Author: nick

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair I thought I’d take advantage of a lazy Memorial Day to re-up some of my standard complaints about the world and the quality of the information we receive. My big four ones today are: 1) The which way is up confusion; is the deficit or job-killing AI the big problem (can’t be both), 2) Big numbers without context; no one knows what spending $100 billion on food stamps means, 3) Media ownership; major news outlets were always owned by rich people, but they are becoming more right-wing, 4) Social media; the major platforms are controlled…

Austrian economics gets its name not from a particular connection to the country in technical terms, but rather because it was born there in the 1870s from great minds such as Carl Menger, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, and Friedrich von Wieser. One generation later, another native Austrian would pick up the mantle. Friedrich A. Hayek, the famed Austrian economist and political philosopher, was born in Vienna on May 8, 1899. His father August was a physician and professor of botany, and his mother hailed from a prominent Viennese family. Like so many young men of his generation, Hayek served during the…

Image by SHTTEFAN. “Zeldin’s EPA To Relax Drinking Water Rules” was the headline this week in the daily newspaper Newsday on Long Island, New York—from which Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is from. The subhead: “Plans to rescind PFAS limits, delay removal deadline.” The article on two pages began with telling how the EPA is proposing “to rescind federal limits on certain toxic ‘forever chemicals’ in drinking water—established two years ago by the Biden administration….The Trump administration plans to roll back restrictions on four types of these chemicals, known as PFAS. Another proposed rule would…

Thanks to Jony Ive and Marc Newson for removing my desire to become rich so I could afford a Ferrari… Scientists just confirmed what’s driving sea level rise and it’s alarming. The “Year Without a Summer” was real, and it’s even stranger than it sounds. NASA unveils its first moon base rovers and landers. Are we ignoring signs of alien life? Could aliens ever visit Earth? An aerospace scientist unpacks the challenges of interstellar spaceflight. Third crop formation of 2026 found. Archaeologists found evidence of ancient humans living where no one thought they could. Cannabis use disorder strongly linked to…

The increasing arc of instability running across Africa today resembles less a series of isolated crises than a single, widening belt of state collapse, insurgency, proxy war, and foreign intervention stretching from the Atlantic coast to the Red Sea. From Mali and Niger to Nigeria, Sudan, Somalia, and the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, the same themes recur with grim consistency: weak post-colonial states, ethnic and religious fragmentation, weapons flows across porous borders, foreign meddling, and Washington repeatedly insisting it can manage extraordinarily complex societies with bombs, military trainers, intelligence partnerships, and favored clients. It cannot. Indeed, many of these…

Photograph Source: Enrique Vázquez – CC BY 2.0 Bob Dylan’s “all night girls whispered escapades out on the D Train.” Billy Strayhorn told us to take the A Train and “Listen to those rails a-thrummin.’” The Last Poets felt the white supremacy in the air as the wheels clicked in the Black rider’s brain: “Eighth Avenue, Seventh Avenue, Sixth Avenue/ I-N-D, B-M-T, I-R-T.” Me, I rode the D Train between Fordham Road and Columbus Circle four evenings a week in the Fall of 1973 to get to my job serving pastas and sauces in a restaurant kitchen on 59th Street…

Other than President Donald Trump supposedly finally ending his Iran War with a beautiful deal—a tremendous deal, an incredible deal, and could everyone please tell him that?—the president’s only other helpful move this quarter was to endorse Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in his successful runoff against the incumbent Sen. John Cornyn. As Cornyn’s $92 million in attack ads painstakingly reminded voters, Paxton has been accused of: bribery, abuse of public trust and misappropriation, misusing state resources, obstruction of justice, making false statements, retaliating against whistleblowers, securities fraud, and adultery. And many of the accusations came from his fellow Republicans.…

A high-ranking government official has sexual relations in the workplace on multiple occasions. An article of fabric is stained. The official is asked about what happened and lies during an official investigation. But thanks to a whistleblower, the truth comes out. The official, caught in flagrante delicto, apologizes and insists it will never happen again. Sound familiar? The saga of President Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky is well known to everyone over the age of 35. (I remember downloading the Starr Report over my 56k modem when I was 14 years old.) Lewinsky, an intern, had ten sexual encounters with…

Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan flew to Iran in 2010 and persuaded the Islamic Republic to ship 1,200 kilograms of its enriched uranium—which accounted for roughly 70 percent of its stockpile—to Turkey in exchange for fuel rods to be used for a medical research reactor. The terms of that deal, signed by the foreign ministers of Iran, Turkey, and Brazil in Tehran on May 17, 2010, required Iran to deposit their enriched uranium in Turkey, where it would remain under IAEA observation. “We went there to convince Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Ali…

Image by Unsplash+. Nuclear Power would never have existed without government handouts and ratepayer subsidies. The commercial nuclear power Gordian knot, from mineral extraction to component manufacturing to reactor operation to Price-Anderson Nuclear Insurance, and ending in waste disposal, exists only because of opium, whoops, OPM, Other People’s Money, in the form of taxpayer subsidies. Intense political pressure from the DC-based Nuclear Energy Institute prevents national and state politicians from cutting that twisted knot into pieces. The financial problems associated with constructing and operating commercial nuclear power plants and the need for federal subsidies had been identified as early as…