Author: nick
From the memorial page website: Author and lecturer Michael Parenti passed away peacefully at home on January 24, 2026, at the age of 92. Born into a family of working-class Italian immigrants and raised in East Harlem, New York City, Parenti attended City College CUNY; Brown University; and Yale, where he earned a PhD in Political Science. Radicalized by the Vietnam War, Parenti became a Marxist and an activist. During protests, he was several times arrested and on two occasions badly beaten and bloodied by the police. Despite publishing articles in the leading political science and history journals, as well…
Boreal owl. Photo: Courtney Celley, USFWS. The Custer-Gallatin National Forest proposed the Bear-Palmer “Forest Health” Project on the northern border of Yellowstone National Park, near Gardiner, Montana. The project would clearcut 824 acres, commercially log most trees on 802 acres, and leave small, isolated clusters of trees on 500 acres, for a total of 2,126 acres, which will then be intentionally burned. The agency claims the goal of the logging and burning project is to remove dead/dying trees to reduce insects such as the Mountain Pine Beetle, Douglas-fir Beetle, and the Spruce Budworm. But these native insect populations also feed…
In one of the scariest moments in modern history, we’re doing our best at ScheerPost to pierce the fog of lies that conceal it but we need some help to pay our writers and staff. Please consider a tax-deductible donation. By Sharon Zhang This article was originally published by Truthout Separate polling found this week that Congress’s disapproval ratings have tied their all-time high of 86 percent. New polling has found that just 4 percent of Democratic voters support increasing military aid to Israel, marking a massive rift with congressional Democrats at a time when other polling has found…
Photo by Marco Zuppone Some day, Donald Trump will be dead. His rodentine mouth, so incessantly slit open to spit imbecilities past his bleached dentures, will be permanently closed. His insistent hands, perpetually positioned a foot apart as if to burrow bullshit into the national conversation, will lie limp and motionless at his sides. It may happen organically. Face down on a tray table from arteries congealed over decades spent in a slurry of Big Macs, Filet O’ Fish, and sauce both tartar and special. It’s even remotely possible that Trump tires of himself. Of regurgitating all those tedious conversations…
The History of Sound, directed by South African filmmaker Oliver Hermanus from a script by American Ben Shattuck that adapts his short story of the same name, has a grandiose title whose diffuse universality undercuts—or perhaps overburdens—the specificity and detail of the subject itself. Set mostly in the early years of sound recording technology during and after World War I, the movie’s MacGuffins are wax cylinders that can capture and preserve the intensely personal, yet also universal, themes of American folk songs and the voices of the people who sing their truths. These singers include the film’s protagonist, Lionel Worthing…
Logotype of Beef (TV series) Beef has a double meaning. On the one hand it is meat, and on the other a feud. The latter definition holds sway in “Beef 2,” an eight-episode series streaming on Netflix now. The series creator, Lee Sung Jin, gained notoriety with his Emmy-award winning “Beef,” a 2023 series that follows a road rage incident between two adults, Ali Wong and Steven Yeun, that descends into violent retribution. In both series, Jin captures aspects of the class structure in capitalist America: income and wealth inequality driving personal instability, fueling divisions of class, ethnicity and gender.…
War, i.e., the legalization of what in peacetime is first-degree murder, has been the imperishable scourge of the species since Genesis. Joshua conquered Canaan by force and violence. The commandment “Thou shalt not kill” is honored in the breach rather than in the observance. Thucydides in his History of the Peloponnesian War observed that the strong doing what they can and the weak suffering what they must is the key to unlocking the human narrative. Geniuses like Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud were clueless about arresting industrial-scale violence. The electrifying Sermon on the Mount has not stopped a single war.…
Photograph Source: FontShop from USA – CC BY 2.0 Many US residents around my age, especially men, have a story regarding the first time they read Rolling Stone magazine. Mine goes something like this. The first time I read the magazine from cover-to-cover was its issue devoted to the Woodstock festival that was published in the fall of 1969. Rolling Stone was hard to find in the redneck suburban town I lived in at the time; only underground newspapers from DC were rarer. It was only through some new friends at the Catholic high school I was a freshman at…
Two years ago, Donald Trump wrote, “KILL FISA, IT WAS ILLEGALLY USED AGAINST ME AND MANY OTHERS. THEY SPIED ON MY CAMPAIGN!!!” But these days, Trump favors renewing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). On Thursday, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana revealed a bill to do precisely that. Johnson’s push came one week after 20 Republicans voted against, and thus helped block, his prior FISA renewal bill. Perhaps the most vocal Republican opponent of FISA renewal has been Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY). Last week, Massie shared on X, “Last night between midnight and 2am, they tried to pass…
The image from above appearing in a news article by Elkanah Tisdale in 1813 – Public Domain On April 21, a majority of Virginia voters said “yes” to a ballot measure allowing the state’s US House districts to be redrawn for the benefit of the Democratic Party. The next day, a judge banned certification of the election results, calling the ballot language “flagrantly misleading” and asserting that state legislators didn’t follow relevant rules in putting the measure on the ballot. Virginia is the latest battleground in a centuries-long war to “gerrymander” legislative districts such that the party in power at…