This is the most abnormal election of your lifetime and mine. At this moment, a mere eleven days before we go to the polls, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are running neck and neck. A Wall Street Journal poll issued Wednesday night, October 23, says Trump is leading by two percent. In England, The Economist’s Election
howard bloom
Why are people so upset these days? The answer is simple. Politics. The political climate in this country is more extreme than at any time since the days of demagogue Huey Long in 1936 and of segregationist George Wallace in 1968. The Democratic side believes that if Donald Trump wins, it will mean the end of democracy
Iran has mounted the biggest ballistic missile attack in history. It claims it launched 200 ballistic missiles at Israel Tuesday night, October 1st. 181 appeared in the night skies over Israel. They were shot out of the heavens by Israel’s Arrow3 missiles, a part of Israel’s remarkable air defense system, the Iron Dome. There was only
Joe Biden’s nightmare of a wider war in the Middle East is coming to pass. But the war is not widening because of Israel. It is widening because of Iran. On October 7th, 2024, Hamas broke a cease-fire deal and started the Gaza war with the rape, torture, and slaughter of 1,200 Israeli civilians. On October
Tuesday the world was shocked by one of the strangest war stories of the century. Between 2,800 and 4,000 pagers went off in the hands or pockets of Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon as the fighters went about their daily lives. Yes, pagers, old fashioned pagers, exploded. In fact, pagers blew up from Lebanon’s capital, Beirut, and
Australia has us beat. When it comes to how long you can expect to live, you’d expect America to come out on top. Far from it. In a new study of life-expectancy in six English-speaking countries, America does not come in first, second, or even third. We come in last. Dead last. The new study, which appeared in the British
Wednesday morning, July 31st, at 2 am Iranian time, Israel appears to have assassinated one of Hamas’ top three leaders, Ismail Haniyeh. Apparently Israel nailed Haniyeh with an explosive that blew up a few rooms of the luxury government apartment building in which the leader of Hamas was staying. Why was Haniyeh in Iran’s capital,
Joe Biden’s Oval Office speech Wednesday, July 24th, was more powerful than those who hate him may realize. It was powerful for a simple reason: it focused on the importance of four forgotten American virtues: truth, character, decency and democracy. It was a speech about what Joe Biden ran on in 2019, saving the soul of
There is a sudden movement in the Western World to take smartphones away from kids. It started in the summer of 2022 when social psychologist Jonathan Haidt at New York University, the father of two adolescents, was writing a book about what he called “the pervasive negative effects of the internet and social media on
The current crisis over Joe Biden’s frailty has twisted Democrats like me in knots. Wednesday morning, July 10, actor George Clooney published an opinion piece in the New York Times calling for Joe Biden to leave the presidential race and make room for a younger candidate. Clooney joined seven other celebrities asking Biden to step
The headline in a CNN story that appeared a little after noon on Wednesday, June 26th, was brutal: “Children are dying of starvation in their parents’ arms as famine spreads through Gaza.” The details were heartbreaking. One nine year old boy, said CNN, is “clearly wasted from severe malnutrition and suffering from dehydration. His blue
On Tuesday, June 18th, a new word showed up in the vocabulary of the Middle-East war: “inevitable.” Nearly every expert in Israel from the country’s military leaders to its newsletter writers said that an all-out war with Lebanon’s Hezbollah was inevitable. And who is Hezbollah? Like Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah is a part of Iran’s “Axis
In the wake of Covid, are Americans losing their minds? Sort of. We are going crazy for animal stories. Why? It could be because stories of insanity among humans are just too hard for us to take. In the Associated Press’s list of the 31 oddest stories of the week, fully 16—more than half—were tales about
The Internet has been under constant attack for the last 20 years as the source of all of our emotional woes, from depression, cyberbullying, and suicide to negative body image. The anti-Internet attack has been so fierce that nine states have tried to ban social media access for kids under sixteen or to require the
We have reached a dire moment. At 2 am Sunday morning, March 14, Iran launched a swarm of between 300 and 350 suicide drones, ballistic missiles, and cruise missiles at Israel. Israel’s Stunner missiles, Arrow missiles, and Iron Dome missiles, with help from the French and Americans, knocked 99% of these weapons out of the sky.
