Author: nick

Uno soldado Inca ataca uno conquistador español. Image Source: Scarton (talk · contribs) – Detalle de la pintura de Juan Bravo sobre la “historia de Qosqo” para la municipalidad de Cusco – CC BY-SA 3.0 Scholar Olga Rodriguez-Ulloa argues that dominant narratives in Peruvian academia have made it difficult to think of subversives as peers. Olga Rodriguez-Ulloa is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English, American Studies, and the Latino Studies Program at Indiana University Bloomington. She is the author of Sadistic Cholas: Transfeminist Provocations in Contemporary Peru (University of Texas Press, 2026). Chola is a racial slur that has…

“People Mover” monorail, Detroit. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair. How did we get here? How can we get out of this mess? From Nixon to Reagan to George W. Bush to Trump, Republican presidents have been getting worse and worse. We can no longer afford to hope that we will be lucky enough to just barely squeak out a narrow victory, election after election. One more victory for the Republicans might mean the end of democracy. We need a political realignment, of the kind that FDR started, or  the Congress that Lyndon Johnson used in 1964 to usher in an era…

A politician in Denmark defended guidelines that would limit residents in government-run nursing homes to just 2.8 ounces of beef, lamb, or veal per week as part of the country’s climate goals. Birgitte Kehler Holst of The Alternative, a Danish green party, said even the elderly should help reduce meat consumption because their generation had “screwed up” the climate—comments that caused major backlash. Critics argued the rules unfairly punish older people and amount to forcing a vegetarian agenda on them, while supporters said cutting meat consumption is necessary to reduce carbon emissions. Holst later apologized for the way she spoke…

Most of us would consider a half-million dollar fine for overlooking less than $30,000 in federal taxes to be excessive. Our astonishment at the penalty would only increase upon learning that the oversight resulted from a paperwork violation, with no evidence of deliberate evasion. But a federal judge signed off on the fine, saying that she deferred to the IRS in finding the punishment “not excessive.” Now, 88-year-old retiree Tuncay Saydam is hoping the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals will reach a more reasonable conclusion. You are reading The Rattler from J.D. Tuccille and Reason. Get more of J.D.’s commentary…

Critics of the May 2026 summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and Xi Jinping, president of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), widely condemned the outcome as being long on pomp and ceremony but short on meaningful substantive results. They noted that most of the agreements reached, especially on trade and other economic issues, were either preliminary or relatively minor. There was a virtual consensus among the opinion-shaping elites that Trump had secured no major concessions on either his commercial or his security objectives. In other words, the outcome of the summit was rather bland and boring. That criticism may…

Image by Marcel Scholte. I am a surgeon in Havana, Cuba. I will not use my name — not because I fear my government, but because I fear yours and what it can do to those I love. Last month, I operated on an elderly man with a perforated peptic ulcer. The surgery was textbook. I closed his abdomen cleanly, without complication. We had antibiotics available that time. What we did not have was intravenous crystalloid fluid for resuscitation. It’s the most basic of solutions, cheap enough to cost almost nothing, yet essential enough to save almost everything. It exists.…

When Donald Trump won his second presidential election in 2024, supporters crowed that this time would be different. Trump’s sometimes chaotic instincts had been honed and refined into a populist-nationalist conservative policy agenda that was supposed to make Americans better off and build a broader, more durable right-wing coalition, with a particular appeal to working-class voters. MAGA 2.0 would be predicated on a rejection, or at least a skepticism, of the free market, libertarian economics that Trumpian intellectuals insisted were hobbling the GOP. These ideas filtered up to the presidential ticket itself. In 2024, then-Sen. J.D. Vance (R–Ohio) told The…

Make billionaires feel fear again. The American rebellion against AI is getting steam. The robot that tried to dance like Michael Jackson perfectly illustrates a deep-seated problem in the sector. Leaked audio confirms Mark Zuckerberg was spying on Meta employees so he could fire them later. UK banking giant set to replace ‘lower value human capital‘ with AI. Feeling infuriated yet? Trump administration lifts ban on cyanide bombs that kill animals. Ok, now are you angry?? Where Did the Road Go? invites experiencer Meredith Spearman, author of the Substack Maze to Metanoia. The Hi, Strangeness podcast welcomes Tim Binnall to…

Here’s the story, somewhat simplified, from a case now labeled Breskin v. Blattberg (D. Mass.) (I had filed an amicus brief opposing pseudonymity, as part of my general opposition to pseudonymity in defamation cases, see, e.g., Roe v. Smith): Son v. mother federal lawsuit threatened: Blattberg accuses his mother, Breskin (a psychologist), of having sexually abused him 30 years ago, when he was 4 to 7 years old. The son claims he “did not remember the abuse until 2024.” The son’s lawyer sends a demand letter to the mother, threatening to sue, with a draft Complaint attached. They apparently agree…

President Donald Trump’s recent two-day summit in Beijing with Chinese President Xi Jinping concluded much as anticipated. In an article written ahead of the trip, I noted that expectations for substantive breakthroughs in the fraught Sino-American relationship were likely to be disappointed. The events of the visit bore this out. While the tone was notably, and welcomely, warmer than in recent years and both sides touted “fantastic trade deals,” the core structural tensions—trade imbalances, technology restrictions, Taiwan, and regional security—remain largely unaddressed. What emerged was a return to the familiar pattern of high-level diplomacy: symbolic gestures, agricultural and aerospace purchase…