Dear President Trump, On September 11, 2001, nineteen foreign nationals hijacked four planes on American soil and murdered over 2,500 innocent civilians. Within 24 hours, America’s NATO allies came to her aid and invoked Article 5 of the Washington Treaty We did so without hesitation, without shirking, and without bickering about money. Whatever history’s view of… Read more »
Category: Politics
Axis of Evil
Trump is no doubt proud of the US$100bn order for bombs that he received from Saudi Arabia this week. This is huge. It is a win of the kind that he promised. It is also about double UNICEF’s annual budget. If Saudi were instead to spend that huge amount of money on education, HIV elimination, clean water, nutrition… Read more »
Carbon Democracy and the Road to Serfdom
Carbon Democracy is a book about the links between the oil industry and the current world order. The basic hypothesis is that many of our political institutions, both in the developed world and in the rest of the world, are shaped by the oil industry. When I read it, and without faulting the detailed footnotes and… Read more »
Fakebook Democracy
Thank you to my friend, JT, for pointing me at a long, detailed article exposing just how much technology the right-wing threw at winning Brexit. In short, a small coterie of right-wing billionaires applied data-mining and psychological profiling technology to social media data, to identify those undecided and target on the one-hand those disaffected to go out and vote for Brexit,… Read more »
Articulation, at Last!
Rex Tillerson gave a speech yesterday. Setting aside the folksy language that has come to dominate US political discourse, it was the first articulate expression by the Trump administration of anything at all, and I commend it on those grounds alone. That said, I can’t say I liked all of it. Tillerson set out what he has… Read more »
Panning for Gold
According to my sister’s book (yes, that was a plug), the 200,000 tonnes of rock that Kalgoorie’s Super Pit blows up every day yields three or four bars of gold. As each bar weighs 12.4 kg, that’s a yield of about 0.00002%. The Great Confusicator’s ratio of information to words must be about the same. Trump’s recent AP interview is typical (and… Read more »
Another Promise Kept
So tweeted, according to the NY Times, Donald Trump Jr as the Motherfucker Of All Bombs was dropped – as if a single bomb and 40 casualties will end the quagmire in Afghanistan or ISIS, and as if 59 Tomohawk missiles specifically targeted at nothing will solve Syria’s intractable problems. But the President, in his… Read more »
Faster than I Thought
You saw it here first a few posts ago, when I predicted that Trump’s madness, folly and incompetence would soon paint his administration into a corner from which war was the only escape. I didn’t think he’d manage it this fast. (However, if you scroll down today’s NY Times here and here and here and here – and that’s… Read more »
ExecuTweeting the Climate
The climate… Trump said he was going to do it; he did it. As with nearly all the other ExecuTweet orders, this one will be a dud. The reason coal stays in the West Virginian ground is not because of all those environmental regulations, but because it’s too expensive to get out. Even if they can… Read more »
Curry Lamb in Hong Kong
This morning, 777 of Carrie Lam’s best friends voted for her to be Hong Kong’s Chief Executive. The pronunciation of the word “7” in Cantonese is “chat,” but is also a contraction of “chow height” which is the foul language for stinky (“chow”) female genitalia (“height”). Not a good omen, and the selection committee’s subliminal… Read more »