Last Friday night, I went out to support a friend’s oldest boys. They had a high school rugby match in Bedford, Texas.
It was a great evening for it, and it felt good to be back out at the pitch (rugby field). I’d played in college and still held a catalogue of deep and abiding memories of my teammates and the matches we played in, the remembrances a comfort and a reminder of the bonds we forged and still shared.
It was no minor joy to see a younger generation of ruggers making …
In America, lying by the Government is routine because the Government represents not the public but only the wealthiest billionaires who provide most of the money that funds political campaigns. Any candidate who doesn’t represent the megadonor won’t get their money and will therefore be defeated by one who DOES represent the billionaires and NOT the public. Consequently, the winningest political candidates are the best liars, who (get all lof the billionaire money that they need in order to) deceive the most voters the most — and who fulfill on their public campaign promises to the …
Ironically, it was the US under President Trump which has broken with the US national security establishment’s bi-partisan strategy of incremental encirclement and escalation against Russia. That break offered Europe the opportunity to escape the trap created by its past lack of policy vision. Instead, Europe has proved plus royaliste que le roi (more royal than the King) and has remained loyal to the US national security Deep State.
In her recent “Threat Assessment” testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee, Director of Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard reasonably described Russia as a “formidable competitor.” However, in keeping with Trump’s desire for improved …
At the request of the United States, Argentine president Javier Milei ordered the declassification of all archives related to Nazi war criminals who fled to his country, including lists of those who sought asylum and were under protection, their bank accounts and financial transactions, as well as records held by Argentina’s Defense Ministry. On top of that, Milei promised full cooperation to organizations engaged in the search for escaped Nazis.
Despite the fact that of the approximately 10,000 war criminals who left Europe via the so-called “ratlines”, about 5,000 were settled …
Want to imagine that no Africans actually live in Africa? Want to go on safari and pretend that you’re not on Indigenous people’s lands? Then Colonial Holidays – supported by big conservation corporations – is for you. Photo by Fokke Baarssen via Pond5
A new travel company has launched today, offering stunning safari holidays with a guarantee of no Africans to spoil the view.
Colonial Holidays is a joint venture between exclusive tour operators and the conservation organizations WWF, WCS, The Nature Conservancy and African Parks.
Paranoia manifests in various ways. It can eat away individuals in desperate solitude, whittling away sanity and balance. It can be enlisted in the making of policy. The latter can be particularly dangerous, notably when readying for a fantastic threat. For the Baltic States, Poland and Finland, there is much talk about the Russia threat, one that will supposedly manifest in boots, armour and missiles once the war against Ukraine concludes. Unfortunately, that talk is now manifesting in preparations for war. So eager are these countries in making such preparations, they are willing to exit important treaties in doing so.
What would annexation by the US portend for Greenlanders?
by Kim Petersen / April 1st, 2025
United States vice president JD Vance traveled to Kalaallit Nunaat (colonial designation: Greenland) to join his wife. He issued a statement that speaks much to the imperialist mindset of the Trump administration:
I’m going to visit some of our guardians in the Space Force on the northwest coast of Greenland and also just check out what is going on with the security there of Greenland. As you know, it is really important: a lot of other countries have threatened Greenland and threatened to use its territories and its waterways to threaten the United States, to threaten Canada and of course to …
The struggle for Western Sahara stands as one of Africa’s longest-running battles against colonialism and neocolonial occupation. Since Spain’s withdrawal in 1975, the Sahrawi people have resisted Moroccan annexation, enduring forced displacement, repression, and the theft of their land and resources. Today, as Morocco consolidates its illegal occupation with U.S., French, and Israeli backing, including through AFRICOM-linked military exercises, the Polisario Front has reignited armed resistance, refusing to let Western Sahara remain the last colony in Africa.
This fight is not isolated. It mirrors the broader contradictions of imperialism on the continent, …
Leading the Kennedy Center and The Institute of Peace
by Dan Lieberman / April 1st, 2025
The Donald Trump salvage corporation has started to dismantle the neo-liberal structure that guided United States’ economic, foreign, and political policies for decades. To complete their destructive agenda, the Trumpsters are dismantling the social and cultural fabrics that accompanied the neo-liberal agenda, starting with gutting Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) social programs and continuing on to reconstitute the Kennedy Center of the Performing Arts and The U.S. Institute of Peace.
