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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.

Let’s read a New York Times editorial from Monday:

“The United States has been at war continuously since the attacks of 9/11 and now has just over 240,000 active-duty and reserve troops in at least 172 countries and territories. While the number of men and women deployed overseas has shrunk considerably over the past 60 years, the military’s reach has not. American forces are actively engaged not only in the conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Yemen that have dominated the news, but also in Niger and Somalia, both recently the scene of deadly attacks, as well as Jordan, Thailand and elsewhere.”

That’s a big “elsewhere” that includes Libya, Pakistan, the Philippines, etc.

“An additional 37,813 troops serve on presumably secret assignment in places listed simply as ‘unknown.’ The Pentagon provided no further explanation. There are traditional deployments in Japan (39,980 troops) and South Korea (23,591) to defend against North Korea and China, if needed,”

Around the world activists who are strategic thinkers face a daunting challenge to effectively tackle the multitude of violent conflicts, including the threat of human extinction, confronting human society in the early 21st century.

I wrote that ‘activists who are strategic thinkers face a daunting challenge’ because there is no point deluding ourselves that the insane global elite – see ‘The Global Elite is Insane’ – with its compliant international organizations (such as the UN) and national governments following orders as directed, is going to respond appropriately and powerfully to the multifaceted crisis that it has been progressively generating since long before the industrial revolution.

October 16th marked the 49th anniversary of an iconic moment in sports history, a moment which exemplified the unwavering dedication necessary to the conduction of actions of civil disobedience.

At the 1968 Olympics Games in Mexico City, two black U.S. medalists—Tommie Smith and John Carlos— had bowed their heads, closed their eyes and raised their glove-covered hands into the shape of a fist.  This salute, also known as the “black power salute,” was held for the entire duration of the U.S. National Anthem. These men, in the course of a few minutes, had created waves in the international community and would forever be remembered for their influence on the Black liberation movement in the U.S. This silent protest was orchestrated in order to highlight the rampant racial inequality in the states and bring awareness to the racial injustices African-Americans faced on a daily basis.