The swampish saga would be hard to invent. In early October, Puerto Rico’s Energy Power Authority awarded a $300 million tax-funded contract to reconstruct the island’s hurricane devastated power grid to a two-person, two-year-old firm based in the small Montana hometown of Trump Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke. The company is financially backed by a major donor to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

About eighty percent of Puerto Rico is still without power. Many hospitals are still dark. Local citizens needing medical treatments such as surgeries or dialysis have been forced to flee to places where electric power is available.

http://davidswanson.org/u-s-empire-not-fade-away/

I wanna tell you how it’s gonna be.

But I really cannot. Prediction is just vastly more difficult than action, which makes it even odder that so much of the former goes on, and so little of the latter.

I just read In The Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power by Alfred McCoy. It’s one of the better books I’ve read in a long time on the history and current state of U.S. militarism. It’s excellent on the truly ridiculous (my word, not the book’s) chess analogy that has driven imperialist thinking, on the outcomes of backing dictators as puppets, and on the abuses of secret agencies — including their role in the drug trade in places like Nicaragua and Afghanistan.

A dozen or so activists braved the cold and marched from the Wexner Center at 15th and High Street to the opening of the OSU football stadium on Saturday, October 28 to “Take a knee to stand with Kaepernick.”

The reason for the rally was “On October 16, 2017 Shelley Meyer made it very clear that she does not support Colin Kaepernick and his fight against police brutality towards POC. For those who don't know, Shelley is OSU football coach Urban Meyer's wife. When 10TV news posted a tweet about Kaepernick filing grievances against the NFL, she responded "What-ever. He made his choices."It is absolutely unacceptable for the wife of a football coach to condemn the actions of the NFL and "take a knee." We must stand (better yet kneel) in solidarity with Kaepernick where it needs done the most. The Shoe. The Meyer's need to know that we do not accept Shelley and her negative reaction to Kaepernick, and we certainly do not accept her half hearted apology she posted later.”

More than a hundred mothers have contacted me over the years, alarmed at the relationships their teenaged children were developing with military recruiters at school. They wanted to know what they could do about it. They were angry, and they were worried.

The fact these women reached out to me and other counter-recruitment activists demonstrates the degree of alarm they experienced. They feared their vulnerable children would enlist against their wishes. They were terrified their child would be killed while they stood by. This was the driving force of their resistance.

Several mothers told me they deeply resented the presence of military recruiters in their child’s school and they described the influence recruiters were having over their child’s thinking and behavior. They talked about difficult relationships they had with their children. Some said their child had forged close relationships with recruiters at school for over two years. These moms were certain their sons were going to enlist because their boys knew the pain it would inflict on their mothers.

http://worldbeyondwar.org/peace-studies-can-help-end-wars

Remarks at Peace and Justice Studies Association Conference in Birmingham, Alabama, October 28, 2017.

Thank you for inviting me. Can everyone who thinks that war is never, and can never be, justified please raise your hand. Thank you. Now if you think every war is always justified. Thank you. And finally all the moderates holding the balanced subtle middle ground: some wars are justified. Thank you. You may not be surprised to hear that this room is not typical of this country. Typical is for absolutely everyone to pile into that last group.

The relationship between peace and war is clearly not understood by the U.S. public as along the lines of that between alive and dead. Peace and war are things people imagine can coexist.