Author: nick

[ad_1] Robert Motherwell was older than I imagined. Through my cameras’ captures, a living embodiment of twentieth-century art history greeted me. In one of two guises: ”Let’s get this over with, or, let’s talk and enjoy the meeting of our decidedly divided ages ”. Fortunately for me, three or so hours flew by. Just about every artist I met started the conversations with, “I hear you photographed Bill de Kooning”. I knew then that it was a generous calling card. From there, no question whether inane or curious was inappropriate. So after the de Kooning briefing and a few niceties,…

[ad_1] Socialists have it all wrong about stolen wealth and taxes, according to Marian L. Tupy, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, in a Washington Post commentary. The daily paper is the property of Jeff Bezos, head of Amazon, and one of the wealthiest people in the world. I will return to that point. First, however, consider Tupy’s comment on the process of wealth creation, a sweeping assertion against his definition of socialism as a critique of capitalism. “But the idea that wealth is taken from others rather than created is an idea economists rebutted 155 years ago,” according…

[ad_1] Photo by Zach Reiner “If you knock out the pillars of a sacred order, at the primal level such a change is experienced by people as a deep and lasting trauma, whether they know it or not.”  –Paul Kingsnorth,  Against the Machine: the Unmaking of Humanity In Freud’s own vision, the psyche wasn’t built for bliss but for something more equivocal—ordinary unhappiness [as opposed to neurotic misery]            –Anna Ballan, Freud in the Age of Therapy-Speak, The Hedgehog Review Neurosis and creation… spring from the same soil –Ibid. “Things come to the poor that can’t get to the door of the rich……

[ad_1] The former Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene posted on X on July 15, “Every Republican Senator voted to merge our military with Israel’s military. The most America LAST thing they could possibly do, selling our military out to a foreign country.” “It’s absolute treason and betrayal,” she added. Greene was referring to a vote the previous day, in which 50 Republican Senators had supported a failed attempt to advance the annual defense policy bill known as the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). This bill, which authorizes defense spending and sets policy for the military, has attracted considerable controversy for…

[ad_1] UK Special Coverage Burnham, Populist? The right must consider the possibility that the new prime minister may in fact be good at politics. UK Special Coverage Photo by Gareth Fuller/PA Images via Getty Images Since Andy Burnham assumed the office of Prime Minister on July 20, most of the right-leaning publications and commentators in the United Kingdom have greeted his every policy pronouncement as vague, insubstantial, and/or impossible to carry out. Those criticisms are largely spot-on. But the tribally-driven dishonesty characteristic of what now passes as political coverage and analysis dictates that those critics fail to note that woolly…

[ad_1] Photograph Source: Olga Ernst – CC BY-SA 4.0 Millions of working people keep their hard-earned money in low-cost index funds to secure a dignified retirement and meet other financial goals. But the infrastructure that has historically given index fund investors a sense of security is eroding. Index providers, exchanges, and asset managers are all changing their policies in ways that weaken investor protections to benefit corporate insiders — just in time for several Silicon Valley companies hitting the market. Meanwhile, the SEC is turning away from its investor protection mission to protect corporate insiders instead. And some states are…

[ad_1] On Monday, Britain’s new prime minister, Andy Burnham, promised to “bring life’s essentials back under stronger public control to make them affordable again.” He has honored his pledge to help with the cost of living by restoring the £2 cap on bus fares and by reducing VAT on household electricity bills. Well, every little bit helps.  But anyone who thinks that bus usage in the UK, which has fallen significantly since the coronavirus pandemic, will be revived by a £2 bus fare is not living in the real world. Nor will a £40 reduction in the average Briton’s £1,600…

[ad_1] Photograph Source: Ryan M. Biller, U.S. Department of Justice – Public Domain It’s summer in Washington, D.C., but members of the Senate aren’t focused on beaches, hikes, and picnics. Instead, they’re focused on President Trump’s nomination of Todd Blanche to run the Justice Department as attorney general. It’s a fight worth paying attention to, because it will affect what kind of country we live in. Attorneys general can change our lives for the better. In the 1960s, Robert Kennedy worked tirelessly to bring civil rights to the South and to dismantle organized crime. In the 1970s, Elliot Richardson resigned…

[ad_1] Ten years ago, if you wanted solar power that actually did something — not a trickle charger for a gate opener, real usable power — you were looking at several thousand dollars minimum, and half of it went to lead-acid batteries that died in five years. That world is gone. Panel prices collapsed, lithium batteries got cheap, and today $1,000 spent right will run a fridge, lights, a freezer, phones, a laptop, and a fan indefinitely, anywhere the sun shines. Spent wrong, that same $1,000 buys a pile of mismatched junk that dies the first winter. This article is…

[ad_1] The uninhabited “lost” city of Varosha, a district of Famagusta, along the Green Line in Cyprus. Photo by Matthew Stevenson. Armed with a paper map of Cyprus that showed principal roads and the dividing Green Line (between Cyprus and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus), plus GPS on my phone and an off-line cycling map of the island, I set off after lunch in the direction of Famagusta, northeast of Larnaca. I figured it to be about thirty miles or a four-hour ride (with stops for water and pictures), and my only hope was not to be pedaling in…