30 Oct, 2022
Hammers are for building, not harming
Antifa comes swarming into the street, hurling full soda cans at cops and at windows, believing they alone have the right to "burn it down," ala Pol Pot, start over, Year Zero.
29 Oct, 2022
American values or Christian beliefs
Sixty-two percent of Republicans believe that America should be declared a Christian country, even though they also understand such a declaration would be unconstitutional.
28 Oct, 2022
Conservative governance has undermined U.S. life expectancy
Although, in recent decades, American conservatives have embraced what they call the “Right to Life,” they have certainly done a poor job of sustaining life in the United States. That’s the conclusion that can be drawn from a just-published scientific study, “U.S. state policy contexts and mortality of working-age adults.”
27 Oct, 2022
Loving nature or profiting from it: Take your pic
It’s fascinating how “interests” interfere with survival. We prepare for — and, of course, wage — war with an overwhelming percentage of our resources (to the benefit of the profiteers), but we plead poverty when it comes to helping people or, you know, saving the planet.
26 Oct, 2022
Crossing the border into Ukraine
Anyone can see it coming, right there on mainstream news. Writers don’t need to warn of the worst because the worst is already unfolding in front of us all.
25 Oct, 2022
In Iran, the revolution is being feminized
Mahsa Amini, who was preparing to go to university with the goal of becoming a doctor, was taken into custody on Sept. 13 in Tehran by Iranian ‘morality police’. Her crime? Wearing a hijab they deemed “inappropriate."
24 Oct, 2022
Is Armageddon a crime?
I have represented nuns, priests, and lay believers, who were arrested, prosecuted (I now say “persecuted”) for pouring their blood on US nuclear ICBMs or other nuclear weapons and praying for peace.
23 Oct, 2022
Europe’s far-right lurch
The struggle to save democracy is proving even more difficult in Europe than here in the US. Virtually every European country is bedeviled by rising conflict between traditional political parties on one side and far-right, sometimes neo-fascist parties on the other.
22 Oct, 2022
Your brain on elections
“I’m afraid what Thanksgiving will be like, no matter how the election turns out,” a friend commented. She’s not wrong to be worried. Elections bring up all sorts of emotions and behaviors that create division. Understanding our “brains on elections” can help.
21 Oct, 2022
Fifteen seconds till Armageddon
“When militarism is addressed as a psychosocial disease, the absurd irrationality of its symptoms is clearly exposed.”
20 Oct, 2022
Vote for your children’s future. Vote because it’s patriotic.
Nobody will ever deprive the American people of the right to vote except the American people themselves. The only way they could do this is by not voting. —Franklin D. Roosevelt
19 Oct, 2022
Let’s defuse nuclear war, together
Sixty years ago this week, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, I was in my mother’s womb. My young, sweet mom was terrified she’d never get to see me be born, as the world teetered on the brink of unimaginable calamity. It’s bewildering to me that nuclear crises bookend my life at this point.
18 Oct, 2022
Bye-bye world: While nuclear weapons and wars exist, annihilation beckons
It’s been a long time since the atomic bombings of August 1945, when people around the planet first realized that world civilization stood on the brink of doom.
17 Oct, 2022
Shame and hope
The primitive stupidity of the global “security” system in which we continue to drift 60 years after the Cuban crisis is beyond shameful.
15 Oct, 2022
Democracy is an act of moral imagination
Shortly before he died, Congressmember and human rights activist John Lewis wrote a farewell to his fellow citizens, declaring: “Democracy is not a state.