Celestial Cycle

Photo credit: Howie Lisnoff

The quarter moon rode the mountainous cumulus clouds a few days from summer. It rose between the Berkshires and Taconics and would set in early hours over the 3,000-foot peaks of the Catskills to the west. Decades of its relentless waxing and waning cannot assuage the impact of the experiences during its march above the laundry and armory across from the white-clapboard two-story World War II barracks of another war. I paid close attention to its movement during those months of basic training desperate to get back to a more normal footing. Late in the training cycle, with only a few days remaining, one soldier shot off his foot. A sergeant, who had been to Vietnam, drove his muscle car into an entry-gate pillar on the base and died just before the holidays. The kid from Brooklyn, a reservist or Guardsman, suffered relentless harassment as a warning to others. The calls of gooks and Charlie were pervasive. I had become a resister to war watching that pale crescent move across the Georgia sky.

Early Summer Recollections: Past and Present

The day, with fair-weather clouds and a vibrant blue sky and moderate temperature, was much like that day in early July 1971. The Berkshire Connector of I-90 showed off its late-spring greenery among the surrounding rolling hills at both times. On this day, I headed to the Albany, New York area to pick up my guitar, which was in repair. All of those years ago, the four friends’ destination was Eganville, Ontario, Canada. We were on the road to visit a family friend of mine who was building a house in Ontario.

My best friend Joe, his friend Judy, and another friend of mine rode the inviting highway in my friend’s green 1967 Ford Mustang. Of all of those friends, it was Judy who I stayed in contact with the longest and who died four years ago. The others on that trip and in that car are gone, except in memory.

I had become acquainted with Judy when I called her in the spring of a year before in an attempt to reach Joe about the possible dangers of his participation in a protest rally in New Haven, Connecticut, in support of members of the Black Panther Party who were on trial there. I told Judy that military transports had flown low over my family’s house in central Rhode Island on their way to Quonset Naval Air Station in case Nixon wanted the military on the streets of New Haven to deal with the crowds gathered there. Judy was a senior at New York University, and Joe studied for a master’s degree in literature. He would go on to earn a Ph.D. in college and university administration.

The last time I saw Judy was in the early morning hours of a July day after driving down from Canada following the 4th. We left Judy and Joe at a graduate students’ small one-story apartment complex, as Judy was ready to begin studying for a Ph.D. in psychology, a degree she would never get for reasons I do not know.

Through a strange and serendipitous set of circumstances, I would reconnect with Judy decades later, but our interactions were of the most superficial kind. Sadly, when I sent Judy a commentary about our road trip of July 1971, she seemed upset by something I had written in that article. I think that it may have had to do with the way I categorized the July 4th holiday that year, amidst the turmoil of the Vietnam War era. When I heard the shocking news that Judy had died four years ago, I found much of the biographical information of her life story very much antithetical to the person I had known at NYU.

I found a reference to Judy’s years as an undergraduate very curious in that bio. A guess is that one or both of Judy’s daughters had written about her life. Judy’s days at NYU were portrayed as being immersed in the youth movement and movements for social justice during that era. No mention was made of the antiwar movement, but I knew from attending meetings with Judy and Joe that they were heavily involved in the latter. In 1971, we all traveled to D.C. to take part in the May Day antiwar demonstrations there, which were anything but sedate. Thousands were arrested on the streets of Washington and held at a sports stadium in that city.

But, there seemed to have been a kind of almost seamless transition for Judy sometime following that era, as she earned an MBA and began working in the insurance industry. That didn’t particularly make an impression on me, but it was the fact, described in Judy’s life story, that seemed to point to living a middle-class, and perhaps an upper-middle class life, with absolutely no hint of involvement in any social causes whatsoever. It may be that Judy’s reaction to my essay about the July 1971 road trip reflected the redirection of her life toward careerism and away from movements for social justice. I don’t know.

Many of us, the baby boom generation, became middle class, but remained socially and politically active.

A recollection of the road trip that Judy recalled, but I must have submerged, was of being led by local police out of a town north of Albany off of Route 87, where we had stopped for dinner. I remember Joe getting into an argument with some people sitting at the counter while we sat in a nearby booth. The argument had to do with hair length, and Joe was not a person who shrunk from confrontation.

What I do know is that my friend Joe moved along that similar path of careerism. That these two lives followed that life story is not surprising. Millions did, and I often wonder what sentiments they had as they apparently jettisoned ideals in one sense for the comforts or acceptance of middle-class life.

One final memory of Judy is of the three friends getting up in West Potomac Park on that May morning in 1971, after having spent the night in sleeping bags. We were ordered out of the park by police. Judy went her own way toward a women’s march against the war, while Joe and I sought refuge in the nearby Lincoln Memorial, as the police quickly began hassling demonstrators there and throughout the city. Judy would have been recognizable on that day from so long ago because she had striking red hair that set her apart. The entire Washington, DC experience was surreal because the theme of the May Day demonstrations was to stop the government from business as usual while it waged the vicious war in Southeast Asia.

