I rewatched Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 11/9. The 2018 film is mainly a screed about all the bad things Trump was going to do as president. Time is a cold mistress: basically nothing Moore said four years ago about what was going to happen actually happened. Moore was wrong about Trump’s ties to Russia, Moore was […]

You’ve been warned — a fight over the U.S. government’s ability to spy on its own citizens is coming to Congress. Section 702 is up for renewal again in December. Section 702 grew out of an illegal post-9/11 program called Stellarwind exposed by NSA whistleblower Tom Drake. It refers to a provision of the United […]

The word malaise, a general feeling of uneasiness whose exact cause is difficult to identify, should be starting to creep in to discussions. It’s a word, albeit like most everything these days, politically-loaded, after its use by President Jimmy Carter in 1979 to describe the country he could not figure out to how lead. Carter’s […]

The thinking in Washington goes like this: for the “low cost” of Ukrainian lives and some American dollars, the West can end Putin’s strategic threat to the United States. No Americans are dying. It’s not like Iraq or Afghanistan ’01-’21. This is post-modern, something new, a clean great power war, Jackson Pollack for war. Getting […]

Looking back at 2022, at what did and did not happen, really tells us what was important, hindsight and all that. Things that Did Not Happen in 2022 Joe Biden did not explain why the U.S. is at war in Ukraine. Any nuclear war. Regime change in Russia. Ukraine winning the war. The Russians running […]

Title 42 is a clause of a 1944 Public Health Services Law which allows the U.S. government to prevent the entry into the country of individuals during certain public health emergencies, in this case asylum seekers who are sent to wait out their years of processing in Mexico, not in the United States, during Covid. […]

Leadership, real leadership, requires setting an example. As far as security is concerned, the leader of the Federal government, Joe Biden, earns an F– for security. His setting of a double standard for the handling and secure storage of classified materials drives home once again (Hillary, Trump, you out there?) that one set of rules […]

Without double-standards would we have any standards for classified information left at all? President Biden said Tuesday he was “surprised” to learn in November his lawyers found classified documents in his former office at a Washington think tank. Biden’s lawyers discovered a cache of classified documents as they packed up his former office at the […]

Hillary versus Trump versus Biden. All three kept classified information at their homes. Who wins the battle to have likely done the most damage to national security? In the end when dealing with the damage done by mishandling classified information it comes down to exposure; who saw it, what was it, when was it seen, […]

Nobody is going to miss 2022. With the won’t-die pandemic, inflation at home and economic troubles abroad, plus the war in Ukraine, it has not been a happy 12 months. Nevertheless, with the year 2022 behind us, it is time for some housecleaning. Here are four memes we really should bury and not have to […]

Numbers can be boring. When discussing immigration blur the lines between sweet old auntie and that bum lapping at the public trough. So let’s look at Mr. Jimenez from Ecuador and Mr. Singh from India, alongside some numbers. Both want to come to the U.S., one for illegal work, one to take his family to […]

I was shadow banned by Twitter, even after my suspended account was restored. What is it with these people? What are they so afraid of? Things are changing fast under new owner Elon Musk, but using available free tools a few days ago I found my new account @PeterMVanBuren has been electronically censored. Specifically, using […]

Was WNBA star Brittney Griner the subject of so much White House attention because she was an important showpiece demographic? Nobody can claim they are unhappy Griner is home safely in the U.S., free again to use marijuana and remain seated during the national anthem ahead of her WNBA games. No one can sit here […]

A friend makes maps, colorful graphic maps of mostly Washington DC neighborhoods. She sells them, often framed, by the bushel at farmer’s markets and through her own shop. She often asks people where they live, but never how they live. Her service — the map — is neutral to whom one is married to, what […]

Why did The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, Der Speigel, and El Pais demand that Department of Justice drop most charges against Julian Assange? The news organizations recently called on the United States government to drop most of its charges (the charges related to hacking directly with then-Army intel specialist Chelsea Manning are […]

