CBS News correspondent David Martin sent out this alarming tweet.

NEW: Iran or Iranian-backed proxies used explosives to blow holes in four ships — two Saudi oil tankers and two others — near the Strait of Hormuz, according to an initial assessment of the U.S. team sent to investigate, @CBSDavidMartin confirms.

— CBS Evening News (@CBSEveningNews) May 13, 2019

Notice how he starts out as if stating an incontrovertible fact “Iran or Iranian-backed proxies used explosives to blow holes in four ships — two Saudi oil tankers and two others — near the Strait of Hormuz” before adding a bit of information that undermines the whole thing: “according to an initial assessment of the U.S. team sent to investigate.” In other words, this is what the US government, that has been demonizing Iran as a prelude to war, has simply asserted via anonymous sources with no supporting evidence. He ends by saying he “confirms” it. But what has he confirmed? That Iran was behind a bombing? Or that anonymous US government sources say so? There is a big difference between the two.
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The field of Democratic candidates for the 2020 election have embraced many of the ideas that Bernie Sanders ran on back in 2016, even though back then those same plans were denounced by the party establishment as too radical and unrealistic for voters, as part of their strategy to have neoliberal Hillary Clinton be the nominee. We know the result. Clinton lost to possibly the worst presidential candidate in the last century. And now we are being told that Joe Biden, who is pretty much Clinton 2.0 (or Clinton 3.0 if you consider Bill Clinton to be version 1.0) as the ‘moderate centrist’ who can win over Trump voters. Yes, they are running the same old losing playbook that they ran last time.
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State after state, including Ohio, are passing extremely restrictive laws on abortion, hoping that at least one of them will lead to the US Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade. Here is what Georgia’s law says .

The law, which bans abortion as early as six weeks into a pregnancy—or just a week or two after a woman discovers her period is late, let alone that she is pregnant—was enacted Tuesday by Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp and will surely be challenged in court.

Calling it a “draconian bill,” Oliver explained that the legislation gives a fetus “natural person” status, allowing it to be entitled to child support, claimed as a dependent on tax returns, and included in Georgia’s population. And the only exceptions to the bill—or the only cases where people would be allowed to have abortions—are due to fatal deformity, if the mother’s life is in jeopardy, or cases of rape and incest (corroborated by police report).

John Oliver brings us up to date on these developments. (If you can’t see the embedded video, click on the above link.)

The compensation for the CEO of Delta airlines is $22 million but for some its employees, such as those who work to load and unload baggage, can be as low as $9 per hour. So naturally employees are considering forming a union. But in an effort to thwart those moves, Delta has put out posters telling workers that they would do better to use their union dues to purchase video games and alcohol.

In its latest offensive to beat back unionization, Delta Air Lines displays total contempt for labor unions and an astonishing ignorance about what unions have accomplished to lift American workers.

Delta has a new anti-union poster that tells employees, “A new video game system with the latest hits sounds like fun. Put your money towards that instead of paying dues to the union.” Another Delta poster estimates that union dues cost $700 a year and says, “Nothing’s more enjoyable than a night out watching football with your buddies. All those union dues you pay every year could buy a few rounds.”
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In the US, many people think that the Republican and Democratic parties represent widely different ideologies when in reality, they are very much in agreement except for a few, mainly social, issues. This is not a new development. In the British comedy sketch review Beyond the Fringe from 1961, Dudley Moore tells his friends that he is going to the US and asks them to fill him in on what to expect. You can see that sketch below and the comments about America hold up depressingly well.

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Under normal conditions, the elections in the UK for their allocation of 73 seats in the 750-seat European parliament would not command much attention. But these are not normal times in the UK as it struggles to find a way out of the mess following the Brexit referendum, where they cannot seem to find a way to leave but also cannot agree on whether to stay. Calls for a second referendum abound but both major parties have been ambivalent on the issue, reflecting the ambivalence of those parties on whether leaving the EU is a good idea or not.
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A few nights ago I watched the 1968 documentary In the Year of the Pig by Emile de Antonio that recounts the story of the Vietnam war up to that year. It uses archival footage and since de Antonio is French, the documentary understandably spends more time on the French antecedents to US involvement than American documentaries usually do. For those of us who remember the history of that brutal war, the key landmarks are the 1954 Geneva accords, the 1956 defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu, the self-immolation of a Buddhist monk in 1963, the 1968 Tet offensive, and the final defeat of the US in 1975.
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An article in The Atlantic magazine sees a major generational divide opening up.

As a liberal graduate student and a conservative professor, we rarely see eye to eye on politics. Yet we agree that the generation war is the best frame for understanding the ways that the Democratic and Republican parties are diverging. The Democrats are rapidly becoming the party of the young, specifically the Millennials (born between 1981 and 1996) and Gen Z (born after 1996). The Republicans are leaning ever more heavily on retirees, particularly the Silent Generation (born before 1945). In the middle are the Gen Xers (born between 1965 and 1980), who are slowly inching leftward, and the Baby Boomers (born between 1946 and 1964), who are slowly inching to the right.
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