Author: nick
Image by Wikipedia. Earlier this year, President Donald Trump surveyed his top military brass on the prospect of making war in Iran. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine urged caution, presciently predicting that a ramped-up campaign against Iran could lead its leaders to close the Strait of Hormuz. However, Pete Hegseth, Trump’s self-styled “Secretary of War,” jumped at the prospect of such a conflict. “Pete, I think you were the first one to speak up,” Trump recently recalled at a press event. “And you said, ‘Let’s do it, because you can’t let them have a nuclear weapon.’” Americans join the…
A Colorado jury awarded former New Jersey investment manager Robert Dial $24 million after finding that a police detective wrongfully arrested him in connection with a 2022 shooting involving Dial’s son. According to the lawsuit, Detective Shannon Brukbacher of the Parker Police Department was upset that Dial hired a lawyer for his son, and she repeatedly pressed him for information, even though Dial was in another state and had told his son to cooperate with police. Brukbacher later accused Dial of helping hide a gun, even though officers found it immediately at the scene, and prosecutors dropped the charges just…
Americans have been fed a comforting fairy tale about Islamic terrorism. Radical jihadists attack the West simply because they despise freedom, democracy, and the American way of life. This narrative flatters domestic audiences while conveniently obscuring a far more troubling reality. For decades, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Israel have armed, financed, tolerated, and tapped into Sunni Islamist extremists as geopolitical tools to destabilize rivals. The evidence spans multiple theaters and rests on declassified documents, congressional investigations, and credible investigative journalism. The most thoroughly documented case is Operation Cyclone, the CIA program to arm and finance the Afghan…
Photograph Source: United States Ambassador to China – Public Domain “China isn’t as strong as it appeared in Beijing, and America isn’t as weak.” (Washington Post, David Ignatius, “The Trump-Xi narrative isn’t true. America keeps falling uphill,” May 21, 2026.) The Washington Post’s leading national security columnist, David Ignatius, has been an ever-present apologist for the “power of the military and the secrecy of the intelligence community.” At a crucial time that requires fresh thinking about the loss of U.S. influence and credibility in the international arena, Ignatius and the mainstream media continue to identify the U.S. as the #1…
The Trump administration maintains that the government of Iran can never be allowed to develop a nuclear bomb. The reason? Because the leaders of that land are allegedly lunatics. The primary concern appears to be that dissident factions sponsored by Iran—including Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis—could wreak untold devastation, were they to gain access to such weapons of mass destruction (WMD). In reality, the only government which has ever explicitly and credibly threatened to deploy WMD against entire populations of mostly innocent people is that of the United States of America. Not only did the U.S. government use atomic bombs…
McNary Dam, Columbia River, Washington/Oregon. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair. The defining signature of the past 6,000 years of human civilization is the domestication of the hydrosphere—capturing, damming, canalizing, reorienting, propertizing, privatizing, consuming, profiting from, depleting, and poisoning it. From ancient hydraulic civilizations to the hydro-powered superdams, reservoirs, canals, and ports of the 21st century, water has been repurposed for humanity, often at the expense of millions of other species that depend on it. Harnessing the hydrosphere has shaped societies and the distinctiveness of cultures across history. The design of hydraulic infrastructure has partially fated societies to the entropic costs that…
Image by Fauzan Saari. Who would imagine that an international sporting event will be the next battleground in the fight against authoritarian repression? Yet that scenario is unfolding right now, and the battleground is the World Cup tournament – soon to begin in cities around the U.S. To understand the dynamics of the situation, consider the concept of state terror, i.e. a regime’s efforts to instill fear as a means of dividing and disempowering a people, thereby tightening its grip on power. In the past year and a half, the Trump administration has deployed ICE as an instrument of state…
In an unprecedented move, the Trump administration announced a decision to impose sanctions on officials in Lebanon’s military and security apparatus who are accused of aiding Hezbollah. The sanctions targeted a Lebanese Army general and a branch chief of the Lebanese Armed Forces’ Intelligence Directorate, marking the first time an American administration has taken such measures against members of Lebanese state institutions. Sanctions were also announced against members of the Lebanese Shi’ite Amal party, which is a close ally of Hezbollah, along with members of Hezbollah itself and Iran’s ambassador designate to Lebanon. “Today’s designations target individuals who are impeding…
US President Donald Trum’’s state visit to China will go down in history as the day the United States finally acknowledged Beijing’s ascendancy as a global superpower. That acknowledgment does not need to be articulated in a formal statement; it can be clearly read in the subtext of diplomatic behavior, global perception, and shifting media coverage. During the summit, Trump’s delegation – accompanied by prominent American corporate leaders – engaged with President Xi Jinping not from a position of absolute global dictation, but through a lens of defensive pragmatism. This transactional approach focused on securing bilateral trade commitments and preventing…
My friend Michael Mailer is an extremely talented film director and producer, most recently of Cutman and Little Audrey, the latter a true story about a little girl that created miracles. Michael’s father, the novelist Norman Mailer, taught me how to headbutt, and when I asked him if there was brain damage involved, he looked nonplussed. “Writers have harder heads than normal people,” he said. Be that as it may, Norman was a frustrated movie director. He introduced me to Elia Kazan, the renowned director, and Larry McMurtry, the great western writer whose Lonesome Dove and The Last Picture Show…