It’s been several weeks since Hurricane Maria stuck Puerto Rico as a near Category Five hurricane that in a matter of hours transformed the US protectorate from the most developed island in the Caribbean Sea to a devastated community thrown back into the past several hundred years. Gone in the…

There appears to be a crack in the sports and entertainment industrial complex of American society. What began as a mostly solitary gesture against racial injustice and police brutality by NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick has ballooned into a fully formed media maelstrom. Kaepernick’s protest consisted of going down onto one…

The acquittal of former police officer Jason Stockley in St. Louis has released a wave of social and racial tensions not seen there since the controversy over the Michael Brown police killing in Ferguson in 2014. Those heady days in Ferguson were part of a larger set of foundational events…

Before the media’s attention turned to Houston and the unfolding flood disaster there, there was much rumination on the political rally of Donald Trump in Phoenix on August 22nd. The event was a throwback to the large campaign rallies that were the hallmark of the Trump presidential campaign and were…

North Korea recently announced that it was pausing in its drive to launching a missile attack against the island of Guam, a sovereign territory of the United States. This announcement should not come as a surprise since any sober analysis of the standoff between North Korea and the United States…

There has been a minor tremor in the media and political world as the ratings for Megyn Kelly’s new show on NBC continue to decline. Kelly was the much lauded and admired host of an evening chat show on Fox News that garnered the network’s second highest ratings (behind the…

The end of June saw an interesting development in the regional balance-of-power struggle in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia along with some of the Gulf emirates called on the peninsular kingdom of Qatar submit to thirteen demands or face the prospect of severe economic sanctions and political isolation. The demands…

Last Monday, General Manuel Noriega, the infamous Panamanian strongman, died anti-climatically in a hospital in Panama City. Noriega will most likely be remembered as one of the Latin American bêtes noires of the late Cold War who ran afoul of the foreign policy imperatives of the United States resulting in armed…

The recent terror attack in Manchester provides and stark example of what political conflict looks like in the society of the spectacle—specifically in the phase of the spectacle referred to here as the spectacle of disintegration. This phase of the spectacle features a historical era when the ability of states,…

Though less than a week has elapsed since the firing of James Comey, a conventional wisdom is already emerging. This has been expressed by a fairly broad cross-section of elites, pundits and academics who all espouse both the unprecedented nature of Trump’s dismissal of the former FBI Director and the…