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77 years ago (August 9, 1945) an all-Christian bomber crew dropped an experimental plutonium bomb on Nagasaki City, Japan, instantly incinerating, asphyxiating and/or vaporizing tens of thousands of innocent civilians, mostly women and children. Very few Japanese soldiers were killed by the bombs.

Japan’s major religions are Shitoism and Buddhism, but a disproportionate number of the dead at Nagasaki were Christian. The bomb also wounded uncounted tens of thousands of other victims who suffered the blast trauma, the intense heat and/or the radiation sickness that killed and maimed so many of the survivors.

In 1945, the US regarded itself as the most Christian nation in the world and the bomber crew reflected that reality. The small United States Army Air Force (USAAF) unit that was charged with dropping the atomic bombs (the 509th Composite Group) even had two Christian military chaplains assigned to it. They all were products of the type of Christianity that failed to teach what Jesus taught concerning homicidal violence (ie, that it was forbidden to his followers).

Until recently, Israeli politics did not matter to Palestinians. Though the Palestinian people maintained their political agency under the most demoralizing conditions, their collective action rarely influenced outcomes in Israel, partly due to the massive discrepancy of power between the two sides. 

 Now that Israelis are embarking on their fifth election in less than four years, it is important to raise the question: “How do Palestine and the Palestinians factor in Israeli politics?” 

 Israeli politicians and media, even those who are decrying the failure of the ‘peace process’, agree that peace with the Palestinians is no longer a factor, and that Israeli politics almost entirely revolves around Israel’s own socio-economic, political and strategic priorities. 

 This, however, is not exactly true. 

The arrogance of power is especially ominous and despicable when a government leader risks huge numbers of lives in order to make a provocative move on the world’s geopolitical chessboard. Nancy Pelosi’s plan to visit Taiwan is in that category. Thanks to her, the chances of a military confrontation between China and the United States have spiked upward.

 Long combustible over Taiwan, the tensions between Beijing and Washington are now close to ablaze, due to Pelosi’s desire to be the first House speaker to visit Taiwan in 25 years. Despite the alarms that her travel plans have set off, President Biden has responded timidly -- even while much of the establishment wants to see the trip canceled.

“I humbly beg forgiveness for the evil committed by so many Christians against the Indigenous Peoples.”

So said Pope Francis last week, at a powwow in Alberta, at the start of his “apology tour” across Canada — for the participation of the Catholic Church in the multi-century horror of Native American “residential schools” on this continent, which more accurately might be called concentration camps for 6-year-olds.

This papal mega-apology, while cheered by some, has been widely criticized as little more than a wimpy shoulder-shrug — sorry about that — for a governmental, church-complicit policy, lasting well into the 20th century, of snatching indigenous children from their families and squeezing their culture, if not their life, out of them.

When New York City recently released a grotesque “public service announcement” video explaining that you should stay indoors during a nuclear war, the corporate media reaction was principally not outrage at the acceptance of such a fate or the stupidity of telling people “You’ve got this!” as if they could survive the apocalypse by cocooning with Netflix, but rather mockery of the very idea that a nuclear war might happen. U.S. polling on people’s top concerns find 1% of people most concerned about the climate and 0% most concerned about nuclear war.

BANGKOK, Thailand -- Vietnam arrested foreign ministry, tourism, air, medical, and manufacturing officials and expelled them from the ruling Communist Party, amid multi-million dollar corruption scandals which are testing Hanoi's reliability in the U.S. Indo-Pacific Economic Framework and Centers for Disease Control.

Corrupt officials allegedly pocketed $240 million by suckering frightened Vietnamese into paying inflated fees for government-arranged COVID-19 repatriation flights from abroad and cumbersome permits.

They also allegedly price-fixed emergency pandemic health care and equipment.

"The anti-corruption campaign is causing increasing uncertainty and anxiety among the [Vietnamese Communist Party] rank and file," the Australian Defense Force Academy's New South Wales University professor emeritus Carlyle Thayer said in an interview.

"Steering committees for each of Vietnam’s 68 administrative units are expected to be more proactive in rooting out economic corruption.

"This raises the possibility of factional in-fighting at the national and local level," said Australia-based Mr. Thayer who returned from Vietnam two weeks ago.

In The Tempest William Shakespeare mused “What’s past is prologue,” which is certainly true for Jan Goodman, whose radical roots set the stage for a lifetime of activism, making her an indispensable part of Los Angeles’ Left. Born 1949 into a progressive family and raised in Watts, her father, printer Eugene Goodman, was named after Eugene V. Debs. Monikered after her dad, Jan was therefore also named in honor of the 1920 Socialist Party candidate who ran for president from a prison cell.

As the Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born’s bail fund holder, Eugene’s father, Morris, posted bail for left activist non-citizens imprisoned at Terminal Island. Morris, who also organized with the Insurance Agents Union, worked closely with Committee founder Rose Chernin; she was arrested during the McCarthy era and charged with conspiring to overthrow the government.

To describe US President Joe Biden's recent visit to Israel and Palestine as a "failure" in terms of activating the dormant "peace process" is to use a misnomer. For this statement to be accurate, Washington would have had to indicate that it had even a nominal desire to push for negotiations between the Israeli government and the Palestinian leadership.

Political and diplomatic platitudes aside, the current US administration has done the exact opposite, as indicated by Biden's words and actions. Alleging that the US commitment to a two-state solution "has not changed", Biden dismissed his administration's interest in trying to achieve such a goal by declaring that the "ground is not ripe" for negotiations.

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.

There are three great acts of naval rebellion in nautical history and the one that’s been the least celebrated in popular culture – until now – is (finally!) the subject of Trouble the Water. Ellen Geer’s stage adaptation of Rebecca Dwight Bruff’s 2019 novel of the same name dramatizes the remarkable real-life saga of Robert Smalls, who was born enslaved in 1839 and rose to become one of the Civil War’s great heroes and among America’s first Black Congressmen, initially elected during the Reconstruction Era.

Smalls’ stunning story is so phenomenal that it takes no less than two thespians to depict this Black Spartacus: A simmering Terrence Wayne, Jr. (whose credits include Will Geer’s Theatricum Botanicum’s production of Ibsen’s Enemy of the People) as the youthful slave-turned-revolutionary aptly nicknamed “Trouble,” and Gerald Rivers as the postwar Republican statesman who, having met Honest Abe during the Civil War, may have coined the phrase that refers to the GOP as “the party of Lincoln.” Rivers, a WGTB stalwart and, quite appropriately, a renowned Martin Luther King reenactor, also directs Trouble the Water.