian people from their homes is the claim that doing so will allow archaeologists to discover historical evidence of the existence of King David.  Such evidence is intended to strengthen the claim that Jews are returning to land occupied by Jews millennia ago.

Yet the living people moved off their land by Israeli expansion are denied any right to return to it.

The King David in the book of Samuel is greedy and cruel, thoughtless read more

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Is Our Deepest Desire to Die?

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Our so-called self-government rarely agrees with what we tell pollsters, and yet it does what it does with our acceptance.  We may have fallen for the pretense that we’re powerless.  Our ignorance and xenophobia should never be underestimated as explanations for what we do.  But consider the following public policy and then tell me the clearest explanation isn’t that we all want to rush our arrival at death’s door.

Not only do we spend over half of public discretionary read more

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New Book for Ages 6 to 10: Tube World

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Tube World is the first children’s book by David Swanson, author of several nonfiction adult books. The illustrations for Tube World are by Shane Burke.

Parents: Have your kids been tired in the morning?  Have you found wet bathing suits in their beds?  Do they know things about far-away places that you didn’t teach them and they didn’t learn in school?  Do children visiting your town from halfway around the world always seem to be friends read more

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Talk Nation Radio: Comedy as Political Force

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Lee Camp is a comedian / political commentator / online video ranter extraordinaire.   In the edition of Talk Nation Radio, we sample his rants and discuss with him the development and political value of his medium.  For more see http://leecamp.net

Lee Camp’s new book is called Moment of Clarity: The Rantings of a Stark Raving Sane Man

Total run time: 29:00

Host: David Swanson.
Producer: David Swanson.
Engineer: Christiane Brown.
Music by Duke Ellington.

Download or get embed code read more

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Should More of the Blood Be on the Train Tracks?

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At this year’s Veterans For Peace convention in Miami, VFP President Leah Bolger challenged members to take risks: “Many of you have risked a lot for war.  What will you risk for peace?”

One VFP member, S. Brian Willson, gave his legs and part of his skull for peace.  It was 1987, and the U.S. military was shipping weapons to port, in order to ship them to El Salvador and Nicaragua, where they would be used to slaughter the people of those nations, where, in Willson’s read more

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Slow Democracy

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Susan Clark and Woden Teachout’s new book, “Slow Democracy,” offers the civil equivalent to slow food. The goal of both is not slowness for its own sake, but quality, health, sustainability, and the pursuit of happiness.

We all know that the federal government ignores us most of the time, state governments nod in our direction once in a blue moon, and local governments listen to us quite often. So, there is an argument to be made for moving decision-making powers to the local read more

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