Every civilization that has ever existed has ultimately collapsed,” Henry Kissinger once noted, in the most Kissingerian tones imaginable. “History is a tale of efforts that failed, or aspirations that weren’t realized. So, as a historian, one has to live with a sense of the inevitability of tragedy.” What…
Over the weekend, thousands of anti-Trump advocates gathered for “No Kings” protests across the country, but their aims were not directed at constitutional norms; instead, they are engaged in a protest against the President’s authority over the Executive Branch. The chief issue in Washington since the second Trump inauguration…
You actually don’t have to read it. Has anyone actually read The Handmaid’s Tale? Maybe Margaret Atwood has. But it seems unlikely that many of the demonstrators who hauled out their red cloaks yet again last weekend have done more than watch the HBO TV show based—rather loosely—on the 1985 novel.
It is some years since I described Benjamin Netanyahu as the most dangerous man in West Asia. That was back when we heard all about the menace of the Assad regime in Damascus, the Beelzebub otherwise known as Iran’s supreme leader, and other such unthinkably malign figures.
One of the things skipped past in the flurry of happenings over the last ten days is that the Trump administration has abandoned Ukraine. Pete Hegseth said as much in Congressional testimony where he said there were no plans to send Ukraine additional weapons or ask Congress for more…
In an instant, everything has changed. For most of history, weapons have been top-down. Rulers tried to monopolize new technologies of violence, giving themselves an advantage over external forces that didn’t have them and their own subjugated populations. Nuclear bombs are emblematic of this historical pattern. Drones are transforming…
This Middle East War is deeply connected with the war to destroy Russia, and it is all orchestrated by the NEOCONS. I have written before that I argued with Bill Kristol back in the ’90s, whose father helped start the Neoconservative movement. They wanted to remove all opponents of…
Saturday morning, we toodled over to the next town, Salem, New York, (pop. 2,612, per capita income $19,499) fifty miles northeast of Albany, to catch one of the hundreds of “No Kings” demos across the nation sponsored by Shanghai-based software billionaire Neville Roy Singham, Walmart heiress Christy Walton, Paypal…
The Donald called Fed Chairman Powell a “numbskull” last week and deservedly so. But to paraphrase an old adage, when the cap fits said numbskulls tend to wear it themselves. Surely, that’s where we are this morning upon Israel’s reprehensible attack on Iran’s civilian nuclear facilities and decapitation of…
Vacuous Pete read the US DoD FY 26 posture statement last week, explaining how the feds will spend the new trillion dollar US defense budget. The SecDef seems unaware of the idiocy, and the irony, of what he presented to Congress. We may quibble on whether it was idiot-speak, mendacity,…
