Reading Time: 20 minutes Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh has stoked something of a hornets’ nest with a recent Substack piece detailing how he thinks the US (together with Norway) was responsible for the explosion on the Nord Stream gas pipelines connecting Russia to Europe in September 2022. If this is the case, the US is responsible for an […]
Joe Biden
Posted inLaw
Are the Biden documents a Trumpian parallel? Not even close
Reading Time: 4 minutes It might be easy to think that the recent Biden classified documents blunder is one that mirrors the Trump debacle, but you would be wrong. Here’s why. First, let’s unpack exactly what happened with the Trump classified documents. Trump’s documents Back in May 2021, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA—responsible, indeed, for the archiving […]
Posted inPolitics
Brittney Griner and the comparative worth of humans
Reading Time: 5 minutes What we value and how much we value any given thing is a subjective affair. We might look at price tags on things, but they are for guidance only. If you aren’t prepared to pay that much for a widget, you won’t buy one. You can try to haggle to arrive at a mutually agreeable […]
Posted inPolitics
Vote for character, not shady characters
Reading Time: 3 minutes When you go to the polls to vote in Tuesday’s midterm election, if you didn’t vote early, keep one word in mind: character. The critical importance of that under-emphasized virtue to the health of the republic is eloquently underscored in a wise (as always) essay by David French in The Atlantic magazine’s “The Third Rail” […]
Posted inPolitics
The crisis of democracy: on remaining vigilant without freaking out
Reading Time: 4 minutes The fiery rhetoric of the campaign trail might make you might think American democracy has failed or is failing. There is declining trust in government, elections, and in democracy itself. And some people are freaking out. This is a crisis of democracy. But there is no such thing as a stable, happily-ever-after version of democracy. […]
Posted inDrugs
Oregon Cannabis Association calls Biden’s cannabis reforms ‘performative’
Reading Time: 2 minutes While Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-OR) and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) praised President Biden’s proposed cannabis reforms, the Oregon Cannabis Association (OCA) claimed Biden did the bare minimum. While Biden’s measure will impact about 6,500 people imprisoned for cannabis use, The Last Prisoner Project estimates that upwards of 40,000 people are currently incarcerated for cannabis-related crimes […]
Posted inWar and Peace
Biden: We are facing the ‘prospect of Armageddon’
Reading Time: 4 minutes The world has been perilously close to an apocalypse on a number of occasions. The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 is one of the most famous. It actually involved several examples, with the closest being when the Soviet submarine B-59 surfaced after a US warship had been dropping practice depth charges. The submarine, incommunicado, believed […]
Posted inHealthcare
Is the pandemic over? Depends on who you listen to
Reading Time: 3 minutes “The pandemic is over. We still have a problem with COVID. We’re still doing a lotta work on it. It’s…but the pandemic is over. If you notice, no one’s wearing masks. Everybody seems to be in pretty good shape. And so I think it’s changing. And I think this is a perfect example of it.” […]
Posted inPolitics
Are China and Taiwan the next Russia and Ukraine?
Reading Time: 2 minutes As if Russia and Ukraine hasn’t been a challenging enough conflict to manage, the bubbling political cauldron of Taiwan that China is threatening to knock over. This thorn in China’s side has been a long time in the sharpening. So why now? Is Taiwan pushing the thorn, or is China walking into it? To understand […]
Posted inPolitics
Resisting the new F-word
Reading Time: 4 minutes There is a South Park episode in which the kids use an “f-word” to mock a bunch of obnoxious bikers. The word is obviously offensive, which is why the kids use it. A violent struggle erupts. In the end, the bikers embrace the epithet and admit that they are f@gs. But at that point, the […]