Global

on October 24 was a seventeen-minute Senate floor speech to announce that he would not run for re-election, all gussied up with at least implied imprecations against a president and administration he could not bring himself to call by name. In seventeen minutes, Flake managed to find fault with nothing more specific in the world today than “our disunion … the indecency of our discourse … the coarseness of our leadership … the compromise of our moral authority.”

http://davidswanson.org/u-s-empire-not-fade-away/

I wanna tell you how it’s gonna be.

But I really cannot. Prediction is just vastly more difficult than action, which makes it even odder that so much of the former goes on, and so little of the latter.

I just read In The Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power by Alfred McCoy. It’s one of the better books I’ve read in a long time on the history and current state of U.S. militarism. It’s excellent on the truly ridiculous (my word, not the book’s) chess analogy that has driven imperialist thinking, on the outcomes of backing dictators as puppets, and on the abuses of secret agencies — including their role in the drug trade in places like Nicaragua and Afghanistan.

Despite the twitter promise of Tyrant Trump to release the remaining files on the JFK assassination as prescribed by law made 25 years ago, evidently the CIA got to him at the 11th hour, causing him to accede to their demand to keep the incriminating documents secret for another 6 months while they are scrubbed and redacted. With varying degrees of certainty the community of scholars who have spent years studying the facts around the political assassinations of the 1960's have long ago come to the conclusion that JFK was killed by the National Security State (CIA and the Military).

More than a hundred mothers have contacted me over the years, alarmed at the relationships their teenaged children were developing with military recruiters at school. They wanted to know what they could do about it. They were angry, and they were worried.

The fact these women reached out to me and other counter-recruitment activists demonstrates the degree of alarm they experienced. They feared their vulnerable children would enlist against their wishes. They were terrified their child would be killed while they stood by. This was the driving force of their resistance.

Several mothers told me they deeply resented the presence of military recruiters in their child’s school and they described the influence recruiters were having over their child’s thinking and behavior. They talked about difficult relationships they had with their children. Some said their child had forged close relationships with recruiters at school for over two years. These moms were certain their sons were going to enlist because their boys knew the pain it would inflict on their mothers.

By the signers listed below
http://davidswanson.org/a-peace-treaty-with-north-korea-and-you-can-sign-it/

http://worldbeyondwar.org/peace-studies-can-help-end-wars

Remarks at Peace and Justice Studies Association Conference in Birmingham, Alabama, October 28, 2017.

Thank you for inviting me. Can everyone who thinks that war is never, and can never be, justified please raise your hand. Thank you. Now if you think every war is always justified. Thank you. And finally all the moderates holding the balanced subtle middle ground: some wars are justified. Thank you. You may not be surprised to hear that this room is not typical of this country. Typical is for absolutely everyone to pile into that last group.

The relationship between peace and war is clearly not understood by the U.S. public as along the lines of that between alive and dead. Peace and war are things people imagine can coexist.

 “. . . insects as a group are in terrible trouble and the remorselessly expanding human enterprise has become too much, even for them.”

And instantly I’m beyond the realm of anything I know, as I consider the gradual disappearance not of whales but of . . . beetles, moths and hoverflies, thanks to the human enterprise we call civilization, as Michael McCarthy put it in The Guardian.

hat motivated White House Chief of Staff John Kelly to bring himself to the White House briefing room October 19, only to perform something like a self-immolation?

He began with abrupt fuzziness:

OK, not clear what that might mean, reporters understood that he was there to defend President Trump’s handling of his suddenly infamous phone call to Sgt. La David Johnson’s widow and mother of three, comforting her with “your guy … must have known what he signed up for.” Kelly is not in the habit of engaging with reporters, but he had been a witness to the call. So the next thing he said was:

Even as some Democrats are at long last growing frustrated with the lack of actual evidence for the past several months of stories about Russia stealing a U.S.

Bing Crosby crooned about “Sweet Leilani,” that Hawaiian “heavenly flower” in Harry Owens’ Academy Award-winning hapa haole ditty. Eric Clapton sang that “Layla” “got me on my knees.” In Michael Connelly’s crime novel Trunk Music, LAPD Detective Harry Bosch scours Las Vegas, searching for the missing stripper also named Layla. And in The Pearl Fishers Georges Bizet features the enticing high priestess Leila (beguiling Tblisi, Georgia soprano Nino Machaidze, last seen gracing the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion as Mimi in 2016’s La Boheme).

Originally set in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), this stunning production is simply eye-popping, with sublime music, even if Michel Carre and Eugene Cormon’s turgid libretto is fraught with Freudian symbolism about sexual repression and religious zealotry (funny how those two things often go hand in hand). LA Opera gives Bizet the Hollywood treatment, opening with a scrim that makes it seem as if the stage is underwater, as real life “swimmers” (or “scrim-mers”?) cavort about.