Welcome! This is an unapologetic, agenda-free zone. Just commentaries on current events that’ll move you to think, laugh, rage, and even cry.
I have been shunning the Academy Awards telecast for years. Here in part is why: I’m on record stating how much I dislike the annual Academy Awards show (the Oscars). Because I have little regard for preening, pampered poseurs showing off their borrowed frocks and bling-bling as a prelude to a [nearly four-hour] show —… Read more.
Corruption, incompetence, lawlessness, and the spectre of racial retribution are driving South Africa into the same dysfunctional shithole where Zimbabwe has been festering for the past 30 years. I have lamented this fateful symmetry in many commentaries, most notably in “South Africa ‘Betraying Its Values’,” May 13, 2011, “Zuma Doing to South Africa What Mugabe… Read more.
Which makes one wonder why so many are so eager to join Washington’s do-nothing Congress. But I trust you will appreciate why these cartoons inspired me to write this derivative take on T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land: The Burial of the Dead”: AUGUST is the slowest month, leaving Cities like concrete deserts, granting Vacation and… Read more.
Reports are that the Trump administration plans to cut post-9/11 screening at airports across the country: The Transportation Security Administration is considering eliminating passenger screening at more than 150 small and medium-sized airports across the US. … The internal documents from June and July suggest the move could save $115 million annually, money that could… Read more.
As fire crews struggled to gain containment on more than a dozen wildfires raging across California Wednesday, Gov. Jerry Brown told reporters that large, destructive fires would probably continue and cost the state billions of dollars over the next decade. … State officials said more than 13,000 firefighters are currently on duty, fighting 16 large… Read more.
Reports have abounded for years about peacekeepers and aid workers preying on the hapless people they are supposed to be protecting and aiding, respectively. And they have perpetrated their abuses in refugee camps or safe zones from Asia to the Caribbean and all points in between. Here in part is how I commented on this… Read more.
On Monday, three days after the publication of an article detailing allegations of sexual harassment against Mr. Moonves … CBS said in a statement that its board was ‘in the process of selecting outside counsel to conduct an independent investigation.’ … The company had announced the planned investigation on Friday, hours after The New Yorker… Read more.
Trumpian newspeak President Trump issued his “most essential command” on Tuesday during a speech before the Veterans of Foreign Wars. He commanded, Don’t believe the crap you see from these people, the fake news. … Just remember, what you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening. (CNN, July 25, 2018) In other words, we all… Read more.
If you’re a black man, you are three times more likely to be killed by police than a white man, according to a recent study published in the American Journal of Public Health. … There’s not a single place in the U.S. where the risk of a black man getting killed by police is less than double that of a white… Read more.
China has been leveraging its economic power on the world stage for years. And it is beginning to do the same with its growing military power, which its aggressive and uncontested moves in the South China Sea attest. More to the point, China’s disregard for international criticisms in this context has been growing commensurate with… Read more.
