The Post-Partisan Emporium

  Malevolent Anal Distraction The media’s reporting on the "Queering Nuclear Weapons" essay written by a new national nuclear security official obscures something much darker John Carter Nuclear security is, I’m sure you do not need to be convinced, a deeply serious matter. Ever since we cracked the atom over Hiroshima our civilization has been walking a tightrope over an abyss. A single misstep could mean annihilation – hundreds of millions dead within minutes, billions within days. Doubtless there would be some survivors, but it’s doubtful that industrial civilization would survive. We’ve come within a hair’s breadth of this a few times, not only in the Cuban Missile Crisis, but on other occasions, when radar mulfunctions or computer glitches left launch officers in the USA and the former USSR unsure whether or not to press the big red buttons they were entrusted with. Fortunately for everyone, they didn’t. If they had, none of us would be here. Nuclear power plants can be ...

  Mirages Edward J. Curtin, Jr. I am sitting on the beach at the National Seashore, a forty-mile long stretch of the Atlantic Ocean seashore on Outer Cape Cod, established in 1961 by President Kennedy.  The wind is whipping hard and the waves are running wildly high against the shore, and, to paraphrase Thoreau – the sand is rapidly drinking up the last wave that wets it.  I am looking far out to the horizon where the sun shimmers on what seems to be the world’s watery edge, creating a strange mirage that I wonder at but find hard to describe.  Earlier, I was rereading Thoreau’s  Cape   Cod  in which he mentioned this phenomenon 150 years ago, not just the mirages across the water but those here along the great stretches of sand.  Now I am confused and my mind wanders to other mirages that make me shake my head in wonderment.  It is hard to grasp what one is seeing these days. When Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., a presidential aspirant, folded his c...

  My Lost Summer Scott Ritter The author (center) with Ilya Volkov (left) and Alexander Zyrianov (right) at Mamayev Kurgan (Volgograd) I had hoped to make the Summer of 2024 a memorable one—building bridges of friendship to Russia, working to develop knowledge and information as an antidote to the poison of Russophobia in America, and trying to prevent a nuclear war between my country and the Russian Federation. The U.S. government had other plans. Growing up in a military family, I was immersed in patriotic themes built around the   notion of service to one’s country. On the wall of my bedroom my parents hung two framed posters. The first showed President John F. Kennedy’s face in profile, with the famous words from his inaugural address superimposed over it: “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.” The second was a poster showing an American prisoner of war behind barbed wire. “The Code of Conduct,” the poster’s title read. “I am an A...