Tomgram

How strange. I’ve been going to demonstrations for a long, long while now. I began once upon a distant time in opposition to the nightmarish all-American war in Vietnam. And almost 60 years later, that war, in some sense, has come home. Hence, the other day, I found myself at the “No Kings” demonstration in New York City, one of more than 2,000 (yes, 2,000!) across this country of ours at which millions — yes, again, literally millions! — of Americans reportedly turned out. These days, in New York where I live, such demonstrations are often launched from Bryant Park, right behind the classic 42nd Street library on Fifth Avenue, and the marchers normally walk down Fifth for perhaps 20... Read more

Source: This Is What Democracy Looks Like! appeared first on TomDispatch.com.

In the annals of national suicide, the present dismantling of the American state will surely rank high. It may not reach the apogee attained by Russia in its final Tsarist days or by Louis XVI in the run-up to the French Revolution, but Great Britain’s Brexit hardly smolders compared to the anti-democratic dumpster fire of the Trump regime. Countless governmental, scientific, educational, medical, and cultural institutions have been targeted for demolition. The problem for the rest of the world is that the behavior of Trumpian America is more than suicidal — it’s murderous. The deaths are mounting. By one accounting, the disruption of overseas food and drug shipments from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), including life-saving HIV,... Read more

Sometime in the late 1980s, I was talking with a friend on my landline (the only kind of telephone we had then). We were discussing logistics for an upcoming demonstration against the Reagan administration’s support for the Contras fighting the elected government of Nicaragua. We agreed that, when our call was done, I’d call another friend, “Mary,” to update her on the plans. I hung up. But before I could make the call, my phone rang. “Hi, this is Mary,” my friend said. “Mary! I was just about to call you.” “But you did call me,” she said. “No, I didn’t. My phone just rang, and you were on the other end.” It was pretty creepy, but that was how... Read more

Source: How Will Your Data Be Deployed appeared first on TomDispatch.com.

At a time when many may feel that good news has gone the way of the dodo, look no further than the homeland of that long-extinct bird — Mauritius — for a dose of encouragement. There, among the islands of the Indian Ocean, news can be found about the power of resistance and the ability of small groups of people to band together to overcome the powerful. Amid ongoing slaughter from Gaza and Ukraine to Sudan and the Congo, the news also offers a victory for resolving conflicts through diplomacy rather than force. It’s a victory for decolonization and international law. And it’s a victory for Africa, the African diaspora, and indigenous and other displaced peoples who simply want to... Read more

Source: Resistance Works appeared first on TomDispatch.com.

He lived over 1,000 years ago, but King Canute’s life still has some important lessons for our own time. After conquering England, Denmark, Norway, and part of Sweden, he forged a vast North Sea empire that made him, by the year 1030, the greatest of all the Viking kings. At that peak of power, he ordered his courtiers to place a throne on the seashore. There, according to a contemporaneous account, he shouted at the rising tide: “Thou, too, are subject to my command, as the land on which I am seated is mine and no one has ever resisted my commands with impunity. I command you then not to flow over my land, nor presume to wet the feet... Read more

Source: America’s New Industrial Revolution appeared first on TomDispatch.com.

In an aphorism sometimes attributed to Leo Tolstoy, sometimes to John Gardner, all literature relies on one of two plots: a person goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town. Let me offer my own version. We might summarize the entire history of the human race in two words: people move. Everything else is just elaboration on that basic plot. Some of history’s worst atrocities can be attributed to certain people trying to control other people’s movements, whether by capturing them, herding them into prison camps (concentration camps, strategic hamlets, model villages), enslaving and transporting them, or warehousing them in besieged countries or regions while barricading the borders of anyplace to which they might want to flee, often... Read more

Thanks to our current misbegotten model of manhood, we are once again arguing about this moral question: Should former Cincinnati Reds player and manager Pete Rose be inducted into Baseball’s Hall of Fame? In a sane time, the proper answer would be: Are you kidding? Maybe many of you reading this couldn’t care less. Unfortunately, you probably should care because the real question in these chaotic times of ours is: What does the Hall of Fame stand for? In the same way, you might now wonder what America stands for and whether, in our moment, Pete Rose — bully, liar, cheat, sexual predator, and fan-favorite superstar athlete — has, in fact, become a sports surrogate for Donald Trump. Back in... Read more

Source: Ending Manhood in the Hall of Shame appeared first on TomDispatch.com.

“We’re back,” I tell the room. It’s January 21, 2029, and I can barely contain my excitement. “America is back!” I expect applause, but there is none. I try again, louder this time. “After four long years, America is finally back! We’re ready to resume our international obligations!” The members of the U.N. Human Rights Council are looking in every direction — except at me. I feel a tug on the sleeve of my suit jacket. I glance down and note that the representative from Morocco is passing me a slip of paper. All I see are numbers. “This is… a bill?” She nods. “Your international obligations.” “Fifty-two billion dollars?” “Four years of non-payment of U.N. contributions.  We rounded it... Read more

Recently, I’ve been turning off my iPhone — all the way off! — for 10 to 30 minutes at a time. I leave it somewhere in the house, while I try to live IRL (“in real life”), washing dishes, hanging up laundry, or even going for a walk, phoneless. In this hyper-connected world of ours, doing so, even for such a short time, often feels like an enormous act of self-deprivation — no podcasts, no long-distance communication with those I’m closest to, no social media, no para-social relationships, no steps of mine being counted, or micro-health-tracking going on. So much, in other words, missing in action. I’m not a digital native. In fact, I am what they call a late adopter. I didn’t... Read more

Source: A World Without iPhones? appeared first on TomDispatch.com.

Thirty-five years after the start of the nuclear age with the first explosion of an atomic bomb, I visited the expanse of desert known as the Nevada Test Site, an hour’s drive northwest of Las Vegas. A pair of officials from the Department of Energy took me on a tour. They explained that nuclear tests were absolutely necessary. “Nuclear weapons are like automobiles,” one told me. “Ford doesn’t put a new automobile out on the highway until they’ve gone through a lengthy test process, driving hundreds of thousands of miles.” By then, in 1980, several hundred underground nuclear blasts had already occurred in Nevada, after the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty required that atomic testing take place below the earth’s... Read more

Source: Is Nuclear Winter a Climate Issue? appeared first on TomDispatch.com.