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 ridiculing this Annual Meeting of the United Nations General Assembly for years. A case in point is the following excerpt from “World Leaders Blow Hot Air at UN Confab…,” September 26, 2007. ___________________ Today, President George W. Bush of the United States and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran joined the queue of… Read more.
Today is the 20th anniversary of “the Handover” (as the British say) or “the Return” (as the Chinese say) of sovereign authority over Hong Kong from Britain to China. To mark the occasion, China is going out of its way to disabuse Britain of any notion that it retains any authority at all. The Chinese… Read more.
China and the United States agreed that efforts to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula should be ‘complete, verifiable and irreversible’, Chinese state media said on Saturday, reporting the results of high level talks in Washington this week. ‘Both sides reaffirm that they will strive for the complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula,’ a… Read more.
Listening to President Trump rail about how underfunded the US military is, you’d think President Obama spent the past eight years defunding the Department of Defense; you know, the way Trump is planning to defund the Department of Education. In 2014, the most recent year available, the United States led the world in military spending… Read more.
A week ago today, thousands of lawyers donned black suits and marched silently through Hong Kong. They did so to protest Mainland China’s decision to bar two elected legislators from serving in their local legislature: [The legislators’] specific offense (at least in the eyes of Beijing) was to unfurl a banner proclaiming ‘Hong Kong Is… Read more.
Not long ago, it was heretical to even question the miracle of China’s everlasting economic growth. Nothing testified to this quite like corporations lobbying to get into its market like Evangelicals praying to get into Heaven. In fact, you’d be hard-pressed to find any Western economist, politician, CEO, or pundit who raised any doubt about… Read more.
World leaders are meeting in Paris this month in what amounts to a last-ditch effort to avert the worst ravages of climate change. Climatologists now say that the best case scenario — assuming immediate and dramatic emissions curbs — is that planetary surface temperatures will increase by at least 2 degrees Celsius [3.6 degrees Fahrenheit]… Read more.
Alas, Mohammed Morsi seems fated to become a martyr for the cause of democracy in the Middle East. He became Egypt’s first democratically elected president in June 2012. But army chief General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi deposed him in July 2013 – in a coup that was, ironically, almost as popular as the student protests that… Read more.
It was a curious thing to see Jamaicans hailing Barack Obama on Thursday more like a returning “son of the soil” than a visiting president of the United States. Even more curious was seeing CARICOM leaders jostle like UWI students for a photo op. But don’t get me started on the way Jamaican Prime Minister… Read more.
I have repeatedly denounced world leaders for refusing to meet with the Dalai Lama out of fear of incurring the wrath of China: Western leaders have made a mockery of their condemnation of the brutal crackdown on Tibetan monks by heeding China’s warning against meeting with the Dalai Lama in any official capacity. UK Prime… Read more.
