Author: nick

The anniversary slipped by without my noticing it, but recently, while hunting down one of my earlier articles, I was reminded that my first online piece for Skeptical Inquirer, “Happiness, Religion, and the Status Quo,” was published on December 4, 2014. So, as of December 2024, I completed a decade writing the “Behavior & Belief” column for SI. As I recall, back in 2014, Barry Karr, then executive director of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, noticed that I’d been writing blog posts on superstition and other skeptical topics for Psychology Today. He contacted me and said, “If you ever want…

I have long argued that free will, as understood by most people, is simply an illusion, and I recently criticized Shermer’s view that it is not. In response, Shermer says I’m mistaken, but concludes that the issue of free will versus determinism is “an insoluble problem because we may be ultimately talking past one another at different levels of causality.” In fact, the problem is not one of levels of causality, but of semantics: Shermer has made up a new definition of free will that’s very different from the one most people hold, and different as well from definitions offered…

When last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act was signed by Donald Trump last July 4, the conventional wisdom in Washington was that it was a one-and-done effort to use the budget reconciliation vehicle for strict party-line lawmaking prior to the 2026 midterms. Source link

An E/A-18G Growler aircraft launches from the flight deck of the world’s largest aircraft carrier, USS Gerald R. Ford, during Operation Epic Fury, March 1, 2026. Photo: US Navy. The table below displays the total US National Security budget.  The amounts shown are not restricted to what constitutes Pentagon spending or the larger “National Defense” (050) budget function.  Also included in the broader National Security category are the Veterans Administration (the human costs of wars), the State Department (diplomacy, arms sales, etc.) and Homeland Security (Coast Guard and border and internal security and more).  I also calculate an appropriate share…

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair Donald Trump continues to undermine the U.S. Constitution, reject democratic culture, violate international law, strain relationships with allies, and threaten adversaries with bombing them back to the Stone Age. The obvious question is: When will this end? Even as immediate issues are being raised about the reasons behind the U.S.–Israeli war against Iran and the exact nature of the ceasefire, we should keep asking: When will Trump’s nightmarish influence stop? But the real question may not be when it ends. It may be whether the United States can ever return to what it was before…

Israel’s Death Penalty Law for Palestinians by Seth Tobocman. In 1947, while describing the crimes of the judicial system of Nazi Germany, Telford Taylor, lead prosecutor at the Nuremberg Tribunal, opined, “[t]he dagger of the assassin was concealed beneath the robe of the jurist.” With these words, Taylor laid bare the historical context of where and how a state executed, not on the basis of equal application of law for the most serious of crimes, but adopted an institutional cover for mass slaughter of a concocted enemy, all dressed up in a courtroom pretext. Long before the Nazi party filled…

Elijah Muhammad standing behind microphones at podium / World Telegram & Sun photo by Stanley Wolfson. “An extraordinary and twisted man, turning many true gifts to evil purpose. . . . Malcolm X had the ingredients for leadership, but his ruthless and fanatical belief in violence . . . set him apart from the responsible leaders of the civil rights movement and the overwhelming majority of Negroes.” —New York Times, February 22, 1965 (one day after Malcolm X’s assassination) “Malcolm X had been a pimp, a cocaine addict and a thief. He was an unashamed demagogue. His gospel was hatred.…

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair Collapsing in panic over the price of gas is a characteristically incoherent American tradition. The highly paid press, political officials, and the same people who ignore as a matter of routine the rising costs of housing, health care, and higher education treat a 25-cent-per-gallon jump in fuel as tantamount to the apocalypse. Meanwhile, something similar to the apocalypse actually threatens livable ecology on Earth (the universe’s only habitable planet for those keeping count), largely due to the extraction of fossil fuels, but biodiversity in a boiling world is hardly relevant. Or, at least, that is…

Album art for the cover of In the Court of the Crimson King (detail), by Barry Godber. “I am not a pessimist; to perceive evil where it exists is, in my opinion, a form of optimism.” – Roberto Rossellini + If, in fact, the war is over (don’t count on it), then Iran wins by surviving two massive bombing campaigns by the US and Israel (both nuclear-armed states) in the last year. Iran wins even bigger by keeping the Islamic Republic in power under the control of a younger, more militant leadership with the Republican Guard largely intact. Iran’s victory…

In this episode of CounterPunch Radio, MV Ramana speaks with Joshua Frank about the lies and misconceptions surrounding a nuclear power revival, atomic energy’s ties to weapons proliferation, and much more. The conversation took place in January at Page Against the Machine bookstore in Long Beach, California. M. V. Ramana is the Simons Chair in Disarmament, Global and Human Security at the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, University of British Columbia, and the author of Nuclear is Not the Solution with Verso Books. Joshua Frank is co-editor of CounterPunch and co-host of CounterPunch Radio. He is the author of Atomic Days: The…