Stephen Zunes’s Keynote Address at the May 17, 2025, Western Washington Fellowship of Reconciliation Spring Assembly from an artificial intelligence (AI) transcription, edited by Cindy Cole and John Repp.  Available at https://wwfor.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/SA2025Keynote.pdf.  And if you’d rather see and hear Stephen’s talk, the YouTube video of Stephen’s talk and other parts of the Assembly is available;  see links at https://wwfor.org/spring-assembly-2025/.

Enough’s Enough in Magic Skagit: A small little town, empowered to do the right thing.  by Gene Marx.  On April 22, with nuclear powers trigger-loaded for confrontation in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, La Connor, Washington became the first municipality in the  state to join 86 other towns and cities in the U.S. to formally recognize the global nuclear threat and adopt a Back from the Brink resolution, endorsed and promoted by the local group No More Bombs.  Read more at https://wwfor.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/LaConnerResolution.pdf.

Newsletter Editor John M Repp starts this article with the question, ‘Why would I write an essay about our closest animal relatives and their dominance systems in a newsletter of WWFOR, a group that writes on its masthead that they want “to replace violence, war, racism and economic injustice with nonviolence, equality, peace and justice?” Good question!’  Read his article which touches on matriarchy, evolution, geology, meteorology, and more at https://wwfor.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/BobonosAndChimps.pdf.

A double-hitter post: First a letter to the editor by Jean Buskin (rejected by the Seattle Times) recognizing President Trump’s brilliant actions to end terrorist attacks on the U.S. Second a bonus cartoon showing the wondrous nature of AI. Both available here [ https://wwfor.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/JeanBuskinLetEdPlusCartoon.pdf ]

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,…

A new issue of the Western Washington Fellowship of Reconciliation newsletter, The Pacific Call, is out!  Thanks to editor John M Repp and to all the contributors.  There are 12 pages full of information – with 12 articles about local, national, and international topics.  The full issue can be viewed as a pdf at https://wwfor.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/March2025PacificCall.pdf and links to the individual articles are available here, https://wwfor.org/category/the-pacific-call/ and listed below. SPRING ASSEMBLY 2025 “Building a Nonviolent Movement in a Time of Chaos” with Stephen Zunes, keynote speaker.  See https://wwfor.org/spring-assembly-2025-announcement/ for David Lambert’s article and the spring assembly page where additional information and a registration link will be added at https://wwfor.org/spring-assembly-2025 or call 206-789-5565. Nuclear Weapons: Under Trump, the global ‘Doomsday Clock’ creeps…

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…