One of my language students is originally from India, from a northern state in the foothills of the Himalayas. Last week, she reported how her mother let her know that the ground temperature near their home is 145°F. This is because the air temperature is quite abnormally high and because…

Hi Xxx, I am very familiar with the Mearsheimer, Grayzone, Johnstone atrocity-justifying and atrocity-minimizing arguments as regards the Russian Federation in Syria, Chechnya, Georgia & Ukraine. It is thin gruel and an easy read for any critic of US imperial wars: The Russian state employs all the same manufacturing of…

Right wing media is intentionally conflating the term “grooming” with what they used to absurdly call “the gay agenda.” The latter term was the paranoid and fantastical notion that LGBTQ people were investing their time in some sort of magical plan for world domination by converting people, young and old…

I was trying to figure out what it was about the analyses of situations in Ukraine, Syria, China and beyond by people like Max Blumenthal, Caitlin Johnstone, Aaron Maté, the hapless Caleb Maupin and others — on what could loosely be described as the authoritarian or selectively anti-imperialist left —…

“Preemptive war” is absurd as a concept and horrific in practice when the US does it — as in Iraq, Afghanistan, the whole posture of the “War on Terror,” Cold War catastrophes like Viet Nam and Drug War debacles, like the 1989 Panama invasion. And preemptive war is an absurd…

Glenn Greenwald recently had a mini-debate on his podcast, with a high school student on the topic of Tucker Carlson’s assertion that Black Lives Matter protesters should be deemed domestic terrorists. Glenn’s predictably smarmy response was that he doesn’t watch Tucker Carlson, didn’t know about that segment and that he…

“… a new (Covid) variant is announced when pharmaceutical company share prices dip.”(1) — Jordan Peterson, 12/8/2021 This quote encapsulates what happens when someone who is a lifelong vehement champion of the capitalism opportunistically decides to offer a Marxist-style take on an urgent social crisis. The line sounds good; it…

As I puzzle over the question of how, out of 209 million adult Americans, Donald Trump became the one elevated to the status of visionary leader and vanquishing hero for tens of millions of his followers, it strikes me that it is his very vacuity, his very emptiness that permits…

This Rittenhouse trial and verdict are just another iteration of something that plays out again and again in the US: a disturbing, unjust event (2 men killed, 1 gravely wounded by AR-15 faux-medic boy in Kenosha) occurs as a result of a series of disturbing, unjust events (many cop and…