Hope and Resolve

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In chaotic times like ours, it behooves us to practice proactive optimism, which is far more than infantile hope or pious faith. Conscious, vigorous optimism is visionary and builds on our awareness of our human identity and dignity. It expresses our faith in humanity, our resolve to be morally and...
Even when the U.S. and Israel fired missiles and dropped bombs on the home of Iranian leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his wife and other members of his family, killing more than 40 members of the leadership of Iran, senior Iranian officials had maintained that Iran would never develop...
History as usual provides a cautionary lesson On August 8, 1974, Richard M. Nixon resigned from the presidency in disgrace with impeachment proceedings underway against him for the Watergate affair in which five men from his presidential election reelection committee were caught trying to break into and undertake illegal wiretapping...
Less than a year after the United States and the U.S.-backed Organization of American States (OAS) supported a violent military coup to overthrow the government of Bolivia, the Bolivian people have reelected the Movement for Socialism (MAS) and restored it to power. In the long history of U.S.-backed “regime changes”...
CIA detracts from national security by purporting to know what it doesn’t In a recent feature article in The New Yorker magazine, writer Amy Davidson Sorkin recalls the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1995 bill, the Abolition of the Central Intelligence Agency Act. One of the original neoconservatives, Moynihan had...
Leaders of the far-right Proud Boys group, including its national chairman, Enrique Tarrio, have been charged with seditious conspiracy for plotting to storm the U.S. Capitol to obstruct the certification of Joe Biden’s election win over Donald Trump on January 6, 2021. While this is certainly a move in the right direction,...
Numerologists tell you that 19 is 1 + 9 which equals the powerful # 1, or new beginnings. Well, 19 years ago on March 19, coincidentally, my nation orchestrated the most horrific deed since God knows when. The illegal and immoral attack, invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq really upset the world's...
Whether One Agrees or Disagrees With Aspects of His Outlook, the Media is Clearly Slanted Against Him In January 1967, the CIA sent a memo (marked “SECRET,” “RESTRICTED,” and “DESTROY WHEN NO LONGER NEEDED”) to its army of media “assets” secretly embedded in virtually every area of U.S. communications. This...
Yellow Journalism of the Hearst Era Is Alive and Well in the 21st Century There is a wise old maxim that says, “The first step on the road to wisdom is to call things by their right names.” So, let’s do that. "Fake News" has been around a long while: The...
I had the great fortune recently of addressing a gathering of Greek parliamentarians in Athens and with meeting members of the European Parliament to discuss national security whistleblowing. The European Union has drafted, and will soon release, a new whistleblower protection law that would be the finest and most comprehensive...