Author: nick

[ad_1] For generations, the American supermarket symbolized abundance. Endless aisles filled with fresh produce, dairy, meat, and household essentials reflected not only the country’s productive capacity but also the confidence that ordinary families could afford to fill their shopping carts without questioning every purchase. Today, that image is beginning to fracture. Across the United States, an unsettling behavioral shift is taking place inside grocery stores. Consumers are pausing longer before reaching for familiar products, comparing prices with unprecedented scrutiny, abandoning name brands for cheaper alternatives, and, perhaps most disturbingly, placing food back on the shelves before reaching the checkout. These…

[ad_1] On Democracy, by Walt Whitman, introduction by David Bromwich, Library of America, 210 pages, $12.50 When Walt Whitman was born in 1819, traversing Long Island took days and was probably best done on foot. Brooklyn, still independent of New York City, was a farm-country alcove for Quakers, freethinkers, and country writers and educators. Whitman became a teacher while still a teenager (and included a student of color in his classes, a rare thing for teachers to accept at the time). His home was the sort of scene you might see on a gigantic puzzle today: old wooden fences, dirt…

[ad_1] Gas station, Snowville, Utah. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair. Getting a cup of complimentary coffee at my credit union recently, I glanced to the left and saw a younger woman with a mass of pennies placing them into a machine for conversion to cash. “The U.S. Mint stopped producing pennies,” I said to her. “They might be valuable.” She quickly replied. “I need gas.” Rising gas prices are an outcome of the U.S. war of aggression against Iran, begun five months ago. As a result, inflationary pressures are rising stateside. One thing is plain as day. Cease-fires between Iran and…

[ad_1] Photo by Samuel Regan-Asante The valuation trends up and down, but one thing’s for sure: Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire this summer. At the height of the SpaceX IPO he was briefly worth around $1.45 trillion. Then SpaceX stock tanked, rallied, then tanked again. But the most important thing about Musk’s wealth isn’t whether it stays above the 13-figure threshold — it’s that 94 percent of it comes from not having to pay taxes on unrealized gains. That’s right: Musk’s fortune effectively comes from not paying taxes. It’s no exaggeration to say that trillionaires (Musk likely won’t be the last)…

[ad_1] Photograph Source: Angelica Jacobi – CC BY-SA 3.0 A friend of mine, long past and now hitchhiking on some eternal highway, used to hitch the Pan American highway every January. From the first time I heard about this road, I had always imagined it as a long road that ran from the northern Mexican border to the tip of Argentina. My friend dispelled me of that notion, describing it as neither a continuous road or a singular one. A new book by Shawn William Miller titled Dream Road to Pan America: A Century in Pursuit of the World’s Longest…

[ad_1] Anti-nuclear activists placed sunflowers, a symbol of nuclear disarmament, in the fence at Germany’s Büchel air base Thur., July 24, marking the 30th anniversary of protests at the base. Photo by Luthar Lange. For the last four years, the U.S. hydrogen bombs stationed in Germany have been stranded at Büchel Air Force Base, southeast of Cologne, unavailable to the fighter jets and pilots that are rehearsed and ready to detonate them against Russia. These WMD have been unusable for nuclear attacks or threats — i.e. ‘deterrence’ — since 2022 because the base is getting a makeover. The deterrence that…

[ad_1] Photo by Jef Wright The recent, record-breaking outbreak of Cyclospora infections linked to lettuce consumption has left Americans wondering what food is safe to eat. What brands of lettuce are safe and which aren’t are important questions. But even more important might be why such outbreaks happen in the first place — and how our government has made them increasingly likely. Nobody wants explosive diarrhea — and yet the way our federal government has left us unprotected is enough to make one sick. The chief culprit in the cyclosporiasis debacle is our centralized, monopoly-based food system. The outbreak has been linked to Taylor…

[ad_1] You just can’t trust archaeologists anymore. Earlier this year, some claimed to have found the bones of Ivar the Boneless. It can’t have been him, then, can it? Dead Viking warlords aren’t the only ones having their remains dug up and rearranged into new and misleading forms. On July 4th, which I’m told is historically significant in some way or other, the Trump administration released a scathing new report on the politicization of museums. Called “Saving America’s Story,” the document reveals how the Smithsonian Institution—particularly its National Museum of American History—has, by the open admission of its director Anthea…

[ad_1] As an immigrant who likes America and spent most of my career working to advance its interests and values overseas, nothing galls me more than seeing other immigrants try to overthrow our uniquely successful capitalist democracy and install Third World Marxism in the United States. In local politics, there is Zohran Mamdani, the mayor of New York. In national politics, we have a whole new crop coming soon to Congress. The latest example is from the Soviet Republic of Colorado, where Ethiopian-born Melat Kiros beat Diana DeGette in the Democratic primary. DeGette had represented the Denver area since 1997.…

[ad_1] Image Source: The US State Department This was certainly an occasion when the mouse roared.  At least the threatened lion thought so, if the latest hysteria-streaked US State Department report on Cuba is anything to go by.  Reading this travesty of an assessment – shrill, stale, markedly undergraduate – was telling in one respect: The Trump administration is more eager than ever to oust the communist regime that seized power in 1959 from the blood-drenched hands of the demented Fulgencio Batista, whose pimping for Washington’s power interests was most appreciated as long as it lasted. The unnamed authors are off to a sterling…