Two Commentaries by a widely-respected analyst: Russia will not disappear Gwynne Dyer — May 23, 2022 Russian President Vladimir Putin will almost certainly not be in power three years from now. The war he foolishly began in Ukraine has fatally undermined his political credibility among the Russian elite (and among a large though mostly silent part … Continue reading Russia’s Future; Taiwan, Ambiguity & Ukraine
I don’t believe in reincarnation. But if I did, I’d be pretty sure that in a previous life, I shambled through the American 1850s. That might help explain why lately I’ve been having vivid dreamlike flashbacks about them. A few acquaintances would nod knowingly at this admission, and murmur something about “past lives.” What I … Continue reading Seeing Our Future in the Past? Flashbacks from the 1850s
The Nation: Abolition Democracy W.E.B. Du Bois and the making of Black Reconstruction. By Gerald Horne – MAY 3, 2022 By the time his magnum opus, Black Reconstruction, was published in 1935, W.E.B. Du Bois was already a rara avis—a prominent Black activist-intellectual in the midst of Jim Crow. Dapper and diminutive, and nattily … Continue reading A Long, Satisfying Read: DuBois’s “Black Reconstruction”
The “Truth Gaffe” of the Century Excerpted from The Guardian: The audience chuckled at George W Bush’s Iraq-Ukraine gaffe. I’m not laughing Arwa Mahdawi I don’t think it’s possible to overstate the depravity and horror of the former president’s 2003 invasion of Iraq Published: Saturday, 21 May 2022 George Bush accidentally confessed to being a … Continue reading G. W. Bush’s Accidental Moment of Truth
[NOTE: Sure, Quakers may have started it all in Pennsylvania, back in 1680. But this year, the relative handful of Friends left there (about 11,000, give or take a few hundred) occupy a tiny back row up in the nosebleed section of state’s rowdy political stadium, especially compared to the mass of Keystone Catholics, who … Continue reading Mastriano & the Bishops: A Catholic Religious Crisis in the (Onetime) Quaker State