How USAID Rules the World

A Russian prostitute, a German terrorist, a Texan lawyer, and a failed children’s book author walk into a bar. It sounds like the setup to a joke because none of those people seem to have anything in common, but they do. They’re all sponsored by the US government, and at least partially owe their success to American tax dollars.

Betting On Both Horses: Holodomor and Armenian Genocide

I understood the Holodomor better, strangely enough, when I visited Armenia. In Yerevan, their capital city, there is a memorial and museum to the Armenian Genocide. The memorial built by the Soviets, and the museum built after the Cold War and partly funded by American money. My first impression of this place was how strange … Read more

Biden’s Ukraine Might Become Trump’s Vietnam

Since 2022 I have argued that there was an obvious and growing schism between the military and civilian leadership of the USA. There have been such schisms in the past like Korea, Vietnam and the Cuban Missile Crisis, but in those conflicts it was typically military leaders who were overly aggressive while civilian leaders insisted … Read more

The Scale of Delusion

I have written about this fatal scale error several times before and I think it’s time to revisit it. Fatal scale error is frequently occurs with children, and is referred to as “fatal” because the child attempts a task that is impossible, like trying to fit a beach ball in his mouth, or sit on … Read more

The Bright Path (To Communism)

Recently I saw a lovely 1940 film The Bright Path set in the 1930s. The main character Tanya is an ignorant, hysterical and illiterate peasant who works as a cleaning lady at a provincial hotel. She falls in love with a promising engineer but rejects his romantic advances on her because she’s not his social equal. He’s … Read more