All of these thoughts came tumbling back as I drove on the Berkshire Connector of I-90 at the height of spring at the edge of a different summer, but similar in many respects.

He Didn’t Have the Decency

Trump didn’t have the decency to wait until Memorial Day was over before resuming attacks against Iran, with which the US was supposed to be negotiating a peace deal. According to one report I’ve heard, the hawks in his administration, and perhaps in Congress, “got” to Trump and began another escalation in this war of aggression. Who knows at this juncture, as those of us who are concerned about issues of war and peace are left mostly out of breath these days.

Was it the issue of nuclear fuel enrichment? Was it the opening of the Strait of Hormuz? Who knows? Was it the demand of Netanyahu to keep the war, one of his many wars, rolling? Were Trump’s big donors upset with him because he had deviated somewhat from their edicts? Oil prices are already on the rise once again. It’s as if the lunatics have been given free rein to not only run the asylum, but also take up key posts in the government in Washington, DC.

Here’s a guy with his hand within reach of the so-called nuclear codes whose behavior and policies are frighteningly chaotic!

I etched this peace symbol into a part of our lawn that I had used to get rid of branches and other organic debris for several years. The peace symbol dates from the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament that began in 1957 in the United Kingdom and moved swiftly across the globe. The symbol reached historic levels of popularity during the anti-war movement against the Vietnam War and larger wars in Southeast Asia during the 1960s and early 1970s. The symbol became so prolific that it reached a point of almost becoming redundant and lacking meaning. The CND used, or included, the three first letters of its movement into the symbol. Many from that era mistakenly thought the symbol was a dove’s footprint, which it wasn’t. The size of the anti-war movement reached a critical mass during the Vietnam era, and much of that energy has been lost to time as endless wars and the abrogation of nuclear arms treaties proliferated. Nuclear arms treaties look to be a relic of a past historical era while war proliferated.

The Nuclear Freeze Movement gave energy to the debate about nuclear disarmament during the early 1980s.

The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) is an organisation that advocates unilateral nuclear disarmament by the United Kingdom, international nuclear disarmament and tighter international arms regulation through agreements such as the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. It opposes military action that may result in the use of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons, and the building of nuclear power stations in the UK (Wikipedia).

Democratic Party’s Autopsy 2024

The leadership of the Democratic Party has finally released its so-called autopsy of the 2024 presidential election. They didn’t want to release this devastating loss to you-know-who, who has done you-know-what to this nation, its people, and the world. So, how did this debacle take place?

The Democratic Party, much like the Republican Party, has long since lost its interest in supporting its people, the people of the US. You and me, to differing degrees. They, the Democrats, once the champions of the New Deal and the Great Society, became the party doing the bidding of the corporate elite and the military-industrial-investment complex. The Democrats would present a prettier face to the public every four years, but wars, corporate bailouts, weak environmentalism, and support for the very wealthy. The results of deindustrialization are obvious with masses of former manufacturing sites in the US abandoned to low-wage countries. All of this happened while hegemony over the globe increased, usually through trade agreements and a military presence in the form of US military bases.

Then came the 2024 presidential election. Joe Biden was a Republican president in most ways. He claimed to be a Zionist, which meant expensive and destructive support for Israel. He was a preeminent supporter of tough crime bills that put masses of people in jail. Income inequality was as apparent during Biden’s term as it was before him.

Then came Kamala Harris, a weak candidate. Whether or not presidents generally select weak running mates is beside the point. In a society that is biased against women at the presidential level, Harris, who seemed not to be able to articulate a coherent agenda against Trump, was at an immediate disadvantage following Biden’s rejection by Democratic donors and Democratic leaders. The Trump administration cornered Harris on her position on transgender issues and used that strategy to the hilt. It was sort of like George H.W. Bush’s attack against Michael Dukakis on crime. Much of the electorate in the US is not sophisticated in terms of manipulation, and the Republicans have been playing that card for years and then stiffing a segment of their supporters. Look at the cost of fossil fuels, housing, and food today, and people have to wonder. Look at these costly and destructive wars with $1.5 trillion, in addition to billions spent on the Iran war, which is hurting us all and is illegal as a war of aggression.

I watched an interview with Kamala Harris sometime late in the summer of 2024, and when asked how she was different from Joe Biden, she gave a foolish response that she was obviously not Joe Biden. What else is new?

This is the New York Times’ summary of major points in the Democrats so-called presidential campaign autopsy. Read it and weep, but don’t be surprised, as this has been going on for decades!

