Welcome! This is an unapologetic, agenda-free zone. Just commentaries on current events that’ll move you to think, laugh, rage, and even cry.
Justice for Oscar Pistorius Oscar Pistorius became more famous after he murdered his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, than he ever was as a track star. It’s like how O.J. Simpson became more famous after he murdered his wife, Nicole Brown, than he ever was as a football player. The fateful symmetry began with Pistorius’s trial. Just like O.J.’s trial in America, the media… Read more.
He is a flame-haired former wild child, who courted controversy in his youth by smoking cannabis and by once wearing a Nazi uniform to a party. She is a biracial, divorced actress from abroad. Together, they are taking the British monarchy — that most conservative of institutions — into a more modern era. Prince Harry,… Read more.
The psychopathology afoot here is called projection. It is defined by people attributing to others traits, faults, and blame that inhere in themselves. And it explains almost every insult Trump has hurled at his opponents throughout this presidential campaign. So when you hear him calling other people crooked, insecure, weak, beholden to special interests, liars, etc., be… Read more.
In the deadliest attack on civilians in Egypt’s modern history, Islamist militants detonated a bomb inside a crowded mosque on Friday and then sprayed gunfire on panicked worshipers as they fled the building, killing [305] people and wounding at least 109 others. The scale and ruthlessness of the assault, which occurred in a small town… Read more.
Even if you’re not into politics, you might find yourself in spirited debate about President Trump’s anti-immigration policies over Thanksgiving dinner. The instructive historical perspective illustrated below might be helpful. The hypocrisy it depicts would be laughable if it were not steeped in the genocide white colonists perpetrated against Native Americans. But I urge you to use it… Read more.
The phenomenon of women outing powerful and influential men as sexual predators has reached critical mass. More to the point, it has already ended the careers of such closeted creeps as Roger Ailes, Bill O’Reilly, Harvey Weinstein, and Kevin Spacey. Never mind its conspicuous failure to end that of Donald J. Trump … I have… Read more.
Heart-warming athlete profiles have become a signature feature of Olympics coverage. But I always find them anodyne because they invariably fail to show the interpersonal relationships featured athletes have with fellow teammates and competitors. Profiles on members of the celebrated Women’s USA Gymnastics team during last year’s Rio Olympics brought this oversight into stark relief.… Read more.
I’d be remiss not to mention Gretchen Carlson. I hailed her for going public ‘Women Complain Fox News Head, Roger Ailes, Has Dick for Brains,’ July 20, 2016. Indeed, it’s arguable that, if Judd had gone public two decades ago, she would have taken down movie mogul Weinstein the way Carlson took down TV mogul… Read more.
Frankly, this could not have happened to a nicer strongman. Early Wednesday, Maj. Gen. Sibusiso Moyo, Zimbabwe’s army chief of staff, denied on state TV that the military had overthrown longtime President Robert Mugabe, despite tanks in the streets and reports of explosions and gunfire. The ruling ZANU-PF party later tweeted that former Vice President… Read more.
A few months ago, I damned Aung San Suu Kyi as the ‘godmother of ethnic cleansing.” I did not think then that anyone could damn her more. I was wrong. But I suppose it should come as no surprise that two acclaimed song writers have found more damning words: The Irish musicians Bob Geldof and… Read more.