After Trump used presidential authority to purge his opposition from the Kennedy Center board, and the newly appointed board voted unanimously to elect him as its new chairperson, self-cancellation culture came …
The US is a peace-loving country that promotes harmony across the globe and treats other countries with respect.
The US has the greatest respect for international law. It meticulously honors its treaties, and uses the UN to constructively resolve any disputes between nations.
The enormous wealth of the US is shared equitably across its population and is instrumental in keeping the standard of living for all citizens at peak levels.
All US citizens enjoy equal opportunities for a good life, self-improvement and comfort, and a better future for coming generations.
The political leaders of the US are exemplary: intelligent, well-informed elected officials of the …
Call for Solidarity and Truth in the Face of Disinformation
by Veterans for Peace / April 1st, 2025
Image by Gerry CondonIn a powerful demonstration of international solidarity, seven members of Veterans For Peace (VFP) visited Nicaragua in mid-to-late March as an official VFP delegation. Veterans from five U.S. states flew to Nicaragua on March 19 for a week-long visit to community clinics, regional colleges, vocational schools, youth groups and mayors in several Nicaraguan cities, including the capital Managua, Matagalpa, Masaya and Ciudad Sandino. The veterans were most impressed to learn that Nicaragua, the third poorest country in the western hemisphere, is providing free, high quality …
There has been a fascinating, near unanimous condemnation among the cognoscenti about the seemingly careless addition of Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic to the chat chain of Signal by US National Security Advisor Michael Waltz. Condemnation of the error spans the spectrum from clownish to dangerous. There has been virtually nothing on the importance of such leaks of national security information and the importance they serve in informing the public about what those in power are really up to.
Rather than appreciate the fact that there was a journalist there to receive information on military operations that might raise …
I saw a hunger not only for food to supply the Iftar meal, but also for safety, for peace, for an end to this nightmare.
by Farida Algoul / March 31st, 2025
A food kitchen prepared 1,000 meals for Iftar — before it had to close due to the Israeli blockade. Photo: Farida Algoul
In Gaza, where the threads of life and death intertwine, and where moments of worship intersect with the horrors of war, people live their daily lives with unyielding resilience. During the holy month …
Recent news reports brought to my attention something that I completely missed when it first happened almost two months ago: JD Vance opining ignorantly and dangerously on Jesus of Nazareth’s teachings about “doing unto others as you would have done unto you.” Less than a month into the Trump/Musk/MAGA regime, Vance said this:
“You love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then after that you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.”
In Islam, one whole month of Ramzan is devoted to fasting. The Islamic calendar is lunar, thus shorter than the solar year by 10 to 11 days; thus Ramadan comes in every season.
If you believe Donald Trump might invade, you should be calling for Canada to withdraw from NATO. The alliance won’t defend Canada, has enabled US interference, and gobbles up resources.
During a recent meeting with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, US President Donald Trump questioned the border and Canadian sovereignty. He said, “if you look at a map, they drew an artificial line right through it, between Canada and the U.S. … somebody did it a long time ago, many many decades ago, and (it) makes no sense.” Trump also repeatedly said …
As Democrats decry the Trump Administration’s national security lapse, the United States is engaged in an actual killing campaign
by Kathy Kelly / March 31st, 2025
Members of the Fifteenth Street Meeting of Friends and the New York Catholic Worker gather for a weekly vigil against the bombing of Yemen in New York City on February 3, 2024
Since March 15, the United States has launched strikes on more than forty locations across Yemen in an ongoing attack against members of the Houthi movement, which has carried …
The convulsions wracking the American body politic inescapably impact the nation’s foreign relations. For the United States today is in a condition that defies all conventional categories. Its leader(s) are abnormal, its government is abnormal, its conduct is abnormal – and, perhaps, its society itself is abnormal. Donald Trump is a malignant narcissist compounded by extreme megalomania; Elon Musk, his Co-President, is also a megalomanic neo-Fascist with Nazi affinities – a Hitler salute is a Hitler salute is a Hitler salute.1Last week, Musk’s daughter affirmed in a public statement that her father indeed was making the Nazi salute. Just a few …
Imagine if Russia or China had suggested a deal with this content and these intentions, depriving Ukraine of its sovereignty
by Jan Oberg / March 29th, 2025
This is posted on Sebastian Sas’ important YouTube Channel with no less than 120,000 subscribers. His succinct analysis is based on an article published by the NED, EU and NATO-supported Ukraine-based newspaper, European Pravda.
