Author: Tom Engelhardt

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

Strange, isn’t it, what doesn’t sink in. Take this number: $6.4 trillion. There’s a figure you might think should cause a genuine stir (especially since each of those was a taxpayer dollar). In fact, that was what, in November 2019, Neta Crawford of Brown University’s invaluable read more

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If you don’t think that the January 6th attack on the Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters armed with everything from baseball bats to read more

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It began with fire. It ended with ice. In between, there were the storms and floods. And the extremity of it all should have caught anyone’s attention.

First, of course, there was that burning season that set staggering records across read more

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Imagine that, as January 2020 began, I had whispered in your ear that a pandemic would soon sweep the planet and, of any country on Earth, the wealthiest and most powerful, the United States of America, would be hit hardest. If I had then told you that there would be by far more read more

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The American Century Ends Early
How the USS Enterprise Was Transformed into the USS Roach

By Tom Engelhardt

Like Gregor Samsa, the never-to-be-forgotten character in Franz Kafka’s story “The Metamorphosis,” we awoke on January 7th to discover read more

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We’ll soon pass 500,000 American deaths from Covid-19 — half a million people deprived of life, or more than a fifth of the counted pandemic dead on this planet. Imagine that. And clearly that figure will, in turn, be but a way station on the read more

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Over these last few years, here’s a problem that’s sometimes bothered me: how to translate Donald Trump — whether, in his initial presidency-launching moments in 2015 when he was fulminating about those Mexican “rapists” read more

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You know that your country is caught in an endless loop of repetitive thinking when, almost 20 years after you invaded and occupied a distant land, beginning a war you’ve been incapable of winning despite massive “surges” of troops, contractors, CIA operatives, as well as air power, read more

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If I were a religious man (which I’m not), I’d say that it was little short of a miracle. After all, from the spear to the crossbow, the flintlock rifle to the fighter-bomber, humanity has been known, historically, for quickly adopting and using any new weaponry created. Nuclear arms should be considered the miraculous exception. Yes, at the end of World War II, the U.S. read more

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Here’s a question for you: Can you rely on this country? Or have we, at least enough of us, gone stark raving mad in these last years? At the moment only 32% of Republican voters believe that election 2020 was read more