#culture-vs-war

#culture-vs-war

Hegseth invoked Psalm 18, in which King David says he did not turn back until his enemies were 'consumed.' His enemies 'cried for help, but there was none to save them.'

The students enrolled in Politics 226 took notes and politely raised their hands as they navigated the complexities of 'just war' theory, questioning whether the U.S. intervention in Iran met its criteria.

The economics are hard to ignore. Shooting down a drone with AeroVironment's LOCUST laser system costs less than $10, using just two to five seconds of laser energy. Compare that to the interceptor missiles currently used against Iranian drone swarms, which cost orders of magnitude more and are in short supply across allied arsenals.

The cycle of dread and panic, of being driven to the edge at full speed before someone slams the brakes, harms our nervous systems, and has the potential to break our spirits.

"As long as that aggressive investment continues by hyperscalers and service providers..., that will provide a certain level of resilience and will cushion some of the impact of any slowdown," Minton said.

The conversation reveals that the ongoing conflict raises critical questions about the motivations behind US foreign policy, particularly regarding Israel's role in shaping military strategies.

For a nation whose founding symbols were carefully engineered around the balance of peace and war, that omission is hard to read as accidental. Dropping the olive branch from the dime isn't just a design choice: it's a cultural signal.

A record high of adults—80 percent—believes that Americans are divided on the most important values. National pride, trust in government, and confidence in institutions are near record lows. The Princeton University historian Sean Wilentz says the United States hasn't been this divided since the Civil War. Nearly half of Americans think another civil war is likely in their lifetime.

The Iranian choke hold on the Strait of Hormuz evidently had a lot to do with it. By cutting off roughly one-fifth of the world's oil supply over the past five weeks, Iran's blockade of that narrow waterway caused an energy crisis and fears of a global recession that the White House could not abide for long.

The January 3rd Operation Absolute Resolve ousted Venezuelan Dictator Nicholas Maduro, marking a significant shift in US policy towards countering adversarial influence in the western hemisphere.

As authoritarianism accelerates - as government-sanctioned violence becomes more overt in immigration enforcement, in policing, in the open deployment of federal force against civilians, and in the steady erosion of civil rights - people are scrambling for reference points. But instead of reckoning with the long and violent architecture of U.S. history, much of this searching collapses into racialized tropes and xenophobic reassurance: This isn't Afghanistan. This isn't Iran or China. This is America. We have rights. This is a democracy. This isn't who we are.

Western governments, the U.S. under Donald Trump leading the pack, are caught in the grip of an anti-immigration fervor, enforcing cruel and degrading laws that violate human rights and undermine public safety. This entire approach toward immigrants is not only immoral but also rests on false economic claims, argues Daniel Mendiola, assistant professor of history and migration studies at Vassar College, in the interview that follows.

Anthony Glees, Emeritus Professor at the University of Buckingham, called the US and Israeli decision to attack Iran a 'war of choice' and the first red flag which previously led to the last two world wars. He claimed that the conflict in the Middle East did not start out of necessity or self-defense, but as a deliberate decision by two leaders focused on gaining power and keeping it.

Collating data from the World Bank and other sources in innovative ways, he argues that globalization in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century was accompanied by then-unprecedented growth of income in both previously poor populations (notably in China) and people at the top of the world's income distribution (especially those in the West). By contrast, relative shares of world income stagnated or were thought to have declined for wealthy nations' middle and working classes, including in the United States.

Across the world, governments are redefining data. It is no longer a commercial byproduct, but a strategic resource. One that carries economic weight, political influence, and long-term national consequences. At the center of this shift is what most people never consciously see but continuously produce: their digital DNA.