“These first few months [have resulted] in the Trump administration’s cuts to scientific and medical research, clampdown on any efforts promoting diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), newly aggressive policies for students with loan debt, revoking of visas for international students and more”…. In recent months… [elimination of] programs meant to train scholars and diversify the sciences as part of an effort to […]
Gaza: The Horror, The Horror . . .
Orono, Maine (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – There are mornings when we are unable to bear to listen to the news taking place in Gaza as it is so deeply distressing that the mind shuts down at the daily bombing and the horrific death count. The only parallel in literary terms can be found […]
Back to the Bad old Days of Empire and Self-Destructive Tariffs: Trump as McKinley Redux
Orono, Maine (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – Among tariffs, territorial ambitions and other threats to America’s well-being by Pres. Trump, one of the more severethreats may be his willful ignorance concerning the severity of climate change. Michael Mann, one of America’s most highly regarded climatologists, noted that the Trump Administration has given polluters and fossil fuel promoters, “the keys to the fossil fuel car […]
Proem: The Trauma of Gaza Scholasticide
We are closed in, and the key is turnedon our uncertainty…We had fed the heart on fantasies,the heart’s grown brutal from the fare,more substance in our enmitiesthan in our love; (WB Yeats,The Empty House of the Stare) Traumas make for suffering as scholasticide becomes a destroyer of learning, thus tearing asunder the intricate tapestry […]
Representative, it is Shameful that you Voted to Sanction the Justices of the Int’l Criminal Court for Netanyahu Arrest Warrant
Letter to Representative Jared Golden (D-ME) Dear Representative Jared Golden: Your decision to vote in favor of sanctioning the International Criminal Court of Justice, (ICC) which had ordered Israel to take steps to prevent genocide in Gaza, was dismaying. This recent vote to sanction the ICC by Representatives of Congress erodes the ability of the […]
Gaza’s Afflictions: A Proem
Orono, Maine (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – Empathy will never be exhausted as gaza schools and hospitals are torn asunder by pilots in fighter jets, their grievances transposed from another time and place into strafing refugee villages with clinical precision; All good gained from sufferings of times long past, all dissipated by the voracious bombing of innocents […]
The Great Babylon: America’s complicity in Gaza Atrocities
Orono, Maine (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – Yesterday, I interviewed a refugee Ukrainian family in transition from their homeland looking for a permanent place to settle. They were being visited by evangelical church friends. Since I was teaching a course on current world conflicts, the conversation turned to Palestine/Israel where a number of references […]
War, Trauma, and Forgetting
Orono, Maine (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – Our memories are often suppressed by trauma, a word derived from “Traumatiko”, a wound or mental shock. Examples of traumatic events are people being compelled to leave their homes due to war, disease, drought, famine or similar events. Recent sociological studies on the after-effects of war reveal […]
Israel’s Netanyahu: An Oliver Cromwell for our Times
“When plunder [and dispossession] becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.” — Frédéric Bastiat Ilan Pappe, the Israeli historian, wrote in “The Forgotten Palestinians” that “Zionism was born […]
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