Militarism

  • Spencer Sunshine
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ammon_Bundy_(14536029270).jpg

Contrary to media coverage, the Oregon Malheur Wildlife Refuge occupation is not led by ranchers who are tired of being pushed around by the federal government.

Hypocrisy always makes for good cartoon material but the militia “takeover” in Burns, Oregon is like peeling the proverbial onion of hypocrisy.

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https://www.flickr.com/photos/pinksherbet/5021164676

No matter what motivates individual attackers, their greatest aid is our national commitment to ridiculously easy access to guns.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AIraqi_boys_giving_peace_sign.jpg

Imagine what could be done by reducing the nearly $600 billion we plan to pour into the Pentagon this year.

  • Stephen Zunes
Photo by The U.S. Army

On at least sixteen previous occasions, President Obama assured the American people that there would be “no boots on the ground.”

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If you blinked, you may have missed the Drone Papers report that was just released.  I’m sure this won’t be the last we hear of the investigative report by the crew over at The Intercept and their anonymous source who leaked classified material.  The nutshell version:  those drones that do so much heavy lifting for United States foreign policy are not as neat and effective as you’d like to think.  (Which we all

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A Cold War Monument to a Hot War That Wasn’t

During a recent vacation trip to the South Dakota Badlands, my family and I made a short detour to a defunct nuclear missile silo.

The Minuteman Missile National Historic Site is managed by the National Park Service. The rocket on display here was an ICBM targeting the Soviet Union. It was deactivated as part of the 1991 START agreement between President George H.W. Bush and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, and was opened to the public in 1999, “the first site dedicated exclusively to Cold War events,” the brochure says.

The place is fascinating at several levels.

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Iran Deal Shifts U.S. Relationship to the World

Photo: "Negotiations about Iranian Nuclear Program - the Ministers of Foreign Affairs and Other Officials of the P5+1 and Ministers of Foreign Affairs of Iran and EU in Lausanne"

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U.S. Army Ends a Costly Mistake

  • Roberto J. González

Image: U.S. Army File Photo

In a strange experiment, a U.S. Army program embedded social scientists with armed military forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, beginning in 2007. The program finally just ended.

Its closure was long overdue.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBkWShXFcZ4

It was fascinating to watch Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders duke it out in the New...

Donald Trump, even before the early caucuses, had profoundly disrupted the Republicans. But how, exactly?

https://pixabay.com/en/guns-revolver-two-weapon-pistols-307948/
Obama’s Executive Action on Guns Targets the Disabled

Research shows that people with psychiatric disabilities are no more likely than anyone else to commit acts of...

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By Wendell Berry

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more 
of everything ready made. Be afraid 
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery 
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card 
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something 
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know. 
So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord. 
Love the world. Work for nothing. 
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it. 
Denounce the government and embrace 
the flag. Hope to live in that free 
republic for which it stands. 
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man 
has not encountered he has not destroyed.
Ask the questions that have no answers. 
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested 
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus 
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion—put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come. 
Expect the end of the world. Laugh. 
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts. 
So long as women do not go cheap 
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy 
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep 
of a woman near to giving birth? 
Go with your love to the fields.
Lie easy in the shade. Rest your head 
in her lap. Swear allegiance 
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos 
can predict the motions of your mind, 
lose it. Leave it as a sign 
to mark the false trail, the way 
you didn’t go. Be like the fox 
who makes more tracks than necessary, 
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

Wendell Berry is a poet, farmer, and environmentalist in Kentucky. This poem, first published in 1973, is reprinted by permission of the author and appears in his “New Collected Poems” (Counterpoint).


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