Category Archives: Signs of the Times

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Early Abortion & The Priest With Two Stethoscopes

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Kansas & Wyoming, 1958-1960

St. Josephs Military Academy, Hays Kansas, late 1950s.

In those old days of the  (pre-Vatican Two) Catholic Church, they used to say of people like me that we had “lost our faith.”

In my case, it wasn’t quite true. That year, 1958,  as I turned sixteen,I didn’t lose my faith.  Instead, I discovered I just didn’t have any.

I was a junior at a Catholic boarding school, St. Joseph’s  Military Academy, in western Kansas. How I got there (my family was then on an Air Force  base in Puerto Rico), and what led me to realize my faithlessness are stories told in another place (for the curious, details are in the memoir, Meetings).

Continue reading Early Abortion & The Priest With Two Stethoscopes →

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Poland Enters Political Rehab; & the U. S. Military (Mostly) Repels An Assault By the Anti-Woke Brigades

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Restoring democracy in Poland
Donald Tusk, prime minister of Poland again after eight years, has a hard job ahead, Gwynne Dyer writes.

Gwynne Dyer — December 15, 2023

Donald Tusk, Poland’s New Premier

It didn’t take the United States long to restore the normal constitutional order after four years of Donald Trump. He is a ruthless and lawless man, but also a lazy and feckless one, and he simply didn’t bother to do all the damage he might have done to American democracy.

Donald Tusk, prime minister of Poland again after eight years of Jarosław Kaczyński’s Law and Justice Party (PiS) being in power, has a harder job ahead. Kaczyński had twice as long to entrench his “illiberal” allies and henchmen in Poland’s courts and its media, and he is a wily and determined enemy of liberal democracy. Continue reading Poland Enters Political Rehab; & the U. S. Military (Mostly) Repels An Assault By the Anti-Woke Brigades →

China: Peace or War?, Future, Gaza, Hamas, Hostages, Islam & Muslims, Israel, Israel/Hamas War, Jews & Judaism, Justice?, Military Matters, Other War Notes, Palestine, Religious Issues & Conflicts, Signs of the Times, Torture & Human Rights, Tyranny, War & Peace, Xi Jinping - China

Two by Dyer: A Just War In Gaza? And China: Is A Slow Future of Fizzle Underway?

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Gwynne Dyer —

#1- Just War and the Gaza Strip

 December 5, 2023

Augustine of Hippo

“If you (Americans) were OK with us killing 5,000 children, you are OK with killing 10,000 children,” said Daniel Levy, a former Israeli diplomat who helped negotiate the Oslo peace accords in the 1990s. That’s what Israeli diplomats really think of US policy, he says.

This implies that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) both dismiss US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s strenuous warnings about the need to avoid high Palestinian casualties in the renewed bombing as just so much hot air.

Continue reading Two by Dyer: A Just War In Gaza? And China: Is A Slow Future of Fizzle Underway? →

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CNN: “It’s Complicated”— Why Israel’s peace activists are reevaluating their position on the war

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CNN: Why Israel’s peace activists are reevaluating their position on the war

By Tara John and Lottie Beilin

Sun Dec 3 2023

Tel Aviv (CNN) — When human rights activist Ziv Stahl was awakened to the booms of rocket fire on October 7, while staying at her sister’s home in Kibbutz Kfar Aza, she did not for a moment anticipate the scale of the terrorist attack unfolding around her. Nor did she imagine the horror she would feel when she later called the police, who “basically told me no one is coming.”

That day saw Hamas militants murder her sister-in-law and several prominent peace activists living in the kibbutz, one of the communities that bore the brunt of the attack on Israel. Continue reading CNN: “It’s Complicated”— Why Israel’s peace activists are reevaluating their position on the war →