The US Senate has passed its National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) military spending bill for the fiscal year of 2022, setting the budget at an astronomical $778 billion by a vote of 89 to 10. The bill has already been passed by the House, now requiring only the president's signature. An amendment to cease facilitating Saudi Arabia's atrocities in Yemen was stripped from the bill. "The most controversial parts of the 2,100-page military spending bill were negotiated behind closed doors and...

American foreign policy, wrapped up in hubris inside American exceptionalism, is incapable of recognizing a dangerous situation. And a dangerous situation is what we have. The Russian deputy foreign minister Sergey Ryabkov speaking for the Kremlin has made it clear that Russia will tolerate no further movement of NATO toward Russia’s borders. Russia has ruled out any possibility of the former Russian provinces of Ukraine and Georgia becoming NATO members. If this red line is ignored, the...

There is an incredible gaslighting campaign happening in the United States right now, as COVID cases reach all time highs in the US northeast and elsewhere. On television and in corporate press outlets, there is a giant, ongoing memory-holing operation related to the once-promised idea that mRNA shots would stop the spread of the virus that causes COVID-19. While they now claim otherwise, every single major government health official and pharmaceutical executive has claimed that COVID shots...

Just as President Biden’s unconstitutional vaccination mandates were being ripped up by the courts, authoritarian politicians, public health bureaucrats, and the mainstream media, announced a new Covid variant to justify another round of lockdowns and restrictions. The things that didn’t work last time would be a good idea to do again this time, they claim.For these authoritarians, the timing of omicron’s emergence was perfect.The variant was first discovered in South Africa, with the US and...

Those weeks following the release of the Great Barrington Declaration did feel odd. On the good side, medical doctors, scientists, public health workers, and citizens all over the world were thrilled that three top scholars in fields of public health and epidemiology had spoken out against lockdowns and for a reasoned approach to Covid. They eagerly signed the document. Yes, there were some attempts to sabotage it too, with fake names and so on, which should have been a clue about what was...

There’s one thing that the “public health expert” class is certain about these days. They claim to have the “the tools” to stop this coronavirus. .@GStephanopoulos on COVID fatigue: “You must be exhausted yourself. What signs of hope can you point to in this holiday season?” Dr. Fauci: “We have the tools to protect ourselves, and that's the thing we keep saying over and over again.” https://t.co/QThiAol6tu pic.twitter.com/o8NYiS3cbZ — ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) December 12, 2021 Here’s...

When Julian Assange and Wikileaks disclosed evidence of dark-side activity, including war crimes, on the part of the US national-security establishment, US officials felt they had no choice but to use Assange to send a three-part message. The first message is to people within the national-security establishment who might be tempted, out of a crisis of conscience, to reveal dark-side activities of the national-security establishment. By doing everything they could to destroy Assange’s life and...

And so, as 2021 goose-steps toward its fanatical finish, it is time for my traditional year-end wrap-up. It’s “The Year of the Ox” in the Chinese zodiac, but I’m christening it “The Year of the New Normal Fascist.” And what a phenomenally fascist year it has been! I’m not talking amateur fascism. I am talking professional Class-A fascism. Government and corporate sanctified fascism. Bug-eyed, spittle-flecked, hate-drunk fascism. I’m talking mobs of New Normal fascists shrieking hatred and...

It is now an incontrovertible fact that closing or opening schools had zero bearing on the course of the pandemic or the safety of children who were never at an elevated risk from this pandemic. It’s clear from schools reopening during the worst Delta wave with no extra repercussions that all of the academic, mental health, physical health, and behavior development problems we foisted upon the children were absolutely senseless. This, despite the fact that so many of us knew this for months on...

Were Pulitzer Prize-winning “author” John F. Kennedy — I mean Ted Sorensen — to write Profiles in Courage today, taking his subjects from the contemporary political world, his pickings would be mighty slim. I suppose he might produce one of those comically brief novelty books, à la Steve Miller’s Higher Poetics or Hot Stuff by Mamie Eisenhower. For my part, I can’t think of a sharper modern political profile in courage than that cut by Tennessee Republican John J.“Jimmy” Duncan, Jr., who...

One of the great things about not being obsessed with racism is not having to go through the mental twisty turns required to see racism in everything. Of course not being obsessed with racism still allows me to understand that racism has played a sordid role in our country’s history. I can understand anger and the sting of discrimination because I, too, am a human being. But I don’t have to pretend moving from New Jersey to Manhattan to find a new job was for a free black man in the 19th...

It’s a good call for Time Magazine: it made Elon Musk the person of the year. It’s actually even a remarkable call, and a great omen. Musk is arguably the most prominent opponent of lockdowns and vaccine mandates in the US. In his official interview, he refused to take back his last-year denunciation of stay-at-home orders as “fascist.” He stepped it up even further concerning vaccine mandates. “I am against forcing people to be vaccinated, not something we should do in America.” Yes, the...

I have always had a bad attitude toward official secrets regardless of who is keeping them. That prejudice and John Kenneth Galbraith are to blame for an unauthorized withdrawal I made from the World Bank. When I lived in Boston in the late 1970s, I paid $25 to attend a series of lectures by Galbraith on foreign aid and other topics. The louder Galbraith praised foreign aid, the warier I became. His hokum spurred my reading and led me to recognize that foreign aid is one of the worst...

Below is my column in USA Today on the aftermath of the Jussie Smollett verdict and what the case says about our state of both politics and journalism. As discussed yesterday, some figures and groups are still insisting that people need to believe Smollett regardless of the evidence or the verdict. Despite media figures calling his account “beautiful” and “brave,” seventy-five percent of the public believe that he staged the racist attack. The insistence by some that he is innocent shows how...

Julian Assange suffered a mini-stroke in October during the hearing for the US appeal of a UK court's ruling on his extradition case. "The WikiLeaks publisher, 50, who is being held on remand in the maximum-security jail while fighting extradition to America, was left with a drooping right eyelid, memory problems and signs of neurological damage," The Daily Mail reports. "He believes the mini-stroke was triggered by the stress of the ongoing US court action against him, and an overall decline...

If the Senate follows the House of Representatives lead and passes the Immunization Infrastructure Modernization Act (HR 550), Americans who do not get the recommended number of covid vaccines can look forward to receiving a text like this: “This is Dr. Anthony Fauci. According to government records you have not yet received your monthly covid booster shot. Until you prove you are following vaccine protocols, your vaccine passport will be revoked, resulting in loss of your privilege to work,...