Writing for the majority, Justice Alito bent logic into bold new shapes by claiming that this ruling actually serves to protect the rights of individuals, and that the entire concept of "corporate personhood" is intended to protect the rights of the employees of corporations. Actor and activist George Takei, however, was having none of it: "In this case, the owners happen to be deeply Christian; one wonders whether the case would have come out differently if a Muslim-run chain business attempted to impose Sharia law on its employees."

The decision in the Hobby Lobby case is many things. It is the continued elevation of Christianity over all other religions, and over the choice to hold no religion, in a country where no single religion is supposed to hold sway. It is yet another flat declaration that corporations have more rights than people. It is a purely political action to strike a blow against the Affordable Care Act, the right's most beloved boogeyman. It is a very sneaky back door through which alleged "people of faith" can peddle their onging discrimination against LGBT employees.

And, of course, it is simple, old-fashioned woman-hating from top to bottom.

It is another jarring attempt to remake the United States according to the opinions of men like Utah's Republican Sen. Mike Lee, who agrees with the court's decision because women only use contraception for "recreational behavior," and not for significant and pressing medical reasons or motivations of personal freedom. It is an attempt to remake the United States according to the opinions of men like Washington Post columnist George Will, who recently argued that women on college campuses only cry "rape" because they want the "coveted status" of being a rape survivor.

Two years ago, Cecily McMillan was participating in a peaceful Occupy protest in New York City when a police officer came up behind her and grabbed her violently by the breast. Like any normal woman, McMillan threw an elbow to stop the assault. For this, she was convicted of assaulting a police officer and sentenced to 90 days at Rikers Island. It could have been seven years.

McMillan was recently released, and gave a harrowing description of the conditions she and the other women incarcerated at at Rikers endured: women dying, women bleeding vaginally for hours, women with cancer, diabetes and other ailments who were denied medical treatment while being stacked like so much cord wood in overcrowded bunk rooms.

McMillan is free now, but still in jail, incarcerated with every other woman in the Rikers Island that is these United States, thanks to the five men who handed down the Hobby Lobby decision. The food is better, and there are no bars on the doors, but it is a prison nonetheless, where women do not enjoy equal status, where women can and will be denied basic and necessary medical services, because somebody's bastardized version of Jesus considers them to be lesser creatures, and not nearly as important as a corporation.

"Her glory is not dominion, but liberty," Adams said of the United States. "Her march is the march of mind. She has a spear and a shield; but the motto upon her shield is Freedom, Independence, Peace. This has been her declaration: this has been, as far as her necessary intercourse with the rest of mankind would permit, her practice."

Adams concluded his address by urging Americans to renew their acquaintance with the revolutionaries against colonial meddling and empire who founded the American experiment, to celebrate their example and to: "Go thou and do likewise!"

BOSTON-On Saturday I went to one of the massive temples across the country where we celebrate our state religion. The temple I visited was Boston's Fenway Park. I was inspired to go by reading Andrew Bacevich's thoughtful book "Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country," which opens with a scene at Fenway from July 4, 2011. The Fourth of July worship service that I attended last week-a game between the Red Sox and the Baltimore Orioles-was a day late because of a rescheduling caused by Tropical Storm Arthur. When the crowd sang "The Star-Spangled Banner" a gargantuan American flag descended to cover "the Green Monster," the 37-foot, 2-inch-high wall in left field. Patriotic music blasted from loudspeakers. Col. Lester A. Weilacher, commander of the 66th Air Base Group at Massachusetts' Hanscom Air Force Base, wearing a light blue short-sleeved Air Force shirt and dark blue pants, threw the ceremonial first pitch. A line of Air Force personnel stood along the left field wall. The fighter jets-our angels of death-that usually roar over the stadium on the Fourth were absent. But the face of Fernard Frechette, a 93-year-old World War II veteran who was attending, appeared on the 38-by-100-foot Jumbotron above the center-field seats as part of Fenway's "Hats Off to Heroes" program, which honors military veterans or active-duty members at every game. The crowd stood and applauded. Army National Guard Sgt. Ben Arnold had been honored at the previous game, on Wednesday. Arnold said his favorite Red Sox player was Mike Napoli. Arnold, who fought in Afghanistan, makes about $27,000 a year. Napoli makes $16 million. The owners of the Red Sox clear about $60 million annually. God bless America.

