Author: Tom Engelhardt

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

Just what we don’t need, right? On a planet increasingly frying — just consider this summer’s megafires that read more

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

A Global Maui Moment Ready, Aim, Fire! By Tom Engelhardt

From the earliest kingdoms to late last night, history has been the story not just of the rise of great powers but of their decline and fall. So, normally, there would be nothing particularly out of the ordinary about the aging America of Joe Biden and Donald Trump, a classic imperial power distinctly in decline and threatening to split into pieces.

As it happens, though, there’s read more

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

On September 11th, 22 years later, what are we to make of it all? Who even remembers that, as the Pentagon burned, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld picked up a read more

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

In a June 2012 piece headlined “Praying at the Church of St. Drone,” I wrote, “Be assured of one thing: whichever candidate you choose at the polls in November, you aren’t just electing a president of the United States; you are also electing an assassin-in-chief.” At that read more

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

The old anti-Vietnam War song that began, “War, what Is It good for? Absolutely nothing!” couldn’t be more on the mark these days. Just imagine that you live on a planet where the truest “war” may be the one we’re waging against nature — and that nature is increasingly waging on us. That “war” could, in the end, simply broil us all.

This summer, the war in read more

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

I only hope I’ll be around in 2123 for Henry Kissinger’s 200th birthday celebration. (I’d be a mere 179 then.) Still, at least I made it to his 100th. Imagine, in fact, that when I was in my twenties and in the streets protesting the war in Vietnam (Cambodia and Laos), he was already Richard Nixon’s national security adviser, a crucial figure overseeing a conflict that read more

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

Hey, it’s not just the number of guns Americans continue to buy (about 20 million a year) in a country already armed to the teeth, but read more

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

You can hardly turn on the TV news or go online these days without seeing… well, Donald Trump, of course, and his extreme version of American politics. Every indictment of him only seems to add read more

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

Okay, if you want to grasp the new world we’re now in, imagine this. No, not a Phoenix that set a record of 31 straight days above 110 degrees Fahrenheit (with, it seems, more to come); read more

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

It’s little short of remarkable when you think about it. Last March, Bezalel Smotrich, the minister of finance in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israeli government (as well as the head of the extremist Religious Zionist Party), read more