The word resonated loud and clear from South Africa. Hendrik Verwoerd, widely described as a key architect of apartheid, was the far-right National Party’s propagandist, political strategist and, ultimately, party leader. In 1961, as South African Prime Minister, he noted that Israel was built on land taken ‘from the Arabs after the Arabs lived there for a thousand years.’ The point was to express his approval and to highlight Zionism’s common cause with the Afrikaner pioneers: ‘In that, I agree with them. Israel, like South Africa, is an apartheid state.’ More

It is impossible, of course, to say exactly when God died. That death – so consequential for humanity and so irrelevant to everything beyond human control -- was a process, not an event.

The death of the two party system in the United States is a process too. But the consequences are so much more limited, and the time frame so much shorter, that it could look to future historians very much like an event -- if there are future historians, that is; in other words, if, despite Democrats and Republicans and Donald Trump, we somehow survive environmental devastation and avoid nuclear war. More

I currently receive a Social Security benefit check of $985 a month, which is a spousal benefit I qualified for, one of the last to be able to make use of the so-called file-and-suspend option for married people reaching age 66 that the Obama Administration and Congress agreed to do away with two years ago, in one of many small cuts being applied to the Social Security program.

This year that benefit, like the benefit checks of all 60 million people (one in five of all Americans) on Social Security, rose by a scant 0.3 percent, taking my check from $983 a month last year to its present level -- a rise of $2.00 a month (I was actually screwed out of a dollar because of crooked rounding!). More