The religious reverie-repeated in sports arenas throughout the United States-is used to justify our bloated war budget and endless wars. Schools and libraries are closing. Unemployment and underemployment are chronic. Our infrastructure is broken and decrepit. And we will have paid a crippling $4 trillion for the useless and futile wars we waged over the last 13 years in the Middle East. But the military remains as unassailable as Jesus, or, among those who have season tickets at Fenway Park, the Red Sox. The military is the repository of our honor and patriotism. No public official dares criticize the armed forces or challenge their divine right to more than half of all the nation's discretionary spending. And although we may be distrustful of government, the military-in the twisted logic of the American mind-is somehow separate.

The heroes of war and the heroes of sport are indistinguishable in militarized societies. War is sold to a gullible public as a noble game. Few have the athletic prowess to play professional sports, but almost any young man or woman can go to a recruiter and sign up to be a military hero. The fusion of the military with baseball, along with the recruitment ads that appeared intermittently Saturday on the television screens mounted on green iron pillars throughout Fenway Park, caters to this illusion: Sign up. You will be part of a professional team. We will show you in your uniform on the Jumbotron in Fenway Park. You will be a hero like Mike Napoli.

Saturday's crowd of some 37,000, which paid on average about $70 for a ticket, dutifully sang hosannas-including "God Bless America" in the seventh inning-to the flag and the instruments of death and war. It blessed and applauded a military machine that, ironically, oversees the wholesale surveillance of everyone in the ballpark and has the power under the National Defense Authorization Act to snatch anyone in the stands and hold him or her indefinitely in a military facility. There was no mention of targeted assassinations of U.S. citizens, kill lists or those lost or crippled in the wars. The crowd roared its approval every time the military was mentioned. It cheered its own enslavement.

War is not a sport. It is about killing. It is dirty, messy and deeply demoralizing. It brings with it trauma, lifelong wounds, loss and feelings of shame and guilt. It leaves bleeding or dead bodies on its fields. The pay is lousy. The working conditions are horrific. And those who come back from war are usually discarded. The veterans who died waiting for medical care from Veterans Affairs hospitals could, if they were alive, explain the difference between being a multimillion-dollar-a-year baseball star and a lance corporal home from Iraq or Afghanistan. At best, you are trotted out for a public event, as long as you read from the script they give you, the one designed to entice the naive into the military. Otherwise, you are forgotten.

All religions need relics. Old uniforms, bats, balls, gloves and caps are preserved in the Baseball Hall of Fame, like the bones of saints in churches. In that Cooperstown, N.Y., museum you walk by glass cases of baseball relics on your way to the third-floor display bearing the words "Sacred Ground: Examining ballparks of the past and present, this exhibit takes a look at America's cathedrals of the game." At ballparks the teams display statues of their titans-there is one of left fielder Ted Williams outside Fenway Park. And tens of thousands of dollars are paid for objects used by the immortals. A 1968 Mickey Mantle jersey was auctioned in May for $201,450. Team minutiae and statistics are preserved, much as monasteries preserve details of the lives and deaths of saints. Epic tales of glory and defeat are etched into the permanent record. The military has astutely deified itself through the fans' deification of teams.

The collective euphoria experienced in stadiums, especially among those struggling to survive in the corporate state, gives to many anxious Americans what they crave. They flock to the temples of sport while most places of traditional religious worship in the United States are largely deserted on the Sabbath. Those packed into the stadiums feel as if they and everyone around them speak the same language. They believe those in the crowd are one entity. And they all hate the same enemy. To walk through Fenway Park in a New York Yankees shirt is to court verbal abuse. To be identified as a Yankees fan after a game in one of the bars outside the park is unwise. The longing to belong, especially in a society where many have lost their sense of place and identity, is skillfully catered to by both the professional sports machine and the military propaganda machine.

Many sports devotees return after the games to dead-end jobs, or no jobs, to massive personal debt, to the bleakness of the future. No wonder supplicants at Fenway Park part with such large sums of money to be entranced by fantasy for a few hours. And no wonder it is hard to distinguish the fantasy of a game from the fantasy of the military. Life in the Army or the Marines begins to look like spending a few years at Fenway. And that is why the military invests so much in sponsoring sporting events. Between innings Saturday, the screen above my head flashed segments called "U.S. Army Presents Top Prospects" that showcased promising ballplayers. Recruitment ads appeared at intervals. And the logo "Discover a Stronger Future. There's Strong. There's Army Strong" was ubiquitous. The Pentagon spends some $4.7 billion a year on recruiting, advertising, public affairs and psychological operations, according to a 2009 report published by The Associated Press. And much of that is targeted at the audiences of professional sports.

