Julian Assange’s Wikileaks of many thousands of Secret documents will go down in history as courageous and heroic – like Daniel Ellsberg’s release of the Secret Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam era.  Then as now, we learned that our leaders, up to and including our presidents, had lied to us. The Gulf of Tonkin incident, like the Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction”...

Hundreds of doom and gloom news stories are becoming like a “perfect storm” of both cynicism and denial.  Corporate lobbyists outnumbering elected officials by ten to one, health care corporations spending hundreds of millions of dollars to defeat a national health care plan – or collectively investing more than a billion dollars in McDonald’s stock – an investment...

Of our unambiguously evil actions, torturing humans or other animals must be among the most egregious.  The UN Geneva Convention on human rights (1975 expanded version) defines torture as:   “any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information...