Image by Hany Osman. As we enter the eighth month of Israel’s genocidal campaign against Palestinians, the flow of weapons to Israel continues from the United States, Germany, Canada, Italy, Australia, and other Western countries. Even as some governments claim to have halted transfers or to not be sending weapons at all, they continue to provide licences or parts and components that are instrumental to the continuing onslaught. As people are now being pulled from the rubble in Rafah, in a strip of land already known as the world’s “largest open-air prison,” in a country and people bordered ..read more

On Tuesday, Stacy Gilbert, a 20-year veteran of the State Department, resigned in protest, after charging that Biden’s State Department falsified a report on whether Israel was restricting the flow of humanitarian goods into Gaza. Gilbert had been one of the Department’s experts helping to assemble the NSM-20 report to Congress assessing Israel’s compliance with US law in its military operations in Gaza. But she charges the report was removed from the experts before it was completed and its conclusions adulterated by the leadership of the department. To read this article, log in here or subscr ..read more

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair How close are we to being in the movie? Leila and I went to the Baghdad Theater, down the road from our apartment in Portland, Oregon, to see the new film, Civil War, a few weeks ago.  There were a few pieces of dialogue where I wished I could have been on the writing team to make some minor improvements, but overall it was an excellent movie. The story itself was a good one — at least to the extent that what was happening could really be understood.  What was at least as good as the story was how it was told, which was to throw the viewers into t ..read more

Image placed on Silk Road after seizure by the FBI While panhandling for votes at the Libertarian National Convention over Memorial Day weekend, two non-Libertarian presidential candidates — Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. — promised to free political prisoner Ross Ulbricht if elected. That promise is a big deal to Libertarians. Ulbricht, 40, is about a decade into his two life sentences, without the possibility of parole, for the “crime” of operating a web site. Yes, you read that correctly. You may hear other, darker allegations concerning what Ulbricht did, but those allegations ..read more

Image by Max Kukurudziak. The Russian bogeyman is played out. The threat of a Russian empire is as empty as Joe Biden’s scolding of Israel’s slaughter in Gaza or Donald Trump’s protestations of innocence. This doesn’t mean that I support the current government in Moscow. Nor does it mean its war in Ukraine is something I support. It does mean I strongly believe the US-sponsored campaign against Russia in Ukraine needs to end. Between Washington’s unashamed support for the elimination of most of Ukraine’s democratic forms and the Zelensky government’s increasing vacuity, the Ukrainian nationa ..read more

Although there are still many votes to be counted the broad outlines of the South African election are clear. There are four key factors for the left to consider. One is that, outside of some largely rural provinces, support for the African National Congress (ANC), the party of Nelson Mandela, is now in steep decline. The ANC will not win a national majority but should be able to govern in coalition with other parties. With massive unemployment, extremely high rates of interpersonal violence, collapsing services such as water, electricity and roads as well as brazen corruption it is not surpri ..read more

 Johann Sebastian Bach’s last pupil, Johann Gottfried Müthel (1728–88) spent the final two decades of his life as a church organist in the Baltic city of Riga, far to the northeast of the three central German cities (Erfurt, Gotha, and Leipzig in the Lutheran—and Bach family—heartland) and two Bavarian ones (bi-confessional Augsburg and Catholic Munich) brought to sounding life in Tanya Kevorkian’s vigorously researched, resonantly detailed, and often tuneful book, Music and Urban Life in Baroque Germany. The organ that Müthel presided over in Riga’s Petruskirche rose some three stories u ..read more

Image by Markus Spiske. “History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.” -Hunter S. Thompson Kids these days, right? With their raucous campus meltdowns and their Maoist TikTok propaganda and their weird designer pronouns and their K-pop trap-hop gibber music. A motherfucker can’t even tel ..read more

A Forest Service employee lighting a prescribed fire on the Deschutes National Forest, Oregon. Photo George Wuerthner. The Deschutes National Forest plans to ramp up prescribed burns across Central Oregon. However, the Forest Service exaggerates the presumed benefits of prescribed burning and ignores the problems. One of the most important issues is that  most wildfires never encounter a fuel reduction, whether from thinning or prescribed burns. So, even if prescribed burns were effective, fires seldom occur in treated areas. Second, the burn must be repeated every few years—forever to ..read more

Still from a video shot by Kharmes al-Refi of the Israeli airstrike on the tent camp in the designated safe zone of Tel-al Sultan, western Rafah. “Oh hell, what do mine eyes with grief behold?” – John Milton, Paradise Lost People were saying their evening prayers when the IDF attacked the refuge camp at Tel al-Sultan in southern Gaza, where thousands had fled from the Israeli invasion of Rafah. They were told by the Israelis this was a safe zone, a secure place to shelter their children and grandparents.  “For your safety, the Israeli Defense Force is asking you to leave these areas ..read more