The owners of coal companies at the turn of the 20th century in southern West Virginia found that by funding local baseball teams they could blunt the solidarity of workers. Towns and coal camps rallied around their individual teams. Workers divided themselves according to team loyalty. Sport rivalries became personal. The owners, elated, used the teams to help fracture the labor movement. And the infernal logic is no different today. The players on a baseball team-who usually do not come from the city they represent-are used to promote a provincial chauvinism and a false sense of belonging and empowerment. And the financial, emotional and intellectual energy invested by fans in these well-choreographed spectacles keeps the onlookers docile and supine.

The Boston Globe and the Knight-Ridder media chain reported in 2005 that Phillip H. Morse, a minority partner of the Boston Red Sox, chartered his private jet to the Central Intelligence Agency, which used it to pick up terrorism suspects in the Middle East and Europe and fly them to Guantanamo Bay. The plane was spotted in Cairo on Feb. 18, 2003, according to Knight-Ridder. The imam of Milan, Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, also known as Abu Omar, had been kidnapped the day before on a Milan street by the CIA and the Italian Military Intelligence and Security Service. He was then flown clandestinely to Egypt. It is nearly certain that Morse's plane was used for that flight. The imam was allegedly beaten and tortured in an Egyptian-run "black site." The Gulfstream jet, the Globe reported, rented for $5,365 an hour, which, it calculated, worked out to $128,760 for a 24-hour day, or about $900,000 a week. Not even the highest-paid star on the Red Sox makes that much money.

Who is the true patriot, Hillary Clinton or Edward Snowden? The question comes up because Clinton has gone all out in attacking Snowden as a means of burnishing her hawkish credentials, eliciting Glenn Greenwald's comment that she is "like a neocon, practically."

On Friday in England, Clinton boasted that two years ago she had favored a proposal by a top British general to train 100,000 "moderate" rebels to overthrow the Assad regime in Syria, but President Obama had turned her down. The American Thatcher? In that same interview with The Guardian she also managed to get in yet another shot against Snowden for taking refuge in Russia "apparently under Putin's protection," unless, she taunted, "he wishes to return knowing he would be held accountable."

Accountable for telling the truth that Clinton concealed during her tenure as secretary of state in the Obama administration? Did she approve of the systematic spying on the American people as well as on others around the world, including the leaders of Germany and Brazil, or did she first learn of all this from the Snowden revelations?

On Saturday, a carefully vetted four-month investigation by The Washington Post based on material made available by Snowden revealed that while Clinton was in the government, the NSA had collected a vast trove of often intimate Internet correspondence and photos of innocent Americans, including many users of Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and other leading Internet companies. The Post reported many files "described as useless by the [NSA] analysts but nonetheless retained ... have a voyeuristic quality. They tell stories of love and heartbreak, illicit sexual liaisons, mental-health crises, political and religious conversions, financial anxieties and disappointed hopes."

The Post concluded after four months of reviewing the documents and checking with government agencies that the material supplied by Snowden was invaluable in evaluating the NSA program: "No government oversight body, including the Justice Department, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, intelligence committees in Congress or the President's Privacy and Civil Oversight Board, has delved into a comparably large sample of what the NSA actually collects—not only from its targets but from people who may cross a target's path."

Did Secretary of State Clinton know that such massive spying on the American people was going on and, if not, why isn't she grateful that Snowden helped to enlighten her? With her scurrilous attacks on Snowden, Hillary Clinton is either a fool or a liar.

Too harsh? Consider her continued insistence that Snowden could have addressed his concerns over the massive NSA spying on Americans and the rest of the world by going through normal channels instead of turning over the documents as he has entrusted to respected news organizations that won the Pulitzer Prize for their efforts.

In an April speech at the University of Connecticut, Clinton said of Snowden: "When he absconded with all of that material, I was puzzled, because we have all these protections for whistleblowers." That is simply not true; Snowden as a contractor to the government is not entitled to the federal protections that cover federal employees. But even those federal employees have found scant protection under the Obama administration in their attempt to blow the whistle on national security practices.

As secretary of state in an administration that has charged three times as many Americans with violations of the draconian Espionage Act as all preceding presidents combined, Clinton must know that the Obama Justice Department has effectively moved to silence whistle-blowers from stating their case in court.

It even tried to prevent Thomas Drake, an honored NSA employee charged under the Espionage Act, from using the words "whistle-blower" or "First Amendment" in his defense. Drake had taken his concerns over the NSA's violation of the law to the Defense Department Inspector General and the intelligence committees of both houses of Congress, but that did not stop the Obama administration, when Clinton was in the Cabinet, from prosecuting him under the Espionage Act for talking to the press. The government's case collapsed, with a federal judge calling it "unconscionable" that Drake had been put through "four years of hell."