What the fuck, Howie? You’re talking, writing about something about which you do not know. If you haven’t read Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground by Zayd Ayers Dohrn, then why the hell are you talking about it?

Well, it’s careerism that I want to address arising from the revolutionary movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s. That the author’s parents went on to become professionals at what is regarded in US society as the highest pinnacle of success, low-level gatekeepers in this nation, is of interest to me. True, they risked jail sentences that could have put them away for life, or close to life sentences, but like others in the radical movement of that era, they went on to rise to high levels of professional life. Only because of prosecutorial incompetence did some on the political, economic, and social left miss being thrown into the dungeons of the prison system of the US that seems to have a penchant for locking up lots of people of color. Indeed, life is good here: radical in one epoch: professionals in another. None became the so-called experts that some love to adore. One of those so-called experts became a pal of sorts with Jeffrey Epstein. Interesting! Some did not fare as well, but notice that those folks either became silent, or near silent, or just faded away. I often wonder what it was like to be at the top of an era of protest and to sink into relative oblivion later in life?

Recently, I completed a search of what former radicals had to say about the Israeli-US war in Iran, a war of aggression no matter what is thought about the radical fundamentalist regime in Iran. They are in a sovereign nation, so to speak, and I could hardly find a serious word about the war. There were a few statements, but how do those who spoke out and acted against the Vietnam War, and the expanded war in Southeast Asia, fall silent? Perhaps the media as it exists now doesn’t give a shit anymore about what old radicals have to say?

In July 1971, I drove from Connecticut to Ontario, Canada, with a group of friends to visit an expat, a family friend, who was in the process of building a house there. Of the four friends, two, including my best friend at the time, went on to become careerists, one other friend became a mental health worker, and I worked in public education for most of my working life. I never wanted to become any kind of gatekeeper, but rather, only support myself and my family. I was able to speak out and remain a critic of this society, as is witnessed in the series of my published writings that I am now gathering into a series of books: Writing on the Left for a Better World.

Democracy Is Not Coming to the USA

Despite Leonard Cohen’s optimistic pronouncement in song, to anyone paying attention, the founding that was a republican form of democracy in the US is just about gone. For the power elite and their subservient sycophants, democracy never mattered. In the past quarter century, there was a somewhat weakly held premise that the elite wanted a less vicious face at the head of government than we have today.

But the elite really never cared about the riffraff among us, and the working class and segments of the middle class were jettisoned to the gods of income inequality, bald-face hate, war, and a general decline in the so-called quality of life in which issues like the environment mattered.

Now, we’re up to our necks in the gathering flood and prospects of getting out of this are similar to those faced in the early morning hours of April 15, 1912 on the Titanic. There will be no one to save most who are left on board.

Since the Trump presidency, and especially during his second disastrous term in office, the Supreme Court has acted to nullify the remaining access to the ballot for many. They allow for the gerrymandering of states while gutting the 1965 voting rights law. The Congress means nothing at all. War powers? They, the Congress, could care less!

While Trump issues executive order after executive order, immigrants are rounded up by ICE, many who are legal immigrants, in a nod to the hate that occupies his base. Others who can still speak out are marginalized, while both genocide and wars rage. Now, he’s on his way to destroying the sovereignty of Cuba, as he did in Venezuela. Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, and Iran are all marked nations. The response to the September 11, 2001 terror attacks turned into endless wars. The supremacy that flourishes in Israel is a reflection of the supremacy that existed in the US during the worst epoch of segregation and slavery.

The 2026 Congressional election is being fixed, just as some sports events once were. The ruling class is ready to bring the curtain down in the US.

The Meanness Surrounding Us

*Please read this version of this commentary piece which includes additional comments about military spending not contained in the podcast.

The Internet has long since become a focal point where vicious points of view are expressed with abandon. This was once not the case, and I don’t know if the atomizing of US society has contributed to this loss of regard, especially a regard for strangers. Not having to face someone a person is mean toward may be a factor in this loosening of social bonds?

Two recent incidents have reinforced this belief. A few days ago, an Internet attack dog was victorious in being written into an office in the government of the town where I live. His sentiments, attacks, against others he cannot possibly know, were so virulent that the online administrator of a site that provided local information and discussion removed him from its membership. He’s a dyed-in-the-wool right-winger foaming at the mouth with petulance against others with whom he disagrees. Now he will occupy an official place on the town’s government. The latter is curious, as the town is made up of lots of those who have migrated here from the greater New York metropolitan area and hold, at least seemingly, liberal beliefs. There are a few people who will vote for the Green Party candidate in a given election, and masses who supported the legalization of recreational marijuana. In other words, there are those who push up against in different ways the gathering right-wing sentiments and actions of some.

