James Mullin
Vietnam Veteran (non-combatant)
Bachelors in English, University of Iowa
Masters in Library Science and Information Studies, UC Berkeley.
Law Librarian, Prison Teacher, Curriculum developer,
Progressive Leftist Humanist
Contact Information
Articles by James Mullin
March 01, 2009
In 1907, a young Quaker woman from a small town in New Jersey travels to England on a Fellowship. There she is exposed to the ideas and practices of militant suffragists. When she adopts their tactics, she pays a high price, but she returns to the United States determined to apply what she has learned so American Women can secure the vote.
February 06, 2009
The history of slavery in America usually begins with the well known fact that founding fathers George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were slave-holders. What is missing is any meaningful context for that information. Providing it requires a wholesale historical revision.
January 27, 2009
In the occupied West Bank, Palestinian areas are separated from each other by numerous Israeli-only roads, checkpoints, security zones, towns, settlements and outposts.
The chief cartographer of this maze was former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. He enthusiastically promoted settlements i...
September 17, 2008
When most knowledgeable Americans hear the word secessionist, they think of the southern slave states that formed the Confederacy and seceded from the United States back in 1861. That action set off the "the war between the states" and caused 625,000 deaths.
A new secessionist group we need to...
September 12, 2008
Whenever I listen to the Star-Spangled Banner, I call to mind whatever images and thoughts make up my own personal vision of America. That's what free people do in a free country. Most of us don´t need a flag as big as a football field, a uniformed color guard, or a Phantom Jet fly-over to feel patr...
August 24, 2008
Former Senator Phil Gramm is not just another Texas blow-hard with an abrasive personality. He's "John McCain´s brain on economic matters", and it doesn't matter that he resigned as co-chairman of McCain´s presidential campaign in July. He'll be back if the old "maverick" is elected, and he migh...
August 22, 2008
As a reporter who has covered Pluto´s career for decades, it hasn´t been easy watching the smallest player on the planetary team (0.0021 Earths) being blind-sided and gang-tackled by 424 heavyweights from the International Astronomical Union. (IAU)
It started when Pluto was in the deepest part o...
July 11, 2008
When D.W. Griffith´s epic silent film "Birth of a Nation" was shown in American theatres in 1915, it changed film making and film viewing overnight. President Woodrow Wilson called it "history written in lightning." Griffith not only created spectacular Civil War battle scenes, he glorified the K...
July 08, 2008
When I first contacted Dr. Paul Winkler, Executive Director of the New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education, and asked him to consider adding the study of the Great Irish Famine to the state curriculum, he asked me if I was claiming Genocide. I said I wanted the teachers and students to make up...
June 02, 2008
The first mention of James, the brother of Jesus, comes in the gospel of Matthew, Chapter 13, Verse 55 - 58:
"And when he (Jesus) was come into his own country, (Nazareth) he taught them in their synagogue, insomuch that they were astonished, and said, Whence hath this man this wisdom, and these...
July 01, 2008
Joe Six-Pack´s Guide to the Ongoing Financial Crisis, Part III:
What Bear Stearns tried to say before it got whacked
In March of 2008 a venerable 85-year-old investment bank suddenly realized that it had become a pariah on Wall Street. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) insisted th...
May 12, 2008
With the death of Jesus, the apostles and other early Jewish Christians remained in Jerusalem under the leadership of James, the brother of the Lord. An apostolic council, led by James, decided that Gentiles who wished to become Christians did not need to become Jews first. The death of James marks the end of the Christian community in Jerusalem
May 09, 2008
Irish History is being subjected to a revisionist rewrite designed to soften Britain's harsh colonial rule, and portray the Irish as hopeless romantics wallowing in victimhood.
May 05, 2008
When the New Deal's primary bank regulation law (Glass-Steagall Act) was repealed by Congress in 1999, financial services companies took advantage of their new-found freedom to create and sell unregulated complex derivatives. The value of these hugely profitable instruments is very difficlt to determine, but banks put it in the trillions. Oddly enough, they could turn out to be worthless.
April 26, 2008
To understand Wall Street's current financial crisis, we need to take a brief look back at the risky practices of banks just before the stock market crashed in 1929. The major New Deal law that reformed bad banking behavior was the Glass - Steagall Act. Understanding how and why it came to be repealed in 1999 will reveal the extent to which banking deregulation has put our economy at grave risk.
April 21, 2008
When John Yoo was a Deputy Assistant Attorney General, he authored a 2003 "torture memo" in order to shield the CIA and members of the administration from prosecution under the U.S. War Crimes Act, if they committed acts defined as tortutre by the Gerneva Conventions. He is currently a "distinguished scholar" at the National Constitution Center even though he has written legal opinions undermining that founding document. He should be prosecuted for aiding and abetting the commission of War Crimes.
September 12, 2006
More than a century after the Synod of Whitby (664) ostensibly resolved various conflicts between Celtic and the Roman Christianity, the two churches continued to grow apart.
The Celtic Church, with its strong tradition of monastic schools, missionary outreach, and ascetic self-denial, remained ...
March 22, 2007
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is in hot water over the politically-motivated firing of federal prosecutors, but I don’t believe he should resign...
September 12, 2006
When Rome fell to the Visigoths in A.D. 410, it ushered in “The Dark Ages” for most of Europe. But as the “matted unwashed barbarians descended on Roman cities, looting artifacts and burning books, the Irish, who were just learning to read and write, took up the great labor of copying all of weste...
September 12, 2006
Concerning the New Testament origins of the doctrine of original sin, The Catholic Biblical Encyclopedia (CBE) points to two statements by Jesus which it says indicate “a universal sinful condition on the part of mankind”.
In Matthew 19:17 Jesus says, “Why callest thou me good? There is none goo...
May 19, 2006
Half way through the biblical account called Acts of the Apostles, Simon Peter disappears for good.
To find out more about him, I consulted Lives of the Popes by Richard P. McBrien. McBrien is the author of Catholics, the general editor of the Encyclopedia of Catholicism, and a professor of theo...
May 05, 2006
Denis Donaldson, a life-long Irish Republican, confessed to being a British spy in December of 2005. He told Ireland’s state broadcaster, RTE, that he had been receiving paychecks from the British intelligence agencies MI5 and Special Branch even while he was serving as Sinn Fein's chief administrat...
May 01, 2006
We welcome the return of a Native American game to our playing fields! Now that you are among us, we who play baseball seek to know your ways, and have you understand ours so that we may live in peace.
Our people follow the diamond-shaped pathways with spiked feet. Our ancestors decreed that ...