The first three chapters of my latest book are on the Amazon webpage. (Click on the ‘Look inside’ link.) The publisher’s webpage is here and you can also buy it from any major retailer. (Note: This will be the new top post for a while. Later posts are below.)
What is terrorism? It turns out that there is no universally agreed upon definition.
There is no legal or scientific consensus on the definition of terrorism. Various legal systems and government agencies use different definitions of terrorism, and governments have been reluctant to formulate an agreed-upon legally binding definition.
…The United Nations General Assembly condemned terrorist acts by using the following political description of terrorism in December 1994 (GA Res. 49/60):
Criminal acts intended or calculated to provoke a state of terror in the general public, a group of persons or particular persons for political purposes are in any circumstance unjustifiable, whatever the considerations of a political, philosophical, ideological, racial, ethnic, religious or any other nature that may be invoked to justify them.
While there is no agreed upon definition, the terms is broadly understood to be along the lines of “the calculated use of violence to create a general climate of fear in a population and thereby to bring about a particular political objective.”
It should not be surprising that there is no agreed upon definition. Governments, including (and especially the US and Israel) have opposed creating a definition because they know that almost any definition would implicate them as terrorist states. By not having a clear definition, the word then becomes a pejorative to be used as a term of propaganda against one’s enemies while exempting oneself. If pressed, they will retreat to ‘intent’, that it is the motivation for the actions that matters. This is conveniently self-serving since one can always ascribe benign motives to ones own actions (even if the outcome was appalling) and malignant ones to one’s enemies.
Kyle Kulinski uses the right wing condemnation of some of Hasan Piker’s comments about US atrocities to argue that by any reasonable reasonable definition, especially the sheer numbers of innocent people killed by the actions of the US all over the world over a long period of time, it becomes clear that the US is the biggest perpetrator of terrorism in the world and he says that American people should face up to this brutal reality.
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I have paid just a passing interest to the issue of ‘furries’, the people who role-play by dressing up as anthropomorphic animals. People have all kinds of hobbies and interests and this seems to be just another one, since it seems to be like people who dress up as their favorite characters from films and TV and get together with like-minded people. But the transphobes among us see them as dangerous allies of the transgender community, trying to create gender confusion.
It is astonishing that Tommy Tuberville, a current member of the US senate who is running the next governor of Alabama, seems to be obsessed with furries, and gave a nearly 20-minutes speech on the senate floor warning about the dangers of furries and the transgender community. You have to listen to the speech to realize how insane these ideas are.
When I was a child, I went on roller coasters in the UK and experienced the thrill of going around curves at high speeds and with sudden drops. But as I grew up, such stomach-turning motion ceased to have any appeal and I have long since stopped going on them. But some people clearly enjoy the experience and seek ever more thrilling rides and owners of amusement parks were very willing to indulge them and began to compete by offering faster, higher runs and more tight and rapid turns.
The thrill that riders experience comes from the rapid changes in velocity, that results in the so-called g-forces they experience when their velocity undergoes changes in magnitude or direction over a short time interval. In the latter case, the greater the speed and the smaller the circle in which they turn, the higher the g-value. But sudden changes in the acceleration (like a sudden drop to almost free-fall) can also produce the kind of disorienting effects that riders seem to enjoy
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Luigi Mangione is scheduled to be sentenced on December 18, 2026. He became something of a folk hero after killing Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, a health insurance company widely reviled for its practice of putting up block after block to prevent having to pay for the health care of its subscribers even when they faced life-threatening situations and even died because of the denials.
In his usual thorough way, John Oliver on his show Last Week Tonight dissects the odious practices of UnitedHealthcare and the even worse practices of its lesser-known but even bigger parent company UnitedHealth Group which, it turns out, is the third biggest corporation in the US. He looks at how it got so profitable by adopting practices that have infuriated both patients and doctors alike.
The obscene profits and behavior of these health insurance companies have to end and we have to create a single payer system that puts them out of business. As Oliver says, “at best they are pointless time wasting middlemen and at worst algorithmically driven, ruthless arbiters of who lives and who dies.”