Unrelated, but interesting, are a group of posts on a Facebook site about a detour on a nearby road that has been the subject of two previous major closures. That road is highly traveled. The road is closed once again because of the crash of a tanker truck that spilled fuel onto neighboring land. I believe at least one person was killed in that crash.

The online discourse included the expected mean posts with people castigating others for complaining about the detour that necessitated the cleanup of land near the crash site. Castigating remarks involved insults against people who dared to criticize the current road closure.

I often travel that road, and it’s interesting that I’ve experienced a number of bumper hangers who want to push me to exceed the speed limit to reinforce their own need for speed and who knows what else. Infrequently, the bumper hangers become very aggressive. Most reading this are aware of road rage.

We live in a highly fractured and atomized society that has been broken for many reasons. A global economy and the loss of the US manufacturing base began the shift. The makeup of the workforce accelerated these trends. The nation solidified its position as a world hegemonic power, although the government has lost war after war, beginning with the Vietnam War. Celebrating wars became cant to many. The Korean War can be viewed as a stalemate. Military spending has eclipsed spending on programs that nurtured many people. The environment, schools, and health care have all suffered. Taxpayers pay for bailouts of the power elite and their coterie, while many can’t afford an emergency bill of $400 or $500. This fiscal year’s military spending began at $1.5 trillion, with the Iran war costing multiples of billions of dollars more. The terror attacks of September 2001 accelerated military spending and tragically led to endless wars. Many see this issue and are moving away from unblinking support for militarism, but the sense of atomization and not being in this together increases. I grew up in a society with much different norms for interacting with others.

I recall a time in the near-forgotten past when camaraderie, at least among some, solidarity if you will, was not all that exceptional a value. Now, it’s not just that I’m not my brother’s keeper anymore, it’s I’ll f$%k my brother if I can get away with it.

Like Waving to the Shore From the Titanic

I met with a group of intelligent people yesterday. Trying this once in a while is not an entirely bad idea. It was in a coffee shop, and trying as I may to shed the coffee klatch syndrome from decades past, it’s still a good experience.

The topic of the state of the society came up during our conversation, and a member of the group engaged in hand wringing about the space we occupy in terms of the effect of right-wing politics on the society. These sentiments are not unusual, as people of goodwill are shocked on a daily basis, if not an hourly basis or less, by how far right the society has moved. One conclusion that this person reached was that the Democratic Party needed a candidate in 2028 with charisma.

The problem of waiting for a charismatic figure to arise from the ashes of the political maelstrom is that it’s a similar hope that many religions have. We’ll eventually be saved is the generally accepted line of reasoning. I’m not opposed to a spiritual inclination, but in politics it has to be accomplished on Earth.

The problem is, however, that our current morass, unless you’re a fan of the chaos that surrounds us now, is that the long march toward right-wing policies has been in full swing since the beginning of the decade of the 1970s. Even if a person accepts Nixon’s views on the environment and a few other issues like occupational safety, his disastrous quagmire in Southeast Asia really blocks the light of day in terms of viewing him as even somewhat liberal on those other issues.

The Democrats have been on a very, very long downward slide from Johnson’s Great Society, which was also lost in Southeast Asia.

What happened after Johnson, indeed long before Johnson, was the US footing as a hegemonic state leading the world following World War II. Despite gains for the working class and middle class during that era, our endless and sometimes secret wars had already been a hallmark of foreign policy. On the domestic front, globalization has long since hollowed out huge swaths of the US. I recall doing hurricane relief work in Florida and traveling to an area around Lake Okeechobee and witnessing a level of poverty that I had not seen since 1969, when returning from basic training and seeing the shacks along the railroad tracks.

Protest in the face of extreme reaction has limited success. The nuances of that conclusion are complex.

It’s all about money and war and an antipathy for the helping hand that at least was once a purported ideal of the society. Power has coalesced in the hands of a few of the power elite and the military-industrial-investment complex calls the tune as to who will be called upon, or allowed into the halls of power. It’s that simple and calling for help, well, recall what happened to the Titanic long ago.

Walking Out of Step at the End of an Empire

I’m going to walk out into the cool morning through the neighborhood where I live. The walk is through the hills of the Taconic range, called the Berkshires, which are foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. What will accompany me through this magnificent scenery is the complete atomization of the society in which we live, and the end of the empire, while it is striking back, but more on that later.

Living in my neighborhood is like being hermetically sealed inside an impermeable material. Readers may remember the scene in The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) when Gort is encased in plastic that turns out to be ineffective. After years of walking in this area, only two people know our names, but I’m unsure if one of those people actually remembers them since I haven’t come in direct contact with that person in months. The “best” we can hope for, and I’m not joking here, is a person who cannot stop talking about herself and her situation in life. She’s a real narcissist, an egotist at an exponential level, and it’s become psychically painful to stop and say hello to her. A few months ago, one of the two of us disappeared from the walking scene, and not a single person inquired as to why that happened.

