Category Archives: Current Affairs

Current Affairs

Bush & His Book: Some Truths In Review

Leave a comment

I make it a rule not to write reviews of books I haven’t read. I also do my best to avoid pontificating about them.

But I’m also a Quaker, who follows this rule about rules by the Elders of Balby, which they appended to a long list of rules for Quakers in 1656:

Dearly beloved Friends, these things we do not lay upon you as a rule or form to walk by; but that all, with a measure of the light, which is pure and holy, may be guided: and so in the light walking and abiding, these things may be fulfilled in the Spirit, not in the letter, for the letter killeth, but the Spirit giveth life.

Continue reading Bush & His Book: Some Truths In Review →

Agni ad Bellum/ The Lamb's War, Current Affairs, Fire This Time, Resistance, Signs of the Times, Uncategorized

Dog Days Weekend Read: Hear The War Prophet: Chris Hedges

Leave a comment
Chris Hedges covered wars close up for fifteen years.

Chris Hedges has been there. A war correspondent for many years, he carries a burden of closely-observed horror for which the term PTSD pales. You can see it in the hollows around his eyes.

Chris Hedges has also been through hell with religion. He’s not “religious” now in any conventional sense. Yet he’s not “anti-religious” either. He can’t leave the subject alone. In books and columns, he delivers impassioned oracles. One of his recent books is, “I Don’t Believe In Atheists.” Continue reading Dog Days Weekend Read: Hear The War Prophet: Chris Hedges →

"Dog Days" Diversions, Current Affairs, Fire This Time, Sedition Watch, Signs of the Times, War & Peace

Sedition Watch: Signs of the Times

Leave a comment

Get-guns-now-closeup

“Sedition Watch.” This feature brings up “dots” of data that come onto my radar screen, which I’m working to connect.

The implications of the potential connections are unsettling, and I hope the authorities are watching. The elements here are straightforward: there are a lot of upset people, mostly guys, with guns out there, and with a high level of training in how to use them. And they are being fed a diet of sedition — talk of violent insurrection, or perhaps mounting a coup d’etat.

Continue reading Sedition Watch: Signs of the Times →

"Dog Days" Diversions, Current Affairs, Et Cetera, Signs of the Times, Social Justice

Dog Days Flashback: Enlightenment In A Canadian Emergency Room

3 Comments

Originally posted in July, 2009

In the current health-care melee, we hear much alarmist talk and Canada-bashing, aimed at their single-payer health system.

A few days back, I had an unexpected chance to observe the Canadian system up close. What I saw was very instructive.

Here’s what happened: on the last evening of a Toronto visit, I was invited to dinner by a young couple – let’s call them Hank and Sue, for privacy.

Continue reading Dog Days Flashback: Enlightenment In A Canadian Emergency Room →

Church Frauds & Related Crimes, Current Affairs, Divergent Friends, Remarkable Friends, Signs of the Times, Weird & Peculiar

Fleecing The Faithful – Prelude: Down the Garden Path & Opening Pandora’s Box

Leave a comment

The 1989 Friends Ministers Conference was the fourth in a series that were held every five years. The event had started out as the Friends Pastors Conference, but this was changed for the 1984 gathering in a bow to traditional Quaker nomenclature, and to accommodate the sensibilities of the handful of attenders who came from the non-pastoral Quaker groups. (I was one.)

The 1989 gathering was scheduled for Denver. The planning committee’s chairman was Eugene Coffin. Priscilla Deters’ introduction to the committee was succinctly described by an Investigator for the Kansas State Security Commission, Gary Fulton. Writing in 1994, he explained that:

Continue reading Fleecing The Faithful – Prelude: Down the Garden Path & Opening Pandora’s Box →