I write this on Easter Sunday, the day of resurrection and hope in the Christian calendar, but such a bright promise looks a bit thin given what is going on in our world, our country: what looks like a mass outbreak of mental illness among our political class. I say this because here is a …
Continue reading “Is Our Political Class Mentally Ill?”
Fresh civilian casualties are being reported in Mosul.
Iraqi soldiers reported symptoms of chlorine gas exposure in Mosul.
All I can say is, we’ve got a hell of a political system on our hands when the surest way for a president to win the adoration of those who thought him a dangerous, ignorant, narcissistic, erratic, and bullshitting blowhard yesterday is to drop a bomb or fire a cruise missile today. We already knew …
Continue reading “What a Perverse Presidential Incentive System!”
Cui bono – "who benefits" – is the first question an experienced detective asks when investigating a crime. Since I was a detective myself for a short time in my youth, I know the meaning. Often, the first and obvious suspicion is false. You ask yourself "cui bono", and another suspect, who you did not …
Continue reading “The Syria ‘Chemical Attack’: Cui Bono?”
Two unnamed senior Trump administration officials briefing journalists Tuesday asserted that a Syrian regime airstrike in the city of Khan Sheikhoun on April 4 had deliberately killed dozens of civilians with sarin gas. The Trump administration officials dismissed the Russian claim that the Syrian airstrike had targeted a munitions warehouse controlled by Islamic extremists as …
Continue reading “New Revelations Belie Trump Claims on Syria Chemical Attack”
Donald Trump has just approved Montenegro’s accession into NATO. Montenegro is a tiny nation, and its inclusion doesn’t significantly change the abilities of NATO, but it’s inclusion is huge, and its meaning is significant and clear to Russia. As the curtain rose on the Donald Trump presidency, the script promised an administration that would warm …
Continue reading “Trump, Russia, and NATO: Why Tiny Montenegro’s Not Tiny Now”
Turkish warplanes targeted PKK locations in northern Iraq.
In the summer of 2013, the international media was aflame with reports that Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad had murdered 1,400 civilians in the town of Ghouta: using deadly sarin gas, children, women, and men had been horribly slaughtered, and Syria’s Islamist opposition, in concert with the Washington foreign policy Establishment, was agitating for US intervention. …
Continue reading “Trump Walks Into Syria Trap Via Fake ‘Intelligence’”
For Palestinians, 2017 is a year of significant anniversaries. While historians mark May 15th as the anniversary of the date on which Palestinians were expelled from their historic homeland in 1948, the fact is the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians began in earnest in 1947. In strict historical terms 1947 and 1948 were the years …
Continue reading “Palestine Retold: Palestine’s Tragic Anniversaries Are Not Only About Remembrance” 