Hillary Clinton knows just how selective the Obama administration has been in punishing whistle-blowers who expose government violations of the Constitution. Obama made a political decision not to hold accountable any of those involved in the torture program conducted during the Bush years but zealously prosecuted CIA veteran John Kiriakou under the Espionage Act for publicly revealing and condemning one of the most horrendous episodes in the nation's history.

Kiriakou, destroyed professionally and financially for his efforts to hold the torturers accountable, plea bargained for the 30-month sentence he is currently serving. Whistle-blower Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning was given a far harsher sentence for revealing crimes in Iraq in a war that Hillary Clinton supported. If she asks for your vote, you might remind her of Kiriakou's words before being imprisoned:

"The conviction of Bradley Manning under the 1917 Espionage Act and the U.S. Justice Department's decision to file espionage charges against NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden under the same act are yet further examples of the Obama administration's policy of using an iron fist against human rights and civil liberties activists. President Obama has been unprecedented in his use of the Espionage Act to prosecute those whose whistle-blowing he wants to curtail.

"The purpose of an Espionage Act prosecution, however, is not to punish a person spying for the enemy, selling secrets for personal gain, or trying to undermine our way of life. It is to ruin the whistle-blower, personally, professionally and financially. It is meant to send a message to anybody else considering speaking truth to power: Challenge us and we will destroy you."

On Sunday The Times published an article by the political scientist Brendan Nyhan about a troubling aspect of the current American scene - the stark partisan divide over issues that should be simply factual, like whether the planet is warming or evolution happened. It's common to attribute such divisions to ignorance, but as Mr. Nyhan points out, the divide is actually worse among those who are seemingly better informed about the issues.

The problem, in other words, isn't ignorance; it's wishful thinking. Confronted with a conflict between evidence and what they want to believe for political and/or religious reasons, many people reject the evidence. And knowing more about the issues widens the divide, because the well informed have a clearer view of which evidence they need to reject to sustain their belief system.

As you might guess, after reading Mr. Nyhan I found myself thinking about the similar state of affairs when it comes to economics, monetary economics in particular.

Some background: On the eve of the Great Recession, many conservative pundits and commentators - and quite a few economists - had a worldview that combined faith in free markets with disdain for government. Such people were briefly rocked back on their heels by the revelation that the "bubbleheads" who warned about housing were right, and the further revelation that unregulated financial markets are dangerously unstable. But they quickly rallied, declaring that the financial crisis was somehow the fault of liberals - and that the great danger now facing the economy came not from the crisis but from the efforts of policy makers to limit the damage.

Above all, there were many dire warnings about the evils of "printing money." For example, in May 2009 an editorial in The Wall Street Journal warned that both interest rates and inflation were set to surge "now that Congress and the Federal Reserve have flooded the world with dollars." In 2010 a virtual Who's Who of conservative economists and pundits sent an open letter to Ben Bernanke warning that his policies risked "currency debasement and inflation." Prominent politicians like Representative Paul Ryan joined the chorus.

Reality, however, declined to cooperate. Although the Fed continued on its expansionary course - its balance sheet has grown to more than $4 trillion, up fivefold since the start of the crisis - inflation stayed low. For the most part, the funds the Fed injected into the economy simply piled up either in bank reserves or in cash holdings by individuals - which was exactly what economists on the other side of the divide had predicted would happen.

Needless to say, it's not the first time a politically appealing economic doctrine has been proved wrong by events. So those who got it wrong went back to the drawing board, right? Hahahahaha.

In fact, hardly any of the people who predicted runaway inflation have acknowledged that they were wrong, and that the error suggests something amiss with their approach. Some have offered lame excuses; some, following in the footsteps of climate-change deniers, have gone down the conspiracy-theory rabbit hole, claiming that we really do have soaring inflation, but the government is lying about the numbers (and by the way, we're not talking about random bloggers or something; we're talking about famous Harvard professors). Mainly, though, the currency-debasement crowd just keeps repeating the same lines, ignoring its utter failure in prognostication.

You might wonder why monetary theory gets treated like evolution or climate change. Isn't the question of how to manage the money supply a technical issue, not a matter of theological doctrine?

Well, it turns out that money is indeed a kind of theological issue. Many on the right are hostile to any kind of government activism, seeing it as the thin edge of the wedge - if you concede that the Fed can sometimes help the economy by creating "fiat money," the next thing you know liberals will confiscate your wealth and give it to the 47 percent. Also, let's not forget that quite a few influential conservatives, including Mr. Ryan, draw their inspiration from Ayn Rand novels in which the gold standard takes on essentially sacred status.

