Category World Affairs

Weasel Words

I had CNN in the background while I was making dinner (I haven’t yet figured out how to change TV channels where I’m staying this week.) and was struck by the wording of one of the stories. The anchor referred to the paying of hush money by Donald Trump to a porn star with whom […]

Food For Thought

“But supposing that the world has become “filled up,” so to speak, with liberal democracies, such that there exist no tyranny and oppression worthy of the name against which to struggle? Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then […]

November Is Coming

Yes, it is seven months away, but I have ben thinking about the American presidential election. Mostly I have been wondering what can be done to fix a broken system. Technically there is nothing wrong with the way Americans elect a president. The system has worked for more than 200 years, with a peaceful transition […]

Two Years and Counting

I haven’t been writing much about the wars in Ukraine, the Middle East and elsewhere. There’s enough news coverage that I doubt you really need to hear what I have to say. Still, today marks the two-year anniversary of what the experts expected to be a four-day war. Russia with all its military might, has […]

Still True

Even if Trump’s ideology were not noxious, his incompetence is a threat to all around him. To say that it is amateur hour at the White House is to slander amateurs.              – David Brooks, The New York Times, January 31, 2017. It is Flashback Friday, and this quote, which was the entire post from […]

Solving The Problem

I wrote the words in italics below more than a year ago, in mid-January 2023. For whatever reason, I never finished the post. Which, as it turns out may have been a good thing – I would probably have looked pretty silly to anyone reading the post today, as I will explain once you’ve read […]

Is It All Over?

Well that was anti-climactic. Despite his opponents spending hundreds of millions of dollars to defeat him, Donald Trump has apparently locked up the Republican Party nomination for this year’s American presidential election. It isn’t usually over after the first primary, but such is the state of the Republican Party. And indeed of America. Now Trump’s […]

Death Of A Terrorist

It’s Flashback Friday. Today’s post first ran on January 19, 2015. I saw the report about the death of a Canadian terrorist last week, first online then, the next morning, in my newspaper. I read the whole article instead of just skimming, noted some interesting details and that was about it. I thought about doing […]

Conspiracy Time

If your mind is already made up, do facts contradicting your position make any difference to you? Or do you ignore them? It is that time of year when conspiracy theorists are turning their eyes towards Switzerland. The World Economic Forum is meeting in Davos, Switzerland. The WEF is the whipping boy for thousands of […]

The Winner

The American presidential election campaign kicks into high gear today with the Iowa Caucus. The winners are basically predetermined, al three of them. Americans, having grown up in the system, instinctively understand the difference between a caucus and a primary, the form most states use to choose party delegates to a presidential nominating convention. If […]