So here’s an odd, mostly overlooked scrap of recent news: Donald Trump wants to end the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq before he leaves office, and is expected to announce a drawdown of troops in both countries. Currently there are approximately 4,500 troops in...
When the mainstream media writes about war, even critically, the image that often comes to mind for me is an infant wrapped in plastic. That infant is naked reality, a.k.a., the present moment, suffocating and screaming for its life; the plastic smothering it are the...
The annual defense budget, passed recently by both the House (377-48) and Senate (82-8), came in at $738 billion for 2020, up from last year a sweet $22 billion. War hits the motherlode every year. “The money just isn’t there” for virtually anything that matters...
“Everyone wants to play with the big boys, and the only way to become one of the big boys is to have nuclear toys.” Attention Planet Earth! Attention Planet Earth! It is time to grow up. The words are those of Mohamed ElBaradei, then director general of the...
The U.S. government protects itself, not democracy. That's what is most apparent about its 18-count indictment of Julian Assange, not to mention the ongoing imprisonment of Chelsea Manning, for the leaking and release of State Department and military documents and...
Mix a little socialism in with the oil and war may be unavoidable. Thus, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, talking about Venezuela: "The president has been crystal clear and incredibly consistent. Military action is possible. If that's what's required, that's what...
"They must kill and continue to kill, strange as it may seem, in order not to know that they are killing." ~ Rene Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World Socially sanctioned killing is called war. The word "war" may be the...
Peace, love and Donald Trump? I get the skepticism regarding the tentative nuclear disarmament agreement the president and Kim Jong-un reached last week, but not the cynicism – not the outright dismissal. It’s too easy to hate Trump, but he isn’t the point. In...
Whenever the topic is nuclear weapons, I remain in a state of disbelief that we can talk about them "strategically" – that language allows us to maintain such a distance from the reality of what they do, we can casually debate their use. Consider, in the...
What’s a little cholera – excuse me, the worst outbreak of this preventable disease in modern history – compared to the needs of a smoothly functioning economy? A week before he was kicked out of British Prime Minister Theresa May’s cabinet for allegedly having...
