I say adversary instead of enemy. Mr. Khamenei and the Iranian people are not the enemies of the US. They did not attack us on February 28, we attacked them… And we did so while the Iranians were engaged in good faith negotiations, or so they thought. Iran’s new Ayatollah shares something…
Inside the mind of the CIA’s most prolific torturer. Within the clandestine world of American intelligence throughout the Cold War, no figure embodied the moral contradictions of the era more completely than Sidney Gottlieb. Known within the CIA as the “Black Sorcerer” and later dubbed the “Poisoner in Chief” by…
“Exposure to true information does not matter anymore. A person who is demoralized is unable to assess true information. The facts tell him nothing, even if I shower him with information, with authentic proof, with documents and pictures…he will refuse to believe it…that’s the tragedy of the situation of…
While censorship is often the main focus of discussions about free speech, there’s a related phenomenon that can do just as much damage to a free society. Not by preventing people from saying things they believe in, but by forcing them to say things they do not. A scoreboard shows a…
President Donald Trump this week expressed his “disgust” with NATO in an interview with Reuters. He added that he is “absolutely” considering withdrawing the United States from the alliance. What has triggered this fury? The refusal of key European NATO allies to join the United States and Israel in their…
There is a peculiar logic at work in the Trump administration’s approach to the Iran war — one that would be almost admirable in its audacity if it were not so catastrophically dangerous. Having spent the better part of a decade methodically dismantling every diplomatic architecture that constrained Iran’s…
On April Fools’ Day, Donald Trump addressed the nation about the Iran War. It would have been too painful to listen to his adenoidal droning and borscht-belt insult comedian shtick, so I just read the transcript. He said nothing new. It was just a live version of his social…
I remember the first time I felt the world shift — not in a single moment, but as an accumulation of everyday experiences that, in retrospect, felt impossible to ignore. It was early spring of 2024, and I stood in a local supermarket examining the price of basic staples…
California is a cash machine. The state collects some of the country’s highest income, business, and fuel taxes, and now spends more than $300 billion per year. And yet, everywhere you look, California seems to be falling apart. The roads are crumbling. Mismanaged wildfires have turned neighborhoods into ash. Drug addiction and homelessness have metastasized, turning…
Time has a new article out in which unnamed sources assert that the Pentagon was caught totally off-guard by Iran’s aggressive retaliation against the US-Israeli onslaught which began last month, reporting the following: “Key Trump officials, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, were surprised by the barrage of retaliatory attacks Tehran…
