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To Bigger and his kind, white people were not really people; they were a sort of great natural force, like a stormy sky looming overhead or like a deep swirling river stretching suddenly at one’s feet in the dark.

— Richard Wright, Native Son (1940)

The memoir, N, by James Henry Harris, Distinguished Professor of Pastoral Theology & Homiletics at Virginia Union University, is confrontational, even fiery from the get-go. Wonderfully in-your-face, no-holds-barred prose that gets right to the heart of the matter about CRT and the controversy over banning books — and …

Watching a buffoon commit suicide is never a pleasant thing.

— Scott Ritter on a Richard Medhurst podcast, May 19, 2022

“Putin is mad and losing his marbles all over Ukraine” goes a certain conventional AmericaNATOstani talking point bombastically broadcast over all mainstream media outlets in the Collective West these days. The idea that the Collective West’s own madness has been projected upon the figure of Vladimir Putin is considered anathema, a heresy promoted by none other than “Mad Vlad” himself, whose propaganda services, we are led to believe, have unusually penetrated our own sacrosanct Disinformation Systems.

How can this be?  Put it …

US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin stated that Western nations will continue “moving Heaven and Earth” to send weapons to Ukraine in its war against Russia.  ((Jacob Knutson, “Austin: West Will ‘Keep Moving’ Heaven and Earth’ to Arm Ukraine,” April 27, 2022.)) While they may be moving Earth, it’s doubtful they’re moving Heaven, which could very well be enraged at US policymakers’ habit of seizing for itself divine powers to inflict massive amounts of death whenever conflict looms on the horizon. For good reason, so much power was never intended to be in the hands of mere mortals.

US policymakers are …

The Israeli Supreme Court has decided that the Palestinian region of Masafer Yatta, located in the southern hills of Hebron, is to be entirely appropriated by the Israeli military and that a population of over 1,000 Palestinians is to be expelled.

The Israeli Court decision, on May 4, was hardly shocking. Israel’s military occupation does not only consist of soldiers with guns, but elaborate political, military, economic and legal structures, dedicated to the expansion of the illegal Jewish settlements and the slow – and sometimes not-so-slow – expulsion of the Palestinians.

When Palestinians state that the Nakba, or Catastrophe …

Four months ago, two days before the civilized world celebrated one year since the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons came into force on January 22, officials here at the Kansas City National Security Campus hosted a virtual celebration of a different milestone with partners from across the National Nuclear Security Administration and U.S. Air Force. “With great pride and excitement,” they recognized the completion of the B61-12 bomb’s Life Extension Program’s first production unit. This plant is responsible for producing 39 major non-nuclear component assemblies of the …

In the ideological disciplines—the humanities and social sciences—it is rare to come across a theoretical work that doesn’t seem to fetishize verbiage and jargonizing for their own sake. From the relatively lucid analytical Marxism of an Erik Olin Wright ((See Russell Jacoby’s savage review of Wright’s Envisioning Real Utopias entitled “Real Men Find Real Utopias,” Dissent, Winter 2011, for an exposure of the intellectual emptiness of a certain type of “theoretical” sociology.)) to the turgid cultural theory of a Stuart Hall, pretentious prolixity is, apparently, seen as an end in …

These Op-Ed’s I pen in Newport News Times are my reckoning with loads of travel, plethora of spiritual work, and in-the-trenches journalistic forays dredging unimaginable but potent “land.”

I muck around with smalltown newspapers, even when the gig pays zero shekels, because I have a thing for smalltown newspapers staying in business. REALLY. So here you go:

I ended up in Spokane, years ago, near or around Father’s Day, 2001. Lo and behold, the story of the celebration is rooted there. A Spokane woman, Sonora Smart Dodd (man, I spent a lot …

“A Haitian president demands reparations and ends up in exile”, declared the front-page of Wednesday’s New York Times. Eighteen years later those who opposed the US, French and Canadian coup have largely won the battle over the historical record.

French ambassador Thierry Burkard admits that President Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s call for the restitution of Haiti’s debt (ransom) of independence partly explains why he was ousted in 2004. Burkard told the Times the elected president’s removal was “a coup” that was “probably a bit about” Aristide’s campaign for France to repay Haiti.

Other major outlets have also investigated the coup recently. In 2020 Radio-Canada’s …

The American Government explains its thefts from other countries as being justifiable because the U.S. Government has slapped sanctions upon those countries, and because these sanctions authorize the U.S. Government to steal whatever it wants to steal, from them, that it can grab. Here are just a few such examples:

On May 26, Reuters headlined “U.S. seizes Iranian oil cargo near Greek island,” and reported:

The United States has confiscated an Iranian oil cargo held on a Russian-operated ship near Greece and will send the cargo to the United States. …
“The cargo has been transferred to another ship …

(Full article …)

Death, remarked Gore Vidal about Truman Capote’s passing, was a good career move.  The novelist Saki also considered the good qualities of shuffling off the mortal coil.  “Waldo,” he writes in “The Feast of Nemesis”, “is one of those people who would be enormously improved by death.”  But what of those instances when death is foiled, the Grim Reaper cheated?

Former US President George W. Bush has had the good fortune of facing such a foiling, though the claims remain fresh.  On May 24, Shihab Ahmed Shihab Shihab, an Iraqi national living in Columbus, Ohio, was arrested and charged with …