It’s been a long time but worth remembering, if you can, that when the Twin Towers and Building 7 at the World Trade Center collapsed on September 11, 2001, the whole world watched in horror. The events of that day were repeated on television over and over and over again, to the point where they... Read More

As another October approaches, the beautiful season of colors begins here in New England. Call it October’s Surprise Party. The turning leaves with all their colors come to announce the earth’s glory, the possibility of peace and happiness for all. Yet as the month transpires and November nears, I think we might expect what for... Read More

I am sitting on the beach at the National Seashore, a forty-mile long stretch of the Atlantic Ocean seashore on Outer Cape Cod, established in 1961 by President Kennedy. The wind is whipping hard and the waves are running wildly high against the shore, and, to paraphrase Thoreau – the sand is rapidly drinking up... Read More

This article is from my last book, Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies.(Nov., 2020). Although it was written in 2018, it still seems appropriate on this anniversary of the evil U.S. bombing of Hiroshima. “Ahab is forever Ahab, man. This whole act’s immutably decreed. ‘Twas rehearsed by thee and me billion years before this... Read More

A contronym is a word having two definitions that contradict each other. Two examples are the word bolt, which can mean to lock with a bolt and to flee, and clip, which means to attach and to detach. There are many such words and there is also a system of thought based on them. It... Read More

Laughing on the bus/Playing Games with the faces/She said the man in the gabardine suit was a spy/I said, “Be careful his bowtie is really a camera” – America by Paul Simon Only people who listen to the chorus of reliable alternative media voices warning of the quickly growing threat of nuclear war have any... Read More

I suppose my title could have been couched in the singular form, as Hermann Hesse, the Nobel Prize winning German/Swiss author, did with his collection of anti-war essays about World War I (the war to end all wars that didn’t), If The War Goes On . . . Or more appropriately, I might have eliminated... Read More

To be crucified is to suffer and die slowly and agonizingly. It was a common form of execution in the ancient world. It is generally associated with Rome’s killing of Jesus and carries profound symbolic spiritual meaning for Christians. In its figurative sense, it refers to many types of suffering and death inflicted on the... Read More

Like all living creatures, people need to eat to live. Some people, eaten from within by a demonic force, try to deny others this basic sustenance. All across the world people are starving because the powerful and wealthy create economic and political conditions that allow their wealth to be built on the backs of the... Read More

Overheard in a coffee shop: A woman and a man are sitting together at a table. She with a laptop open before her and he with a coffee and a book. Looking at the screen, she says to him, “I didn’t know that the solar eclipse lasts for 70 to 80 minutes, going from partial... Read More

Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a spate of books and articles extolling the word “soul” became the rage in the United States. Soul became the chic word. It popped up everywhere. Everything seemed to acquire soul – cars, toasters, underwear, cats’ pajamas, assorted crap, kitsch, etc. Soul sold styles from boots to... Read More

Here’s a film about the 1950s – “The World As It Was” – that will tell you a great deal about life in the U.S.A. today, while disabusing anyone of the notion that nostalgia for that mephitic decade is in order, for it was a time when “democracy” tended toward totalitarianism. In doing so, it... Read More

Sometimes it takes our bodies to return us to our souls. And our little pains to remind us of the indescribable pain of the savage killing and dismemberment of innocent children and adults in Gaza and many other places by U.S. weapons produced in clean factories by people just doing their jobs and collecting their... Read More

There is propaganda by commission and propaganda by omission, the former often serve to conceal the latter. Timing is crucial. That the U.S. President Joseph Biden, his British, NATO, Israeli allies, and their corporate media mouthpieces are in need of a major propaganda victory is obvious. They are losing the war in Ukraine, have been... Read More

Despite calendars and clocks and all the mental gymnastics we use to control life and time, surprises are at the heart of existence. This may seem like a truism, but if so, it is one of those truths we often avoid in our desire for stability and the quelling of anxiety. Our expectations, a form... Read More

It’s always encouraging when a country’s military commander-in-chief – President Biden, in this case – announces in advance that he knows how he is going to respond militarily to the killing of three American soldiers at a base that supports an illegal and immoral U.S. “covert” war against Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Iran, and all those... Read More

Now that our revels are ended, the holiday celebrations and feasts, if one had them, just a dream melted into thin air, our hungers perhaps richly satiated temporarily or not, our visions project us into a new year in which we hope to realize in a not insubstantial way the images we see before the... Read More

It is hard for those who have not lived through the shattering political assassinations of the 1960s to grasp their significance for today. Many might assume that that was then and long before their time, so let’s move on to what we must deal with today. Let some old folks, the obsessive ones, live in... Read More

My title is redundant for a reason, since the root of the word radical is the Latin word, radix, meaning root. For I mean to show how the use and misuse of language, its history or etymology, and ours as etymological animals as the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gassett called us, is crucial for... Read More

On February 12, 2002 at a Pentagon news conference, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was asked by Jim Miklaszewski, the NBC Pentagon correspondent, if he had any evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and was supplying them to terrorists. Rumsfeld delivered a famous non-answer answer and said: When he was pressed by Jamie... Read More

Much has been made of the September 9, 2023 simultaneous reports in The New York Times and Vanity Fair of the claims of a former Secret Service agent, Paul Landis, who was part of the security detail in Dallas, Texas when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963. Like so many reports... Read More

“A treasure stumbled upon, suddenly; not gradually accumulated, by adding one to one. The accumulation of learning, ‘adding to the sum-total of human knowledge’; lay that burden down, that baggage, that impediment. Take nothing for your journey; travel light.” – Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body These are “heavy” times, colloquially speaking. Forebodings everywhere. Everything broken.... Read More