conflict
Stigma of Addiction and Mental Illness is Alive and Well, Even in Our Own Families.

In five days, my brother Brett will be 50 years old. It should be a huge party with love, laughter, family, and friends. But there will be no party.
I can still hear it ringing in my ears, “Your brother was a junkie who deserved to die.”
Anyone who loves or has lost someone addicted to drugs or alcohol has heard this very statement in some form or another. Many times. It can often be ignored. Tolerated. Accepted. Maybe someone hasn’t said it to you directly, in those exact words, but you hear them loud and clear. And so does our loved one.
I don’t typically react, it’s not my style; after all it is a waste of valuable energy for me to scream and challenge every person with whom I come into contact. I am confident not only in who I am and my belief that addiction and mental illness are diseases, but also in who my brother was.
Everyone can be pushed past their limits. To where they have had enough. They’re hurt. Frustrated. And they need to stand up for what they believe is right, when someone else can’t find the courage to have a voice of their own. Not because I’m fighting my brother’s battles; after all we are no longer two- and six-years-old playing in the neighborhood sand box. But rather because I have walked this painful road, witnessed the judgment and because of that I see the world in a more empathetic way.
I remember vividly my mother and I sitting for about an hour, waiting for my brother to be seen in emergency. His leg rattled with anxiety until he was taken into a private room. We explained to the nurse that Brett was severely intoxicated and needed help to safely withdraw off the alcohol, not that we needed to as his situation was very clear from his scruffy appearance and glassy eyes. And she began to take his vitals.
It wasn’t the nurse’s cold, disassociated approach while taking my brother’s blood pressure, pricking his arm with a needle, or asking him how much he had had to drink that made my blood boil. It was the fact that it was obvious she absolutely loathed him. For the first time ever, like a bolt of electricity running through my veins, I felt judgment—exactly what my brother must have felt. Pure unadulterated judgment. As she left the room, I scampered quickly behind her, catching up in front of the nurse’s station.
“Excuse me,” I said. She didn’t hear me so I repeated myself. She turned around to look at me.
“Hi. Listen, I don’t mean to be rude. I completely understand and appreciate how hard your job is and how many different things you must see. I even get that on some level maybe to you my brother isn’t sick in the same way as most of the people here, and that you believe this may be purely self-induced. What I need to remind you is that he is a human being.”
She didn’t blink.
I continued, “Now I don’t care what you did yesterday or how you are tomorrow. All I care about is that for right now, when you come into that room, you show a little compassion as that is a person in there. A person! That is someone’s brother, someone’s son. And despite what you very obviously perceive as completely disgusting, someone loves him. Do you think you can do that?”
I didn’t give her time to answer.
“’Cause if you can’t, then what I suggest is that for the next hour or so you FAKE IT!”
I walked away, so I didn’t have to look at her stony expression for another second. Before stepping through the door to sit quietly in the corner of my brother’s room, I caught my breath as I was so overwhelmingly pissed off.
I understand and appreciate how hard nurses work—after all, our mother is a nurse—and I can imagine that they see all sorts of things. But that’s their job, a job that they choose. To treat someone very obviously, whatever their circumstance, like they are below dirt, I cannot take. As I looked at my brother at his worst, just as I had done so many times before, all I thought was he is in there.
The doctor arrived a short time later. I knew the drill; it seemed like I had heard this a thousand times before. They couldn’t keep Brett overnight as all the beds were full, although I appreciate the doctor did give him a shot of Valium. At least I think it was Valium, which by then I knew belongs to the class of medications called benzodiazepines. It is used for the short-term relief of symptoms of mild to moderate anxiety and for alcohol withdrawal. Mom and I knew that at least it would help Brett get through the night and the suggestion the doctor offered was for us to head back to the detox center in the morning.
What most people don’t know is that people with severe addiction can actually die from the effects of withdrawal. Whether you want to challenge your mind with that truth or not, the choice debate doesn’t work here: they cannot just stop. My brother needed medical supervision and help as he came off the booze. Normally it would take four to six days in which he would be given things like Valium to ease his way through the excruciating pain and suffering of the withdrawal process. Alcohol is actually one of the most dangerous substances to come off. People addicted to alcohol can experience symptoms like nightmares, vomiting, diarrhea, shivering, sweating, racing heart, fever, shaking, tightness in the chest, and difficulty breathing.
That is if things go well.
