The United States stands at the endpoint of a long series of attacks on democracy, and the choices faced by the American public today point to the divide between those who are committed to democracy and those who are not. Debates over whether Donald Trump was a fascist or Hillary Clinton was a right-wing warmonger and tool of Wall Street were a tactical diversion. The real questions that should have been debated include: What measures could have been taken to prevent the United States from sliding further into a distinctive form of authoritarianism? And what could have been done to imagine a mode of civic courage and militant hope needed to enable the promise of a radical democracy?
Such questions take on a significant urgency in light of the election of Donald Trump to the presidency. Under such circumstances, not only is the public in peril, it is on the brink of collapse as the economic, political, and cultural institutions necessary for democracy to survive are being aggressively undermined. More

The Twitter-addicted right-wing uber-asshole and authoritarian megalomaniac Donald Trump and his team of racist, arch-plutocratic, and eco-cidal vultures are about to set up shop alongside a right-wing Congress and a soon-to-be right-wing majority Supreme Court in Washington D.C. So what if the Republican Party is a widely hated institution, viewed with disapproval by nearly two-thirds of the U.S. populace? More

The Russian Game is a chess strategy developed in the mid-19th Century by Alexander Petrov, a grand master from St. Petersburg. Petrov's thinking about chess was deeply influenced by Napoleon's invasion of Russia. Essentially, Petrov viewed chess as a kind of military exercise and his Russian Game was a defensive plan to protect the "homeland" of the chessboard from attack by an overwhelming imperial force through deception, misdirection and infiltration.

Petrov's Defense, as the Russian Game is also known, is a devious scheme of counterpunching, where the movements of your opposition are mirrored, creating the illusion that your opponent's pieces are fighting themselves, until a line of counter-attack opens with devastating consequences. When played by a master, the Russian Game is meant to confuse, disorient and induce a feeling of paranoia in the invading force of pawns, rooks and knights More