The emerging Democratic-neoconservative alliance

The neoconservatives have had a terrible influence on US politics. They gained a firm foothold in the Bush-Cheney administration and succeeded in pushing for disastrous wars against Iraq and Afghanistan and threatening war against Iran. Their goal was the destabilization of the Arab governments in the region, and the dynamic they created resulted in the Obama administration continuing the policies and leading to chaos in yet more nations like Libya and Syria. The resulting blowback with the rise of groups like ISIS resulted in the neoconservatives being discredited and lying low for awhile but they are making a comeback.
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What the US did during World War II and the Korean war

We now know much about the horrors inflicted by the US on Vietnam during that war. It is sometimes suggested that the atrocities committed by the US during that war were an aberration of some kind, a deviation from its usually honorable behavior in wars such as in ‘good’ wars like World War II. But this investigation from Reveal discusses how in that war, US soldiers committed a war crime when they rounded up German prisoners of war in a field and machine-gunned them. General George S. Patton called it a murder but none of the people involved were punished.
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The rise of black women freethinkers

It has rightly been pointed out that while atheists span the entire spectrum of the population, the atheist movement itself, in the sense of the leadership of organizations and the most visible atheists in the media, has been dominated by white men. This is fortunately changing and Christopher Cameron in an article titled Black atheists matter: how women freethinkers take on religion reports on those developments. In doing so, he addresses the often-raised question of why the horrors of slavery did not result in the wholesale discrediting of religion in the black community since religion was often used not only to justify slavery but to encourage black people to passively accept their situation in return for their reward in heaven. He says that support for religion in the black community ebbed and flowed depending on the contemporary situation.
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Kareem Abdul-Jabbar also picks up the baton of The Heritage

In my series of posts about Howard Bryant’s book The Heritage, I discussed the book’s thesis of how the responsibility of successful black athletes to speak out on issues of injustice that was started by Paul Robeson, and carried on by Jackie Robinson, John Carlos, Tommie Smith, and Muhammad Ali, went into decline with the arrival of extremely successful athletes like OJ Simpson, Michael Jordan, and Tiger Woods who wanted to do nothing that would endanger their lucrative corporate endorsements.
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The British Jewish establishment’s attacks on Jeremy Corbyn

I have been writing about how the Israel lobby in the US is attempting to stifle criticism of Israel for its atrocious treatment of Palestinians, the latest move being to pass a law declaring the country as a Jewish state, placing into law what had been in practice already. One effort to stifle critics in the west is to formalize the definition of anti-Semitism, while at the same time expanding its definition to include legitimate criticisms of Israeli government policies. In the US, the lobby is going so far as to advance legislation to punish advocacy for the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) Movement that seeks to apply to Israel actions similar to those that led to the collapse of apartheid in South Africa. The reason for the lobby’s actions is the concern that an increasing number of Jews and non-Jews alike see the actions of the Israeli government as indefensible and are referring to its policies as apartheid.
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Congress only cares about violations of rights when theirs are affected

According to the ACLU, Amazon has developed facial recognition software called ‘Rekognition’ that has come under severe criticism from privacy advocates because of the possibility that it will create a massive database of ordinary people that will further aid the national security state apparatus to keep track of everyone. Of course Congress, ever compliant to the needs of the national security state, did nothing.

But then the ACLU took photos of members of Congress and used the software to compare with a database of photographs of people who had been arrested for crimes.
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Is Trump a racist?

The answer is of course yes. So why are we even bothering to debate a question to which we know the answer? Because his defenders try to deny it. Here Mehdi Hasan corners Trump campaign advisor J. D. Gordon on this question and nicely skewers him at the end.

Begin the countdown to the genital identification

Kimberly Guilfoyle is a Fox News personality who has abruptly left the network. She has also revealed that she is dating Donald Trump’s son Don Jr. who is in the process of divorcing his wife. Although she implied that she was leaving voluntarily because of the relationship and that she might be working for the White House in some capacity, there are now reports that she was forced out for misconduct.
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The strange desire for ostentatious wealth

When I first read news headlines that a yacht belonging to secretary of education Betsy DeVos had been deliberately unmoored by someone and had drifted away causing thousands of dollars in damage, I did not bother to go into the story because I simply do not care about the lifestyles of the wealthy, though the idea that this was a small act of vigilante retaliation against rapacious elites was noteworthy.
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