If things go badly, our loved ones can have a stroke, a heart attack, or a grand mal seizure. During withdrawal, long-term alcohol users can suffer psychosis that manifests as hallucinations and delusions, which is why they need to be monitored by a health care professional. Delirium tremors (DT’s) can sometimes be associated with severe, uncontrollable tremors of the extremities and secondary symptoms such as anxiety, panic attacks, and paranoia. All these realities. And yet we are once again being sent on our way as all the beds were full.
It seemed like a completely different nurse came into the room, yet it wasn’t. She was kind, compassionate, and caring, and as we left, she said to my brother, “Take care of yourself, Brett.”
I whispered, “Thank you” to her as we walked out the door, and I hope she knew how much I meant it.
My magnificent, smart, witty, handsome, kind, soft-spoken, and much-loved brother took that first sip of alcohol in high school, as most of our own young children will do some day. Sadly, he lost his battle with severe substance use and mental health issues on March 18, 2012 when he took his own life. I remember very vividly a few months after he passed away, someone in our close family circle was standing in my office and he said directly to me, “Your brother was a junkie who deserved to die. He had more than enough chances.”
I could be rattled, offended, shocked; I could have screamed, yelled, and told him to get the hell out of my office. But I didn’t. Instead, I calmly took a sip of my coffee, said a little “hmmm” to myself and changed the topic. I assure you it was not because I am quiet, scared, or I didn’t know what I wanted to say. But rather the opposite as I am confident, bold, outspoken, and unapologetically honest.
I have no interest in getting into a war of words. I have grown and learned so much since that hospital room visit more than fifteen years ago. I have learned that stigma is alive and well, not only in the healthcare profession. In society. In the media. And even in our own families and circle of friends.
I am not shocked nor surprised that we live in a world where some believe this statement about my brother and others battling addiction. It surprises me that we live in a world where it is acceptable to say it out loud. That somehow, it is all right to inflict intentional pain on someone who has lost someone who they love very much.
My approach is choosing to dedicate my time and energy into calmly and confidently sharing my journey and experience, every uncomfortable piece of it, without shame. The truth is I have been surrounded by alcoholism my whole life; it is on many branches of my family tree. But what I experienced with my brother; most could not fathom. I feel that if people hear the whole story, beginning with us as innocent children, it might open their hearts, change their perceptions, and perhaps give understanding and compassion for people with addiction and mental health challenges in society—our mothers, fathers, husbands, wives, daughters, sons, brothers, sisters, cousins, uncles, aunts, grandparents, friends, and neighbors.
For me, I am not going to spend my life arguing, debating, letting people break my spirit for what I know and believe with all my heart. What I remind myself when I share our story to enlighten others is that this way of thinking and speaking about Brett with hurtful, condemning statements is not at all about my brother’s character or who he was; it is about theirs.
Sending love, light and strength when you need it to everyone, on this Sat, September 10th, World Suicide Prevention Day.
conflict
US airstrike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Was it obliteration?

A satellite image of the Isfahan nuclear research center in Iran shows visible damage to structures and nearby tunnel entrances from recent US airstrikes. / Satellite image (c) 2025 Maxar Technologies.
Seymour Hersh
The US attack on Iran may not have wiped out its nuclear ambitions but it did set them back years
I started my career in journalism during the early 1960s as a reporter for the City News Bureau of Chicago, a now long-gone local news agency that was set up by the Chicago newspapers in the 1890s to cover the police and fire departments, City Hall, the courts, the morgue, and so on. It was a training ground, and the essential message for its aspiring reporters was: “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.”
It was a message I wish our cable networks would take to heart. CNN and MSNBC, basing their reporting on an alleged Defense Intelligence Agency analysis, have consistently reported that the Air Force raids in Iran on June 22 did not accomplish their primary goal: total destruction of Iran’s nuclear-weapons capacity. US newspapers also joined in, but it was the two nominally liberal cable channels, with their dislike—make that contempt—for President Donald Trump, that drove the early coverage.
There was no DIA analysis per se. All US units that engage in combat must file an “after-action report” to the DIA after a military engagement. In this case, the report would have come from the US Central Command, located at MacDill Air Force base in Tampa, Florida. CENTCOM is responsible for all US military operations in the Middle East, Egypt, Central Asia, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. One US official involved in the process told me that “the first thing out of the box is you have to tell your boss what happened.” It was that initial report of the bombing attack that was forwarded to DIA headquarters along the Potomac River in Washington and copied or summarized by someone not authorized to do so and sent to the various media outlets.
