As the Schiller Institute was meeting in France for an in-depth dialogue on how to build a new global peace based on development, Biden unleashed cluster bombs on Ukraine.

July 9—Weather forecasts can be fairly predictable, except when they’re not. It’s those fascinating intervals when great forces gather, seemingly out of nowhere, that epochal changes may occur.

July 8—Today was the first of a two-day international conference held by the Schiller Institute, titled “On the Verge of a New World War: European Nations Must Cooperate with the Global South!” Today’s proceedings, organized in three panels, and an evening concert, featured 22 speakers, from 14 different countries. The dialogue took place before more than 200 attendees. Another two panels are set for tomorrow.

July 7—While the July 11-12 Vilnius NATO conference will, in all probability, constitute a self-blinding exercise in arrogance, incompetence and hubris—continuing what historian Barbara Tuchman called “the march of Folly” into the jaws of an “unthinkable” thermonuclear Hell—today’s Strasbourg, France Schiller Institute Conference offers a form of Promethean “forethought”—an alternative to that self-destructive path. The world need not be tragic; neither wealth, nor power, nor force of arms, nor murder need triumph over those that believe in the unalienable rights of humanity. Ideas, indeed, when embodied by individuals in touch with the immortality of humanity, are more powerful than weapons—including thermonuclear weapons.