Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – A young Norwegian man wearing body armor and carrying two shotguns and a handgun attacked the Al-Noor Mosque in a tony suburb of Oslo on Saturday. Only 3 people were in the building for afternoon prayers. On Monday, 1,000 congregants are expected, to celebrate Eid al-Adha, the feast of sacrifice […]
Humanity hasn’t experienced a Month as Hot as July in all the Time since Millard Fillmore was President
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – July was the hottest month ever recorded, i.e. the hottest since about 1850 when scientific records began being kept around the world using modern thermometers. So writes Chelsea Harvey at Climate Wire via The Scientific American. July was more than 1 degree Fahrenheit warmer than the late 20th century average. […]
Next: The Climate Crisis is Coming for Your Food
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The sources of the climate emergency are often framed with regard to electricity generation and transportation, while the impact of global heating through burning of fossil fuels is of discussed with regard to extreme weather and sea level rise. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has just issued A […]
White al-Qaeda, Trump and Economic Terrorism against El Paso
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Trump’s visit to El Paso on Wednesday was unwelcome to most of its residents. They understood that his anti-Latino rhetoric and talk of “infestation,” “crime” and “invasion” had inspired the white terrorist who massacred them, and they are inconsolable in the grief for the 22 dead among them, as are […]
Immigrants aren’t “Invaders:” They’re Who will Pay your Social Security
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Australian-American Rupert Murdoch’s white nationalist TV channel, Fox Cable News, is doubling down on the anti-immigrant memes that drove the El Paso shooter, with empty suit Brian Kilmeade and provocateur Laura Ingraham insisting that immigration is invasion. They appear to be conspiring at provoking a race war, more or less […]
On How Latinos are America’s Greatest Hope for Economic Growth and Renewal
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Hispanics or Latinos have been a key population in North America for four hundred years. They are now often coded as immigrants by white Americans, but they were in what is now New Mexico, Arizona and Texas centuries before English-speakers arrived. Spaniards founded San Antonio in 1718, long before the […]
America’s Shame: 15,549 Gun Homicides in US in 2017; 32 (160) in UK
Revised We are reeling from back-to-back mass shootings, at least one of them an explicit manifestation of white nationalist terrorism in which Americans of a specific ethnicity were targeted, Nazi-like. The US policy of constantly endangering our children is enacted by a bought-and-paid-for Congress on behalf of 10 major gun manufacturers with an $8 billion […]
White Supremacist Terrorism strikes Again in the Age of Trump and Putin
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The slaughter of 20 persons in and around a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, by a virulent white nationalist on Saturday was not just a “mass shooting.” It was a profound act of terrorism. Nor was it the action of a single person. The alleged shooter was invested in Trump’s […]
Be Afraid, Very Afraid: Greenland Ice Sheets Cascading into Ocean 50 Years Ahead of Schedule
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Amid the European heat wave, Ruth Mottram of the Danish Meteorological Institute set off a panic this week when she observed that Greenland lost 11 billion tons of ice on August 1, the most in recorded history, and half the ice sheet was experiencing some level of melting. She added […]
© 2025 All Rights Reserved