A guess is that as individualism and consumerism were solidified throughout the US among those who could afford that luxury, so did the breaking apart of community. Over a decade ago, a town official in a town laser-focused on its provincial underpinnings, and not in a positive way, complained that a community group that offered help to those, and there are many such people here, who needed help with work done to their houses, disappeared. Now, for a price, anything can be accomplished except community.

One house that we pass displayed a lawn sign touting a social justice cause for several years. One of the two residents of that house turns away when we pass, we’ve never seen the other person. In the neighborhood where I grew up, most people spoke and socialized with one another.

What is now the guiding principle here besides atomization is the lesson quickly learned in keeping one’s mouth shut and doing things through the formal ways and vagaries of power. A recent police chief found that out quickly, within a year, and was fired. Readers can read an article I wrote about those issues in “Welcome to the The Bluest of Blue States,” (CounterPunch, August 17, 2023).

As the US under right-wing rule spins out of control in terms of war, income inequality, environmental destruction, etc., all of the reflections of that decline that took place soon after the heyday of this society following World War II are obvious to those who wish to look.

I find myself, having fixed up a fixer-upper, living amid an array of relative wealth of second homes upon which millions of dollars are lavished while not paying a cent toward state taxes on millions of dollars of income from out-of-state.

Elsewhere, the religious fundamentalists of the US and beyond, and the secular Jewish supremacists of Israel and beyond, and the Islamic fundamentalists of Iran and beyond, have all combined to change the world order in ways that will emerge only slowly and it probably won’t be a pretty picture. Wealth, power, and greed are in the mix, too.

Illustration credit: Donald Trump, Truth Social

One day Jesus: One day Rambo. That’s about the picture, the real picture through illustrations on Truth Social that Donald Trump imparts to the world. Daily, it’s as if a circus has come to town, but as the potential audience, we don’t exactly know who the clowns will be. Will there be the killer clowns of cinematic imagination, or the clowns of endless wars? We never know! By now, it is obvious that we’re in the grip of a power-hungry man, in my view, with a Congress and Supreme Court to back him up, in addition to his MAGA base. Is $126 a barrel of oil making us great again, or $1.5 trillion in so-called defense spending, or a $25 billion war of aggression in Iran?

Here is investigative reporter Seymour Hersh as he hits his target once again in “Will Trump Cut a Deal With Iran?” (Substack, April 29, 2026):

America’s love affair with Israel has hit an astonishing bump because President Donald Trump, in a political panic over the economic fallout from the Iranian blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, is now “talking to Iran,” as an Israeli insider put it, about ending the current impasse in return for a payment from the United States of at least $25 billion, and possibly much more, to the government in Tehran. In return, Iran would end its blockade and open the strait to all traffic, ending a crisis for Trump, the US, and much of the world.

One motive for Trump’s extraordinary step—I was not told how or by whom Trump’s offer was communicated—may be personal. The president, I was told, “no longer trusts Israel. He now believes he was misled” by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about the potential for success of the recent joint US-Israeli bombing attack, a goal of which was to trigger an overthrow of the religious leadership in Iran.

As Hersh points out, the mercurial Trump (my take in the kindest world possible):

One clear sign of Trump’s indecision came this morning when the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg published similar stories quoting Trump telling “his aides” to prepare for a lengthy US Navy blockade of the Strait in an effort to compel cash-strapped Iraq to agree to giving up the nation’s stockpile of partially enriched uranium. The Journal depicted the offer as demonstrating that Trump, “who always seeks a quick and salable victory, is devoid of a silver bullet.”

So, where do we stand this morning, so to speak? There’s no knowing. The best that can be hoped for is that Trump declares victory and gets the US out of Iran and the larger Middle East and stops being Netanyahu’s lapdog. The worst is how Trump feels on any given morning.

“ Blood is a big expense.”*

We are a society awash in guns and gun violence. War is not far removed from that violence, but on a global level. The empire striking out, and an individual violently striking out are close, but not in magnitude. No other society compares to us. The Second Amendment and a very real, at least in the mind, American connection to the wild west and open frontier are the heart of this penchant for guns. Racism also enters into the equation, as do other variables.

The current defense budget is at $1.5 trillion and the New York Times carries an article today that notes another $25 billion specially targeted for the war in Iran.

