Author: nick
In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan’s greatest fear was nuclear war. On Easter weekend 2026, neoconservative talk host Mark Levin’s greatest wish seemed to be nuclear war. On Tuesday, Donald Trump appeared on the brink of giving Levin that wish, with the president writing of Iran, “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.” By Wednesday, it hadn’t happened—and Levin was fuming. If this sounds crazy or barbaric, congratulations on having a moral compass. But it’s worth examining this neoconservative, war-eager mindset and how dismissing human…
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The venerable Hispanic activist Cesar Chavez is venerated no more. After the New York Times reported that he sexually abused women and girls, the union organizer was posthumously cancelled. States and cities announced they would stop celebrating Cesar Chavez Day and many streets and plazas dropped his name. The sudden cancellation likely marks the end of attempts to turn Chavez into the Hispanic MLK. Some conservatives see something else at work here. They claim Chavez was a border hawk and imply the sexual abuse claims were a convenient way to get rid of an unreliable leftist icon. That’s the argument…
“Israel must immediately release Gazan doctor Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya,” UN experts said in a recent statement, in unequivocal terms. Dr. Abu Safiya was “subjected to torture and other cruel and degrading treatment,” they said. His health condition is “dire.” Many are already familiar with the iconic Palestinian doctor from Gaza. But the deserved and urgent focus on his case should not end with him. Rather, it should illuminate the broader catastrophe afflicting Gaza’s health sector – one deliberately dismantled as part of the ongoing genocide that began on October 7, 2023. Palestinians and others continue to refer to the…
On March 23, CBS News published a national poll saying that two-thirds of the American people felt the Iran War was a war of choice rather than one of necessity. The war has grown even less popular since then. I have been to many public events and have talked to very many people over the last month or so and have been amazed at the strong feelings about this war. The opinions have ranged from a belief that we never should have gotten into it at all to those who express a very strong desire for us to get out…
Originally set for March, the high-stakes summit between US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping was postponed for about “five or six weeks,” due to the U.S. focus on military operations in Iran. The delay suggests that the Trump administration grossly underestimated Iran’s resilience. The summit will take place under the shadow of the worst energy crisis since the 1970s. US-China stakes in the crisis The crisis itself illustrates the differential stakes the two major powers have in the outcome. US military exposure is high, due to its military bases and fleets in the Gulf, whereas China’s armed…
Self-evidently, the news has been overwhelmingly focused on Washington’s current endeavor to unload $200 billion of imperial destruction upon Iran and its neighbors around the Persian Gulf. Well, and also upon all other users of petroleum products, LNG, LPGs, nitrogen fertilizer, food, helium, semiconductors, manufactured goods and most everything else anywhere on the planet. Accordingly, comparatively scant attention has been given to another recent milestone on America’s headlong dash to fiscal disaster. To wit, the public debt crossed the $39 trillion mark and nearly in the blink of an eye, too. Just four years ago, we were at the $29…
On March 30th, the Selective Service System (SSS) sent the White House its proposed regulations for “automatic” [sic] draft registration for review and approval before they are made public. This is the first visible step in the transition from trying to get young men to sign themselves up for a military draft, to trying to sign them up “automatically” by aggregating data requisitioned from other Federal agencies. This year-long process began with the enactment of the SSS proposal for “automatic” registration in December 2025. The new scheme is supposed to go into operation in December 2026. [Excerpt from Selective Service…
Is personal freedom a reality or a myth? Does the government execute the will of the governed or the will of those who finance its officials? Does the Bill of Rights restrain the government? Are the levers of government power pulled by those the governed have elected or those we don’t see? Do elections change anything? Can the president kill people whom he suspects might commit a crime? Aren’t even those who would cause great harm entitled to due process? Isn’t everyone entitled to a fair trial in front of a neutral judge and jury before any punishment can be…
It is clear that the US wants to conduct some kind of regime change operation in Cuba, egged on by Republican and Democratic hawks, though polling indicates it is not popular within the US, Cuba, or the international community. Figures like Marco Rubio have said that Cuba will need to open their economy up, in a nod to when the island was a completely deregulated vassal for US casino companies, ruled by a pro-US brutal dictator, Fulgencio Batista, who was deposed by the Cuban Revolution led by the Castro brothers and Che Guevara. The US has been applying maximum pressure…