A blog about a criminal enterprise
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Progress? Let’s see. We’ve gone from unending wars in distant lands against enemies capable of little more than wielding firearms and roadside bombs — and those conflicts were disasters — to the possibility of a war in the European heartland between nuclear-armed foes. I mean, honestly, what could possibly go wrong?
And it was all fated to happen in Europe because of
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Think of the U.S. military-industrial-congressional complex as a remarkably self-contained system. It’s capable of funding itself at staggering levels, producing weaponry (however inefficient,
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Whatever the U.S. military may be considered, it isn’t usually thought of as a scam operation. Maybe it’s time to change that way of thinking, though. After all, we’re talking about a crew with a larger “defense” budget than
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America’s Two Pandemics And How They Mixed and Matched ByImagine that you were experiencing all of this (and by this, I mean our lives right now) as if it were a novel, à la Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year. The famed author
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Sometimes the unconscious mind tells us just what we truly want to say about our world. That happened to Senator Mitch McConnell only the other day. He was speaking to reporters after fellow Senate Republicans (with the
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Heroes? When I was a kid, among my heroes — and I was joined in this by so many Americans — was Jackie Robinson. Yes, he was the first Black ballplayer to break into the segregated major leagues. But the main thing for me was that he was the stellar second baseman for the Brooklyn Dodgers and I was a mad Dodgers fan. My dad grew up in Brooklyn, so no surprise there.
But
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It was more than 20 years ago, but I still remember the shock I felt when the word “homeland” first entered our culture in a big way. That was soon after the 9/11 attacks and, in the end, it would be attached to what became known as the Department of Homeland Security. For me — and I
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Who even remembers when President Bush — no, not George W. but his father! — exclaimed, “By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam Syndrome!” That was in the wake of Operation Desert Storm (aka the First Gulf War of 1991) and it was indeed true that the U.S. military had kicked Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein’s troops out of Kuwait with remarkable ease. And yes, visually,
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Yes, many of its prisoners, swept up in the early days of the war on terror, had committed no hostile acts against this country or its allies (55% of them, according to one study). And yes, they
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We — all of us on this planet — now live in one world and only one. Somehow, this remains hard for so many of us to grasp. Yet it’s been true since at least August 6, 1945, when a single atomic bomb obliterated the city of Hiroshima and, lest there were any doubts, three days