Reprinted from TomDispatch. It’s one of the stranger phenomena on this planet. By 2023, the U.S. was estimated to spend more money on its “defense budget” than the next 10 countries combined. Yes, the next 10! And yet, whether you’re talking about Korea and Vietnam in...
As I write this, more than 31,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza and, as Aya Batrawy reported for NPR, thousands more are “unaccounted for – either missing under the rubble, buried hastily in side streets, or decomposing in areas that can’t be safely reached.”...
From TomDispatch: You know we’re in an increasingly extreme world when a young American airman burns himself to death outside the Israeli embassy in Washington to protest Israel’s nightmarish war in Gaza. (“Today, I am planning to engage in an extreme act of protest...
Reprinted from TomDispatch: Make no mistake, artificial Intelligence (AI) has already gone into battle in a big-time way. The Israeli military is using it in Gaza on a scale previously unknown in wartime. They’ve reportedly been employing an AI target-selection...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. War, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing. So that classic late 1960s song claimed. Still, for Bill Astore and me (and, I have little doubt, Joe Biden, too), such a thought didn’t cross our minds as we played with toy soldiers on...
Consider this strange: Seventy-eight years after the first and only nuclear weapons were used on Planet Earth, anyone with half a brain knows that a nuclear war would be an incomparable disaster for this planet and everyone living on it. So, remind me, why the endless...
I was uptown in New York City on September 11, 2001, but I still remember the distant smoke that you could see over the Hudson River. If you had told me then that, thanks to those four hijacked planes and a tiny group of al-Qaeda operatives, my country would launch a...
In war, people die for absurd reasons or often no reason at all. They die due to accidents of birth, the misfortune of being born in the wrong place — Cambodia or Gaza, Afghanistan or Ukraine — at the wrong time. They die due to happenstance, choosing to shelter...
Originally appeared at TomDispatch: How strange to be living through it a second time, however different the form. I’m thinking, of course, about a devastating set of totally unexpected attacks on one’s homeland. On September 11, 2001, it was the World Trade Center in...
Originally appeared at TomDispatch: On a picturesque beach in central Gaza, a mile north of the now-flattened Al-Shati refugee camp, long black pipes snake through hills of white sand before disappearing underground. An image released by the Israel Defense Forces...
