Palantir Technologies — its name derived from the “seeing-stones” of deception (Palantir) that allow their holder to see across great distances to track friends and foes, in JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings — has been called the “most evil company on the planet” by critics[1] — on both…
Mark Dankof’s advice to Putin’s Russia (and Iran) is to stand up to the New World Order. If they pull a knife, pull a gun. Ukraine Watch on April 11th, 2025: Trump’s special representative for Ukraine, General Keith Kellogg, has proposed dividing Ukraine. This is…
I’m ready for heads to roll, figuratively of course, because I find it unacceptable that the Department of Justice, under the direction of Pam Bondi, is still prosecuting an American citizen over the defunct “pistol brace rule” signed by Merrick Garland and enacted under the Biden ATF—the rule has…
The Democrats’ most influential pollster, David Shor, has been in the news lately with his report on how Kamala Harris botched the 2024 election. Lots of interesting stuff, but one particular item in Shor’s analysis requires refutation for encouraging Republicans’ worst, stupidest, most mathematically …
Whatever else you think is happening in our world, contraction is the reality-based order-of-the-day, and everything else is downstream of that. The world has to get by with less. Nothing is going to fix this for everybody, though any number of schemes for redistributing what’s left will preoccupy the…
One of the questions rarely asked regarding the ongoing American crisis is whether we have passed the point where reform is possible. Few want to consider that possibility for obvious reasons. If reform through the regular political process is no longer possible, then only unpleasant alternatives remain. One of…
Trump gives in to the military/security complex, renews weapons to Ukraine and extends sanctions on Russia for a year. On April 10 Trump declared a continuation of the national emergency with Russia and renewed President Biden’s April 2021 executive order declaring Russia to be an “unusual and extraordinary threat…
President Trump says he want to “go back, probably, to a 2020 standard” as regards federal mandatory miles-per-gallon edicts – the latter being the right word because it’s the honest word. A “standard” is an objective value of some kind, used to evaluate whether a given thing rises to that standard. Federal…
The title of today’s essay pays homage to the inimitable John D. MacDonald’s novel The Girl, the Gold Watch & Everything in which the gold watch has the power to stop time. In the context of today’s keening cries of tariff-trade-war agony, let’s use this imaginary power over time to…
Twenty years ago, the word “incel” didn’t exist. More importantly, the notion of the “incel” as a person to be loathed and despised wasn’t alive in the popular imagination. Before “incel,” men who were low-status, socially awkward, unattractive, or otherwise unappealing to women were called things like “nerd,” “geek,”…
