There was a raid in Ishaqi last week. Armed men crept upon the sleeping houses in the dead of night. Armed men stirring in the darkness, in a land still open, like a flayed wound, to violent death and chaos from every direction, many years after the savage act of aggression that first tore the country to pieces. They crept toward the houses. They said nothing, gave no warning, could not be clearly seen, did not identify themselves. “Thieves!” someone shouted. Someone grabbed a rifle – one kept ready at hand to guard the sleeping family – and fired a

(UPDATED BELOW) (UPDATED AGAIN) So the deed is done. The “debt ceiling” crisis has been “resolved” by a further maniacal destruction of the commonweal, in a bipartisan pact that completely ignores the murderous imperial wars as the primary drain on the nation’s treasury. As we noted here yesterday, the deal also sets up an unaccountable politburo (the special “Super Congress” committee) that will remove further coddling of the rich from the democratic process altogther. However, I do feel I must defend our president from the charges of “weakness” and “cowardice” and “capitulation” that are pouring in on his noble head

(UPDATED BELOW) Pressing matters of various kinds have kept me from my appointed rounds in these precincts of late – and there will probably be further lacunae over the next few weeks. My apologies. We hope to be back to more regular programming soon. Circumstances aside, there is another factor at play in the recent dearth of posting: the inherent difficulty of saying anything meaningful about a political world that has become almost totally hallucinatory. This is currently being exemplified by the debt-ceiling “crisis.” Every single element of the public presentation of this “crisis” is transparently, even brazenly false. It

There is not much to say about the horrific events in Norway, beyond this general observation. If a white, Christian nationalist carries out such atrocities, then he is, inevitably and always, a “lone nut,” an outlier, emblematic of nothing but his own individual lunacy. But if a Muslim– or any person of color or non-white ethnicity — does anything similar (or indeed, far less serious in scope), why then, that perpetrator is emblematic of an entire race or religion or ethnic group: a group which must then be laid under collective suspicion, and collective harrasment, by the “security” forces (and

Do you support the policies and political fortunes of President Barack Obama, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate? Then this is what you support: cowardly, cold-blooded mass murder. You support mass murder. You support the shredding to pieces of innocent people, many of them children, week after week, month after month. You support the murder of children. You support the cultivation of extremism and hatred: hatred aimed at you, and your children, for the mass murder — the state terrorism — committed in your name by your progressive president. You support extremism. You support hatred. You support terrorism. The Guardian tells

When I first saw the stories about the CIA’s super-cunning covert op – setting up a fake vaccination scheme to try to get DNA from Osama bin Laden’s children in Abbottabad – I immediately thought: How many innocent people are going to die or suffer needlessly from this unconscionable tainting of medical programmes by Terror War subterfuge? How many people will now turn away from ostensibly genuine humanitarian efforts, wary of being used by foreign spies infiltrating their country? How many more genuine medical relief and health care workers will now be targeted as agents of militarist agendas in troubled

A friend pointed me to this remarkable performance by Gillian Welch and David Rawlings of a now-old song. I pass it along here not only for its inherent worth, but also because it seems to chime with many of the thoughts and intimations behind this blog. Here we can see, through the conjurations of two guitars and two human voices, how the bloody murk of history is turned into a powerful myth — a myth of yearning, a yearning for liberation: from the bonds of convention, from the sentence of mortality, from the soul-draining exigencies of history itself. And if