1984, Here We Come!

Years ago, I developed the habit of watching the cable television Sunday news channels in order to learn what was happening in the world. Today I watched but not for the same reason; today it was just for comic relief! I snickered, snorted, and even laughed out loud as the vaunted pundits lied, alibied, and wriggled out of their share of responsibility for the mess in which our nation now finds itself. They discussed the stories about Tilman and Lynch. Why did they buy into them with such gusto? Well……. they... Read article

Blackwater mercenaries, West Point graduates & other contractors’ tales

When I was in Iraq, I brushed my teeth with the non-potable water. Having survived brushing my teeth with the tap water in Afghanistan and Mexico (with the help of some Cipro), I was thinking, “Who’s afraid of a little bacteria?” Well, since I’ve been back, my mouth just hasn’t felt right. OMG! Maybe the water was non-potable because it was filled with depleted uranium? Then I started getting really paranoid. “I’m gonna die of mouth cancer!” Me and Sigmund Freud. Yuck! ... Read article

Video: Playing God with the Weather

Film highlighting the benefits and consequences of weather modification, from its humanitarian roots to its dark history of military involvement. Loading...  Read More →

It’s Spring!

Spring has come to our Northern retreat: The snow has melted and uncovered meadows that somehow managed to stay pale-green; thick ice on the lake has broken up and crawled up on the shore like so many white crocodiles; now a warm wind blows and the sun shines as if it means business. The Spring has come to conclude the gorgeous winter: our soul needs darkness as well as light, and here at latitude 60°N, a snowball-throw from the Arctic Circle, where I am spending a few months far away from the relentless Mediterranean... Read article

The Bloody Passovers of Dr Toaff

Blood, betrayal, torture, and surrender are intervowen in the story of an Italian Jew, Dr Ariel Toaff, as if penned by his compatriot Umberto Eco. Dr Toaff stumbled onto a frightful discovery, was horrified but bravely went on, until he was subjected to the full pressure of his community; he repented, a broken man. Dr Toaff is the son of the Rabbi of Rome and a professor in the Jewish University of Bar Ilan, not far from Tel Aviv. He made a name for himself by his deep study of medieval Jewry. His three-volumed Love, Work,... Read article

Video: Breaking Ranks

Documentary film that examines the current phenomena of US soldiers seeking refuge in Canada as part of their resistance to the war effort in Iraq. http://www.breakingranksthefilm.com Loading... You may need to update / download Free Real Player to view this video.  Read More →

Washed in the blood of the lamb: Iraq in retrospect

“So, Jane,” someone just asked me, “what have you learned from your trip to Iraq?” What have I learned? That coming back to Berkeley was a let-down? I always thought that Berkeley was the hot-gossip epicenter for the entire universe but now everything here seems to fall flat. Who even CARES if the same tired old feuds are still going on and X isn’t speaking to Y and both X and Y are still going out of their way to avoid Z? And when I went to my housing co-op’s board meeting... Read article

The Bush Legacy Of Death

Thanks to George W. Bush children and young people in Iraq never have a ‘normal’ day, a day when they can feel safe and go about their lives. Every day in Iraq, children, young people, women and the elderly along with good, decent, men simply trying to survive are snuffed out horribly. Their homes are invaded; going to the grocery store is fraught with fear; they live with one hour of electricity a day. That is how it is. When their loved ones are shot there are no counselors and George Bush, the man who did this to... Read article

Holocaust Redux

“The only thing for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing” — Edmund Burke The State of That Which Is Such is the state of human affairs, whether in the present age or in those that came before, that not a decade passes without humanity resurrecting, in some corner of the globe, in some forsaken nation, the devastation unleashed by human wickedness. Whether mass murder, genocide, ethnic cleansing, endemic rape, pillage, scorched earth and yes, even Holocaust, human wickedness prevails upon the human... Read article

Contracting the troop death tolls out: Why more US soldiers died in Nam than Iraq

On my plane flight back from Iraq, I was cogitating on what I had learned while I was there and, in between the inflight movie and the rubber chicken, I started remembering what one female Parliamentarian I had interviewed kept saying to me. “The number of American troops that have died over here is much higher than reported because they do not count the contractors.” Counting contractors’ deaths? Was she talking about including the deaths of mercenary soldiers into the U.S. troop death count? I... Read article

Who Grieves For Them?

While spending my usual Sunday morning, watching the news shows on television, I founds myself in total empathy with the parents of the slain college students at Virgina Tech. Having lost a child of my own a year ago, I understand intimately the pain which they now must bear. I thought of how nice it is that some find solace in speaking to the nation which mourns with them about their lost sons and daughters via the television interviewers. Also, according to the news, grief counselors are being sent in to help the students... Read article

Demons and Angels

We have learned “Do not make yourself a god”; now it is the time to learn “do not make yourself a demon”. Demonisation of one’s enemy is a relatively new invention. In the good old times, men fought and then made friends – and then fought again, like the valiant heroes of the Iliad and like the gallant knights of King Arthur. The warriors who fought and killed each other will forever drink mead and fight at the same table in the Valhalla. True, the Old Testament tells of Joshua who initiated the first Nuremberg... Read article

Carter and the Swarm

Publication of Jimmy Carter’s Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid is a great event for America and for all of us. It’s not that Carter said anything we did not already know about Palestine. Before Carter, we already knew that the Zionists had established a racist apartheid regime in the Holy Land where Jews have rights, and goyim have duties. Before Carter we knew a native Palestinian has no right to vote, move or work freely in his land — that he is locked up behind the twenty-foot wall. Before Carter... Read article

The Tyranny of Liberalism

Modern Liberalism is the dominant paradigm in the US, and it plays a major role in Europe, in post-Soviet Russia and elsewhere. This line is preached by the powerful world-wide mass media syndicate whose elements are ostensibly independent yet they transmit the identical message James Petras has called The Tyranny of Liberalism.[1] A “liberal tyranny” may strike some as oxymoronic if not a contradiction in terms since Liberalism likes to represent itself as the neutral ground of freedom rather than as an ideology and... Read article

Shlimazls and Priestesses

Men do fight and die for fair women: Sir Lancelot over Queen Guinevere, Tristan over Isolde came to grief but satisfied their passion. Others died in the attempt, they were sung about or bewailed. But a guy who dies for pussy he is not going to get anyway – deserves derision. Heinrich Heine, that ironic genius, used to call such a fall guy “Schlemihl;” or Shlomiel in modern Hebrew, Schlimazl in Yiddish. The original Shlomiel was killed by mistake in a fight for a pretty Moabite girl (Num. 25:6), and since then... Read article

Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

The villain kills innocent people in order to frame Roger Rabbit, that much I remember of the marvellous Zemeckis 88’ cartoon. The movie spoofs Hitchcock private eye films where the hero wades waist-deep in dead bodies, all killed to frame him. Chandler and Hammett developed this genre being bored by always-safe violin-playing Holmesian detectives: their heroes unravel murders while being accused and pursued by police. The Russian president Vladimir Putin found himself in the uncomfortable position of Roger Rabbit. Soon... Read article

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