The view of many who were involved in the planning and execution of the mission is that the report was summarized and leaked “for political purposes”—to cast immediate doubt on the success of the mission. The early reports went so far as to suggest that Iran’s nuclear program has survived incapacitation by the attack. Seven US B-2 “Spirit” bombers, each carrying two deep-penetration “bunker-busters” weighing 30,000 pounds, had flown without challenge from their base in Missouri to the primary target: Iran’s Fordo nuclear facility, concealed deep inside a mountain twenty miles north of the city of Qom.
The planning for the attack began with the knowledge that the main target—the working area of the nuclear program—was buried at least 260 feet below the rocky surface at Fordo. The gas centrifuges spinning there were repeatedly enriching uranium, in what is known as a cascade, not to weapons-grade level—uranium-235 isotopes enriched to 90 percent—but to 60 percent. Further processing to create weapons grade uranium, if Iran chose to do so, could be done in a matter of weeks, or less. The Air Force planning group had also been informed before the bombing raid, most likely by the Israelis, who have a vast spy network in Iran, that more than 450 pounds of the enriched gas stored at Fordo had been shipped to safety at another vital Iranian nuclear site at Isfahan, 215 miles south of Tehran. Isfahan was the only known facility in Iran capable of converting the Fordo gas into a highly enriched metal—a critical early stage of building the bomb. Isfahan also was a separate target of the US attack on Fordo, and was pulverized by Tomahawk missiles fired by a U.S. submarine operating in the Gulf of Aden, off Yemen.
As a journalist who for decades has covered the nascent nuclear crisis in the Middle East, it seemed clear to me and to informed friends I have in Washington and Israel that if Fordo somehow survived its bunker-buster attack, as was initially suggested, and continued to enrich more uranium, Isfahan would not. No enrichment, no Iranian bomb.
I’ve been frustrated and angry at cable news coverage for years, and that includes Fox News, too, and decided to try and find the real story. If your mother says she loves you, check it out. And I checked out enough of it to share.
I was told that “the first question for the American planners was how big was the actual workspace at Fordo? Was it a structure? We had to find that out before we got rid of it.” Some of the planners estimated that the working space “was the size of two hockey rinks: 200 feet long and 85 feet wide.” It came to 34,000 square feet. The height of the underground working space was assumed to be ten-and-a-half feet—I was not told the genesis of that assumption—and the size of the target was determined to be 357,000 cubic feet.
The next step was to measure the power of the dozen or more bunker-busters that were planned to be “carefully spaced and dropped” by the US B-2 bombers, using the most advanced guidance systems. (During one high-level session in Washington, one of the Air Force planners was asked what would happen if the B-2’s guidance systems were corrupted by an outside signal. “We’d miss the target” was the answer.)
I was assured that even if the rough estimate of the working space at Fordo was far off, the bombers targeting Fordo each carried a 30,000-pound bomb with an explosive payload of as much as five thousand pounds, which was more than enough to pulverize the mythical hockey rinks, or even a much larger working space.
Some of the bombs were also outfitted with what is known as a hard target void sensing fuze, which enabled the bombs to penetrate multiple layers of a site like Fordo before detonating. This would maximize the destructive effect. Each bomb, dropped in sequence, would create a force of rubble that would cause increasing havoc in the working areas deep inside the mountain.
“The bombs made their own hole. We built a 30,000-pound steel bullet,” the official told me, referring with pride to the bunker-busters.
Most important, he said, was that there were no post-strike hints detected of radioactivity—more evidence that the 450 pounds of enriched uranium had been moved from Fordo to the reprocessing site at Isfahan prior to the US attack there, which was code-named “Midnight Hammer.” That operation included a third US strike at yet another nuclear facility at Natanz.
“The Air Force got everything on the hit list,” the official told me. “Even if Iran rebuilds some centrifuges, it will still need Isfahan. There is no conversion capability without it.”
Why not, I asked, tell the public about the success of the raid and the fact that Iran no longer has a potential nuclear weapon?
The answer: “There will be a top-secret report about all of this, but we don’t tell people how hard we work. We tell the public what we think it wants to hear.”
The US official, asked about the future of the Iranian nuclear program, quickly acknowledged that “there is a communication problem” when it comes to the fate of the program.
The intent of the strike planners, he said, “was to prevent the Iranians from building a nuclear weapon in the near term—a year or so—with the hope they would not try again. The clear understanding was that there was no expectation to ‘obliterate’ every aspect of their nuclear program. We don’t even know what that is.
