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Ash Carter’s Asian Folly

“We will remain the principal security power in the Asia-Pacific for decades to come.” Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter Ash Carter is on a mission: to convince Asia’s democracies that Asian security is synonymous with American leadership.  Unfortunately for him,…

Obama’s Trillion-Dollar Nuclear-Arms Train Wreck

“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” These were the words from the Hindu religious text, the Bhagavad-Gita, that flashed through the mind of the man credited with creating the first atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer, as the…

Catholic church now more advanced than U.S. philosophy departments

It ought to be with considerable embarrassment that I say this, as an atheist who thinks religion does far more harm than good, and that it does so not only through the pretense that death isn’t real but first and…

The VAWA Play: Changing the Law, One Show at a Time

The Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe is the last “arty” stop for Sliver of a Full Moon, a play by Mary Kathryn Nagle that dramatizes the legislative struggle to enact the Violence Against Women Act of 2013.…

Nuclear weapon ban treaty – the only way forward

Last year, the UN General Assembly approved the formation of an Open Ended Working Group on the subject of “Taking Forward Multilateral Nuclear Disarmament Negotiations”.  Work started in February and will finish in August.  In the first sessions a range…

The two worlds of precious metals: East and West

For five thousand years, gold and silver have been humanity’s premier form of money; real money, not the faux-money manufactured by our central banks. During that same period of time, these metals have been our premier instruments of wealth preservation and…

Sanders or Clinton? My Two Cents.

This is a three-part story by Partha Banerjee. Here is Part One. Many people here in New York are unsure whether they should vote for Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries, slated for April 19. As of…

Saving Capitalism or Getting Rid of It?

What kind of change socialists should be fighting for? Danny Katch, author of Socialism… Seriously: A Brief Guide to Human Liberation, makes some proposals in his review of a book from a different part of the left: Saving Capitalism: For…

Panamaleaks: let’s start with Iceland!

The Prime Minister of Iceland was, like a sunken ship, scuttled through Panamaleaks because, for the Western financial system, he was far more dangerous than even Russia’s Putin. Yes, I hear you, however, as the late Italian premier Giulio Andreotti, used to…

Ending human violence is a task for each of us

Do you think that ending human violence is impossible? Do you believe that even aiming to do so is unrealistic? Well, you might be right. But you might also be interested to know that there are a lot of people…

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