Новости за 20.02.2018

Last week there was another tragic mass shooting. The media went on to make this young man a celebrity. Some, including Donald Trump, even painted him as a victim. I still don’t understand why we have to give the names of the shooters in the media. Probably because it makes a better story. CBS head Leslie Moonves said of Trump: "It may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS.” The same can be said for these shootings.  If stardom has anything to do with the shootings, it is irresponsible... Читать дальше...

To be hideously diminished in language, like Donald Trump, is to be hideously diminished in thinking; and to be hideously diminished in thinking is to have to constantly squeeze your enormous American body into a claustrophobic thought-arena that reeks like an Arkansas cockfighting pit—and that is what Trump’s brain looks like, a cockfighting pit full More

“Since the FBI never inspected the DNC’s computers first-hand, the only evidence comes from an Irvine, California, cyber-security firm known as CrowdStrike whose chief technical officer, Dmitri Alperovitch, a well-known Putin-phobe, is a fellow at the Atlantic Council, a Washington think tank that is also vehemently anti-Russian as well as a close Hillary Clinton ally.” More

“Mass shootings have become routine in the United States and speak to a society that relies on violence to feed the coffers of the merchants of death. Given the profits made by arms manufacturers, the defense industry, gun dealers and the lobbyists who represent them in Congress, it comes as no surprise that the culture of More

When I first met Malcolm X, I was like the punk who challenges the veteran gunslinger Jimmy Ringo played by Gregory Peck in “The Gunfighter.” I had a swell head. I had been told by professors at the University of Buffalo that I was “very bright.” They even offered me a full scholarship. After dropping More

The Trade Unions Congress (TUC) is campaigning for Britain to stay in the single market for as long as possible, under a transitional agreement, to “keep workers’ rights safe”. The call came in a press release on 6 July from the TUC supporting the line being taken by the employers’ organisation, the CBI. Nowhere do More

I chanced upon “crude thinking” while reading Bruce Cumings’ The Korean War. Here’s the quote from his book: Nothing is more important than learning to think crudely,” Brecht once said. “Crude thinking is the thinking of great men.” So was the milieu of crisis in which he wrote, and Koreans fought: crude, illiberal, murderous. It More

It’s the sort of thing to turn many an otherwise calm stomach, but the revelations that UN peace keeping staff have been involved in sexual assault has done its fair share of upsetting.  Legislators in the United States, many sceptical of the body to begin with, are taking note.  Such revelations draw out the worst More

Sanctions against apartheid South Africa are, in the opinion of the writer, the only instance when sanctions have achieved their objective. They were also driven by civil society rather than by governments. By contrast, US sanctions since the 1950s against Cuba, Iraq, Iran, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, North Korea and numerous other countries have proved dismal failures. More

Any politician who votes against gun control is complicit in murder—this includes President Trump and the many Senators and Representatives who have accepted millions of dollars from the National Rifle Association and who fear that a bad grade from the NRA could cost them an election. While NRA-backed politicians do their thing in Washington, more More

This is an assertion in a major Post article on infrastructure, but it doesn’t fit with the evidence. Trump is actually only proposing to put up $200 billion (0.09 percent of GDP) over the next decade towards his infrastructure initiative. The rest is supposed to come from state and local governments and private investors. As the piece More