Today’s New York Times (April 29, 2026), the so-called newspaper of record, ran an article, “An age of political violence,” that pointed to the fact that we’re not in a greater historical epoch of political violence in the US compared to other eras. It’s an article worth reading because it skips the violence championed by Trump, et al. Many well-regarded readers’ comments on that article don’t jump over that reality both here at home against immigrants, violence on the high seas, and real and proxy wars such as in the Middle East with an emphasis in Gaza and Iran. The article glosses over some of the violent hate groups such as the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers who were prominent at the Unite the Right violent rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017. I’m now rereading 24 Hours in Charlottesville by Nora Neus (2023), and that protest, which led to the beating of anti-far-right demonstrators and the murder of Heather Hyer, is hardly an invisible incident! Recall Donald Trump’s “Some very fine people,” to describe the far and violent right at Charlottesville?

The Times seems to want to downplay the significance of contemporary violence and instead point to 1960s groups like the Weatherman and the Black Panthers for examples of political violence in the US. Far-right political violence has always dwarfed left violence in the US.

It was Martin Luther King, Jr., who in his Riverside Church talk “Beyond Vietnam” in April 1967, delivered exactly one year to the day before his assassination, said that the US was “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.” The novelist Kurt Vonnegut observed in a different setting, “And so it goes.” Indeed, it does with violence.

The reasons for the increase in violence, in my view, are the radical reductions in opportunities in the US, traditional sources of hate against the other, and an educational system that does not adequately educate, or produce citizens who question.

A disclaimer: I learned to fire an M-16 quite accurately in basic training in the military. Once the sights were aligned and adjusted at the top of that rifle, it became incredibly accurate at long distances. The military today has a telescopic sight at the top of the M-16, an addition that makes the weapon highly “effective” or destructive, whichever way a person views its use or function. Most violence in war now comes from the air.

I write after reading a Substack post about the spate of recent political shootings, all by gunmen. It seems that these gunmen were more critical of the system than anyone on the right or left might admit. They, the gunmen, were certainly not completely wild-eyed leftists, no matter what the talking heads of the Trump administration wish others to think. I view anyone using guns to settle political scores much like organized crime from decades ago.

*The Godfather (1972), Mario Puzo

Alcoholism and Drug Use at My Alma Mater

As if the world as it is today isn’t enough, I mean bad enough with wild men carrying guns and out-of-control wars. I received my college bi-annual magazine yesterday via mail. Readers may recall the feds would love to destroy, or bring to its knees, the US Postal Service. The federal government that could fit in a pocket would favor a privatized version of mail, but that is the subject for other writing.

The magazine featured a picture of an alumnus of the school, who graduated a few years after me, in his “sports cave.” That “cave,” a male iteration of a place to hide out or celebrate, usually has copious amounts of alcohol. With liberalized marijuana laws in some places, perhaps those caves sometimes have joints? Who knows?

Now, none of this is unusual, but I’ve never heard of a woman cave in any of my meanderings. My alma mater is known for its connection to alcohol and alcoholism over many, many decades. As I looked at the photo of my fellow alumnus holding what appeared to be a beer, I wondered what the hell was or is going on somewhat connected to that school?

At my 10th-year college reunion, most fellow alumni sitting at the table where my wife and I sat, had to be carried off to their rooms in the hotel where the reunion took place because they were drunk.

Looking at this issue in the alumni magazine and the alcohol consumption implicitly connected to the photo, from a near-teetotaler’s (not in my student days) point of view, I thought of the weekend booze-laden parties that filled the off-campus student residences of the area of the city where the school was located when I was a student. When I returned to teach at the school at the end of the decade of the 1980s, the same issues caused problems in the neighborhood that surrounded the school. The school’s administration had set up a disciplinary board to hear cases against offending students who had caused mayhem in those places for neighborhood residents. Rowdy behavior was at issue, and the non-student residents of the area were beside themselves.

Several months ago, a serious drug overdose involving fentanyl in that neighborhood put seven students in the hospital, four of whom were found by rescue and fire squads near death on the lawn outside of an apartment. I followed the case over several weeks, and it seemed as if the media focused solely on at least two drug dealers a few streets distant from where the incident took place, who were charged with several serious crimes, including selling drugs to the students. Looking at the Internet and news releases months later, I could find nothing about what educational interventions had been brought for the students who had come close to death. Were these students sanctioned in any way for their behavior? The school published its drug and alcohol education policies after the near-fatal incident. My calls to the school and the city’s police department public affairs unit following these overdoses went largely unanswered.

I had a bit of time on my hands this morning, a Sunday with dark skies and a few showers left behind from a storm. I love that feeling when a kind of satisfying silence fills the room where I sit and the world is comprehensible for a least a short time. I just finished a book (24 Hours At The Capitol, (2025) by Nora Neus) on the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot and the violence of that uprising was matched on this morning by some of the details of the press gathering in D.C. that involved violence. Besides Trump’s pardons of some of the violent actors from January 2021, violence once again was the defining element in how our society operates. The wars of the Middle East and beyond are another backdrop of violence.