Taiwan’s defense chief, Chiu Kuo-Cheng, has revealed that American troops are permanently stationed in Taiwan. Our soldiers are there to train Taiwan’s military in the use of things like drones. However, some of those troops are less than two miles from China’s border. A headline in London’s The Express warns that this puts the “world” on
Nikki Haley competed against Donald Trump in primaries in 29 states and territories over the last five months and won only in two—Vermont and Washington, DC. So, Wednesday morning, March 6th, Haley gave a speech suspending her campaign. Haley’s words mark a profound change in the Republican party and in America’s kind of politics. In her
There is a fight in America between those who want Russia to win its loathsome war in Ukraine and those who want Russia to lose. The top cheer leader for a Russian victory is former President Donald Trump. Mr. Trump controls the Republicans in Congress. A bill to give $38 billion to Ukraine has passed
The Senate Judiciary Committee, under Democrat Dick Durbin and Republican Lindsey Graham, held a hearing Wednesday, January 31, that the Committee advertised as “the first time a group of Big Tech CEOs will testify on online child sexual exploitation.” The CEOs included Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, TikTok’s Shou Chew, X’s Linda Yaccarino, Snap’s Evan Spiegel, and
England’s Morrisons, a 470-store British supermarket chain, has tried something innovative but disturbing. In a few of its stores over the Christmas season, it installed a robotic intrusion detector designed to act as a night watchman on construction sites, in mines, and on farms. Morrisons tried this machine to detect, not trespassers, but shoplifters. The robotic
There are new fears that the war in the Middle East between Hamas and Israel could spill over into a wider conflict. And there is reason to fear that, in the end, the conflict could go nuclear and kill us all. Here’s what’s happened in the last few days. Early on Saturday, December 23, a
A new survey from LendingTree, the online loan comparison service, looked at accident rates of 30 auto brands and found that the brand with the most accidents per 1,000 drivers was Tesla. Other brands high on the list of accidents per 1,000 drivers were Dodge Ram and Subaru. When it came to driving incidents, a
The Wall Street journal has published a story that may explain many of the mysteries of the war against Hamas in Gaza. The Journal reveals something the Israelis are keeping secret. The Israeli military has built five water pumps near the coastal Al-Shati refugee camp in Gaza City and has been experimenting with flooding Hamas’ 310
At 10:52 Wednesday morning, The Wall Street Journal reported new data from the National Center for Health Statistics on suicide in the United States. The data was shocking. According to the Journal, last year close to 50,000 Americans committed suicide. That’s the highest level of suicides since 1941. 50,000 is not just a lot of suicides
There’s a Muslim phrase you need to know if you’re going to understand the war in Gaza and Israel. It’s a phrase that militant Islamic Jihadists have used from Chechnya to Lebanon: “We love death more than you love life.” Keep that in mind as you watch the latest news on the Israel-Hamas war. Israel
We all know what happened Saturday. Or we think we know. Gaza fired what it said were 5,000 rockets at civilian targets in Israel. And Hamas fighters infiltrated Israel using a massive bulldozer to tear a hole in the smart fence draped with razor wire that separates Gaza from southern Israel. Over 1,500 invaders streamed through. Some of
On Tuesday September 21st, Target announced that it was closing nine stores in four states in October because of a new form of organized crime—smash and grab robberies, flash robberies. The sort of robberies that hit a Wawa convenience store in Philadelphia on Sunday September 24, when it was invaded by between 50 and 100
In 1968 Pope Paul VI established a Global Peace Day. A New Year’s Day on which the Pope gives a speech “reflecting the signs of our times.” Wednesday August 9th, the Vatican put out an announcement about the speech the pope will give at next year’s Peace Day, coming up on January 1st, just four months
Something startling is happening to aging. 90,000 Americans have reached the age of 100. Which means that you, too, may live that long. But how? Publicity for a new book on longevity has brought a 2012 study back into the news. In that study, researchers from Yeshiva University looked at 250 people 98 to
Sex has three big payoffs. • Payoff number one. The male-female combo is a way of tapping into the power of what game theorists call “mixed strategies.” Males are gambles on wild exploration. Exploration so dangerous that less than one in a million sperm strike home. Females are bets on the safe, the tried and