As he wraps up his investigation with the prosecution of Igor Danchenko, we are left only with questions about what John Durham did not do. Best to start with what we learned. Durham established what FBI Director James Comey likely knew from near day one, that the Steele dossier was politically-driven nonsense created by the […]

“What stands out for visitors?” I asked our guide during a Honolulu Chinatown tour with my out-of-town guests. “Always the same, the homeless. Even Mainlanders from big cities like San Francisco and New York are surprised how many we have here. I’m waiting to see how the Japanese and Korean guests respond when they start […]

Under the gathering dark clouds of today, a reread of 1984 showed how the otherwise prescient George Orwell was wrong to think people were going to have to be tortured into submission; half of America (still psychologically locked down, vexed and vaxed, of course) wouldn’t want it any other way. The world of 1984 is […]

For  most Americans, which high school their children attend is a pretty basic decision. They either go to the school designated by where they live like everyone else (Smallville students from Smallville Middle School move on to Smallville High School) or they attend one of a few private schools in their area, typically religious schools […]

God bless Texas. A case the state recently won at the circuit level is almost certainly headed to the Supreme Court. The Texas law, upheld, makes it illegal for social media giants to censor, delete, or otherwise interfere with viewpoints, what is known as content discrimination. If the Supreme Court stands with the circuit court […]

No one is above the law, but some actions are beneath it. Just ask Leticia James, the New York Attorney General who filed a $250 million civil suit against Donald Trump, what may turn out to be the last gasp of a multi-year effort to criminalize the electoral process in America. As she prepares for […]

Conventional strategic thinking suggest Putin would never use nuclear weapons in Ukraine. But what if he is following a new paradigm? First, let’s find the most important place on earth. Stick your finger on a world map, now move south, good, little to the right, too much, back a bit. There. Did you end up on […]

Donald Trump is suing CNN for $475 million for defamation, claiming the network associated him with Adolf Hitler and portrayed him as a Russian lackey. E. Jean Carroll is in turn suing Trump for defamation in connection with him allegedly raping her. Mike Lindell is being sued for $1.3 billion for defamation in connection with […]

Nothing would be better than for Elon Musk to buy Twitter and then kill it. Take it off line. Delete it. Make it go away. What is the point anymore? Like some aged European monarchy, the service has become too inbred to say anything useful. It consists now as a giant push survey, claiming the […]

Spotify once took a run at Joe Rogan. YouTube banned Dan Bongino. Twitter permanently suspended Marjorie Taylor Greene. Twitter also famously canceled Donald Trump, and me. As with the suspension of Trump (and on a much, much lesser scale, me) progressives cheered the deplatformings the way public lynchings used to attract a picnicking crowd. Progressives […]

If you thought the Supreme Court threw up some dust overturning Roe v. Wade, wait until this autumn when they look at overturning Grutter v. Bollinger. The Supreme Court will decide whether race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina are lawful. The two cases which might overturn Grutter, Students for Fair […]

They want to take down Thomas Jefferson’s statue at the university he founded. Why not? A thought experiment, one where in the near-enough future of say 2030 the word Nike comes to mean the same as today’s N-word, a new N-word. Calling someone a nike (maybe the derogatory grew out of the popular shoes, or […]

It used to be called the “New York Times Problem.” It asks at what point does the First Amendment stop protecting journalists against the receipt of stolen property, particularly classified documents. It stems originally from the Pentagon Papers, a classified history of the Vietnam War stolen by Daniel Ellsberg and handed over to the Times […]

The Supreme Court is poised to grant a victory to religious conservatives via the First Amendment in blocking recognition of an LGBT club at Yeshiva University. Yeshiva is a Jewish law school which objects to the club on religious grounds. This is important news for other religious schools across America facing similar legal challenges. Though […]

When I try to sleep at night, I can’t relax. I blearily turn on the TV. But I can’t change the channel. My TV is telling me I am going to die, maybe by Covid (they say there’s a new variant, you know, called Monkeypox), maybe by climate change because it is likely already too […]