Author: nick

[ad_1] My wife and I still chuckle about the time we toured the battlefield in Petersburg, Va., where 100,000 Union forces led by Ulysses S. Grant laid siege to 20,000 Confederate soldiers led by Robert E. Lee. It was the longest battle of the Civil War, lasting 292 days. Brutal trench warfare led to 70,000 casualties, as Union forces cut supply lines to the Confederate capital in nearby Richmond and precipitated the South’s defeat. There was nothing funny about this brutal slice of American history, of course, but we were bemused by the National Park Service video that took an unequivocally…

[ad_1] Photo by Juan Pablo A new paper making a stir in the financial press spells out the dangers to which private equity-owned life insurance companies are exposed by private credit funds with large portfolios of loans to software and AI companies. It’s a complicated story that could have enormous consequences. Pranjal Drall and Andrew Granato, the report’s authors, argue that some of these insurance companies could become insolvent if these loans crash. And an unanticipated consequence of a 60-year-old rule that protects insurance company policy holders from losing all of their life insurance benefits or annuity payments could leave…

[ad_1] The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and its allies, who are rapidly gaining traction in the Democratic Party, want to turn “food, education, energy, medicine, and transportation” into “common goods and utilities” run by the government “in a future without capitalism.” But never mind, I’m told. I’m assured by responses to my recent column on the surge in left-wing radicalism that “when your representatives vote and allocate your tax dollars for a library,” that is “democratic socialism.” You are reading The Rattler from J.D. Tuccille and Reason. Get more of J.D.’s commentary on government overreach and threats to everyday…

[ad_1] Photo: Swedish Red Cross. Can we escape the terrors of our time? In September of 2025, during a Saturday vigil in Stockholm’s Odenplan Square, Isak Hernández, age nine, asked if he could recite a poem he wrote. Deeply troubled by images he saw, day and night, from Gaza, he resolved not to be silent. “Their lives are not numbers,” Isak declared. “Their dreams are not ashes.” His refrain repeated: “I won’t be silent,” and he begged the world, “Listen to me.” Isabella Lundgren, a Swedish jazz vocalist, heard Isak deliver his poem. She felt his words had reverberated throughout…

[ad_1] Based on an atmospheric video game about a man stuck in a subway station who must notice “anomalies,” Exit 8 is a tightly wound horror thriller that neatly transforms a simple puzzle game into an elaborate metaphor about taking responsibility and moving on in life. The film opens with a gamelike sequence shot in a first-person perspective on a crowded subway train in which our hero ignores the world around him while staring at his phone, just like everyone else. He witnesses a man berate a woman with a baby, then finds himself trapped in a purgatorial puzzle space, where he…

[ad_1] There exists, in the architecture of human delusion, a particular cognitive trap so seductive that even the intelligent, the disciplined, and the otherwise rational succumb to its geometry. It is the fantasy of the homo silens—the silent man who watches the conflagration from behind reinforced glass, untouched by the thermal bloom of societal dissolution. If you have spent the preceding decade fortifying this fantasy—converting liquid assets into ammunition, transforming relationships into operational liabilities, and mapping escape routes that lead only deeper into isolation—then what follows will function not merely as correction, but as an autopsy of your future self. You…

[ad_1] This report traces how Russia sustains its war in Ukraine by recruiting foreign nationals, many of them deceived or coerced, through a global pipeline of social media advertisements, intermediaries and disposable websites. It centres on a recent investigation by the European External Action Service (EEAS), which uncovered a coordinated digital infrastructure behind this recruitment drive. The Kremlin has faced challenges in recruiting personnel for its war against Ukraine. With monthly casualties around 30,000, many Russians are reluctant to fight. During Russia’s partial mobilisation in 2022, hundreds of thousands of citizens – officially 261,000 and up to 700,000 according to…

[ad_1] Amazon AWS data center, image Wikipedia. Most would agree that the animals suffering as the world burns need our help. So Jeff Bezos and Leonardo DiCaprio’s $200 million commitment to the Phoenix Species Project to revive 100 endangered species around the world should be welcome news. Leo believes it is. “I could not be prouder to announce this,” DiCaprio wrote joyously in an Instagram post. “Save these species, and we protect everything around them. The forests, the rivers, and the climate itself.” I sincerely hope that’s true and that these creatures, including a lemur in Madagascar, a pink iguana…

[ad_1] With its unwinnable war on Iran, the U.S. urgently needs to rethink the illegal and corrupt policy of aggressive war it has pursued since 2001, write Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies President Donald Trump overseeing the U.S. attack on Iran, at Mar-a-Lago, Palm Beach, Florida, March 1. (White House /Daniel Torok) By Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), the United States spent $21 trillion on its military between 2001 and 2024 (in constant 2024 dollars), equal to the combined military spending of the next 18 countries. Iran barely made that…

[ad_1] Photograph Source: NIAID – CC BY 2.0 We all make choices. Dr. Anthony Fauci, former Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, invoked the Fifth Amendment over 100 times when he appeared before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs on July 29. Subpoenaed to testify about his handling of the COVID pandemic and the questions surrounding the origins of the virus, Fauci declined to answer the committee’s substantive questions, a striking departure from his previous appearance before the House in 2024, when he answered questions for hours and defended his actions and decisions…