“Obliteration means the glass—[eliminating] Iran’s nuclear program—is full. The planning and the results are the glass is half-full. For Trump critics, the results are the glass is half-empty—the centrifuges may have survived and four hundred pounds of 60 percent enriched uranium are missing. The bombs could not be assured to penetrate the centrifuge chamber . . . too deep, but they could cover them up [with rocks and other bomb debris] and in the process cause unknown damage to them.
“Whether the 60 percent [enriched uranium] was there or not is irrelevant because without centrifuges they cannot refine it to weapons grade. Add to this the research and refinement and conversion from gas to metal—required for a bomb—at Isfahan are also gone.
“Results? Glass is half-full . . . a couple of years of respite and uncertain future. So now Trump’s defense is Full Glass. Critics? Half-empty. Reality? Half-full. There you are.”
The immediate beneficiary of the use of US force in Iran will not be a more placid Middle East, but Israel, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The Israeli Air Force and army are still killing massive numbers of Palestinians in Gaza.
There remains no evidence that Iran was on the cusp of becoming a nuclear power. But as the world has known for decades, Israel maintains a significant nuclear arsenal that it officially claims does not exist.
This is a story not about the bigger picture, which is muddled, but about a successful US mission that was the subject of a lot of sloppy reporting because of a reviled president. It would have been a breakthrough had anyone in the mainstream press spoken or written about the double standard that benefits Israel and its nuclear umbrella, but in America that remains a taboo.
conflict
Obama Dropped Over 26K Bombs Without Congressional Approval

@miss_stacey_ Biden, Clinton, Obama & Harris on Iran #biden #clinton #obama #harris #trump #iran #nuclear
Iran has been the target for decades. Biden, Harris, and Clinton—all the Democrats have said that they would attack Iran if given the opportunity. It appears that Donald Trump is attempting to mitigate a potentially irresolvable situation. As he bluntly told reporters: We basically — we have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the f‑‑‑ they’re doing.”
A portion of the nation believes Trump acted like a dictator by attacking Iran without Congressional approval. I explained how former President Barack Obama decimated the War Powers Resolution Act when he decided Libya was overdue for a regime change. The War Powers Act, or War Powers Resolution of 1973, grants the POTUS the ability to send American troops into battle if Congress receives a 48-hour notice. The stipulation here is that troops cannot remain in battle for over 60 days unless Congress authorizes a declaration of war. Congress could also remove US forces at any time by passing a resolution.
Libya is one of seven nations that Obama bombed without Congressional approval, yet no one remembers him as a wartime president, as the United States was not technically at war. Over 26,000 bombs were deployed across 7 nations under his command in 2016 alone. Libya, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, and Pakistan were attacked without a single vote. Donald Trump’s recent orders saw 36 bombs deployed in Iran.
The majority of those bombings happened in Syria, Libya, and Iraq under the premise of targeting extremist groups like ISIS. Drone strikes were carried out across Somalia, Yemen, and Pakistan as the Obama Administration accused those nations of hosting al-Qaeda affiliated groups. Coincidentally, USAID was also providing funding to those groups.
The 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) was initially implemented to hunt down the Taliban and al-Qaeda after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Obama broadened his interpretation of the AUMF and incorporated newly formed militant groups that were allegedly expanding across the entire Middle East. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism believes there were up to 1,100 civilian casualties in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. Thousands of civilians died in Syria and Iraq but the death toll was never calculated. At least 100 innocent people died in the 2016 attacks in Afghanistan alone.
The government will always augment the law for their personal agenda. The War Powers Resolution was ignored and the AUMF was altered. Congress was, however, successful in preventing Obama from putting US troops on the ground and fighting a full-scale war. In 2013, Obama sought congressional approval for military action in Syria but was denied. Obama again attempted to deploy troops in 2015 but was denied. Congress has to redraft the AUMF to specifically prevent Obama from deploying troops in the Middle East. “The authorization… does not authorize the use of the United States Armed Forces on the ground in Syria for the purpose of combat operations.” Obama attempted to redraft the AUMF on his own by insisting he would prohibit “enduring offensive ground combat operations” or long-term deployment of troops. He was met with bipartisan disapproval as both sides believed he was attempting to drag the United States into another unnecessary war.
The United States should not be involved in any of these battles, but here we are. Those living in fear that Donald Trump is a dictator fail to recognize that past leadership had every intention of sending American men and women into battle unilaterally without a single vote cast.
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