It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir; that Tacitus was right and that peace is merely the desolation left behind after the decisive operations of merciless power. – Seamus Heaney, “Crediting Poetry, ” Nobel lecture + At least 74,396 Palestinians have been killed by [...]

At least 1,439 Palestinians have been killed by Israel, and another 5,052 wounded, since the Trump-brokered “ceasefire” in Gaza went into effect on October 11, 2025. That amounts to more than 18 total casualties and 4.2 deaths a day. In comparison, the US averaged 1.8 deaths per day during the “active” phase of the  Iraq War.

All that great wealth generally gives above a moderate fortune is more room for the freaks of caprice, and more privilege for ignorance and vice, a quicker succession of flatteries, and a larger circle of voluptuousness. — Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, July 28, 1750 + Trump at the UN, sounding like Lex Luthor on ludes: [...]

“The richest fuckin’ people in the richest country in the world – you gonna tell them some little guy in a hole in South America can have something they can’t? Like shit, man. If the little guy in the hole can be a revolutionary, they can be revolutionaries too.” – Robert Stone, Dog Soldiers Is [...]

“The less he understands something, the more firmly he believes in it.” – Wilhelm Reich, Listen, Little Man! Are you an American citizen if you were born here or merely if it looks like you were born here in the eyes of police and immigration officers? Do all American citizens enjoy the same constitutional rights [...]

A tyrant institutionalizes stupidity, but he is the first servant of his own system and the first to be installed within it. – Gilles Delueze + The best story of the summer so far is Trump fleeing the NATO summit in a catering cart….The great American bully sneaking away in a white van filled with [...]

“History is what hurts.” – Frederic Jameson It was 92 in the shade and we fled to the nearest theater to escape the heat and the shrouds of smoke from distant fires that had drifted across the Cascades into the Valley. The movie was “The Odyssey.” Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, not Homer’s, which quickly became [...]

“History that repeats itself turns to farce. Farce that repeats itself turns to history.” – Jean Baudrillard, The Agony of Power Put yourself behind the wheel of Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero’s white Kia. You’re 25-years-old. You’ve been living in the United States for three years. You’ve played by the rules, as you understand them. You [...]

“The American mirror, said the voice, the sad American mirror of wealth and poverty and constant useless metamorphosis, the mirror that sails and whose sails are pain.” – Roberto Bolaño, 2666 ICE has killed again. This time in Houston. Once again, ICE shot and killed someone in their car. Once again, ICE claims the shooting [...]

All my means are sane, my motive and my object mad. ― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale I remember when Woodward and Bernstein’s description in Final Days of Nixon wandering the halls of the West Wing late at night having drunken conversations with the portraits of FDR, Jefferson and Lincoln, seemed such an inconceivable [...]

The US is a violent country.  Every American knows this. We need violence to get through the day. We need to watch it. We need to play at violence in games. We need to hear it and feel it. We need to believe we’re more violent than anyone else. We need the security of thinking no one can take our violence away. We’re frightened by the violence around us and turned on by the violence done to others. Many of us are scared we’re not violent enough, that when push comes to shove, when it comes time to prove our violence, we won’t measure up. 

ante himself couldn’t have found a better spot in Hell to deposit James Dolan, maybe the worst owner in all of professional sports (and that’s really saying something), than to lock him in a box next to a farting, snoring, grunting Donald Trump as  24,000 Knicks fans jeer and boo them both, while watching his team lose to the young San Antonio Spurs, over and over again, night after night for all eternity…

In the fall of 2003, Alexander Cockburn and I were in Los Angeles for a long weekend shortly after our book, The Politics of Antisemitism, came out. Few bookstores would put it on their shelves, not even the now shuttered Midnight Special in Santa Monica, a venue where we’d both appeared several times to vibrant [...]

Trump began his war on Iran during talks to prevent it. He said it gave him the element of surprise. His missile strikes killed much of the Iranian leadership, including some of the Iranians his team thought might govern the country after the bombing ended. One of his missiles hit a girls’ school, another hit the compound of Mahmood Ahmadinejad, one of the candidates Trump’s people had in mind to run Iran after they killed Ayatollah Ali Khameni, the Iranian religious leader who, austere as he was, preferred negotiation over confrontation.

NPR interviewed a Trump voter in Georgia who said he thought the President was doing “an A+ job.” When asked how his family was dealing with rising food prices, the man replied, “My wife and I fast.” What’s the cure for this mass mesmerism that induces people to be willing to suffer extreme deprivations in order to enhance the fortunes, political and financial, of their billionaire leader? Trump’s like Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse, without the medical degree.

