Author: nick

Musk on 20 January 2025, at Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration in Washington, DC. Wikimedia Commons. What should be done about the world’s richest man, and all that he represents? Here in South Africa, it is tempting to contrast Elon Musk to our other most famous recent personality, Nelson Mandela, a symbol of freedom, justice and political equality for all. Mandela led one of the last century’s greatest human achievements – ending Apartheid, a crime against humanity – by invoking the decency of people across the world, in unity with the oppressed in Black South African society. The result in 1994…

Hope your weekend was as fun as mine – now let’s get into the Monday Grail news briefs! Centuries before the Aztec and Inca empires existed, locals built something incredible in the Colombian jungle. The strangest mushroom on Earth keeps making people see the same tiny elves. New analysis shows that satellite constellations could create unstable, runaway amounts of space debris. Related: Could the Kessler Syndrome explain why we haven’t heard from aliens? Illegal mummy trafficking may curse buyers with mold, not magic. New research finds that dolphins can use seashells to help them catch fish – and they might…

Grocery prices are insane. They’re still rising. Addressing this problem should be the number one priority of every elected leader. End the stupid foreign wars and focus on this issue. It’s one of the main reasons socialists are gaining power. — Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) August 3, 2026 If you want to know why the youth is suddenly so enamored with socialism, look how the self-proclaimed defenders of the free market have been lying to Zoomers with their preaching of what I’ve labeled the “libertarian prosperity gospel.”  While the “democratic socialists” are winning Democratic primaries across the nation while saying they…

Jason Arday, Wikimedia Commons. CC0. I am sickened and deeply saddened by the death of Jason Arday. He was only 41, a young man whose life was cut short following a period of intense public controversy and scrutiny, much of it shaped by pressures and forces far larger than any one individual should have to bear. His death is first and foremost a profound human tragedy. But mourning him also requires that we look beyond the immediate circumstances of this tragedy and ask difficult questions about the society and institutions that created the wider conditions in which his ordeal unfolded.…

Cali, not Bogotá, hosted Colombia’s August 7, 2026 presidential inauguration. Abelardo de la Espriella gave his first address as Colombia’s president from a military garrison and set the terms of his next four years. “I reaffirm my intention to defeat without truce narcoterrorism—the criminal organizations that threaten Colombia’s freedom,” he said. He then sent the armed forces after criminal structures and closed his predecessor’s negotiations, telling the country that “the option of dialogue is completely exhausted.” That vocabulary was not new here. Ecuador’s Daniel Noboa proclaimed an internal armed conflict on January 9, 2024, designated twenty-two gangs terrorist organizations, and…

Photo by Andriyko Podilnyk Nothing inspires confidence in the silliness of the human species than its efforts to understand the workings of others.  This, at least, makes an improvement from wanting to biblically subjugate, enslave and eat members of the animal kingdom.  But when efforts are made to understand what the domestic cat (surely an oxymoronic category) is up to, humankind is bound to come up short. The issue of imposing curfews upon cats as if they were disobedient, wandering children is one such symptom.  While the feral cat is an apparatus of mass killing when it comes to wildlife, Felix catus, that oddly…

Whether immigration is good for a country’s economy and public finances is a subject of intensifying debate in Britain in recent years. The most consequential domestic policy issue of the year is whether the government goes ahead with its plans to extend the qualifying period for new migrants to receive permanent settlement, welfare entitlements, and eligibility for citizenship from five to 10 years. Extending this would save the British taxpayer billions of pounds, according to the government, by avoiding handing welfare access to the Boriswave of migrants—drawn largely from countries like India and Nigeria on low salaries. A large amount…

Everyone talks about the health insurance crisis in America, but rarely do we talk about the other crisis: people with decent insurance coverage who simply cannot access healthcare. There’s more to this than single payer versus private coverage. Health insurance is meaningless if patients cannot actually obtain timely medical care. This week I helped a friend access healthcare in America. She has health insurance from a national provider. She is a recent legal immigrant (from a place with good national health care) but had little idea how getting a doctor here actually works. She had come down with a terrible…

August 17, 2026 Orin Domenico Amerika’s saga from our genocidal inceptionto Hiroshima & Nagasaki to our carpet-bombing ofwhatever poor dark folks we choose as recipients todayis one of ceaseless, unmitigated, relentless violence,for murder is us, Gus allwhile wearing  a good guy’s lily white Stetson! & you can bet that we ain’t gonna changethat we will remain deranged murderers.We are the planet’s nationalized Mafia w/ ademented-imbecilic  Don our Capo-de-Capos.A coast-to-coast mad-insane-asylum.Stack the corpses up, pile ‘em high. Let’s have a good ol’ fashioned tie-dye noose -partyw/ Spin & Marty as our noose-masters ‘causein Amerika we do everything better when we are…

Even as the Trump administration doubles down on its failed Iran war, it’s also laying the groundwork for military action much closer to home, in Cuba. The Trump administration claims Cuba is a nefarious presence in the Western Hemisphere and a local proxy for Russia and China. Now it seems intent on toppling the Havana government. The Pentagon has reportedly been weighing military options for the island, while the State Department recently released a fever dream of a report alleging that Cuba is behind a decades-long campaign of subversion to bring down the United States. All of this comes on…