George Beebe was Dick Cheney’s former Russia adviser. He authored the 2019 book The Russia Trap: How Our Shadow War with Russia Could Spiral into Nuclear Catastrophe.  He is Director of Grand Strategy at Quincy Institute but is no left-wing pacifist. Beebe says in this interview on WABC that he supports U.S. efforts to aid…
On July 30, 2022, when it was in the mid 90s in Bellevue, The Lodge at Bellevue Square was running the gas fireplace at 523 Bellevue Way NE. . They do it, I presume, for the sake of “ambience” or mood. I’ve seen similar fireplaces burning in the lobbies of condo buildings, office towers, movie…
David Talbot’s book The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government is a biography that reads like a spy novel. It is painful to read because of all the injustice it exposes. Almost every page makes me groan with a sense of outrage. Most of the book summarizes the…
The antifa and BLM protests over the last several years were overwhelmingly peaceful. Nonetheless, right-wing media were able to convince tens of millions of Americans that antifa and BLM are violent, radical movements. Right wing media exaggerated the few instances of violence that did occur, and many of those incidents were the result of provocations…
The transpartisan* Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft held a zoom meeting today with antiwar conservatives: The New Right: Ukraine Marks Major Foreign Policy Shift Among Conservatives. *The Quincy Institute is funded by both the Charles Koch Foundation and by George Soros’ Open Societies Foundations, as well as other groups. The meeting had discussion among antiwar…
Using data from Harvard and MIT Election Data and Science Lab, “County Presidential Election Returns 2000-2020”, https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/VOQCHQ, Harvard Dataverse, V10; County Presidential Returns U.S. Dept. of Commerce: Bureau of Economic Analysis U.S. Dept. of Agriculture, Economic Research Service I wrote a program to visualize 2020 presidential elections results in 3d. Few of the findings are…
In an essay Are We Doomed? from The Atlantic in January of 2022, George Packer warned of the dangers to our democracy from Republican extremism, in particular with regards to elections. His prescription for stopping Republican extremism is that a coalition of Democrats, Independents, and moderate Republicans should overlook minor areas of disagreement. He says…
On April 21, 2022 Rep. Adam Smith held his first in-person town hall meeting in two years. The location was an elementary school in SeaTac, WA, a working class and multi-ethnic suburb to the southeast of Seattle. After presenting Congressional art awards to three local K12 students, Rep. Smith spent fifteen minutes giving an overview…
St. Alban’s Episcopal Church is a progressive church that has a facebook page that I subscribe to. They often share inspiring, progressive memes about social, religious, and political issues. Recently they shared the following meme image with me: I liked the image and so tried to share with others. When I did that, a warning…
I suspect that many antiwar activists are upset not just about the outbreak of war in Ukraine but also by the fact that Putin’s stupid and evil invasion makes U.S. aggressive policies seem reasonable. Putin has managed to unite the world behind U.S. militarism, and U.S. public opinion seems solidly against Putin, as it should…