Patrick Lawrence: Imperium: Decline on the Way to Fall
I just read a most remarkable piece in The Seattle Times—remarkable for its bluntly nihilistic candor. The headline atop Ron Judd’s August 2021 essay for The Times’s Pacific NW Magazine gives a good idea of the writer’s point: “The decline of American…
Patrick Lawrence: Late-Imperial Duplicities
As I was saying to Diocletian over Prosecco just last week, it is hard to run an empire these days. You have to lie to people more or less incessantly to keep the troops minding the perimeter in supplies. No…
Patrick Lawrence: Old Man Shouting, The American Empire is Doing Great! But It Isn’t
Democratic elites and the reporters who clerk for them were effusively approving of Joe Biden’s State of the Union speech last Thursday evening—not so much for what he said, which came nothing new, as for the demeanor of our enfeebled president. Never…
IMPEACHMENT: A Rapid Succession of Events
Patrick Lawrence on the indictment of key witness Alexander Smirnov; the under-reported testimony of Jason Galanis from a federal prison; and Hunter Biden’s testimony under oath. This is the fourth in Consortium News’ series on the congressional investigation into President Biden’s allegedly corrupt…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: The Russians in Ukraine
Recent disclosures provide an incomplete inventory of the West’s covert activities in Ukraine. There is more than we have been told, surely. You may have read or heard about the freakout that ensued after Emmanuel Macron convened a summit of…
Patrick Lawrence: The CIA in Ukraine — The NY Times Gets a Guided Tour
The New York Times recently ran a story called “The Spy War: How the C.I.A. Secretly Helps Ukraine Fight Putin.” Patrick Lawrence writes that these “secrets” only contained what the CIA “wanted and did not want disclosed,” and were “effectively…
“‘Palestinian Voices’ makes its goal.”
We’re in this project together now. To our readers, I am pleased to announce that we’ve met our fundraising goal for “Palestinian Voices.” In just six days, The Floutist’s readers and supporters stepped forward in a generous show of support for…
“Starvation as a weapon of war.”
Palestinian voices have never been more urgent. “This is the fastest decline in a population’s nutrition status ever recorded. That means children are being starved at the fastest rate the world has ever seen.”—Melanie Ward, Medical Aid for Palestinians. 1…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Authorized Atrocities
Israel’s lawlessness has a history that those in the West share with the apartheid state. It is remarked often enough, including in this space, that Israel’s savagery in its determination to exterminate the Palestinians of Gaza — and we had…