The economic war on Cuba, which has been going on in one form or another for more than six decades, has increasingly become a war waged on Cuban children. Since Trump and Biden reimposed and broadly extended the economic sanctions and embargo on Cuba that Obama had eased, Cuba’s infant mortality rate, which in 2008 was lower than that of the US, has risen by 148 percent. This is infanticide committed through a policy of economic strangulation.

One day, I got a call from Peter Bahouth, a former Greenpeace honcho whom Ted Turner had swiped to run his grant-making operation. Peter said, “Jeff, can you hold for a sec? My boss wants to talk to you.” I was going to say, “No,” to Ted Turner? I waited longer than “a sec,” more like two or three minutes. Billionaires must be busy managing their billions, I thought.  I was expecting to hear Ted’s southern drawl. Instead, it was Jane, who babbled on for about 20 seconds, thanking me for mentioning the foundation [it was new then] in a piece I’d written with Alex Cockburn for The Nation, and then hung up without allowing me to say as much as “Hello” or “Damn, you had the greatest hair in Klute!” 

Cole Allen had been sold too many promises that didn’t pan out. The promise of hope and change. The promise of restoring the “soul of America,” whatever that really means. The promise of nostalgia restored, a reified America from the land of promise and dreams. But it’s the little annoyances that can loom large: the rising insurance payments, crappy cell service and internet too slow to stream, the damn heat, the traffic that doesn’t move, the commercialization of everything, even church, the bad TV, and the worse movies, music that grates and irritates, rather than consoles and inspires.

Donald Trump’s few remaining defenders are now reduced to explaining his increasingly erratic behavior as a ploy, that like Hamlet (I mean, the Don can play Jesus on Truth Social, so why not Hamlet on Fox News?), he is merely putting on “an antic disposition,” and is only “mad North-by-Northwest.,” not mad “true north,” not truly insane, but only acting so, as part of some still obscure deep strategy. Yet imagine the state of imperial entropy the US must’ve reached that its $1 trillion war-making budget and 5,000 nuclear warheads no longer command respect or obedience from smaller, much less powerful nations, so that its leader must pretend to be deranged in order to frighten people into submission … and even then, they still resist.

+ If, in fact, the war is over (don’t count on it), then Iran wins by surviving two massive bombing campaigns by the US and Israel (both nuclear-armed states) in the last year. Iran wins even bigger by keeping the Islamic Republic in power under the control of a younger, more militant leadership with the Republican Guard largely intact. Iran’s victory grows larger when you consider that it keeps its nuclear research program and uranium stockpile. The victory becomes almost total when you factor in its ongoing control over the Strait of Hormuz and the fact that Trump was ready to call it quits in less than two months–not the 20 years it took to realize it had been defeated in Afghanistan.

Iran has no air defenses left. The US can bomb whatever it wants, whenever it wants. It can bomb military bases and government buildings. It can bomb schools and mosques. It can bomb power plants and sewage treatment systems. It can bomb fire stations and hospitals. It can bomb TV networks, radio stations and newspapers. It can bomb museums, schools and daycares. What it can’t bomb is a revolution into being. It can’t bomb a regime change into being. It can’t bomb new rights for women into being. It can’t bomb the Islamic faith out of the hearts of most Iranians. It can’t bomb Iranians into loving instead of hating the US. In fact, each new bomb does the opposite, bombing new hatreds into being. The blowback is immediate and will last for decades.

Perhaps Trump will now replace Joe Kent with Newt Gingrich, who is very, very strong on security. So strong that Newt, the Edward Teller of our tormented times, advised Trump to drop 12 nuclear bombs on Iran to blast out a canal by-passing the Strait of Hormuz. In other words, someone with the guts to start a nuclear holocaust to prevent one.

The Iran war is a war of choice. But that doesn’t tell us much, does it? All wars are wars of choice. The questions are: was it a necessary choice? Was it a good choice? Was it a rational choice? Were the consequences considered? Who made the choice and why? We still don’t know the answers to these questions.

Israel has hundreds of nuclear weapons. Iran has none. If Iran were really planning a preemptive strike on Israel, that would pretty much invalidate the notion of nuclear deterrence. Let’s get rid of them all! On the other hand, would Trump and Israel have risked launching a preemptive attack on Iran if the Islamic Republic possessed its own nuclear arsenal? Unlikely. (It’s more likely Trump would have written love letters to the Ayatollah, ala his endearing correspondence with Kim Jong-Un.) I think it’s safe to conclude that Iran had no plans to preemptively attack Israel or the US.

