Some Sunday Reading

* A warning to college profs from a high school teacher.

* The Secret to Fixing Bad Schools.

* Pulp Science Fiction in Spain, Before And During Totalitarianism.

* Sweating Obama Admits Drone Strikes Have Been Happening On Their Own.

* On “So-Called Americans.”

* SF Gate review of Kill Anything That Moves The Real American War in Vietnam.

The problem, as described in Turse’s “Kill Anything That Moves,” is the tension between the “bad apples” argument – which sees atrocities in Vietnam as the exception – and the reality of the broader, official “American way of war.” Turse came to understand the latter after he stumbled onto documents of the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group. The military created the group after the My Lai massacre to avoid again being caught flat-footed.

The point, Turse found, was not to prevent war crimes but to contain the damage and stay, as the euphemism might go today, ahead of the PR problem. Finding the cache of internal documents, Turse halted his academic thesis work, and lit out in his car to spend the next several days photocopying these documents. He rounded this out with interviews with more than 100 veterans, alongside those of eyewitnesses and survivors of American atrocities in Vietnam. His verdict – more than a decade later – is damning and masterful.

* In the new New Republic: Original Sin: Why the GOP is and will continue to be the party of white people.

* There is no intrinsic value in the prescribed motion. But this needn’t necessarily make up weep.

* It’s One Of The Craziest Internet Rumors About Guns. And As It Turns Out, It’s True.