Author: nick

[ad_1] Photograph Source: Robert Frola – Flickr – GNU FDL On 2 July, 29-year-old Nicholas F. Gosselin, an American pilot, was shot and killed by members of the TPNPB (West Papuan Liberation Army) when he landed a light aircraft of the company PT AMA (Associated Mission Aviation) in Balinggalinggama in the remote mountain zone of Yahukimo, West Papua. His seven Indigenous passengers were unharmed but the plane was torched. It’s difficult to know much about this young man because the media has turned him into a cardboard cutout for sensationalist (and, yes, cynically racist) reports about an American killed by…

[ad_1] There’s more important news stories about, but probably none as fascinating as the ones in the Wednesday Grail news briefs! Could invisible planet fly-bys have triggered Earth’s mass extinctions? The Neanderthal extinction mystery just got even stranger. People with psychiatric disorders tend to have a smaller pineal gland. ‘He looked like Ramses the Great’: How experimental archaeologists used ancient techniques to mummify a modern-day person. From Stephenville to the Pentagon: Institutionalizing the UFO. The real mystery behind Moana: After 1,700 years, why did Polynesians suddenly sail east? Related: ‘Water lightning‘ – the mysterious Polynesian navigation method known as Te…

[ad_1] Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair The popular political discourse frequently presents the idea that redistribution happens or can happen after markets yield conditions of inequality. But this narrative is fundamentally mistaken and misleading. Redistribution begins before firms, markets, or competition exist at all, because the legal concepts we use themselves confer economic value and they do so unevenly. The legal coding of capital acts as a distribution mechanism, routing economic value upward to the extremely rich. Capitalism is not ultimately defined by exchange through markets, economic competition, or even property. Though it contains these elements, other systems have likewise…

[ad_1] Why a Military Victory Could Become an Economic and Political Defeat for the United States The latest U.S. strikes on Iran have put one of Donald Trump’s defining promises under pressure. He returned to the White House insisting that America could no longer keep paying for other countries’ wars. During the campaign, he pointed to trillions spent in Iraq and Afghanistan while roads, factories, and communities at home were neglected. A long conflict with Iran would make that promise difficult to keep. The question is not whether the United States can defeat Iran conventionally. It can. The harder question…

[ad_1] Photograph Source: Artaxerxes – CC BY 4.0 On June 9, Graham Platner won the Democratic Party’s nomination for US Senate from Maine with 72.1% of the primary vote. On July 10, Platner withdrew from the race, presumably due to popular demand by the same voters who nominated him. I’m tempted to a bit of schadenfreude toward those voters. This was not a case of “seems like a really good guy, very consistent, upright citizen … oh my God, I had no idea!” Platner’s entire short political career — his whole adult life, in fact — resembles a locomotive, on…

[ad_1] María Corina Machado is having a bad year. The exiled leader of Venezuela’s opposition has pinned her hopes of returning to lead the country on President Donald Trump, who overturned the hostile government of Nicolas Maduro after a raid to capture the former Venezuelan president. After Maduro’s removal in January, Machado attempted to position herself as the natural leader of a new government in Caracas, and travelled to Washington to personally present Trump with her Nobel Peace Prize—a distinction Trump has openly coveted. But those hopes have been repeatedly disappointed, as Trump has instead preferred to work with a…

[ad_1] The 'Irrepressible' U.S.-Iran Conflict [ad_2] Source link

[ad_1] Reprinted with permission from the Eisenhower Media Network’s Substack.   Visit the Eisenhower Media Network. By: Major General Dennis Laich, US Army, (ret.) Executive Director, Eisenhower Media Network The first sentence of Thomas Paine’s classic 1776 essay, Common Sense, urged the American people to challenge the legitimacy of the English Crown, something that had never been challenged before. He wrote: “Perhaps the sentiments contained in the following pages are not yet sufficiently fashionable to procure them a great favor; a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first…

[ad_1] Marine Le Pen has a new lease on life. Last Tuesday, a court cleared a path for her to contest France’s presidential election next year. And she took it with celerity. “There is no longer any scenario in which I could not run,” Le Pen announced on TV that evening. “I am a candidate.” This will be Le Pen’s fourth bid for the job, and her chances appear better than ever. Multiple polls conducted over the past several days show her comfortably defeating all comers in both phases of France’s two-round election system.  Of course, much could change in…

[ad_1] Donald Trump entered office promising to end America’s endless wars. Instead, he chose a war openly aimed at regime change in Iran that has predictably become a quagmire, trapping the United States in an open-ended cycle of tit-for-tat strikes, economic blockades, and escalating confrontation over the Strait of Hormuz, with no plausible military path to victory. The immediate crisis is dangerous enough. The larger problem is that Washington is once again doubling down on a decades-long strategic obsession with Iran that has repeatedly produced the opposite of what American policymakers sought to achieve. My recent report for the Center…