Reports from the Middle East these days have two things in common: All the parties wish to avoid a war, yet all the movement is toward one, centered in Lebanon.
In my college days I was a Goldwater Republican. My roommate and I saw eye-to-eye. Today he is a conservative Republican, and I am a progressive Democrat. We remain close friends, but this divide troubled me. I asked him to help me understand why the right harbors so much animosity towards the left. He responded with a link to a lecture given in 2020, by Tom Klingenstein of the Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank. I now understand the anger. If Klingenstein’s arguments were honest and factual, I would be angry too.
We live in a global family of more than 190 countries. Disputes and squabbles inevitably arise in all families; what matters is how we settle them. Just as immature families might see bullying and violence, at the global level we see countries threatening and waging war, paying dearly in unnecessary death and suffering. By contrast, a mature family resolves its disputes peacefully, often with the help of a dispassionate third party. Providing the world family such a dispassionate dispute settler was the driving purpose for creating the International Court of Justice (colloquially known as the World Court) in the aftermath of World War II. Unfortunately, the Court suffers from fundamental flaws that have hindered its ability to preserve peace and avoid violent conflict between countries.
We will not evolve into the future with closed minds.
Back in the ‘90s, when writer Hunter S. Thompson held court at the Woody Creek Tavern just outside of Aspen, Colorado, he’d often rail against the “greedheads.”
Although Donald Trump, as president, proclaimed in his 2020 State of the Union address that he had produced a “blue-collar boom” in workers’ wages, the reality was quite different. Using his control of the executive branch of the U.S. government, Trump repeatedly undermined the wages of American workers by blocking raises and imposing wage reductions.
Peaceful protest, violent response – that says it all.
The conservative columnist George Will wrote a very welcome column calling attention to a book, “Nuclear War: A Scenario,” by historian Annie Jacobsen, a riveting must-read that details just how easily deterrence could unravel, how fast and irreversibly escalation would occur, and how complete the destruction would be.
A few years ago, I turned a carport into a bedroom. But first I had to empty out the books, papers, furniture, rugs and tools that were in the carport. Then I took it all to a storage unit where rent was $50 a month.
“Mr. Netanyahu faces a delicate calculation — how to respond to Iran in order not to look weak, while trying to avoid alienating the Biden administration and other…
