In March 1906, on the heels of the U.S. Army’s massacre of some 1,000 men, women, and children in the crater of a volcano in the American-occupied Philippines, humorist Mark Twain took his criticism public. A long-time anti-imperialist, he flippantly suggested that Old Glory should be redesigned “with the white stripes painted black and the…
Germany’s literary establishment has declared a moratorium on the phrase “climate hysteria.” No wonder “climate denial” is epidemic – there’s no better way to convince people something’s not real than making belief mandatory. One might think that painting the climate debate in black and white – evil “climate deniers” versus saintly Greta Thunberg and her…
The sleep of reason brings forth monsters. El sueño de la razon produce monstruos. …Francisco José de Goya Afghanistan is in dire straits due to the United Kingdom’s ‘divide & rule’ colonial legacy and an unholy alliance with the United States circa Charlie Wilson’s endless War, which mutated from carefully inflamed anti-Soviet insurgency into…
During his election campaign in 2011, the current leader of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, expressed his intention to bring to life several grandiose political and infrastructure initiatives. The most ambitious of these projects entails the construction of a new waterway, to the west of the Bosporus, that will connect the Black Sea to the Sea…
Plagues from the east are nothing new. The Black Death and other epidemics arrived in Europe from China during the 1300’s, killing a large percentage of its population. Much of this pestilence came from rats that stowed away on merchant ships coming from the east. At the end of World War I, another pandemic, wrongly…
In August of 1945, the United States became the only country to drop nuclear bombs on an enemy. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were largely destroyed in the blink of an eye. And the Japanese had no choice but to surrender to the Allies, finally ending World War II. Ever since, world superpowers have been rapidly advancing…
