Howard bloom

Sunday December 8th the world was hit with a massive surprise. The government of Syria had fallen.  Syria’s dictator for life, Bashar al-Assad, had fled to Moscow.  In a mere eleven days, rebels had swept through the cities of Aleppo and Hama and had taken Syria’s capital, Damascus. Syria had been in the hands of dictators from
0 Comments
Donald Trump has won the 2024 presidential election.  In a landslide.   How did he do it?  And what will it mean to the country?   First, how did President-elect Trump pull off this triumph? He used three levers.  Lever number one is publicity. Trump began to seek publicity 50 years ago. His mentor, the mastermind of the
0 Comments
The headlines say that as of October 30th’s polls, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are running neck and neck.  But is that true? In FiveThirtyEight’s Recent Polling Average Update, which pulls together roughly a hundred national and state polls, Harris leads Trump, even though her edge is a slender 1.8%. In the Cook Political Report average of
0 Comments
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
0 Comments
Anger is on the rise in 2024.  Ask ChatGPT or the search engine for scientific studies, Consensus, and they will feed you great gobs of information showing that anger in America is reaching record highs. What’s more, they will tell you that much of the anger scientists have studied recently is based on politics.  Republicans are furious
0 Comments
In January, eight months ago, Nikki Haley said, ‘The first party to retire its 80-year-old candidate is going to be the one who wins this election.’ Nikki Haley may be right. The Democratic National Convention that took place at the United Center in Chicago the week of August 19th demonstrated something no one may have
0 Comments
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
0 Comments
The space race of the 21st century is not between nations, but between China and one man: Elon Musk. As CEO of SpaceX, Musk has revolutionized space travel, achieving milestones once thought impossible. His relentless drive has put SpaceX at the forefront, far outpacing NASA, not to mention Russia, China, and India. In contrast, America’s
0 Comments
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
0 Comments
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
0 Comments
On Wednesday June 12th something frightening happened. The Russian Northern Fleet naval group completed “precision missile weapons” drills East of the Florida Keys, within easy nuclear missile distance of the United States.  Then the four ships of mass destruction sailed to Cuba, only 106 miles from the beaches of Florida, anchored at Havana Harbor and were
0 Comments
Hamas’ strategy of using civilians as human shields is working. The biggest stories in Gaza War news in the last few days have centered on two purported Israeli strikes in Rafah killing civilians.  On Sunday May 26th Israel dropped two small 37-pound bombs to kill two Hamas leaders.  These pinpoint bombs killed precisely the leaders they were
0 Comments
The standard story in the Western media right now is that Israel has proposed a ceasefire deal that American Secretary of State Anthony Blinken calls “extraordinarily generous.”  And that is true. The Israeli deal proposes to give up over a thousand Palestinian prisoners—in many cases men who have murdered Israelis—in exchange for only 40 hostages. For
0 Comments