Here’s a piece of paradoxical news that puts even the looming U.S. presidential election in perspective: Nuclear weapons are now (or soon will be) . . . good Lord, illegal.

Armageddon is against the law!

Well, sort of. And the Trump administration doesn’t agree. Indeed, no nuke-armed nation has, as far as I can tell, anything but contempt for this infringement on its right to blow up the world (only if necessary, of course). War and peace, it seems, exist in parallel universes.

 single election administrator in Detroit could give Donald Trump four more years.

Election protectionists warn that she was key to Trump’s illegitimate victory in 2016, and that she could do it again in 2020 if she is not removed (not likely at this point) or intensely monitored.

Four years ago, Trump was awarded Michigan’s 16 key Electoral College votes based on an official margin of less than 11,000 votes. But more than 70,000 ballots from around the state came in without presidential preferences — a state record.

These “beheaded” ballots were allegedly cast by voters who stood in line for hours, only to apparently not bother to choose between Trump and Hillary Clinton.

Sophisticated hackers can perpetrate ballot beheading with a well-known algorithm that has surfaced in numerous US elections. In 2004, a similar outcome on Indigenous reservations helped give New Mexico to George W. Bush.

Whenever you hear something repeated, it feels more true when you hear it repeated. In other words, repetition makes any statement seem more true. So anything you hear will feel more true each time you hear it again.

Each of the three sentences above conveyed the same message. Yet each time you read the next sentence, it felt more and more true. Cognitive neuroscientists like myself call this the “illusory truth effect.”

Illusory truth is one consequence of a phenomenon called “cognitive fluency,” meaning how easily we process information. Much of our vulnerability to deception in all areas of life revolves around cognitive fluency.

The heated 2020 presidential election incites the question for Ohioans: what has Trump done for the people of Ohio?

We have indeed set records these past four years – from jobs to factories and agriculture – and why are we tired of these records being broken? Because they’re all going in the wrong direction.

Economic inequality, unequal development, and leveling of labor has plagued the rust belt the past 40-plus years. This is the understandable context for rural Ohio, some of suburbia and some blue-collar pockets of Ohio’s turn to populism when it was presented with a right-wing, anti-establishment populist candidate promising an alternative to the “status quo.” 

Trump has proved, however, to be a hollow right-wing populist in the lack of real economic development outside of the tax cuts and deregulation (a very mainstream conservative political strategy) that mostly benefited the top income brackets. His promises to revitalize some of Ohio’s most struggling working-class regions, like Northeast Ohio, have fallen short.

Trump in 2017 told Youngstown, Boardman, and the Mahoning Valley: “Those jobs have left Ohio, (but) they’re all coming back.”

Peter Kuznick answered the following questions from Mohamed Elmaazi of Sputnik Radio and agreed to let World BEYOND War publish the text.

1) What’s the significance of Honduras being the latest country to join the UN’s Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons?

What a remarkable and ironic development, especially after the U.S. had been pressuring the previous 49 signers to withdraw their approvals. It is so fitting that Honduras, the original “banana republic,” pushed it over the edge–a delicious fuck you to a century of U.S. exploitation and bullying.

2) Is it possibly a bit of a distraction to focus on countries that have no nuclear capability?

Not really. This treaty represents the moral voice of humanity. It may not have a universal enforcement mechanism, but it clearly states that the people of this planet abhor the power-hungry, annihilation-threatening madness of the nine nuclear powers. The symbolic significance can not be overstated.