And if you look at the internal dynamics of the Republican Party, it's obvious that the currency-debasement, return-to-gold faction has been gaining strength even as its predictions keep failing.

Can anything reverse this descent into dogma? A few conservative intellectuals have been trying to persuade their movement to embrace monetary activism, but they're ever more marginalized. And that's just what Mr. Nyhan's article would lead us to expect. When faith - including faith-based economics - meets evidence, evidence doesn't stand a chance.
(c) 2014 Paul Krugman --- The New York Times

First of all, thank you to Lindis Percy and everyone else involved in bringing me here, and letting me bring my son Wesley along.,P. And thank you to the Campaign for the Accountability of American Bases. I know you share my view that accountability of American bases would lead to elimination of American bases.

And thank you to Lindis for sending me her accounts of refusing to be arrested unless the police disarmed themselves. In the United States, refusing any sort of direction from a police officer will get you charged with the crime of refusing a lawful order, even when the order is unlawful. In fact, that's often the only charge levied against people ordered to cease protests and demonstrations that in theory are completely legal. And, of course, telling a U.S. police officer to disarm could quite easily get you locked up for insanity if it didn't get you shot.

Can I just say how wonderful it is to be outside of the United States on the Fourth of July? There are many wonderful and beautiful things in the United States, including my family and friends, including thousands of truly dedicated peace activists, including people bravely going to prison to protest the murders by drone of others they've never met in distant lands whose loved ones will probably never hear about the sacrifices protesters are making. (Did you know the commander of a military base in New York State has court orders of protection to keep specific nonviolent peace activists away from his base to ensure his physical safety -- or is it his peace of mind?) And, of course, millions of Americans who tolerate or celebrate wars or climate destruction are wonderful and even heroic in their families and neighborhoods and towns -- and that's valuable too.

I've been cheering during U.S. World Cup games. But I cheer for neighborhood, city, and regional teams too. And I don't talk about the teams as if I'm them. I don't say "We scored!" as I sit in a chair opening a beer. And I don't say "We won!" when the U.S. military destroys a nation, kills huge numbers of people, poisons the earth, water, and air, creates new enemies, wastes trillions of dollars, and passes its old weapons to the local police who restrict our rights in the name of wars fought in the name of freedom. I don't say "We lost!" either. We who resist have a responsibility to resist harder, but not to identify with the killers, and certainly not to imagine that the men, women, children, and infants being murdered by the hundreds of thousands constitute an opposing team wearing a different uniform, a team whose defeat by hellfire missile I should cheer for.

Identifying with my street or my town or my continent doesn't lead the same places that identifying with the military-plus-some-minor-side-services that calls itself my national government leads. And it's very hard to identify with my street; I have such little control over what my neighbors do. And I can't manage to identify with my state because I've never even seen most of it. So, once I start identifying abstractly with people I don't know, I see no sensible argument for stopping anywhere short of identifying with everybody, rather than leaving out 95% and identifying with the United States, or leaving out 90% and identifying with the so-called "International Community" that cooperates with U.S. wars. Why not just identify with all humans everywhere? On those rare occasions when we learn the personal stories of distant or disparaged people, we're supposed to remark, "Wow, that really humanizes them!" Well, I'd like to know, what were they before those details made them humanized?

In the U.S. there are U.S. flags everywhere all the time now, and there's a military holiday for every day of the year. But the Fourth of July is the highest holiday of holy nationalism. More than any other day, you're likely to see children being taught to pledge allegiance to a flag, regurgitating a psalm to obedience like little fascist robots. You're more likely to hear the U.S. national anthem, the Star Spangled Banner. Who knows which war the words of that song come from?

That's right, the War of Canadian Liberation, in which the United States tried to liberate Canadians (not for the first or last time) who welcomed them much as the Iraqis would later do, and the British burned Washington. Also known as the War of 1812, the bicentennial was celebrated in the U.S. two years ago. During that war, which killed thousands of Americans and Brits, mostly through disease, during one pointless bloody battle among others, plenty of people died, but a flag survived. And so we celebrate the survival of that flag by singing about the land of the free that imprisons more people than anywhere else on earth and the home of the brave that strip-searches airplane passengers and launches wars if three Muslims shout "boo!"

Did you know the U.S. flag was recalled? You know how a car will be recalled by the manufacturer if the brakes don't work? A satirical paper called the Onion reported that the U.S. flag had been recalled after resulting in 143 million deaths. Better late than never.