Of the many lessons that we can learn from the sudden advances by the group Ansar Allah (aka Houthis) in Yemen, the main one is that the US, although it has the raw power to bludgeon its enemies and win tactical victories by bombing campaigns, seems to be consistently outmaneuvered by its enemies when to comes to strategic thinking. Air power is a blunt weapon, incapable of securing and holding territory and yet the US continues to think it can deliver more than it can.
The classic example was in Vietnam. The US poured in massive amounts of troops and aerial firepower that enabled them to seize (or at least destroy) any village or hamlet that they chose, not to mention waging massive ecological warfare and committing war crimes on a massive scale. And yet, general Võ Nguyên Giáp, the legendary wily leader of the North Vietnamese army, was able to stymie their enemies, such as with the French spectacularly in the battle of Dien Bien Phu, that forced them to give up and leave.
While the French and the US had superiority in terms of weaponry and air power, the Vietnamese had the advantage of fighting on their home terrain. Furthermore, this was an existential fight for them, they were fighting for something they believed in, and they were never going to give up easily, while the foreign invaders were dilettantes with little knowledge of who they were fighting and why they were there in the first place. That pattern is being repeated with Iran and now Yemen.
The so-called defense umbrella strategy where the US provided bases to the Gulf states to provide security in exchange for uninterrupted supplies of oil from them has fallen apart. As the recent photographic evidence of the wreckage of planes and buildings at some of those bases show, rather than US bases providing shields, those countries have instead been made into targets that the US cannot defend, which must make those countries wonder what benefits they provide. And we have not even seen the damage to the major base in Bahrain where even the acting secretary of the navy Hung Cao said of Iran that “They blew the hell out of Bahrain”, an admission that the Iranians were quick to echo.
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There seem to be two iron rules of American consumerism.
The first one is that people love to buy stuff even if the don’t really need the items. This habit has become hugely magnified by companies making it extremely easy to buy stuff on impulse. You see something online that interests you? Just one click and it appears at your door the next day. The second one is that people hate to get rid of stuff that they do not use and perhaps should never have bought in the first place.
I know people who have ever increasing amounts of stuff even as their need for it decreases. They buy things because they met a specialized need, like some tool or a kitchen gadget that is designed for a specific task, and now lies unused They hang on to them for sentimental reasons or with the idea that at at some point they may need it again, however unlikely that is.
I tend to be of the opposite frame of mind. I am an anti-consumer and try not to buy anything, however small and cheap, unless I absolutely need it and nothing else can substitute for it or it serves multiple useful purposes.Recently I was in the supermarket in the kitchen items aisle that has lots of gadgets. I make omelets and recipes for that and other things often call for the use of a whisk. I picked one up to buy but after a few moments decided that a fork would be an adequate substitute and put it back. Then the other day, I saw a video of a neat little gadget. You put a raw egg in it, close it, and then open it and the two halves of the egg separate cleanly, with no bits of shell or a broken yolk. But did I really need it? I usually crack an egg on a sharp edge of a skillet or a bowl and most of the time it separates just fine but occasionally there will be bits of shell or the yolk breaks. But I figured that the occasional mishap did not warrant getting such a specialized gadget. But clearly there is a market for such items. Because of my attitude, although my apartment complex provides additional storage space, I have not used it at all.
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Thanks to the ever-expanding conflict in the Middle East triggered by the war that Trump and Netanyahu launched against Iran, the news forces us to confront information about the geography and politics of the region.
As an example, we recently learned that the Houthis (or Ansar Allah to give them their formal name) had made a lightning advance along the coast of Yemen, ending up capturing various strategic locations such as the islands of Perim and the Greater and Lesser Hanish islands, giving them significant control over the Bab al-Mandab Strait that lies at the gateway to the Red Sea, a key artery for shipping in the Middle East.
