Featured

Southern White Male GOP Voter Suppression, anti-Abortion Laws are ways of reviving Jim Crow and expanding it to White Women

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – African-Americans have complained about the tendency of commentators to compare political suppression and regressive policies of white Republicans to slavery. Nothing, they rightly maintain, is like slavery. But some GOP laws passed by elite white males are very much like Jim Crow-style discrimination. Voter i.d. laws, for instance, are completely […]

Climate Crisis

Top 5 Health Dangers of Climate Emergency that are far more Pressing than Covid Pandemic (- 230 Top Medical Journals)

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Some 230 medical journals carried an editorial on Sunday, “Call for Emergency Action to Limit Global Temperature Increases, Restore Biodiversity, and Protect Health.” In my view, the editorial buried the lead by putting this sentence two-thirds of the way down and by not giving it its own paragraph: “Rises above […]

Featured

On Labor Day, Poverty for Workers has fallen from 12.8% to 8.5%

Juan Cole

Revised. Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – This Labor Day, American workers finally have something have to celebrate, by virtue of having voted for a Democratic president and Congress. The pandemic-driven labor shortage has raised wages. Direct payments from the government, including an expanded child tax credit and expanded unemployment benefits added $3,200 to the income […]

Climate Crisis

UN: Climate-Driven Extreme Weather Disasters since 1970 increased 5-Fold, costing Trillions

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction have issued a report finding that in the past 50 years, 11,000 droughts, storms, extreme temperature and other extreme weather events have accounted for 50 percent of all disasters and three-fourths of known economic losses, totaling $3.64 […]

Arab World

Don’t Compare Texas Abortion law to Islamic Law: Most Muslims are and have been More Liberal

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The Texas “heartbeat law” banning abortion after six weeks has prompted comparisons of Texas evangelicals to Afghanistan’s Taliban. There is a resemblance globally of religious-Right movements on women’s issues, since religious conservatism is usually patriarchal and aims at controlling women. If, however, the comparison is between Christianity and Islam in […]

Climate Crisis

Why We Need Electric Cars: Climate-driven Hurricane Ida Knocked out Gulf Oil Production, 1/5 of US Refinery Capacity

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Louisiana’s petroleum refineries are out of action in the wake of Hurricane Ida. Refineries run on electricity, and electricity has been knocked out in New Orleans and environs, perhaps for another couple of weeks. Here’s the kicker: Louisiana refineries account for nearly 1/5 of America’s refining capacity. Raw crude oil […]

Afghanistan

Biden: Afghanistan Withdrawal is “about ending an era of major military operations to remake other countries”

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – President Joe Biden on Tuesday announced the end of the war in Afghanistan. I saw the Neoconservative Bill Kristol on CNN deploring Biden’s speech for not assessing the sweep of the war. Kristol was the biggest warmonger of all the pundits in the early zeroes, arguing for invading and occupying […]

Afghanistan

So Long, Afghanistan War: Top 6 Things we Won’t miss about our Longest Military Engagement

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Tom Bowman and Audie Cornish at NPR report that all U.S. troops are out of Afghanistan, ending America’s longest war. I teach that war every year, so I’ll still be living with it the rest of my career. But for most Americans, its end should be something to celebrate. Here […]

Afghanistan

Ida: The Climate Emergency and Fossil Fuels, not Afghan terrorists, just Knocked out Power to America’s 4th-Largest Port

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The two big stories on Sunday, of the continued evacuation effort at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, and the landfall of Hurricane Ida on the coast of Louisiana have something in common. Both are about potential threats to the United States. America’s national security elites and arms manufacturers […]