. . .
K “He spoke truth.”
J “And got killed.”
. . .
Bumper sticker of the week:
Give peace a small chance
. . .
K “Think it is staged.”
J “Somewhat. But neither of them are capable of staying on script.”
. . .
K “Trump dons a red Make America Great Again hat while Musk sports a black Occupy Mars t-shirt.”
J “King Trump’s crown is an ordinary baseball hat and Minstrel Muskrat’s regal attire is a t-shirt. They call it ‘cosplay’ because they are play acting their roles in their costumes.”
. . .
J “All the world is a stage that is now dominated by two stooges. One is the world’s most powerful man. The other is the world’s richest man. America is all about power and money.”
K “Keep in mind the fundamental truth. The Problem for decades was overlooked or disregarded. There is no democracy. Trump is not an assault on something that does not exist. Trump is the Symptom of the staggering Problem who has metastasized into another competing Problem. The last election was between Systemic Problem versus Trump Problem. Both candidates were stooges in his and her own way.”
. . .
K “The show must go on.”
J “It must not necessarily go on, but it is going to go on.”
. . .
Bumper stickers of the week:
“You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity.” Robert A. Heinlein
“For what else is the life of man but a kind of play in which men in various costumes perform until the director motions them off the stage.” Erasmus, The Praise of Folly (1511).
No Kings
. . .
K “Biden clearly was not in charge. Trump appears not to be in charge. The U.S.A. escalated and expanded its war with further charges on and charges dropped on Russia. The most powerful faction in his fractured administration is committed to war and making the command decisions.”
J “They are hitting dangerously close to home.”
K “They could hit dangerously close to home.”
J “The fundamental nature of war has changed in two big leaps. First, the use of drones in the Armenia and Azerbaijan war in 2020 voided so many legacy weapons. Second, hiding and moving the drones in mobile innocuous appearing civilian vehicles and using them on civilian infrastructure is a game changer. Technology and technique are rapidly evolving.”
. . .
K “I could end the war in one (1) day. Others have not the ken, the courage or the clear vision to craft a solution. Cease the ISTAR [intelligence, surveillance, target acquisition, and reconnaissance], no war; continue the ISTAR, war. The U.S.A. elected to escalate and expand the war. One profound and effective way to cease the war in under twenty-four (24) hours is to warn the combatants that every deployed missile will be redirected back to land on its point of origin. And then just do it once.”
J “They could hit close to home.”
. . .
K “And then there is the exploding bodaciously bad budget bill.”
J “At least that action is being done with Congressional approval.”
. . .
Bumper sticker of the week:
Cease the ISTAR [intelligence, surveillance, target acquisition, and reconnaissance], no war; continue the ISTAR, war.
. . .
K “We are now one hundred days into the Trump regime. Biden’s War is now officially renamed and rebranded Trump’s War.”
J “Trump must continue the war without hesitation or interruption.”
. . .
Bumper stickers of the week:
“We will measure our success not only by the battles we win, but also by the wars that we end and, perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into. My proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and unifier. That’s what I want to be, a peacemaker and a unifier.” Donald Trump, Inaugural Address.
“When two neighboring countries fight each other, just know the USA visited one.” Nelson Mandela
“Let everyone who advocates war be enrolled in a special regiment of advance guards, for the front of every storm, of every attack, to lead them all!” Leo Tolstoy
“They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country. But in modern war there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason. . . . The only way to combat the murder that is war is to show the dirty combinations that make it and the criminals and swine that hope for it and the idiotic way they run it when they get it so that an honest man will distrust it as he would a racket and refuse to be enslaved into it.” Ernest Hemingway, “Notes on the Next War: A Serious Topical Letter”, “Esquire”, September 1935.
“No one man nor group of men incapable of fighting or exempt from fighting should in any way be given the power, no matter how gradually it is given them, to put this country or any country into war.” Id.
“I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902–1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.” Smedley D. Butler in a poem in the September 1935 issue of the magazine “Common Sense” that later become a classic.
. . .
K “I read an essay critical of another writer who advanced an insightful analysis of many of society’s problems yet was accused of not advancing workable answers. A prohibition on complaints devoid of answers? I thought about it. That may be the best one can do. Attacking hypocrisy and dishonesty and the like that we do not like with an eye toward eliminating it while also germinating alternative workable ideas is the only course of action.”
J “I have all the answers! Just listen. Yet too often my answers are underpinned by a belief that we can or must change fundamental human nature. That is not going to happen.”
. . .
K “The only way to bring about productive change in America is fundamentally to eliminate not internally reform every major institution. They are fundamentally broken and must be disassembled in toto and rebuilt from the ground up.”
J “It is the individual not the institution. Those limits that nature fixes for human conduct will fix you.”
. . .
Bumper stickers of the week:
Eliminate and germinate
“We have met the friend and he is us.” Pogo
“If there is a solution to a problem, there is no need to worry. And if there is no solution, there is no need to worry.” Dalai Lama
What me worry.
“The whole future lies in uncertainty, live immediately.” Seneca
. . .
K “Do something, anything (good).”
. . .
. . .
K “Wear sunscreen. Wear hearing protection; listen attentively. Wear chainsaw safety chaps; cut with care. Eat dessert: First. Learn to tie a bowline (and a bow tie). Stop, pause, think. Eschew fear. Transcend: Maintain FL 44; Make A Few Discrete Dives And Diversions To TPA (Traffic Pattern Altitude). Find the First Amendment. Plant a garden. Do something, anything (good).”