So who are the Houthis and how have they been able to take over much of Yemen? Western media has painted this as a proxy war between two old rivals, the Houthis being backed by Iran, and the weak Yemeni government backed by Saudi Arabia. But Yohannes Woldemariam writes that this is a far too simplistic an account of a conflict that long predates any Iranian involvement and that the Houthis should be viewed more as a lately-created informal partner of Iran rather than a proxy.
To understand who [the Houthis] are, it is necessary to begin in Yemen, particularly in Saada, a mountainous region in the north with its own religious, tribal and political history. The movement that eventually became Ansar Allah emerged there from a Zaydi religious and political revival during the closing decades of the twentieth century. The Believing Youth movement, founded in the 1990s, sought to revive Zaydi learning and identity. Hussein al Houthi emerged from this environment, not from an Iranian project to establish an armed organization on the Arabian Peninsula. The Iran Primer’s account of the movement’s origins traces this history well before Iranian military assistance became important.
…Yemen’s history also warns against reducing the conflict to an ancient Sunni and Shi’a confrontation. In 1962, republican officers overthrew the Zaydi imamate in North Yemen. Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt intervened on the republican side, eventually sending tens of thousands of soldiers, while Saudi Arabia supported the Zaydi royalists. Both Egypt and Saudi Arabia were overwhelmingly Sunni.
I have to admit that ever since I discovered the existence of the livecam that points directly at the Lincoln Reflecting pool, I have been checking it regularly to see what progress is being made in fixing what has clearly become yet another symbol, if a minor one, of Trump’s utter incompetence at doing anything. While nowhere close to the cost in lives and money of his blundering in Iran and the economy, shredding formerly good relations with allies such as Canada and others, and so many other missteps, this failure is highly visible, even if he tries to hide the debacle by surrounding the pool with high metal fencing and then covering that with black tarpaulin. I am surprised that he has not ordered the livecam to be removed, since it directly contradicts in real time his repeated claims that the pool is almost fixed.
I asked my browser search engine whether the pool can be fixed and its AI replied with a confident ‘yes’ and then linked to a New York Times article from a week ago, presumably in support of its answer. But reading the article, one gets the sense, reinforced by the accompanying photos, that while work is being done on the pool, the problems may well be insurmountable. In reports to the administration, the contractor Atlantic Industrial Coatings conceded that it was their own fault, and not that of vandals as claimed by Trump, that created this fiasco.
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It should be no surprise that Trump and Hegseth have been hiding the true costs of the Iran war from the public all the time and the Republican leadership in Congress has abetted this deception. Even right at the beginning, when Trump declared that the US strikes had totally obliterated Iran’s capabilities, it appears that Iran had severely damaged US bases in the region. The evidence is coming out now in the form of photographs sent to US media by service members in the region.
CBS News obtained and broadcast some of the footage.
The Intercept reports on the costs and the unrelenting attacks on US bases that has brought the US to “the brink of a breakdown”.
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Yesterday was the annual Emmy’s awards event that honors TV shows and it provided yet more evidence that when it comes to popular culture, I am hopelessly out of the mainstream. Usually I have not even seen any of the nominees, let alone the winners, of such awards but in this case I had watched the series Widow’s Bay that won a slew of Emmys since my daughters recommended it to me and there was a massive amount of positive publicity about it. So I watched the entire 10-episode series.
To say that I was disappointed is putting it mildly. I thought it was pretty bad. While there were some funny bits, what the series lacked was a story that made any sense. It is not the fact that it involves the supernatural that I found problematic. What is hard to stomach is when people act in utterly irrational ways in response to it.
Take for example, the basic premise that there is a small island off the coast of Massachusetts which has suffered from a curse for over three hundred of years. What caused the curse was never made clear but it manifests itself in many ways that are disjointed and lack coherence. One effect of the curse is that any resident born on the island dies as soon as they leave it. You would think that such a situation would create considerable unhappiness and trigger a massive investigation into what causes the deaths and how to escape the curse. But nothing. Nobody even talks about it, seeming to accept it with a “What can you do?” equanimity.
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