What's happening right now in Aleppo, which is frankly even worse than I made it out to be yesterday, has always been one of the nightmare humanitarian scenarios in terms of how Syria's civil war might play out. Aleppo was Syria's largest city before the war and has still been home to somewhere between one … Continue reading The unsolvable problem of Aleppo

Obviously I have no way of knowing the exact worst place to be on the entire planet at this very moment. Being at the bottom of the Mariana Trench would probably suck, for example. But I can't imagine anyplace being consistently more terrifying an abode for most of the past ~5 years than the city … Continue reading The worst place on Earth right now?

I'm sure most of you have heard the legend that Scipio Aemilianus sowed the fields of Carthage with salt at the end of the Third Punic War (c. 146 BC) to ensure that nothing would ever grow there again. This is, as you probably also knew, fiction, a legend invented in the 19th century as … Continue reading Root and branch

Tayyip Erdoğan was in St. Petersburg today, bro-ing it out with fellow sort-of-democratically-elected autocrat Vladimir Putin: Russian President Vladimir Putin said Russian trade sanctions on Turkey would be phased out "step by step". "The priority is to get back to the pre-crisis level of co-operation," he told Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in St Petersburg. … Continue reading Changing BFFs

I realize the old blog here has been light on what you might call "substantive" content today, but in my defense I probably got about 3 hours of uninterrupted sleep last night because our new puppy decided that our backyard was suddenly a scary place, and so instead of going to the bathroom every time … Continue reading Schrödinger’s Siege

Hey everybody, big news! "Principled Conservatives," a term that Bill Kristol has used so often lately I wouldn't be surprised if he's had it tattooed across his back, have finally found their man to make an independent run against Donald Trump, and it's big. Which intrepid and clearly well-known (otherwise it would be total folly … Continue reading Meet the heretofore unknown “Never Trump” candidate who might just hand the election to Trump

Al-Monitor's Akiva Eldar notes that the presidential campaign (and Hillary Clinton's need to appease big money Likudnik donors like Haim Saban) doesn't seem to be tempering the Obama administration's willingness to criticize illegal Israeli settlement activity: Top US administration officials are not in the habit of shooting announcements from the hip, especially when it comes … Continue reading Actions speak louder than words

Welp, they did it. Our own government, the one you and I and so many other American citizens rely upon to defend us against our foreign enemies, paid the hostile Iranian regime in what appears, and let's not mince words here, to be a straightforward hostage ransom. Oh sure, the president denied that this was … Continue reading Sick to my stomach