Trump has done the world a service. He has abandoned pretense and clarified the true nature of American power. There is no longer any need to manufacture a case for war, to make an attack seem conform to international law and treaties or to demonstrate its righteousness by acting as part of an international coalition. Now America can do what it wants to whomever it wants solely because the people who run its government want to. This has, of course, almost always been the case behind the curtain of diplomatic niceties. But Trump has ripped those curtains down and now the world is seeing American power in the raw: brazen, arrogant and mindless of the consequences, which will be borne by others and if they complain, they might be whacked, too.

Iran has not attacked the US. Cuba has not attacked the US. Venezuela did not attack the US. Nigeria did not attack the US. Gaza did not attack the US. Libya did not attack the US. Iraq did not attack the US. Serbia did not attack the US. Haiti did not attack the US. Panama did not attack the US. Nicaragua did not attack the US. Grenada did not attack the US. East Timor did not attack the US. Chile did not attack the US. Cambodia did not attack the US. Laos did not attack the US. Vietnam did not attack the US.

let’s venerate the brave souls of the Twin Cities, who came together to protect their neighbors from an invading force of masked paramilitaries. Let’s study and replicate their strategies, but be wary that the “great blonde beast” of ICE still lurks, its coffers swollen with taxpayer loot, wounded and chastened, but not slain, and, like many wounded creatures, is perhaps now even more unpredictable and dangerous.

If the ranks of ICE had been filled by a draft, we wouldn’t be seeing this kind of mass brutality. Normal human beings would recoil from committing daily acts of violence against defenseless people and would question the psychological health of those giving them orders to do so, as we ultimately saw in Vietnam. But instead, ICE is populated by people who signed up for this, people who are eager to terrorize, abuse and inflict gratuitous brutality on others. Sadists, in other words.

Now that white people in the northern states are being shot, gassed, beaten and killed, there is an eruption of national outrage over the hyper-violence of CPB and ICE, as there well should be. But since 2010, there have been 364 people killed in encounters with Border Patrol, the means of death include shootings, car chases, beatings, asphyxiations and Taserings. And, as Todd Miller points out, “at least 10,000 people have died crossing the U.S.-Mexico border since the 1990s, a number that could be three to eight times higher.” The anger and indignation are a long time coming…

Trump left for the elite meet-and-greet at Davos in one of his manic phases. He’d just spent the previous two days trash-talking, bragging about his Venezuelan coup, boasting over pocketing the revenue from Venezuelan oil in offshore accounts, lobbing invasion threats against allies, brandishing new tariffs as if they were hypersonic weapons, badmouthing his rivals, trolling his political enemies, and serial-posting of memes depicting himself as the latest conquistador of the New World. The Re-Conquistador. 

It’s revolting, but hardly surprising, that a woman (Kristi Noem) who thought bragging about the time she shot her puppy in the head for disobeying a command and dumped its body in a gravel quarry would advance her political career, also thinks it’s entirely justified to shoot a mother of three in the head for “disobeying” confusing commands from her ICE agents.

Many of the people who have spent the last five years denouncing the killing of Ashli Babbitt for raiding the Capitol in an attempt to overturn an election are celebrating the murder of Renee Nichole Good, a terrified mother killed by masked men from unmarked cars who chased her down a neighborhood street and shot her in the face.

The cocksure boast that the US will “run” Venezuela appears to be another Trumpian fantasy. It’s impossible to “run a country,” if you don’t have control of it, which the US doesn’t by any measure. The Maduro government remains in place and defiant, even with Maduro renditioned to New York City. Indeed, the attack appears to have only strengthened the resolve of the Venezuelan people, instead of inspiring the chimerical uprising Rubio led Trump to expect, much as Rumsfeld and Cheney deceived Bush into believing about Iraq.

A year into Trump’s mass purge of immigrants from the United States, it’s beyond debate that the people orchestrating and conducting the raids, round-ups and deportations have committed more grievous crimes than the vast majority of the people they’ve harassed, assaulted, arrested, jailed and sent into exile. They’ve committed crimes against the Constitution of the government they’re acting in the name of and they’ve used the force, often violent force, of the federal government against innocent people. They’ve lied to Congress and federal judges. They’ve systematically violated judicial orders. They’ve denied people the most fundamental right guaranteed to residents, regardless of legal status, in the US: the right to due process of law.