On May 10, Robert Kagan, the high priest of neoconservative thought, the bell ringer for muscular interventionism and general American meddlesomeness, lamented in The Atlantic that the United States had suffered a unique defeat in its efforts to subjugate Iran. The article says much about Kagan’s own identification with the […]
Author: Binoy KAMPMARK
Epic Nonsense: Trump Shelves Project Freedom
The waxwork figures of the Pentagon recently glowed with excitement with the announcement that the US military would be finally called upon to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. With the ceasefire between Teheran and Washington barely holding, President Donald Trump, as far as his attention span would allow, gingerly put […]
Show Me The Money: A Loutish Administration Confronts A Craven Congress
Louts pressing false claims, faux principled types seeking to score successes against clearly useless targets. Jules Hurst, in trying to discharge the duties of the comptroller, had some news for members of the House Armed Services Committee: the Iran War had drawn $25 billion from the coffers of Freedom Land […]
Starmer’s Silly Talking Points: King Charles III Visits Washington
He can hardly be blamed for being given the brief by his Prime Minister. King Charles III is in the United States on a repair job, playing diplomatic handyman and mender for Sir Keir Starmer and the US-UK alliance so long regarded as special. On the occasion of the 250th […]
Ideas Of Expulsion: Trump, NATO And Spain
Intellectual giants are in painfully short supply in the Trump administration, but if there was anyone who might lay claim to cerebral weight of any sort, Elbridge Colby might be one of them. Self-styled as a China hawk, the US Under Secretary of War for Policy must privately be bemused […]
The Travails Of Noma: God Chefs, Brutal Kitchens And The Cult Of Fine Dining
They are an easy bunch to demonise, and to a certain extent, they should be. The God Chef, the collector of Michelin stars; the veteran of the kitchen, with all the cuts, bruises and wounds to show for it; the brute who terrorises the staff, mocking their lack of adeptness, […]
Space Loos, Lunar Exploitation And Colonial Escapism: The Artemis II Mission
The Earth is in a fine mess, but human beings sealed in laboratories full of energy and vigour, attached to screens, and running tests about conditions in space, have another reason to cheer. Between April 1 and April 11, the Artemis II undertook a flyby of the Moon and returned […]
Troubled Relations: Pope Leo XIV And President Donald Trump
Depending on which historical sources you care to consult, the Pope has been a figure of obloquy, ridicule and abomination. This mediator between the terrestrial and the divine was always set for the battering. Martin Luther’s violent Protestant split from the body of the Catholic Church was merely one aspect […]
Confused Closures And Opaque Openings: Continuing Dramas In The Hormuz Strait
Reading messages from President Donald J. Trump is an exercise in taunting masochism. It is one inflicted on commentators and the press corps the world over, and they are not better for it. The latest – and here, the latest will become distant and dated shortly – is that the […]
Ceasefire Exemptions And Quarries Of Death: Israel’s War On Lebanon
In the Devil’s Dictionary, Ambrose Bierce defines peace as a period of cheating between two periods of fighting. The Israeli version of a ceasefire might be defined as a moment of war deceptively halted to enable conflict to continue. War as cosplay and camouflage. Under such fragile conditions, military objectives […]






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