. . .
J “How about work to ‘Ban the Internet’ as graduation advice for the entire nation to graduate to a more sane and fulfilling existence? Or work to ‘Sensibly license the Internet akin to shortwave radio licensing’ to save the nation?”
K “That works. That is doing something, anything (good).”
. . .
[See the original “Sunscreen Column”, the Wikipedia article “Wear Sunscreen” and listen to “Everbody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen)”.]
Bumper stickers of the week:
Wear sunscreen. Wear hearing protection; listen attentively. Wear chainsaw safety chaps; cut with care. Eat dessert: First. Learn to tie a bowline (and a bow tie). Stop, pause, think. Eschew fear. Transcend: Maintain FL 44; Make A Few Discrete Dives And Diversions To TPA (Traffic Pattern Altitude). Find the First Amendment. Plant a garden. Do something, anything (good).
“We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate. . . . We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad flapping American ear will be that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.” Henry David Thoreau, Walden
. . .
K “Four score years ago on May 8 / 9, the Russians defeated the Germans and won World War II; since that time the United States has lost every single war it has instigated or inflamed. What an enviable record in the history of empires.”
J “Except Grenada. Do not forget Grenada. A few grenades in Grenada is all that one took. Not really a record worth writing home about. It was more of what the sports world calls a ‘friendly’ competition.”
. . .
K “An entire generation was condemned to slow percolating despair and an utterly pointless collective death. I remember fearing that I was given a death sentence with an indeterminate start date. I found my unburned draft card last year that proclaimed me ‘fit to die’ and recall my low two-digit draft number that said ‘ready to die’.”
J “The idea of a lottery may be the only way to distribute scarce resources. The Fates cut strings; the government plucks a ball out of a bin and decrees who has good luck and who does not. The spectacle is so surreal and perverse and macabre.”
. . .
K “We are also talking about the war on drugs and the war on poverty and the war on terror and the war on peace and the war on war. It does not end. The goal now is for war not to end.”
J “I can’t fail to advance the contention that there are times when thoughtful and purposeful military intervention is necessary.”
K “It don’t disagree, yet America does not think and embarks on so many thoughtless and purposeless crusades on purpose.”
. . .
Bumper sticker of the week:
Bumper stickers of the week:
“We came, we saw, he [Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi] died.” Hillary Clinton
“And as for him who lacks the courage to defend even his own soul: Let him not brag of his progressive views, boast of his status as an academician or a recognized artist, a distinguished citizen or general. Let him say to himself plainly: I am cattle, I am a coward, I seek only warmth and to eat my fill.” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Live Not by Lies” written before he was arrested on February 12, 1974.
We live in a country with many, many, many rules and many, many, many laws, but we do not live in a country that believes in or adheres to the rule of law.
You cannot get out of bed in the morning without violating some section of title 18 of the United States Code, the federal criminal code. In fact, and as a matter of law, you cannot stay in bed in the morning without violating some section of title 18 of the United States Code, the federal criminal code. In practice, the United States is a system of men not laws because men and women opt from the panoply of laws that punish all behavior and decide who is and who is not imprisoned.
Pope Francis
Earth Day
e-commentary 
Tenth Annual Pushitzer Prize In Commentary For 2025 (May 5, 2025)
Posted in Journalism, Pushitzer Prize In Commentary on May 5, 2025 by e-commentary.org. . .
“The envelope please. . . . This year’s Pushitzer Prize in Commentary is awarded to . . . Chris Hedges . . . Sage, poet, moralist, philosopher, historian, he is the soul and conscience of today’s small cadre of honest, concerned and courageous journalists and commentators. For his efforts stirring the pot, asking hard questions, demanding answers, rejecting lies, spotlighting uncomfortable truths, comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable. And being a model journalist.”
J “He speaks truth.”
. . .
[See the e-commentary on the Commentary Award and previous recipients at Ninth Annual Pushitzer Prize In Commentary For 2024 (May 6, 2024), Eighth Annual Pushitzer Prize In Commentary For 2023 (May 8, 2023), Seventh Annual Pushitzer Prize In Commentary For 2022 (May 9, 2022), Sixth Annual Pushitzer Prize In Commentary For 2021 (June 7, 2021), Fifth Annual Pushitzer Prize In Commentary For 2020 (May 4, 2020), Fourth Annual Pushitzer Prize In Commentary For 2019 (April 15, 2019), Third Annual Pushitzer Prize In Commentary For 2018 (April 16, 2018), Second Annual Pushitzer Prize In Commentary For 2017 (April 10, 2017), First Annual Pushitzer Prize In Commentary For 2016 (April 18, 2016) and Pulitzers Are Pro-War? Pressing The Pushitzers (April 22, 2013).]
[Please send your nomination for the Pushitzer Prize in Commentary for 2026 and a supporting letter by January 21, 2026 to e-ssay@gci.net and send the entry fee to your favorite charity.]
Bumper stickers of the week:
“We now live in a nation where doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, governments destroy freedom, the press destroys information, religion destroys morals, and our banks destroy our economy.” Chris Hedges
Make journalism great again
Make journalism journalism again
Knowledge is not power, but ignorance is powerless
“First they came for the journalists. We don’t know what happened after that.”
“All tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force.” George Orwell
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