WESTERN WASHINGTON FELLOWSHIP OF RECONCILIATION SPRING ASSEMBLY 2025Saturday, May 17, 9 am to 12:30 pm PT on Zoom “Building a Nonviolent Movement in a Time of Chaos” Stephen Zunes, keynote speaker, see below  see wwfor.org/spring-assembly-2025 to register soon or call 206-789-5565 by David Lambert We are in governmental, political, and societal turmoil, when each of us is affected in so many different ways. Helplessness and a strong sense of loss of control is an understandable reaction to what some have termed an administrative coup by the Trump Administration. Yet, seemingly daily, there are court actions blocking actions by this administration, people massing together in angry street protests, communicating with the Congressional Representative and Senators in town halls, and writing letters,…

Public vigilance is needed to keep the threat of annihilation in check by Cindy Ann Cole, published in the print edition of Cascadia Daily News Friday, Jan. 31, 2025, p. A4 continued on p. A6 Cindy Cole is a mother, grandmother and a citizen peace and labor activist. She lives in Bellingham and has been working on the issue of nuclear weapons and the military for more than 20 years. 89 seconds to midnight!  The prestigious Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists sets the Doomsday Clock closer to midnight than ever before, accentuating the danger of possible nuclear war and climate catastrophe.  With wars raging in Ukraine and the Middle East and nuclear powers such as Russia, the United States and…

by John M Repp The Parable of the Tribes: The Problem of Power in Social Evolution, 2nd edition (Albany, State University of New York, 1995) is a book written by Andrew Bard Schmookler. Here is the link to Schmookler’s latest website: https://abetterhumanstory.org/ and, in the next paragraph, a summary of his idea. In the book, he lays out a grand theory about human civilizations and how civilizations have been in power struggles since they first existed. Here is a direct quote from the book which explains his idea in a nutshell: “Imagine a group of tribes living within reach of one another. If all choose the way of peace, then all may live in peace. But what if all but…

by John M Repp John Hart-Smith was a man well respected in the field of aerospace engineering, specifically in the craft of designing the manufacturing of an aircraft’s fuselage. In his obituary notice, The Seattle Times tells of how he tried to wake up Boeing management in a 2001paper about the dangers of their “corporate business culture of outsourcing, cost-cutting and downsizing”. Hart-Smith also wrote technical papers, and later whimsical stories featuring Winnie the Pooh making fun of managers not paying attention to quality control. In the mid 2000’s, he criticized the Boeing plan to build the 787, calling it flawed and predicting that it would prove very costly. He turned out to be right. In the last few years,…

Letter to the Editor: The Seattle Times American Health: A top issue ignored by candidates Re: “U.S. life expectancy gap widens to 20 years among groups, Seattle researchers found” (Dec. 10, 2024): The Seattle Times is to be commended for publishing some of the best reporting on the new report on America’s health status from the University of Washington-based Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation featured in The Lancet. That U.S. health lags far behind that of other rich nations has been known for years. This has never been an issue to be discussed by candidates wanting to become president of the United States. Why? Surely Americans being dead first should matter to us all. In the forthcoming State of…

by John M Repp On January 29, 2025, DemocracyNow  told us that a new Chinese startup company, DeepSeek, is out competing the world’s previously leading artificial intelligence (AI) company OpenAI’s application ChatGPT. This news upset the technology sector of U.S. financial markets when it was announced. Why? Because DeepSeekwas developed at a fraction of the cost of American companies’ costs. The news about DeepSeek came after President Trump announced a $500 billion investment plan to build more AI infrastructure in the United States. DeepSeek is available to download for free on the Apple application store. I tried it. You can give the application a very short description or outline of what you want it to write about and then it…

On December 18, 2024, Our Children’s Trust won a case in the Montana Supreme Court upholding the right of children to a safe and livable climate. This is a historic decision. The Montana Supreme Court upheld a decision of a district court in Montana. But the December 18 decision is the first of its kind from a state supreme court. Our Children’s Trust is a public service law firm that has been suing the governments to establish the right of children to a safe and livable environment not to be sacrificed by fossil fuel interests. The first lawsuit Our Children’s Trust filed was a lawsuit against the U.S. government (Juliana vs US ) which the U.S. Justice Department has stopped…

See BreakThrough News YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fH8d7UJNmaA by John M Repp The U.S.-Israel relationship is unlike any other relationship the U.S. has with another nation-state. Israel is by far the biggest recipient of U.S. foreign aid in the world. Despite Israel being about .01 percent of the world’s population, Israel has received about 30% of U.S. foreign aid since World War II. They get about 4 billion dollars every year and have received almost $400 billion since 1945 if you adjust for inflation. Most of the money goes right back to the USA to purchase military weapons. The amount would be enough to end world hunger. But what is more shocking is that this support is unconditional. It goes through Congress every…

Trump Lost: If All Legal Voters Were Allowed to Vote and All Legal Ballots Were Counted, Harris Would Have Won   by John M Repp from a guest post by Greg Palast for the Hartmann Report, January 24, 2025      The 2024 election was stolen by means of voter suppression. There was a mass of voter challenges by Republican-trained “vigilantes” in a number of states where the voting laws had been changed so ordinary citizens could challenge voters. The challenges were concentrated in districts with a majority of voters-of-color. Remember Bush v. Gore in 2000. Yes, the Supreme Court stopped the counting and gave a victory to Bush, but that was after his brother Jeb had knocked thousands of black voters…

by John M Repp The Federal government, according to the Constitution, creates the money we use in our nation’s economy. Since we no longer have to back the money with a limited supply of gold, the government can print as much as it needs. If it prints too much, we get inflation. If we have inflation, we can tax people and companies, pulling money out of the economy and thus lowering prices. However, if there are just a few companies in each economic sector, which is the case now, they can keep the prices high. They cooperate against us rather than compete with each other. Part of the recent inflation was just so.    We need a Federal Job Guarantee at…