Christmas Here – and in Nagasaki, 1945

Reprinted with permission from Greg Mitchell’s newsletter Between Rock and a Hard Place.

Since this is Timmy/Zimmy week here, and elsewhere, let’s just start with ecumenical Bob’s wildest Christmas song, “Must Be Santa.”

Then, in case you missed the return of Darlene Love with “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home),” an annual staple on the old Letterman show but now revived (with my old pal Miami Steve Van Zandt and others) on Fallon.

“Silent Night” in an Atomic City

(Re-posted from my Oppenheimer/nuclear era Substack.) As some of you may know – since I posted about it not along ago – I have just completed my new film, and it is now going out to festivals. Below you will find the trailer for “The Atomic Bowl: Football at Ground Zero & The Forgotten Bomb.” This is my fourth documentary in the past four years and the previous three all made it to PBS. It’s narrated by Peter Coyote and produced by Lyn Goldfarb. By coincidence, PBS.org (after a lag) has again made free and easy for streaming my award-winning “Atomic Cover-up,” so you can watch that here if wish. I’d be happy to read any comments or questions about either film.

Continue reading “Christmas Here – and in Nagasaki, 1945”

Panama and Trump’s Throwback Imperialism

Trump threatened to steal another country’s land again:

Trump reiterated his intentions to take back the Panama Canal, after threatening he would in a Truth Social post on Saturday. Trump said that the United States is being “ripped off” at the Panama Canal and has insinuated that China is gaining influence over the waterway. “We’re being ripped off at the Panama Canal like we’re being ripped off everywhere else,” Trump said Sunday.

The fearmongering about China is a reminder of how pernicious defining U.S. foreign policy around great power rivalry can be. The threats against Panama show how Trump’s crude imperialism and the pursuit of rivalry with China reinforce each other. Trump assumes that the U.S. is always being “ripped off,” and he believes that the answer to this is to steal from other countries. If he thinks another country is getting too close to a rival, he wants the U.S. to “solve” that by threatening to steal some of their territory. Trump sees weaker countries in our hemisphere that he wants to dictate terms to, and rivalry with China provides him with the excuse for threatening them. He has probably been encouraged in this by his National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, who has been inflating the Chinese “threat” in Panama for years.

Continue reading “Panama and Trump’s Throwback Imperialism”

Veteran Calls Out House Committee for Supporting Genocide

Washington, DC – On Wednesday, 17-year veteran and intelligence officer Josephine Guilbeau disrupted the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs to call out the billions of dollars Congress sends to fund genocide in Gaza while neglecting veterans at home. Here is what she had to say:

“US Congress is complicit in the genocide in Gaza! You keep sending billions of dollars to Israel meanwhile veterans are homeless and committing suicide with more budget cuts on the way. As a 17-year veteran and intelligence officer, I am watching you destroy American values and jeopardize our national security.

Israel is burning children alive! Israel is burning children alive!

Continue reading “Veteran Calls Out House Committee for Supporting Genocide”

The Ongoing Horrors in Gaza

Another State Department official quit in frustration over the Biden administration’s Gaza policy:

Casey resigned from the state department in July after four years at the job, discreetly leaving the post unlike other recent high-profile government departures. Now seated at his kitchen table in the quiet suburbs of northern Michigan, Casey reflected on how, as one of only two people in the entire US government explicitly focused on Gaza, he became an unwilling chronicler of a humanitarian catastrophe.

“I got so tired of writing about dead kids,” he said. “Just constantly having to prove to Washington that these children actually died and then watching nothing happen.”

Continue reading “The Ongoing Horrors in Gaza”