Global

”Certified lunatics are shut up because of their proneness to violence when their pretensions are questioned; the uncertified variety are given the control of powerful armies, and can inflict death and disaster upon all sane men within their reach.” -- Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)

“Show, by your actions, that you choose peace over war, freedom over oppression, voice over silence, service over self-interest, respect over advantage, courage over fear, cooperation over competition, action over passivity, diversity over uniformity, and justice over all.” -- Anthony J. Marsella, PhD

“It takes only one man to commit a crime but an entire community to conceal it” -- Krishnamurti

“We're not made by God to mass kill one another, and that's backed up by the Gospels. Lying and war are Quotablealways associated. Pay attention to war-makers when they try to defend their current war; if they’re moving their lips they're lying.” -- Phil Berrigan

"The poor tell us who we are; the prophets tell us who we could be,
So we hide the poor; and kill the prophets." -- Phil Berrigan

Though Israel’s past wars on Gaza have often been justified by Tel Aviv as a response to Palestinian rockets or, generally, as acts of self-defense, the truth is different. Historically, Israel’s relationship with Gaza has been defined by Tel Aviv’s need to create distractions from its own fractious politics, to flex its muscles against its regional enemies and to test its new weapons technology. 

Curse that First Amendment! What were the Founding Fathers thinking?

As Ron DeSantis has declared and legislated, the safety of Florida — and, yeah, the safety of the nation — isn’t a matter of gun control (or police control) but speech control, especially in public-school classrooms and libraries, where the innocent minds of our children are developing.

BANGKOK, Thailand -- A former wartime British spy in Afghanistan and Pakistan for Britain's Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), also known as MI6, says he regrets disguising himself as a foreign correspondent but is proud of his espionage among mujahideen guerrillas during "the last act of the Great Game" in Central Asia.

After spying from early 1981 until the end of 1983 -- during British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's administration -- John Fullerton became a career foreign correspondent and editor for Britain's Reuters news agency for 20 years, based in Hong Kong, New Delhi, Beirut, Nicosia, Cairo, and London.

Mr. Fullerton's work as a spy among Afghan mujahideen guerrilla groups was to help "the U.K. discriminate between the effective and ineffective resistance leaders," he said in an interview.

"When I told SIS (Secret Intelligence Service) I planned to apply to Reuters, they made it abundantly clear they could have no further contact," said Mr. Fullerton, 74, now living in Glasgow, Scotland.

He retired from Reuters in 2003.

From the moment James Conlon lifts his baton and LA Opera Orchestra lets loose with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s peerless score, listeners are in for an almost four-hour treat as the James Gray-directed The Marriage of Figaro unspools onstage. Along with Mozart’s majestic, matchless music is a rollicking, often slyly subversive story upending sex and class conventions. While there’s much talk nowadays about gender roles and “binary” identities, Mozart and company did that and more way back in 1786 when this rambunctious opera premiered at Vienna.

David Swanson is the author of the new book The Monroe Doctrine at 200 and What to Replace It With.

The Monroe Doctrine was first discussed under that name as justification for the U.S. war on Mexico that moved the western U.S. border south, swallowing up the present-day states of California, Nevada, and Utah, most of New Mexico, Arizona and Colorado, and parts of Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Wyoming. By no means was that as far south as some would have liked to move the border.

The catastrophic war on the Philippines also grew out of a Monroe-Doctrine-justified war against Spain (and Cuba and Puerto Rico) in the Caribbean. And global imperialism was a smooth expansion of the Monroe Doctrine.