The steady deterioration of American political discourse seems to have reached its lowest ebb in historical memory, visible in the rightward shift of both Democrats and Republicans.  One sign is the frenzied Democratic assault on Republicans from the right, especially in foreign policy.  Another is the resounding silence on the most crucial problems facing humanity: More

Canadian hockey culture is racist.

I get it. That sounds harsh. After all, Canada is perceived from beyond its borders as the beacon of progressive multiculturalism to the North. It is – and I speak from the experience of someone who lives in the U.S. South – in relative terms an almost impossibly utopian society, what with the healthcare, gun control, and lack of openly racist head of state. More

During the bombing of Baghdad in January 1991 I went with other journalists on a government-organized trip to what they claimed was the remains of a baby milk plant at Abu Ghraib which the US had just destroyed, saying that it was really a biological warfare facility. Walking around the wreckage, I found a smashed-up desk with letters showing that the plant had indeed been producing “infant formula” milk powder. It had not been very successful in doing so, since much of the correspondence was about its financial and production problems and how they might best be resolved. It did not seem likely that the Iraqi government could have fabricated this evidence, though it was conceivable that in some part of the plant, which I did see, they might have been manufacturing biological weapons (BW). More