Op-Ed

On a shrugged-off afternoon of YouTube wandering, I came upon this: “Is There Life After Death?”

Hmmm . . . well, is there?

Turns out it was a presentation by five professors at the University of Virginia, moderated, good God, by John Cleese. I more or less had no choice but to click the link and listen — and doing so pushed me into places I’d never been before, into a universe of questions and wonder. This wasn’t so much because I learned anything new. It was because these profs, who belonged to the university’s Division of Perceptual Studies, were neuroscientists groping to understand the nature of consciousness beyond the physical realm.

Perhaps consciousness isn’t sheerly a manifestation — a side effect — of the brain’s physical functioning. Could “something” exist beyond the brain? If so, what?

If you depart from an "us vs. them" philosophy of life, your first confrontation is likely to be with the cynics.

Perhaps the most important thing I learned was how deeply and intensely people wanted to be listened to.

Last week, for instance, I wrote about the weekend I spent, a decade ago, getting handgun training from the NRA—and what I learned, which is that the things you need to fear are endless, and when one of them pops up in your life you'd better be prepared to kill it. One reader said he wondered "if Robert has ever truly felt as though his life or those he values were threatened" and quickly answered his own question: Of course not! And then he crooned, oh so tenderly: "Must be nice for Robert to live in such an insulated bubble."

Issue solved! Everyone needs a gun, except for the utterly naïve.

If I'd had a gun, I may have taken aim at this snarky fool, but eventually I started calming down and thinking about his words—this monkey wrench of cynicism, as I called it—with slightly more positive energy.

In a blog entry, reflecting on the G20 Foreign Ministers' meeting in Bali, Indonesia, on 7-8 July, the High Representative of the European Union, Josep Borrell, seems to have accepted the painful truth that the West is losing what he termed "the global battle of narratives".

"The global battle of narratives is in full swing and, for now, we are not winning," Borrell admitted. The solution: "As the EU, we have to engage further to refute Russian lies and war propaganda," the EU's top diplomat added.

Borrell's piece is a testimony to the very erroneous logic that led to the so-called 'battle of narratives' to be lost in the first place.

Is an insurrection percolating in the MAGA universe? A civil war?

One thing I notice as I read the growing warnings that this is the case is the assumption that suddenly the USA has become a divided nation, a splintered democracy, when, in point of fact, it has always been deeply – and for much of its history, good God, legally – divided.

Indeed, Jim Crow America was the prime model for a certain would-be European dictator.

You may have heard of Adolf Hitler. In Mein Kampf, the biography he wrote before he came to power, he “praises America,” according to Alex Ross, writing in the New Yorker, “as the one state that has made progress toward a primarily racial conception of citizenship,”

WASHINGTON -
Declaring that “President Biden has been neither bold nor inspiring” and “his prospects for winning re-election appear to be bleak,” the national activist organization RootsAction announced today that it will launch a campaign to prevent his renomination.

With an email list of 1.2 million current supporters in the United States, RootsAction issued a statement saying it is committed to nationwide organizing to prevent Biden from being the Democratic Party’s 2024 nominee for president. This is the first time that a large national organization has announced such plans.

“In 2024 the United States will face the dual imperatives of preventing a Republican takeover of the White House and advancing a truly progressive agenda,” RootsAction said in a statement. With so much at stake, renominating Biden “would be a tragic mistake.” The statement concluded: “A president is not his party’s king, and he has no automatic right to renomination. Joe Biden should not seek it. If he does, he will have a fight on his hands.”

The full RootsAction statement announcing the #DontRunJoe campaign is posted at DontRunJoe.org.

(Dedicated to the memory of Ghassan Kanafani, an iconic Palestinian leader and engaged intellectual who was assassinated by the Israeli Mossad on July 8, 1972)

 Years before the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, US media introduced many new characters, promoting them as ‘experts’ who helped ratchet up US propaganda, ultimately allowing the US government to secure enough popular support for the war. 

The Department of Justice and Attorney General Merrick Garland must do their sworn duty to uphold the Constitution and charge Donald Trump with the extremely serious crimes the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol has documented and alleges that the ex-president committed in order to subvert democracy. The DOJ, AG Garland and Biden administration must not make the same mistake that Pres. Gerald Ford did when he granted a full and unconditional pardon to Richard Nixon on Sept. 8, 1974, shortly after Tricky Dick resigned the presidency. Not prosecuting Trump for the heinous crimes he purportedly perpetrated will, in effect, be the same as Ford’s Proclamation 4311, which let Nixon get off Scot free for the crimes he committed as part of the Watergate Scandal and set a deplorable precedent of unaccountability.

The rich, powerful and famous must be held to account, the same as the rest of us. They must pay the consequences for their actions, just like ordinary people are expected to. There must not be a double standard for the high and mighty; NOBODY is above the law, not even a president or ex-president.

“They were at places that seemed safe — but few spaces in America are guaranteed safe anymore.”

This is CNN, doing its best to stay atop America’s mass shootings and keep the survivors (by which I mean us) informed. Yeah, 13 gun massacres this past weekend, at strip malls, nightclubs, graduation parties — with 16 people dying, many more injured — and the total number of such shootings so far in 2022 is 246.

“The country is on pace to match or surpass last year's total, which is the worst on record . . .”

And another sex scandal pops into the news. This time it’s the Southern Baptist Convention, the country’s largest Protestant denomination, cringing in shame upon the recent release of a “bombshell” report detailing two decades of sexual abuse by pastors and other church officials, along with ongoing official coverup of the crimes and denigration of any victims who had the courage to speak up.

“Crisis is too small a word. It is an apocalypse,” one former church official said.