Author: nick

At the White House on August 19, President Donald Trump said he anticipates a face-to-face session with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un before December. Pressed on whether it would happen, he answered “Yeah, I will be,” and noted that the two men get along “very well.” He added, “The fact that I get along with him is a good thing, not a bad thing.” He then offered a figure no American official had ever stated publicly, asserting Pyongyang commands 57 “very powerful” nuclear weapons. The comments trailed the sharpest concession Washington has extended to the North since 2019. Three…

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Image by Richard Young. Global warming is becoming a self-advertised nuisance with the recent Nepal disaster bringing renewed attention: Is global warming fueled by fossil fuel CO2 emissions behind the Nepal catastrophe? In High Mountain Asia, there are thousands of glaciers at some stage of transforming into large lakes that may burst, barreling down mountainsides. The recent Nepal incident is but a warning, according to Jason Gulley, professor of geology, University of South Florida, who focuses on glacier hydrology. (The Melting Glacier in Nepal Was a Time Bomb. There are More to Come, The New York Times, August 28, 2026)…

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Washington has converted a military operation into a strategic endurance contest in which Iran possesses an exceptionally powerful economic weapon, writes Dan Steinbock. Israeli Air Force F-16I Sufa fighter jets during the U.S.-Israel war on Iran, March 4. ( IDF Spokesperson’s Unit, Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 3.0) By Dan Steinbock Iran has not collapsed, while Hormuz has become a global economic choke point. The central failure was not ignorance of the risks, but the political decision in Washington and Tel Aviv to gamble that coercive military power could overcome them. So, why did they set the stage for the catastrophe that was both…

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“You kill people and break things for a living.”- Secretary of War Pete Hegseth in Quantico, Virginia on September 30, 2025 The primary male sex hormone, testosterone, has been in the news of late. Students of social science may be familiar with the series of twentieth-century prison studies which had as their conclusion that high testosterone levels among incarcerated felons were associated with a propensity toward personal and violent crimes such as rape and murder. Correlation is not causation, but statistics are statistics all the same. Sports enthusiasts will know that testosterone has often been at issue in cases of…

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Image by William Gibson. In a recent Jacobin article, Noah Suárez-Sikes, “an organizer with the Los Angeles chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America,” criticized mainstream news outlets for gleefully outing DSA leaders who hail from backgrounds that range from upper-middle class to upper class. Dubbed “Class traitors are welcome in the socialist movement,” a construction perfectly tuned to immediately alienate right wingers and left wingers alike, the piece was framed around a feeding frenzy by the NYC and national conservative press against one Gustavo Gordillo, who Suárez-Sikes first described as “the democratically elected cochair of the New York City chapter…

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