There are many wonderful and rapidly improving elements in U.S. culture. It has become widely and increasingly unacceptable to be bigoted or prejudiced against people, at least nearby people, because of their race, sex, sexual orientation, and other factors. It still goes on, of course, but it's frowned upon. I had a conversation last year with a man sitting in the shadow of a carving of confederate generals on a spot that used to be sacred to the Ku Klux Klan, and I realized that he would never, even if he thought it, say something racist about blacks in the United States to a stranger he'd just met. And then he told me he'd like to see the entire Middle East wiped out with nuclear bombs.

We've had comedians' and columnists' careers ended over racist or sexist remarks, but weapons CEOs joke on the radio about wanting big new occupations of certain countries, and nobody blinks. We have antiwar groups that push for celebration of the military on Memorial Day and other days like this one. We have so-called progressive politicians who describe the military as a jobs program, even though it actually produces fewer jobs per dollar than education or energy or infrastructure or never taxing those dollars at all. We have peace groups that argue against wars on the grounds that the military needs to be kept ready for other, possibly more important wars. We have peace groups that oppose military waste, when the alternative of military efficiency is not what's needed. We have libertarians who oppose wars because they cost money, exactly as they oppose schools or parks. We have humanitarian warriors who argue for wars because of their compassion for the people they want bombed. We have peace groups that side with the libertarians and urge selfishness, arguing for schools at home instead of bombs for Syrians, without explaining that we could give actual aid to Syrians and ourselves for a fraction of the cost of the bombs.

We have liberal lawyers who say they can't tell whether blowing children up with drones is legal or not, because President Obama has a secret memo (now only partially secret) in which he legalizes it by making it part of a war, and they haven't seen the memo, and as a matter of principle they, like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, ignore the U.N. Charter, the Kellogg Briand Pact, and the illegality of war. We have people arguing that bombing Iraq is now a good thing because it finally gets the U.S. and Iran talking to each other. We have steadfast refusals to mention a half-million to a million-and-a-half Iraqis based on the belief that Americans can only possibly care about 4,000 Americans killed in Iraq. We have earnest crusades to turn the U.S. military into a force for good, and the inevitable demand of those who begin to turn against war, that the United States must lead the way to peace -- when of course the world would be thrilled if it just brought up the rear.

And yet, we also have tremendous progress. A hundred years ago Americans were listening to snappy tunes about how hunting Huns was a fun game to play, and professors were teaching that war builds national character. Now war has to be sold as necessary and humanitarian because nobody believes it's fun or good for you anymore. Polls in the United States put support for possible new wars below 20 percent and sometimes below 10 percent. After the House of Commons over here said No to missile strikes on Syria, Congress listened to an enormous public uproar in the U.S. and said No as well. In February, public pressure led to Congress backing off a new sanctions bill on Iran that became widely understood as a step toward war rather than away from it. A new war on Iraq is having to be sold and developed slowly in the face of huge public resistance that has even resulted in some prominent advocates of war in 2003 recently recanting.

This shift in attitude toward wars is largely the result of the wars on Afghanistan and Iraq and the exposure of the lies and horrors involved. We shouldn't underestimate this trend or imagine that it's unique to the question of Syria or Ukraine. People are turning against war. For some it may be all about the money. For others it may be a question of which political party owns the White House. The Washington Post has a poll showing that almost nobody in the U.S. can find Ukraine on a map, and those who place it furthest from where it really lies are most likely to want a U.S. war there, including those who place it in the United States. One doesn't know whether to laugh or cry. Yet the larger trend is this: from geniuses right down to morons, we are, most of us, turning against war. The Americans who want Ukraine attacked are fewer than those believing in ghosts, U.F.O.s, or the benefits of climate change.

Now, the question is whether we can shake off the idea that after hundreds of bad wars there just might be a good one around the corner. To do that we have to recognize that wars and militaries make us less safe, not safer. We have to understand that Iraqis aren't ungrateful because they're stupid but because the U.S. and allies destroyed their home.

We can pile even more weight on the argument for ending the institution of war. These U.S. spy bases are used for targeting missiles but also for spying on governments and companies and activists. And what justifies the secrecy? What allows treating everyone as an enemy? Well, one necessary component is the concept of an enemy. Without wars nations lose enemies. Without enemies, nations lose excuses to abuse people. Britain was the first enemy manufactured by the would-be rulers of the United States on July 4, 1776. And yet King George's abuses don't measure up to the abuses our governments now engage in, justified by their traditions of war making and enabled by the sort of technologies housed here.

War is our worst destroyer of the natural environment, the worst generator of human rights abuses, a leading cause of death and creator of refugee crises. It swallows some $2 trillion a year globally, while tens of billions could alleviate incredible suffering, and hundreds of billions could pay for a massive shift to renewable energies that might help protect us from an actual danger.

