Source: Common Dreams
by Toby Miller & Joan Pedro-Caranana
“Seemingly endless recitations throughout history of what constitutes virtuous citizenship emphasize military life. A specifically masculine heritage of violence in the service of the nation oversees and delimits democracy and authority—a privileged area of social welfare in contrast to health, education, the environment, or poverty. Much classical and modern political theory assumes and even endorses domestic violence, bellicose masculinity, and the notion that ‘real’ politics is generated, discussed, and concluded between men. The idea that male virtue is tied to violence, whether in defense of faith, family, or the border, is immensely strong. From individual duels to national campaigns, the ‘right’ way to engage in violence has given rise to ideas of nobility. Masculine worth is supposedly incarnate in bloodshed and authoritarian leadership, embodied in the military as a righteous national embodiment of power, spirit, religiosity, and victory.” (03/21/26)
“For the second time this year, NASA moved its moon rocket from the hangar out toward the pad Friday in hopes of launching four astronauts on a lunar fly-around next month. If the latest repairs work and everything else goes NASA’s way, the Space Launch System could blast off as early as April 1 from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center. The Artemis II crew went into quarantine this week in Houston. The 322-foot (98-meter) rocket began the slow 4-mile (6.4-kilometer) trek in the middle of the night, transported atop a massive crawler used since the 1960s Apollo era. The trip was held up for several hours by high wind but completed by midday, 11 hours after it began. The three Americans and one Canadian will zip around the moon in their capsule and then come straight home without stopping.” (03/22/26)
“Just when you thought that the hare-brained schemes of the Democrats who run our beleaguered big cities couldn’t get goofier, Chicago has passed a new doozy. The Windy City is raising hotel taxes to, get this, increase tourism. Ordinance 2026-0022544 will raise the tax on hotel rooms within that district to 19% from the rate of 17.5%, with the proceeds going to an organization called Choose Chicago, which will use the cash for tourism marketing campaigns. The top target on Choose Chicago’s wish list of events is the 2028 Democratic National Convention, and now, everyone who books a room in Second City gets to chip in a bit on the effort. It’s quite a thing: Only a leftist Democrat could possibly think that making it more expensive to visit Chicago will increase tourism. Maybe they should throw in a complimentary mugging to sweeten the deal.” (03/21/26)
“Sudan’s army has denied it carried out a deadly attack on a major hospital on Friday night in a city in the west of the country held by its rivals, the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF). The head of the World Health Organization (WHO) said 64 people – including 13 children, two nurses and a doctor – had died in the strike on el-Daein Teaching Hospital and 89 others had been wounded. ‘Enough blood has been spilled,’ Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus posted on X, urging the warring parties to end the conflict, which started nearly three years ago. The RSF said an army drone had hit the hospital in el-Daein, the capital of East Darfur state, on the day Muslims were marking the festival of Eid. (03/22/26)
“A California sheriff running for governor has seized more than half a million ballots cast in a November special election from county election officials, saying he’s investigating a ballot count discrepancy. County elections officials have disputed the claims by Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, a Republican. California Attorney General Rob Bonta, a Democrat, called Bianco’s move unprecedented and says it is designed to sow distrust in elections. Bianco held a news conference Friday saying his office had launched the investigation after receiving a complaint from a local citizens group about the ballot count from a November 2025 special election on redistricting. In the special election, voters approved a measure to redraw congressional district lines to favor Democrats in the upcoming midterm election. The measure passed in the county by a margin of more than 80,000 votes.” (03/22/26)
“Since the inauguration of Donald Trump for a second presidential term, a student loan borrower has fallen into default every nine seconds. A federal appeals court wants to accelerate that process. Last week, a three-judge panel of the Eighth Circuit (which includes two Trump appointees and one appointed by George W. Bush) nullified the Biden administration’s income-driven repayment (IDR) program, versions of which have been in place under presidents of both parties for over three decades. The specific Biden-era version, known as Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE), which nearly seven million borrowers have opted into, was authorized through 2028 by Congress and President Trump in the fiscal mega-bill passed just last year. Yet without any hearing on the merits, the Eighth Circuit unilaterally tossed out the program.” (03/20/26)
“Nine countries now possess nuclear weapons and we have just seen the start of a new war in the Middle East over one more nation supposedly trying to acquire them. While we consider the dangers of such weapons and their capacity to cause massive destruction, we often overlook the risks associated with what still passes for ‘peaceful’ nuclear power. With that in mind, let me revisit a moment when that reality should have become far clearer. I had crawled into bed on March 10, 2011, opened my phone, and scrolled through my Instagram feed. The app was still fairly new then, and I was only following a dozen or so accounts, several from Japan. One amateur photographer there had posted photos minutes earlier of a fractured sidewalk and a toppled bookshelf. A massive earthquake had just rattled Tokyo.” [editor’s note: The fearmongerers continue to ignore the advances in “safe” nukes as a viable power source – SAT] (03/19/26)
Source: Caitlin Johnstone, Rogue Journalist
by Caitlin Johnstone
“Westerners are about to start paying a lot more attention to the war in Iran as massive US-Israeli escalations point to a coming energy crisis set to impact the whole world. Israel has bombed the world’s largest natural gas field in southwestern Iran, reportedly in coordination with the United States. Now that a major red line for Tehran has been crossed, retaliatory strikes have already begun pummeling the energy infrastructure of US allies in the region, with Qatar reporting that its primary gas facility has sustained ‘significant damage’ from an attack after Iran issued evacuation warnings for energy facilities in Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Fuel prices are already surging.” (03/19/26)
“I try to be fair to people I disagree with. Emmanuel Saez (the famous UC Berkeley economist who’s considered an architect of California’s proposed billionaire wealth tax) is someone I read carefully, even when I find his income-inequality work unconvincing. So, when I say that his arguments for the wealth tax are not just biased or misleading but egregiously wrong, I’m not being careless. I mean it. In a recent debate at Stanford University, Saez offered his central justification (apart from, you know, ‘billionaires are unfairly rich’): California’s hospitals need it because the federal government cut Medicaid through last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill. As Economic Policy Innovation Center researchers have repeatedly documented, under the Biden administration, Medicaid spending expanded by almost 60 percent, going from roughly $409 billion before the pandemic to $656 billion by 2025.” (03/19/26)
“Israel has been a junior partner of the US empire’s Middle East policy since its military success in the 1967 Six Day War. While there are instances of Israel pushing the US into conflict, most directly in the US-Israel war against Iran in June 2025, the current war in Iran was driven by the US empire’s perceived interests plus the Trump factor. Israel has long been pressuring the US to fight Iran, but the empire did not find it worthwhile to initiate a full-scale war against the country. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to the US Congress during the Obama era warned of an impending Iranian nuclear weapon. But, instead, President Barack Obama continued the diplomatic route through establishing the Iran Deal, ensuring Iran would not develop nuclear arms.” (03/19/26)
