Midlife Meditation

One of thousands of Trump Troll images I Googled. It took just over six months for President Trump to fulfill the destiny foretold for him by generations of necromancers, seers, and pundits: utterly ignoring his printed talking points (which were about opioid addiction), in total disregard for the criticisms he had levied against his predecessor for drawing lines in the sand and then not acting on them, Trump promised to exercise the literal nuclear option if North Korean dictator Kim Jung-Un makes any more threats of his own. Within hours, Kim called Trump's bluff, threatening to attack Guam, the American territory closest to North Korea's missile launchers. Thus begins the Trumpocalypse. All through the campaign, we joked about it. Slate Magazine summarized the speculations in its "Trump Apocalypse Watch," issuing a daily estimate on a scale of one to four horsemen of "how likely it is that Donald Trump will be elected president, thus triggering ...

These weapons are different. That's the argument President Obama has used to justify intervening in Syria: chemical weapons cross a line. Go ahead and kill civilians with bullets, grenades, missiles, bombs, and as long as there's no chemical in there except explosives, we're good. Gas them, and we're no longer good. It's an odd argument to make, but wholly consistent with the hypocrisy of international law in matters of war. The Chemical Weapons Convention was introduced in 1968 by an 18-nation coalition. Since then, 175 other nations have signed the treaty, though not all have ratified it. If Syria adds its name to the treaty, the total will be 194. Chemical weapons are, without a doubt, horrible things. Slow, agonizing deaths by seizure and asphyxiation are crimes against humanity. There is no question about this. The question for me lies in the fact that these weapons have been singled out for condemnation. Biological weapons have also been condemned f...