Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – On Saturday, Kim Jong Un insists on having a huge parade in honor of the 75th anniversary of the ruling Workers’ Party, and Trump insists on having a crowd on the grounds of the White House. Then on Monday, Trump will hold a rally north of Orlando, Florida. Trump’s rallies […]
With Crushing sanctions on 18 Iranian Banks, is Trump trying to leave a War behind for Biden?
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – As the dying Trump administration, literally on a sickbed, contemplates losing power, its hawks are lashing out at Iran in an attempt to ensure that the 2015 international nuclear deal is dead and buried, and that the US and Iran remain on a war footing. Trump’s two main allies in […]
Syria’s security services flourish while people starve; what sort of ‘president’ is Assad?
Ghazi Dahman | – ( Middle East Monitor ) – It is no surprise that the Syria Justice and Accountability Centre has released documents revealing that Syrian Embassies around the world spy on their own citizens on behalf of the Assad regime. Every Syrian who has travelled abroad for any reason knows that the regime’s […]
Peace and pro-Christian themes in Muhammad and the Qur’an
Juan Cole is interviewed below by Professor Adnan Husain, Queens University (co-editor of A Faithful Sea: The Religious Cultures of the Mediterranean, 1200-1700) on themes of peace and warmth toward Christians in the Qur’an. The event was sponsored by the Muslim Societies Global Perspectives initiative at Queens University. My remarks are drawn in large part […]
For Insights into Michigan’s Toxic culture of Masculinity and Guns see Groundbreaking Director Arman Cole’s Short, “Small Arms” (4 mn Views)
Arman Cole is a director and graduate of the University of Southern California film school. His dramatic short film, Small Arms stars Tyler Young and Dominic DeVere. Young later “starred as Philip Shea in the acclaimed USA Network limited series Eyewitness (2016), directed by Catherine Hardwicke and co-starring Julianne Nicholson. He also starred in the […]
Kamala Harris’s best Zingers and Pence’s worst Lies
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The Pence-Harris debate was what disagreements among normal people might look like, as opposed to the weird behavior of Trump in the first presidential debate. While pundits are saying that it lacked fireworks, that is not true if you define fireworks as policy disagreement as opposed to mud wrestling. The […]
Fundamentalist Pastor and Trumpie John Hagee, who sued over Pandemic Shutdown, Contracts COVID-19
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Last summer, the mayor of San Antonio, Ron Nirenberg, ordered all schools closed until September 7 as a mitigation measure against the spread of the coronavirus. Texas had a major outbreak this summer, one of the country’s worst hot spots. Texas has had over 800,000 cases and 16,444 deaths. Fundamentalist […]
How ExxonMobil’s plan to Surge its CO2 output is Like Trump’s plan to Deal with the Coronavirus
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Trump made a mad dash to escape his hospital room at Walter Reed, browbeating his military physicians into letting him go while he was pumped full of a cocktail of potions that included euphoria- and delusion-inducing steroids. His lungs laboring with broken glass syndrome, he vaulted up the stairs to […]
More Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: ‘With soul afire, words flowing like a sea’
In 1882 Edward Henry Whinfield (d. 1922) brought out a bilingual Persian and English edition of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, based on eight medieval manuscripts. It is really his own selection, since he admits he played down the wine poetry (!), and several of his manuscripts are late and Indian. Whinfield did not know […]
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