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“From what GOP faction might Trumpites come?  The establishment?  Social conservatives?  Unlikely.”

— George F. Will, The Washington Post, August 12, 2015

The raging, erratic fire refuses to go out.  The longer the Donald flame flickers and burns in its impetuous, cartoonish way, the more the GOP is agitated in recoiling horror. In itself, this assessment suggests that the GOP is the vestal virgin being assaulted by the barbarian who is not merely at the gates but in the bed chamber.

The conservative commentariat have gathered their pens in what is becoming a united front against Donald Trump.  Their anger is an indicator, …

News coming out of the occupied Palestine on 8 August 2015 said that Saad Dawabsheh, the father of a Palestinian toddler Ali who was killed in a firebombing of his home a week ago, has died from wounds he sustained in the incident.

Early in the morning of July 31, Israeli settlers hurled a Molotov cocktail into a window of Dawabsheh’s home in the Duma village in occupied West Bank. His 18-month-old son, Ali was burned to death in the arson attack, while his four-year-old son Ahmad, and his wife, Riham were seriously injured and remain in critical condition.

The arsonists left …

To get a job is like that haystack needle,
‘Cause where we live, they don’t use colored people
— Stevie Wonder, “Livin’ for the City”

I was raised in a racist family, in a racist neighborhood and a racist world, in the 1940s and ’50s. In those days everyone around me was white, almost always and almost everywhere I went in Tacoma, Washington. The man who swept our street with a push broom was white. The cop who walked the beat which included my neighborhood was white. All of the delivery people– the milk man, the ice man, and all of the tradesmen.

One …

In 1953 at the age of 5, I was positive that I’d grow up to be Superman.  When George Reeves paid his weekly visit to the family television set I was ready.  With a dish towel cape, hands upon my hips, wearing an invincible expression, I was ready to battle the bad guys with truth, justice, the American way, incredible strength, and an unparalleled flying technique.

But even Superman had his Kryptonite.  Now, 62 years later, my Achilles’ heel turned out to be fair skin.  Too many severe sunburns in the Sonoran Desert came back to haunt.  Basal cell carcinoma now decorated my upper lip.

The procedure to remove this face invader …

This fortress built by Nature for her self
Against infection and the hand of war,
….
This precious stone set in a silver sea
…
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England…
England, bound in with the triumphant sea,
Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege …

— William Shakespeare, 1564-1616, Richard II

Britain’s top “diplomat”, Foreign Office Minister Philip Hammond has accused “marauding” migrants – the desperate, dispossessed, bereaved, orphaned children even, attempting to reach the UK, where many have relatives, contacts or speak the language – of threatening Britain and Europe’s “standard of living.”

In a racist rant he told the BBC:

Europe can’t protect itself …

(Full article …)

Jose Saramago wrote a novel translated as The Stone Raft, published in 1986. It appeared in English in 1994. The story is quite remarkable if simple. One day it appears that the entire Iberian peninsula—for the “geographically challenged”, that is the land mass comprising Spain, Portugal and the British dependency of Gibraltar– ruptures and begins to separate from the rest of the European peninsula. Quite independently several inhabitants of this land mass had premonitions of this bizarre event. When the governments involved discover this two parallel processes are first unleashed. Official plans emerge to pour enough cement into the gaping …

Our next iconic avatar would naturally arrive on the scene near the end of 19th century as Dracula.  However, the 1922 cult classic silent film Nosferatu made in breach of the Dracula copyright actually serves our heuristic purposes better. Although the stories are essentially the same, with the underlying incest theme discussed by anthropologist Robin Fox in The Tribal Imagination, the evil cleric finally looks like a sinister archpriest. The symbolic development or growth in its imago change has gone from dandy, to grandiose filthy blood sucking (energy draining) old man, to filthy old energy draining high cleric. Interesting to …

E.H. Carr suggested in his lectures that formed What is History? that one can only really understand history through understanding the historian.  To understand the historian, one then casts an eye towards circumstances, the background of gestation, product and ultimate shaping behind that process.

Robert Conquest, accomplished poet and historian who died on August 3, was the great example of the historian as process.  He gathered his material with what amounted to an almost penitent objective (many historians do, feeling that the truth is beavering its way to the pen of revelation).  Such histories do become political weapons, furnishings for furious …

On July 29, 2015, the trial of Palestinian activist Amer Jubran in Jordan reached its predictable conclusion: 10 years with hard labor for phony “terrorism” offenses, based at least in part on laws manufactured after his arrest.

Last year I wrote an article about the circumstances of Amer’s arrest and detention. At that time he was being held without charges, after being seized from his home in the middle of the night and held incommunicado at an undisclosed location for over 2 months.

In August of 2014, he was finally given a list of charges against him. These included the charge …

What is the relationship between organizing to slow, stop and reverse the climate crisis, a very big job with a very close deadline, and organizing to bring together a unified movement against our oppressive system that links people concerned about climate, racial justice, women’s and LGBT rights, labor rights, peace, social and economic justice, equality and more?

This is the third column I have written on this subject. My first one, last November, was in the form of an Open Letter to Naomi Klein in connection with how she addressed this issue in her wonderful book, “This Changes Everything.” The …

The modern trope and symbol for the sinister archpriest likely requires some analysis to give it meaning in three dimensions, and to put this being into some kind of social context related to the present spirit of the times. At first, this may seem like an impossible task, given the media’s proliferation in everyday life. When therefore, is the individual not inundated with a glut of images in print, social media, television, satellite, cable stations, etc., that can even be accessed on one’s personal cell phone, tablet or other electronic devices? The human mind has the capacity to recognize and …

In recent weeks, I have been part of a haphazard and ad hoc process to compose an open letter to Pope Francis in advance of his September, 2015 visit to the United States. The promotion of this letter has been taken up by Friends of Franz Jagerstatter, a community of peacemakers inspired by the Austrian Catholic farmer who was martyred for his refusal to fight in the German Army during World War II.

Pope Francis’ recent comments regarding war, the environment and economic justice inspire our letter, which cites segments of his new encyclical, Laudato Si. “War always does …

Anti-water charge campaigners had a major moral victory over government plans to make the people pay for the financial crisis when Eurostat determined that Irish Water had failed the Market Corporation Test.  One reason given was that “sales must cover at least 50pc of production costs. This is further amplified by the high number of households not paying their bills,” Eurostat said.  It is estimated that “57 percent of the people are refusing to pay the water charges” and that of the 43 percent who did pay, many were intimidated by landlords or solicitors collecting for the …

As an American born and partially raised in Africa, and as a person who strongly believes in the inalienable rights of non-human animals to live their lives without being molested by humans, I am left with a sense of outrage following the tragic and senseless killing of Cecil, the lion. Although my desire to write this article stems in part from a visceral need to express these sentiments, I also believe that this incident has raised at least two important issues in desperate need of discussion by those of us who care deeply about the African continent and by those …

The erasure of national sovereignty leads, not to Shangri-La as some would have us believe, but to a supranational consolidated ‘sovereignty’ presided over by banking interests, which is no sovereignty at all. On the contrary, it’s the Town Hall of the Panopticon. Greece is not some idiot uncle who simply needs a loan to get back in the fold. That’s a tragic misread. Greece is the canary in our mine-shaft, loss-leader on the road to global debt servitude. As goes Greece so too will go the world in due course. Others wait in the wings: Puerto Rico, Italy, Portugal, the …