nukes

Not since 1953, when the U.S. and the Soviets exploded thermonuclear bombs, has the world been such a powder keg!
Only recently, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the Doomsday Clock forward 30 seconds. It now registers two minutes to midnight. Verily, it’s lights out when the clock strikes 12:00 midnight. Ka-boom, it’s over!
What’s going on?

There is one thing missing from the upcoming Women’s March publicity and philosophy: the urgent need for Peace not War!
The March will speak out against hate, discrimination and exploitation. That’s good.
The March will also speak out strongly in favor of equality, women’s reproductive choice and respect for all people regardless to disability, gender, orientation, etc.. That’s also good.

Perhaps few double standards in international relations could be so sharply exposed as the US-Canada hosted Conference in Vancouver on 16th January, focused on the traded threats between the United States and North Korea.
The US possesses an estimated 9,600 nuclear missiles, enough to eliminate life on earth multiple times – were it not vapourised in a mere “few” nuclear strikes.

Should progressives support the efforts of Trump and Putin to bring about rapprochement between Russia and the U.S.? Or to use Trump’s terminology, should progressives support the effort to “get along with Russia”?

Unfortunately, the hope for peace and justice on earth and goodwill to all seems to be receding with each passing year. US politicians, particularly the neo-cons and neo-libs in Washington DC, seem to respond with a bah, humbug to this desire. These neo-folks, like other Americans, are people who have not directly experienced the ravages, destruction and killing of war here and are thus all too quick to ignore diplomacy. Instead they resort to the military in response to challenges, whether they are real or manufactured.

In his excellent “NATO, a Monstrous Institution” Karel van Wolferen writes:

Maybe you thought America’s nuclear arsenal, with its thousands of city-busting, potentially civilization-destroying thermonuclear warheads, was plenty big enough to deter any imaginable adversary from attacking the U.S. with nukes of their own. Well, it turns out you were wrong.

The last two weeks of October 1962, 55 years ago, was the closest the world has come so far to a widespread nuclear exchange in what has become known as the “Cuban Missile Crisis.” 
The First Use of Nuclear Weapons

The popular educational and comedic podcast The Sample Hour invited me on to have a more free-flowing banter concerning my work, Hollywood scandals, my book, doing standup, and creating Hollywood Decoded.
Stream Audio Here. 
Purchase my book here.

The oldest physical footprint left by the 100-year-old Balfour Declaration in what is today Israel is visible from my home in Nazareth. From my vantage point on a ridge above the Jezreel Valley, Balfouriya appears like a dark smudge below in the middle of the vast agricultural plain.
The small, exclusively Jewish farming community was established in 1922, five years after Britain’s foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, signed a letter pledging help to create “a national home for the Jewish people” in what was then Palestine.