Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Trita Parsi writing at Responsible Statecraft wonders if the Trump administration is planning to widen its piracy against Iranian vessels on the high seas as part of an October surprise. Trump had four Iranian oil tankers seized in August, alleging that they were heading for Venezuela. The problem? There is […]
Abraham Accords: The War Pact Among Jim Crow States of the Middle East
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The Middle Eastern parties to the “Abraham Accords,” Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and Israel, did not make peace by signing them. The small Arab Gulf principalities have long had behind-the-scenes relations with Israel and Israeli firms. They weren’t at war with the Israelis. As members of the Arab League, […]
Arctic Heat Wave: Block of Ice Twice as Big as Manhattan breaks off Greenland’s largest Ice Shelf, goes into Ocean
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – A 42 square mile block of ice has just hived off from the Arctic’s largest ice shelf, in northeast Greenland, alarming climate scientists. That is the size of Santa Barbara, California. It is ginormous. Danish scientists are speaking ominously of “glacier disintegration.” The Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland reports, […]
Gullible Trump was manipulated by Netanyahu’s Deep Fake Video of Mahmoud Abbas to Cut off Palestinians
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Haaretz reports that Rage, Bob Woodward’s new book due out tomorrow, reports that Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu manipulated Donald Trump with fake video of Palestine President Mahmoud Abbas. The episode points to the dangers of deep fake videos in our contemporary era, but points even more alarmingly to the […]
Even Lindsey Graham is Terrified Trump will drag us into War with Iran
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Hawkish Republican senator Lindsey Graham tried to talk Trump out of his assassination of Iranian Gen. Qasem Soleimani last winter, according to Bob Woodward’s new book, Rage, to be published Tuesday. Sonam Sheth and John Haltiwanger at Business Insider have an advance copy and yesterday quoted some excerpts about Graham […]
Climate Emergency Overdrive: Our Age of Compound Disasters as 10% of Oregon is Evacuated, California Burns and Louisiana Sinks
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – It is astonishing to me that we still have 287 million gasoline vehicles on our roads and that 20 percent of our electricity comes from burning dirty coal. We just go on blithely pumping over 5 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide, a powerful and dangerous heat-trapping gas, into the […]
Top 4 reasons Trump’s Saving “ass” of Bin Salman over Khashoggi Murder is Shameful and just Wrong
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Sonam Sheth and John Haltiwanger at Business Insider have seen Bob Woodward’s Rage, which will be published next Tuesday. They quoted some passages from the interview with Trump in which he boasted about having saved the “ass” of Saudi crown prince Mohammed Bin Salman in Washington D.C. by discouraging the […]
Aztec Politics: Trump sacrificed 200K by Downplaying Covid-19 to save the Stock Market from Panic
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Bob Woodward’s new book of interviews with Trump and figures in his administration records how Trump told the reporter in mid-March that he plays down the coronavirus to avoid a panic. According to CNN, which obtained Woodward’s tapes, Trump said: “I wanted to always play it down. I still like […]
Did the US War on Terror Displace 37 Million?
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The Brown University Watson Institute Costs of War Project has put out a report concluding that the US-led “War on Terror” has displaced 37 million people. While there are parts of the report I agree with, some of the argument seems to me flawed. Let me explain why that is, […]
© 2025 All Rights Reserved