Author: Tom Engelhardt

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Three Failing Experiments?
Mine, America’s, and Humanity’s
By Tom Engelhardt

There was a period in my later life when I used to say that, from the age of 20 to my late sixties, I was always 40 years old; I was, that is, an old young man and a young old one.  Tell that to my legs now.  Of course, there’s nothing faintly strange in such a development.  It’s the most read more

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If you don’t happen to be part of Donald Trump’s base and you’re a member of the “fake media,” it’s a commonplace to assume that our president is a creature of impulse, a giant id with hardly rhyme, no less reason for what he does.  News headlines and those of opinion columns tell the story: “Trump read more

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September 11, 2001, was the day that “changed everything.” And indeed, in New York City and elsewhere, it was hard not to feel just that. Unfortunately, the top officials of the Bush administration took advantage of that deep sense of shock (and awe) to advance a global shock-and-awe program all their own, including the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq that launched read more

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The report was devastating — or would have been, if anyone here had noticed it.  “Between 2001 and 2017,” it concluded, “U.S. government efforts to stabilize insecure and contested areas in Afghanistan mostly failed.” I’m thinking of “Stabilization: Lessons From the U.S. Experience in Afghanistan” put read more

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[Note for TomDispatch Readers: A small reminder that, for a donation of $100 ($125 if you live outside the U.S.) to this website, signed, personalized copies of former New York Times sports columnist (and TD jock culture correspondent) Robert Lipsyte’s SportsWorld: read more

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[Note for TomDispatch Readers: I suggest that, in conjunction with Rajan Menon’s powerful piece on American poverty today, any of you who missed Beverly Gologorsky’s vivid TD post, “What Does Poverty Feel Like?,” read more

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Never forget it: Donald Trump rode birtherism like a surfboard into the White House. He first played the birther card back in 2011 (“I’m starting to think that [Obama] was not born here”), and the next year cited “an extremely credible source” that Obama’s birth certificate read more

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A recent study of insect life in protected nature reserves in Germany got the most modest attention in our busy Trumpian world. In the last 27 years, however, researchers found that flying insect populations there had dropped 76% seasonally and 82% in mid-summer (when insect numbers are read more

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America’s Addictions
Opioids, Donald Trump, and War
By Tom Engelhardt

When you think of addiction in America today, one thing comes to mind: the opioid epidemic. And it should. It’s serious. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, almost 64,000 Americans died of opioid read more

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

Who could forget it? There were the $37 screws (no need to say who was getting screwed), the $2,043 nut (McDonnell Douglas made it specially for the U.S. Navy), the $7,622 coffee pot, the $74,165 aluminum ladder, and the $640 plastic toilet seats for the Air Force. All of those examples of Pentagon waste read more