What we need now is a movement of education and lobbying and nonviolent resistance that doesn't try to civilize war but to take steps in the direction of abolishing it -- which begins by realizing that we can abolish it. If we can stop missiles into Syria, there's no magical force that prevents our stopping missiles into every other country. War is not a primal urge of nations that must burst out a little later if once suppressed. Nations aren't real like that. War is a decision made by people, and one that we can make utterly unacceptable.

People in dozens of countries are now working on a campaign for the elimination of all war called World Beyond War. Please check out WorldBeyondWar.org or talk to me about getting involved. Our goal is to bring many more people and organizations into a movement not aimed at a specific war proposal from a specific government, but at the entire institution of war everywhere. We'll have to work globally to do this. We'll have to throw our support behind the work being done by groups like the Campaign for Accountability of American Bases and the Movement for the Abolition of War and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and Veterans For Peace and so many more.

The Food Network has changed the way America cooks. It has turned a broad swath of Americans, me included, into amateur foodies. Much like the popularity of forensic crime shows like "CSI" has changed our expectations of what is required to prove guilt in a court of law, by offering us fantastical representations of the magic and certainty of DNA, the Food Network has increased our expectations and demands of our food choices in areas like flavor, originality and presentation. It's no secret that those categories approximate the categories by which food is judged on "Chopped," one of Food Network's biggest shows.

But shows like "Chopped" are part of the problem. And what problem is that? The number of actual chef-centered cooking shows on the network has declined dramatically in the last three years or so.

In the early 2000s, the heyday of Emeril Lagasse, my TV habits included a steady diet of Food Network TV. Every evening around 5 p.m. and every Saturday morning, I watched Rachael Ray's rise to stardom on "30 Minute Meals," got a good Southern girl fix watching Paula Deen put too much butter in everything, and gave the side-eye to Sandra Lee's "Semi-Homemade Meals." Though her food seemed exactly like the meals I had grown up eating, where my working single mom mixed packaged foods with fresh foods, a slight food snobbery was emerging for me, as I recognized the benefits of the fresh cooking that Ray, Bobby Flay, Tyler Florence and others were doing.

I also learned what quinoa was watching an episode of Ray's travel show "$40 a Day." I laughed at the ditzy blond girl who was featured on a show called "How to Boil Water," and I ran out eagerly to buy to white ramekins after watching an episode of Sara Moulton's "Cooking Live," in which the theme was 5-ingredient meals. I realized excitedly that I already had the butter, eggs, sugar, chocolate and vanilla extract that would make for a quick chocolate souffle. When I recently attempted to re-create my grandmother's famous pound cake, despite my aunt's protestations that if I didn't "do it right it will come out like a brick," it came out like a dream. And that is in part because an episode of Ina Garten's "Barefoot Contessa" taught me that I had to let the eggs and butter come to room temperature.

Like so many, Ray was and in many ways remains my favorite. I bought her cookbooks, was heartbroken when I arrived at one of her book signings so late that the line to see her snaked out the door, and cheered for her when she got her own show. One of my prized gifts is a set of her cookware. Because of her I keep EVOO (extra virgin olive oil) and an assortment of vinegars in my pantry, and can always make my own salad dressings. That may seem normal for so many, but for a working-class black girl from the South, the cuisine I grew up eating was a mashup of Paula Deen and Sandra Lee, which is to say, fattening, rich, processed - and I mostly ate vegetables- collard greens, field peas, green beans, and occasionally on Sundays, fresh sliced tomatoes - in the context of soul food dinners.

Despite my absolute fandom for the various network personalities, around 2007 or so, I realized that in all the years I had watched the network (about 5 at that point), there had not been one cooking show with an African-American host.

I slowly started to come around to the idea that perhaps I should not give so much time and money to a network that clearly didn't think black people cooked. Though things seemed to be changing when I saw a few episodes of a Latino show called "Simply Delicioso" hosted by a Colombian-American woman, Ingrid Hoffman, it was short-lived.

When I first saw Gina and Patrick Neely, a married couple who owned a couple of barbecue joints in Memphis, on an episode of one of Paula Deen's shows, it seemed clear that the Food Network was thinking again about diversifying. And sure enough, in February 2008, just in time for Black History Month, the network debuted the couple on their own show, "Down Home With the Neelys."

A few months later, their show was joined by "Cooking for Real" with Sunny Anderson, and then shortly after that the winner of Food Network Star Season 4, Aaron McCargo Jr., got his own show, "Big Daddy's House." From zero to three in a span of about two years, the network was on fire.

