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What Snowden Wrought
When Edward Snowden was a tyke in North Carolina in the mid-1980s, his father, an engineer in the Coast Guard, got a Commodore 64. One night little Ed saw him playing a rudimentary game in the den and...
View ArticleForget About Human Rights
The Donald J. Trump’s indifference to human rights, law, and basic morality was on display again in December 2019. For example, his + Greeting the Russian Foreign Minister in the Oval Office while...
View ArticleClimate Change Accounting: The Failure of COP25
Prior to the UN Convention on Climate Change talks held in Madrid, the sense that tradition would assert itself was hard to buck. Weariness and frustration came in the wake of initial high minded...
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Are the Wealthiest Americans Tired of Winning Yet?
The obituaries for Paul Volcker, the former Federal Reserve chair who died last Sunday at age 92, have been consistently echoing a truly heroic narrative. Between 1979 and 1987, as one prominent obit...
View ArticleThe 2020 Elections and the Coming of the Post Baby Boomer Era of American...
The 2020 elections are significant for many reasons. But perhaps most importantly this could be the last hurrah for the Silent Generation, those born between 1924 and 1944, and it is also the...
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Europe Is Lost
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair When the tribesmen are dead in their deserts To make room for alien structures Develop, develop And kill what you find if it threatens you —Kate Tempest, Europe Is...
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But Mr. Trump, Is Israel Lovable?
Photograph Source: U.S. Embassy Tel Aviv – Public Domain Speaking before Sheldon Adelson’s Israeli-American Council the other day, Trump took a shot at Jewish Americans who he says don’t “love Israel...
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The Case for a Universal Basic Income
Photograph Source: Generation Grundeinkommen – CC BY 2.0 In a British election campaign overshadowed by Brexit, one important Labour initiative attracted little or no attention. Buried on page 60 of...
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The Free College Battle
Photograph Source: COD Newsroom – CC BY 2.0 The prospect of free public college is shaping up as one of the major divides between the more progressive candidates (Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren)...
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Wither Britain?
Photograph Source: August Brill – CC BY 2.0 Thursday’s UK General election effectively spells the end of British politics as we know it. All that remains is to catalogue events as what is left of the...
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Corbyn’s Defeat has Slain the Left’s Last Illusion
Photograph Source: Jeremy Corbyn – CC BY 2.0 This was an election of two illusions. The first helped persuade much of the British public to vote last week for the very epitome of an Eton toff, a man...
View ArticleRevving the Solar Engine to Support Local Jobs, Clean Energy
Of all the federal government programs struggling out there, there’s one that’s actually working — the federal investment tax credit (ITC) for renewable energy systems. The ITC is a federal incentive...
View ArticleA Mined History: The Bougainville Referendum
It would be an understatement to claim that Bougainville, that blighted piece of autonomous territory in Papua New Guinea, had been through a lot. Companies have preyed upon its environment with...
View ArticleA Totalitarian Republic?
Faction: A number of citizens, whether amounting to a minority or majority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other...
View ArticleSin Taxes & Other Orwellian Methods of Compliance That Feed the Government’s...
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victim may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber...
View ArticleThe Very Bad Space Force Deal
Unless grassroots action somehow stops it, it looks likely that the Trump scheme for a Space Force, a sixth branch of United States armed forces, will happen. The U.S. House of Representatives last...
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The Stubborn Persistence of the Military-Industrial State
I’ve been writing critiques of the Pentagon, the national security state, and America’s never-ending military overreach since at least 1979 — in other words, virtually my entire working life. In those...
View ArticleIndia is Gradually Leaning Toward a Dangerous Unitarianism
One of the unfortunate calamities of India’s historical past is that today religio-cultural tensions continue to sharpen divisions along communal lines in the country. The Citizenship Amendment Bill...
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A Modest Proposal for Improving Senate Impeachment Trials
Photograph Source: U.S. Secretary of Defense – CC BY 2.0 US Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) makes no bones about his position on the likely upcoming impeachment trial of US president Donald Trump. “I am...
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The Threat to Life as We Know It: The View from Sri Lanka
Ranil Senanayake at the Belipola Arboretum. Photo by Quincy Saul, September 2019 Ranil Senanayake is the originator of the science and art of Analog Forestry, and founder of the Belipola Arboretum and...
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