Author: nick

[ad_1] Ben Soodavar, King’s College London The Conversation (The Conversation) – Less than a month after a ceasefire was signed between the US and Iran, conflict has returned to the Middle East. The peace agreement Donald Trump signed at the palace of Versailles in France on June 18 – which he hailed as Iran’s “unconditional surrender” – is now, in the US president’s own words, “over”. I recently argued that the memorandum of understanding (MoU) between Washington and Tehran was best understood not as a peace agreement but as a “deferred crisis” – a ceasefire with a built-in detonator. That detonator has now gone off.…

[ad_1] No false promises here: the Friday Grail news briefs collection is full of absolute bangers! Ancient Roman may have been the world’s first collector of sea monster fossils Related: The Ancient Egyptians collected fossils. It became too easy to shout ‘aliens’, so SETI changed its rules. Sharon Stone’s near-death experience: “Pulled upwards into this incredibly bright white”. Our bacteria are talking – we’ve just begun to understand what they’re saying. (Archived page link) 13,000-year-old bones found near SoCal coast could rewrite human history. A family found a strange metal sphere in the woods. It started moving on its own…

[ad_1] Intifada at MIT [ad_2] Source link

[ad_1] The Democrats Can't Go on Like This [ad_2] Source link

[ad_1] Ancient ball court of Monte Alban, in the Oaxaca region of Mexico. Photo by Bobak Ha’Eri. Wikimedia Commons. Tump’s foul There are reasons to love and reasons to hate the current World Cup, the six-week, quadrennial football match organized by FIFA, Fédération Internationale de Football Association. I’ll start with one of the second:  corruption of a Trumpian scale. Atop the ticket-price gouging, fleecing of host cities, and migrant labor exploitation, (more on these below), Trump added his own je ne sais quoi  by making FIFA capo Gianni Infantino an offer he couldn’t refuse: rescind the red-card suspension of American…

[ad_1] 7/10/1832: President Jackson vetoes the bill to recharter the Second Bank of the United States. He wrote that the bill was unconstitutional. President Andrew JacksonThe post Today in Supreme Court History: July 10, 1832 appeared first on Reason.com. [ad_2] Source link

[ad_1] Please note: This post is also on Substack.* * * Oligarchy is a very old system of governance and one we have never really escaped. More than 2,000 years ago, Aristotle stated that oligarchy (oligarchia) becomes the governance system “when men of property have government in their hands.” Today, we define “oligarchy” as “government by the few, especially despotic power exercised by a small and privileged group for corrupt or selfish purposes.” When oligarchs exercise political power by virtue of their wealth, we call it “plutocracy.” A branch of political science called “Elite Theory’” has tried to justify the plutocracy of contemporary oligarchs.…

[ad_1] Photo by Richard Vanlerberghe In The Tyranny of Words, Stuart Chase warned that words do more than describe reality—they carry ways of seeing the world. Some point to facts. Others evoke entire worldviews. Either way, words often carry an implied explanation of why things are the way they are. “It’s very hot” is an observation. Ask why it’s hot, however, and you’ve entered a political argument about climate change, economics, responsibility, and ideology. By contrast, when President Trump declared, “Communism is the exact opposite of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” in his recent speech at Mt. Rushmore,…

[ad_1] If you like history but don’t care what actually happened, check out Fin vs History. The podcast features two British comedians, Fin Taylor and Horatio Gould, poking fun at some of history’s most revered figures and events. The humor in the pod is frequently juvenile and occasionally exhausting, but chaos is part of the appeal. For instance, an episode about Mahatma Gandhi punctures the bubble surrounding the saintlike icon, treating him as a flawed human being, “the biggest killjoy there’s ever been,” rather than the sacred figure from our history lessons. Much of the humor is deliberately adolescent, with extended…

[ad_1] Rio Tinto’s Borax Mine, in Boron, California. Photo by Colby Groves. It’s dry, hot, and windy. The dust is swirling. My buddy Colby and I are in the heart of the blazing Mojave to visit California’s most expansive open-pit mine. Owned and operated by the Australian mining goliath Rio Tinto, the pit, which produces a mineral called borate, is uncomfortably large, stretching two miles long, 1¾ miles wide, and 755 feet deep. According to the Rio Tinto guide that let us through the gates (of hell?), the mine produces about half of the world’s borax supply, a borate-derived compound…