I happened to see and listen to a YouTube video of an 85-year-old man who had turned his life into something that gave him meaning many, many decades ago. Here it is: it’s worth a listen to as the insanity of events surround and constricts us. This video reminded me of a professor and counselor I once knew who said: “Even if you win the rat race, you’re still a rat.” That’s probably not a new take on society and not limited to the US.

At this point in the morning, the talking heads have already sized up the gunman in D.C. in many ways. His education, his $25 contribution to the Harris campaign, etc. The media have a need to present some kind of portrait of people who are drawn to, and use, guns in the US.

A few years ago, I visited the memorial to the children and the staff members who were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School by a gunman in December 2012. A person who visits that memorial likely comes away with a sense that something is radically wrong here.

This morning’s New York Times, where all the news in support of war and income inequality is fit to print, ran an article about a shortage of US weapons (“War in Iran Has Drained U.S. Supplies of Critical, Costly Weapons”). Somewhere else in today’s paper, April 24, 2026, there appeared a piece about the weapons manufacturer Lockheed Martin doing quite well in the current environment of endless wars, both overt and proxy.

Who from the critical mass of protesters of the baby boom generation could ever have guessed this outcome in US policy? Many of the generation of baby boomers couldn’t wait to shed their credentials from the years of protest. Even some former radical Weathermen took that “opportunity” and became lawyers, professors, and such, but some of those “opportunities” only presented themselves because of governmental incompetence.

I recall an interchange with a student during a class discussion at a community college where I taught in upstate New York. The issue of the Geneva Conventions came up, and we were about halfway through the endless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that came about following the terror attacks of September 11, 2001.

The student laughingly referred to the Conventions, that body of the laws of war that evolved over time and came to codify the limits of war that involved civilians, proportionality in war, and prisoners of war, among other issues of war and peace.

It turns out that that student was mostly right given the wars that now involve the mass murder of civilians, no proportionality, and endlessness. Proxy wars have been all the rage for some time. The point in all of this is I would never have guessed this outcome vis-à-vis the issues of war and peace when the Vietnam War ended in 1975.

The Insane War Against Iran

As prices soar, especially fossil fuel prices and their related economic effects, I found an article I wrote in 2018 that seems as if it could have been written today. It was by chance, while editing a series of my past published writing, that I came upon this piece. It was prescient, because one of the often-quoted experts on that subject is quoted. As Yogi Berra said: “It’s like déjà vu all over again.” Here’s the citation and it even has a discussion of the draft returning, which it most certainly will not: “A Military Draft Will Return When the Ninth Circle of Hell Freezes Over” (2018).

So, where does all of this war and aggression stand with the demented team

of Trump and Netanyahu? Israel brought the dumbass Trump into this war of aggression because the government and majority of people in Israel support aggression in the larger Middle East and Jewish supremacy. Those values are a given and this stuff about the land of milk and honey is a bald-face lie that’s been going on for well over 3/4 of a century! Those vicious scoundrels are no longer going to be able to get away with calling Jews, whose points of view are noble, as self-hating and antisemitic. The Israel lobby may continue its hold on Democrats and Republicans, but their days of spewing hate speech against opponents are over! Shove it!

There’s lots of money to be made with war: the US is at $1.5 trillion and counting, but we can’t house or feed or educate or bring to health masses of people. Dwight Eisenhower warned us against this at the end of his second term as president. Imagine Eisenhower meeting the dope Trump and the warmonger Netanyahu today? Want to watch an empire and planet in decline: Hold up a very big mirror and take a look.

I can’t stomach Trump and his hate and exponential stupidity anymore! He’s obviously not all there in the sense of relating to reality and what his office means. He’s surrounded himself with idiotic sycophants and right wingers of all stripes including the fundamentalist kind. My own humanistic version of Judaism, quite common among contemporary Jews, abhors the Jewish suprematists in Israel and in the US. They are among the worst warmongers on the planet. For years they’ve attempted to paint Jews with consciences as either self-hating or alternately, antisemitic, or both. If it weren’t for the genocide they’ve committed in Gaza, and their endless wars throughout the Middle East, these slanders and libels would be humorous. They attempt to cover themselves with the horror of the Holocaust, and then create their very own. Abby Martin conducted interviews a few years ago with the man and woman on the streets of Israel, and the Jewish supremacism of these fools jumps right out at the viewer. Those interviews could have easily been swapped for interviews with good Germans during the Holocaust and the differences would have been window dressing. Here are more recent interviews that Abby Martin conducted.

This is a YouTube video from yesterday with Trump’s Jesus image (April 13, 2026). It’s from CBS. A person can’t make this demented stuff up. I wonder how Trump’s minions are doing today with wars everywhere; they probably love dead kids in Iran, and US weapons, among other nations’ weapons, killing civilians in Gaza?