They followed up with Latino-inspired cooking shows like "Viva Daisy" and "Mexican Made Easy." And on the heels of winning Season 6 of Food Network Star, the winner, Aarti Sequeira, an Indian woman, had her own show, "Aarti Party."

Yet if you watch the network for any length of time, now, you'll see only two of those people - Sunny Anderson and Marcela Valladolid, host of "Mexican Made Easy." No longer hosting their own shows, they cook together on a new show called "The Kitchen." The Neelys have unceremoniously disappeared alongside Aaron McCargo Jr. and each and every Latino show.

This weekend when I tuned in for the usual roundup, I saw three individually hosted cooking shows, Trisha Yearwood's show "Trisha's Southern Kitchen," "The Pioneer Woman" with Ree Drummond, and "Farmhouse Rules," with a middle-aged woman who looks like a Paula Deen knockoff. There were also old episodes of one of Rachael Ray's shows, a new episode of Bobby Flay's show "BF's Barbecue Addiction" and an episode of Guy Fieri's "Guy's Big Bite." Other than Sunny Anderson, one of the co-hosts of "The Kitchen," not one other show with a host of color appeared.

It bears noting that the network has significantly pared down all of its cooking shows. The regional and stylistic diversity of shows even among white chefs has decreased dramatically, such that many of my favorite shows over the years have come and gone quickly. In their place, banal reality show cooking competitions proliferate, most probably because they are a ratings draw.

Still, it is an egregious oversight on the part of the higher-ups at Food Network to feed us a steady diet of TV shows hosted by heterosexual white men and Southern white ladies.

Cooking is both a mundane and also a deeply intimate act, something we do on the regular for ourselves and those we love. Nothing is more important than how we think about what we put into our bodies. This network has greatly shaped not only how I cook, helping me to become a far healthier cook than I was reared to be, but it has helped me think about food politics more generally. When I watch hosts of travel shows take on various gluttonous food challenges, like eating a five-pound burrito, I know that this kind of ingestive excess is a direct result of America having access to way more than our fair share of the world's food supply. When I read the think pieces about how quinoa farmers can no longer afford to buy this staple food of their own diet, I think about how our mediated relationship to food as a commodity hurts others while supposedly helping us to be more healthy. And on a far less serious note, the network has influenced how I think about vacations, since I usually want to re-create at some level the travel experiences of people like Guy Fieri on "Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives." And before I found out about Paula Deen's racist antics, one of my homegirls and I drove down to Savannah a few years back to visit her restaurant, the Lady and Sons.

I know when I both see and share food pics on social media, that the desire to show off beautifully arranged, presumably delicious food has been shaped immensely by what the Food Network chefs over the years have taught us repeatedly: "You eat with your eyes first."

And herein lies the conundrum. In all things, race continues to matter. Even how we cook. We Americans pride ourselves on the variety of foods we eat from other cultures, including Chinese, Thai, Indian, Mexican (and Tex-Mex), Spanish, Salvadoran, Cuban, Jamaican and African-American. In a country that is increasingly more brown than white, we have no problem, to invoke bell hooks, "eating the other," marking our commitments to diversity by the variety of ethnic foods that we put on our plates. Meanwhile, despite the declining popularity of the salad bowl analogy to represent multiculturalism, racial diversity in representation remains deeply unpalatable and unprofitable. Hooks writes: "Within commodity culture, ethnicity becomes spice, seasoning that can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture." So we are more likely to see Giada De Laurentiis or Bobby Flay cooking "ethnic foods" than we are to see a brown person cooking them. As diversity goes, it seems to take very little to bring about a feeling of satiety.

Dear Hauptgeschaftsfuhrer Green,

Congratulations, you have just been awarded the "Vidkun Quisling Award!" Your name will now live throughout history with such past award winners as Marcus Junius Brutus, Judas Iscariot, Benedict Arnold, George Stephanopoulos, George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush, Prescott Bush, Sam Bush, Fredo Bush, Kate Bush, Kyle Busch, Anheuser Busch, Vidkun Quisling and last year's winner Volksjudge John (the enforcer) Roberts.

Without your lock step calling for the repeal of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, your bribing the Extreme court to put corporate rights over womens rights, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Syria, Iran and those many other profitable oil wars to come would have been impossible! With the help of our mutual friends, the other "corporate whores" you have made it possible for all of us to goose-step off to a brave new bank account!

Along with this award you will be given the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross with Golden Oak Leaves, Swords and Diamonds presented by our glorious Fuhrer, Herr Obama at a gala celebration at "der Fuhrer Bunker," formally the "White House," on 09-11-2014. We salute you Herr Green, Sieg Heil!

Signed by,
Vice Fuhrer Biden