Author: nick

Image by Matt Palmer. What a planet! I only wish I could tell my grandfather about it. He arrived in this country, an immigrant from what’s now Ukraine, in March 1888 — or so his daughter, my Aunt Hilda, wrote me once upon a distant time. Here’s how she began that long-ago message to me: “Your grandfather, Moore Engelhardt, a boy of 16, arrived in New York from Europe in March 1888. It was during the famous blizzard, and after a sea voyage of about 30 days. He had no money. He often said that he had a German 50-cent…

Zack Polanski, leader of the Green Party of England and Wales, has signed a letter calling on the British government to monitor British-Israeli dual citizens who served in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) during the war in Gaza. The letter says the U.K. should track returning soldiers and require disclosure of IDF service, saying “nobody wants to live next to a potential war criminal.” Critics, including Jewish community organizations and some political opponents, condemned the proposal as unfairly targeting Israelis and potentially encouraging discrimination against British Jews. The post Brickbat: Keeping a List appeared first on Reason.com. Source link

Is Beijing preparing for war? Of course: It has no choice. But the war it is bracing to wage is one the United States seems intent on provoking. The Chinese have no other such plans. China’s President Xi Jinping with President Donald Trump outside the Temple of Heaven in Beijingon on May 14. (White House / Daniel Torok) By Patrick LawrenceSpecial to Consortium News I have never quite got over how completely Antony Blinken and Jake Sullivan, who Joe Biden assigned to oversee his foreign policy, blew it during their first encounter with Chinese counterparts at a hotel in Anchorage. This…

Image by David Vines. When he ran for president in 2012, Mitt Romney famously declared that corporations are people. What brought laughter then has begun to be reality today, however. A little noticed court decision in Delaware confirmed that corporations have the right to vote in that state. I wish this was a joke. But it’s not funny at all. Delaware corporations, however, won’t face the death penalty as Delaware abolished it more than a decade ago, so we won’t see a manifestation of one of the best signs at Occupy Wall Street: “I’ll believe corporations are people when Texas…

“Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty were critically important weapons in the free world’s competition with Soviet totalitarianism—and without them the Soviet bloc might even have not disintegrated.” This was the assessment of Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national security advisor to President Jimmy Carter and one of the most influential foreign policy strategists of the Cold War era. Brzezinski’s description is notable not only because of who said it, but because of how he described the organization. He did not characterize Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty as merely a U.S.-funded news organization but instead, referred to it as a “weapon” in a…

The New York Times posted a long editorial last week to make the case against choosing Bill Pulte as the acting director of national intelligence.  That was not a difficult case to make, but it didn’t question whether we should even have an Office of National Intelligence.  The answer to that particular issue requires an understanding of why the intelligence failure of 9/11 took place and why the many investigations of the failure came up with the wrong answers. There have been two major strategic intelligence failures over the past 85 years—Pearl Harbor and 9/11.  In each case, nearly three…

Gustave Flaubert was a French writer who wrote the great Madame Bovary novel, among other lesser ones. A close friend of his once wrote to him asking for advice on happiness, and Gustave wrote back offering his fail-proof method to achieving joyfulness: “One needs good health, and also good luck. And of course stupidity, but if the last one’s missing, all’s lost.” Good old Gustave, he certainly knew things. If he were around today, he’d be finding some very happy people in America, and I mean very happy people. Especially among the young glued to their contraptions. Aristotle insisted happiness…

Adam Hochschild’s masterpiece King Leopold’s Ghost reconstructs one of the largest and least remembered mass atrocities of the modern era and exposes how Belgium’s liberal monarchy built a slave state in the Congo, which killed millions. First published in 1999 and updated in a revised 2006 edition, Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost serves as a stark historical warning at a time when Western politicians and commentators habitually frame global politics as an epic struggle between virtuous democracies and barbarous autocracies. The book shows in forensic detail how one of Europe’s most constitutional monarchies oversaw a regime of forced labor, mutilation, rape,…

On September 15, 1970, Richard Nixon ordered the CIA to “make the economy [of Chile] scream” (CIA Director Richard Helms’s actual note of the conversation can be seen here). But it wasn’t the economy that screamed: it was people. “The economy” is an abstraction. The concrete reality of sanctions and embargos is people who are starving. Driving people to starvation has become the foreign policy of the United States. America has always struggled for its soul. In his book The True Flag, Stephen Kinzer pins the date the struggle began as 1898. That year, America confronted the choice between remembering…

We’ve never seen a president like Donald J. Trump. Heck, I’ve never seen a human being like Trump. When Henry David Thoreau wrote about the man who steps to the music of a different drummer, he was probably imagining a religious seeker or political dissenter—not a billionaire businessman who dated European supermodels and erected golden towers before ascending to the heights of global power. But has anyone danced so wildly through life as the current POTUS? Trump’s latest two-step: waging a brutal war against Iran—to the delight of America’s most fanatical Iran hawks—and then, this weekend, announcing a momentous peace…