Illustration credit: Donald Trump, Truth Social

This illustration could also be called His Holy Grace of the Fighter Jet

The society in the US fell into decline following the 1960s and early 1970s. Globalization allowed The Great Communicator to weaponize the long march of tax cuts to the very wealthy and cuts to the social programs of the New Deal and Great Society. Government became the problem as people took on more jobs and more hours to make ends meet. The right wing convinced the ordinary Jane and Joe that public schools were bad, decent wages were a sin, help for those in need through housing, food, medical care, and public transportation were all commodities in short supply that those in need and especially those with skin color needed to be kept away from. Now we have the shit show in front of our own eyes with Trump-Jesus as the master of ceremonies. Who would have believed that this debacle would have happened in the US?

The Sun Rises: It’s All a Shitshow

I got up this morning to more moderate temperatures than seen in the Northeast in a long time, but this is not a weather report. Generally, in fact universally, I peruse and read the international and national press with coffee in hand. I’ve learned, as war has become routine, and war crimes the usual, to ignore much of what I read and form my own conclusions. The press works in the shadow and for the power elite, but this was not always the case.

Today, April 13, 2026, the price of oil is rising due to Trump’s and Netanyahu’s war of bald-face aggression against Iran. Trump now threatens to close the Strait of Hormuz, and the effects on everything from gasoline to food will react accordingly in a world where one intellectually and ethically challenged man, along with another of a bit more intelligence, but a grotesque warmonger with equally evil plans and deeds, can turn the entire world into a dangerous and expensive shitshow.

I read in both the Guardian and New York Times that Trump the Dunce has begun calling Pope Leo names. There you go, readers, whether Catholic or not, the orange fool is calling an international faith leader names. We once did this as kids; in fact, I recently received a Facebook friend request from a fellow high school student who did the same to me, but that was decades ago. In any case, that person is as petulant as ever, and placing him on a friends’ list, which is pretty much meaningless, is about as likely as my becoming that professor of physics that I referenced in my article Saturday about the likelihood of a military draft.

Today may be the first day I go out and ride a bike, but this sounds too much like Eleanor Roosevelt’s My Day column. Speaking of the Roosevelts, some historians point to the issue of war with Japan, that may have been avoided by astute diplomacy between Franklin Roosevelt and the political elite of Japan over the question of oil. History will never figure out that issue, but of interest is that oil is in the news once again, and in any case, Hitler still would have had to have been countered.

Is There a Draft in Your Future?

The answer is a resounding and unequivocal “no!” The chance of a military draft, both in the near future, or distant future, is about as possible as my becoming a professor of physics. And with my math skills, the prospect of a professorship in physics is about as likely as aliens showing up on my front lawn. Although I do display a peace flag close to that lawn, I rest assured that the prospect of aliens is nil, or even less than nil.

Why won’t there be a military draft, despite years of receiving well-intended communications from an individual who has kept the flame burning for preparedness in the face of what won’t happen? I commend that person, but it ain’t going to happen.

It, a draft, won’t happen for two reasons: First, however distant there’s the memory and history of the Vietnam War and how the draft caused a response both in and outside of the military to slow and stop that war. For readers who don’t believe that history, look to the numbers that I won’t bore people with. Hundreds of thousands of young men revolted against the draft in many, many ways. Look to our challenged president for one example, although I’m hesitant to hold up Mr. Bone Spurs to any high standard. There were many, many ways out of the draft during Vietnam and that ultimately slowed the ability of both Johnson and Nixon to fight that war. Second, there was rebellion within the military to the point of soldiers in the field refusing to follow orders they felt were bogus. The latter became so extreme that the existence of fragging took place, which was the elimination of officers who gave those ill-conceived orders. The opposite of this phenomenon was the My Lai massacre led by William Calley. Many in the US could not stomach the mass murder of unarmed civilians.

Besides this trend to buck the military in times of war, there exists the state of mind that fighting wars for the US is not something many men and women want to sign onto. Some do, however, but most are not willing to support US adventures with their bodies and lives, and that generally is the rule with certain exceptions such as the terror attacks of September 2001.

Still, the chance of a draft is equal to my being called to duty as a physicist. I don’t mean to make light of this situation in the backstory of the war of aggression against Iran, but the automatic registration of men of draft age, if in fact it becomes a reality, is more about getting data about people than any real prospect of a draft.

During the Vietnam War, I was a member of the National Guard, the Reserves, and for a time was on active duty. Following the massacre at My Lai and the Kent State massacre, I became a war resister. I joined hundreds of thousands of men and a few women as war resisters during that war. I was, and am, as Dr. Willard Gaylin recounts in his book about war resisters, In The Service Of Their Country (1970).

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