I hope you are half as shocked as Sas — and I — are. Because, remember that this war, this destruction of Ukraine has been caused by the Russia-NATO conflict — that is, by the Obama administration’s regime change in Kiev in 2014, the US-led NATO’s expansion and the US/Western pumping of arms into Ukraine.
Now, Ukraine is destined to be paying for generations …
Will History Repeat Itself with the April 5 Protests?
by Roger D. Harris / March 29th, 2025
“The economy is great! You can go home to watch TV now. The 1%,” Oakland Occupy satire, November 2, 2011.
Like the proverbial spark that ignited a prairie fire, the Occupy movement that began on September 17, 2011, in New York City went viral. Rallying around the slogan, “We are the 99%,” the movement initially mobilized large numbers of what might be called the newly dispossessed. They were looking for remedies to a neoliberal order which was not working for them.
Elements of this same constituency of the dispossessed today are in the …
As a result of three years of the war, Ukraine faced a massive demographic crisis. According to various estimates, mass migration, a high rate of premature mortality and a sharp decline in birth rates have led to a huge population decline from 41 to 30 million people. Over 2024 the number of the Ukrainians, who died, exceeded the amount of those, who were born, threefold. Experts from the Institute for Demography and Life Quality Problems of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, has …
Comparing any political system to Hitler’s Nazi regime is a tricky business and often overstated. One shouldn’t diminish the horrors of the Holocaust or overstate current political conditions. Nevertheless, the lessons gleaned from the Nazi’s Gleichschaltung project are worthy of consideration.
Gleichschaltung is the German word for bringing society into line with a specific political agenda. In the two-+ months since taking the White House, Donald Trump and his wingman Elon Musk’s moves are eerily reminiscent of Hitler’s …
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is waging a war on many fronts. He has ended the tense ceasefire with Hamas in Gaza in spectacularly bloody fashion and resumed bombing of Hezbollah positions in southern Lebanon. Missiles fired at Israel from the Houthi rebels in Yemen also risk seeing a further widening of hostilities.
Domestically, he has been conducting a bruising, even thuggish campaign against Israeli institutions and their representatives, an effort that is impossible to divorce from his ongoing trial for corruption. He has, for instance, busied himself with removing the …
Frans Verbeeck – The Mocking of Human Follies (detail)
Super storms of wind, rain, and fire rage across the planet.
For eons, before us, wind scattered seeds and the world was fructified. Rain the great thirst of life and cleansed, warmed and illuminated.
Yet now the elements admonish us for humankind’s planet-poisoning folly. Men, shallow ones, claim, industry created civilization; the poetic voice of nature is now poised to …
The Utility of 'Terrorism' versus 'Warfare', from Ground Zero to Gaza
by Seth Meldon / March 28th, 2025
No person can calculate the greatness of the evil to transform the citizens of a peaceful, industrious republic into a band of furious soldiers; and yet the unhappy policy of nations is to cultivate a martial spirit that they may appear grand, powerful, and terrific, when in fact they are kindling flames that will eventually burn them up root and branch.
— David Low Dodge, American activist and theologian, War Inconsistent with the Religion of Jesus Christ (1815)
The term “terrorism” has long assumed a role in political discourse just as useful for its slippery definition as it is for its geopolitical utility. …
There are many contrasts between the 35th president, John F. Kennedy, and the 45th and 47th president, Donald J. Trump. One extreme example is regarding U.S. policy toward Israel.
JFK and Israel/Palestine
Unknown to many people today, JFK supported Palestinian rights and sought a sustainable peace in the region.
In 1960, when JFK was campaigning to be president, he spoke at the convention of the Zionists of America. In his speech, Kennedy was complimentary about Israel but frankly said, “I cannot believe that Israel has any real desire to remain indefinitely a garrison state surrounded by fear and hate.” That warning, issued …
