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In this video recording of a webinar from January 14, 2023, David Swanson discussed his forthcoming book The Monroe Doctrine at 200 and What to Replace it With. See the 26:24 point in the video.

The Monroe Doctrine was and is a justification for actions, some good, some indifferent, but the overwhelming bulk reprehensible. The Monroe Doctrine remains in place, both explicitly and dressed up in novel language. Additional doctrines have been built on its foundations. This book looks at the creation, evolution, and use of the Monroe Doctrine over the years since 1823, and proposes a radically different approach for the U.S. government to take with Latin America and the world.

David is available to speak about this or other topics, as are other World BEYOND War speakers.

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I recently went to a theater production of George Orwell’s ”1984” and also recently viewed the Ken Burns 10 episode documentary “The Vietnam War” on PBS. Although the Burns documentary was flawed in many respects, it was still well worth watching. I highly recommend that everybody watch it. It happens to be still running on PBS (one episode each Tuesday night in my Duluth, MN area).

Posted at: https://www.geoengineeringwatch.org/duty-to-warn/

Given the fact that the storylines of both the documentary and the play have relevance in our increasingly proto-fascist, increasingly militarized nation, I have decided to re-publish a slightly revised version of my April 4, 2017 Duty to Warn column about Orwell’s work of art and King’s critique of the Vietnam War.

Remarks on RootsAction.org’s Defuse Nuclear War livestream on January 12, 2023. Video here.

Thank you for all for being here and for including me.

We know the risks. They’re no secret. The Doomsday clock has almost nowhere to go but oblivion.

We know what’s needed. We’ve made a national holiday of a man who said he would oppose all nukes and all wars without any regard to whether it was popular, who said the choice was between nonviolence and nonexistence.

We are so aware of what’s needed that we all routinely tell our kids to be radical peacemakers, to deescalate, to back away, to apologize, to compromise.

Once more, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) will offer a legal opinion on the consequences of the Israeli Occupation of Palestine. 

 A historic United Nations vote on December 31 called on the ICJ to look at the Israeli Occupation in terms of legal consequences, the rights of the Palestinian people to self-determination and the responsibility of all UN Member States in bringing the protracted Israeli Occupation to an end. A special emphasis will be placed on the “demographic composition, character and status” of Occupied Jerusalem. 

It was the guacamole’s fault!

That’s the guy’s defense, anyway — that plus his right to carry four handguns, an AR-15 and a 12-guage shotgun into a supermarket in Atlanta. Oh yeah, and he was wearing body armor. This was in March 2021, barely a week after an actual mass shooting at several massage parlors in Atlanta, in which eight people were killed. And it was only two days after a mass shooting at a grocery store in Boulder, Colorado, where ten people were killed.

After departing Mangareva, everyone aboard Aranui 5 – from passengers to crew – must submit to the voyage’s second obligatory covid test, no exceptions. The first swab for the swabbies, of course, had been taken a day before shoving off from Papeete, and now another one to make sure outsiders don’t carry the dreaded plague to the 40-plus inhabitants of way out-of-the-way Pitcairn Island is also required. Testing positive back at Papeete meant being barred from boarding Aranui 5 for the voyage. While if one passed the test but later flunked it before reaching Pitcairn doesn’t quite mean the infected shipmate has to walk the plank, it does oblige the afflicted to remain solitarily sequestered in his/her cabin until testing negative.

When the newsstand of Giuseppe Trani was swept away by disastrous flooding that devastated the southern Italian town of Casamicciola at the end of November, the 70-year-old man lost everything. Not for long, though, as the townsfolk, who were also affected by the flooding and landslides experienced throughout the whole region, raised the funds needed to help Trani rebuild his kiosk.

Moreover, when a five-year-old Moroccan boy, Rayan Oram, fell into a well in the impoverished northern Chefchaouen province, tens of millions followed the story with trepidation throughout Africa, the Middle East and, eventually, around the world. The fact that the story had a sorrowful ending may have distracted some of us from the realisation that little Rayan had unwittingly united us in hope and prayer, despite our seemingly insurmountable differences.

American football has always been a blood sport.

It needs to change or die.

Tackle must end.  Flags must come.

And they will.

Why?  Because human lives are at stake…and with them, a trillion-dollar industry.

A century ago, football players were maimed and died in droves.  The college game was a cross between rugby, mixed martial arts and all-out trench warfare.

Merciless scrums brought on bloody body piles in which players did their very best to gouge and permanently harm their opponents.  Often they succeeded.

Where helmets were worn, they were virtually useless leather gloves, perhaps functional in keeping cracked skulls from falling apart during a game, but that was about it.  The death toll for a given year of the college game was substantial and undeniable.  Long-term post-season repercussions were undiscussed, unstudied…and permanent.

It’s full steam ahead aboard Aranui 5 to the raison d’etre of this far-flung voyage through French Polynesia’s remotest isles and atolls as we near way off the beaten track Pitcairn. The legacy of and lore surrounding this isolated spot at the end of the Earth has made it one of the most romanticized and fabled islands in history, dramatized, if not celebrated, by bestselling authors and Hollywood blockbusters. Here’s the bare bones outline of what has made little Pitcairn loom large for decades in the zeitgeist as the ultimate getaway and isle of escape, the polar opposite of Alcatraz, that infamous icon of the island as prison.

On December 23, 1787, His Majesty’s Armed Vessel Bounty departed from Spithead, England for Tahiti. The maritime mission’s purpose was to secure breadfruit, which grows in abundance at Polynesia, then sail to Britain’s Caribbean colonies, deposit the starchy staple foodstuff there, and return to England.

After visiting flat atolls of the Tuamotus and then a day out at sea, the appearance on the horizon of the Gambier group, with its high islands, emerges as a sharp vertical contract to the previous days’ horizontal vistas. This remote chain of mostly volcanic isles, located 1,000 miles southeast of Tahiti, is one of French Polynesia’s five archipelagoes that comprise a sprawling watery realm the size of Western Europe, and I’ve never been here before.