Author: nick

[ad_1] Photo: Kent Paterson. If there is any place on the map that captures the depth of the global revolt over AI data centers, it might well be little Socorro County, New Mexico. Located astride the Rio Grande and almost smack dab in the center of New Mexico, at first glance, rural Socorro County seems an unlikely center for the rebellion. But at a May town hall, matters of environment and climate change, gaping economic inequality and creeping oligarchy, local land use, legacies of the nuclear weapons age and space exploration, democratic governance and transparency, and then some all boiled…

[ad_1] Image by Element5 Digital. Woody Guthrie proudly sang “This land is your land, this land is my land / From California to the New York island,” but, in fact, the conversion of vast public resources and wealth to private property is one of the defining dynamics of American history. The political economist Thorstein Veblen called this process “The American Plan:” the conversion of public resources into private hands as fast as possible. It started with the “legal seizure” of native lands and resources. Then in the last century the federal government began giving away our information highways. New technology,…

[ad_1] On June 3, as messages continued to pass between Iranian and American negotiators, the U.S. endangered diplomacy with renewed aggression against Iran. Enforcing the blockade on Iranian ports, U.S. forces fired a Hellfire missile into the engine room of a Botswana-flagged oil tanker. Moments earlier, per CENTCOM, they had “conducted self-defense strikes on an Iranian military ground control station on Qeshm Island” in the Strait of Hormuz. These were the third round of U.S. strikes on Iran in the past week. The Iranian reply to the attacks included the firing of 13 ballistic missiles and 17 drones at Kuwait.…

[ad_1] Google held at least 34 meetings with top German government officials – including the Chancellor – to discuss suppressing [ad_2] Source link

[ad_1] Actor-comedian John C. Reilly is a familiar face to most people, having acted in both dramatic movies like Chicago as well as in comedy romps such as Stepbrothers and Talledega Nights. And it turns out that Reilly has an interesting tale to tell related to the question of whether there is an afterlife. Reilly was recently interviewed on NPR’s ‘Wild Card’, where the questions are randomly chosen from a special deck of cards. When Reilly chose the middle card of three pulled by host Rachel Martin, the question on that card was “Do you think there’s any part of…

[ad_1] Behind every fight on jobs, data centers, or safety lies a more basic question of who gets to set the rules. And we know the answer favored by Big Tech, writes Senator Josh Hawley. [ad_2] Source link

[ad_1] Even if President Donald Trump’s White House ballroom project is illegal, the Justice Department argued last week, federal courts are powerless to stop it. That assertion was consistent with Trump’s general attitude toward judicial review, which he considers legitimate only when it allows him to do what he wants. Last October, Trump demolished the East Wing of the White House, which he plans to replace with a building that would be 60 percent bigger than the Executive Residence in square footage and three times as big in cubic volume. In March, U.S. District Judge Richard Leon, a George W.…

[ad_1] But by defying Trump, Israel has done more than challenge Iran’s new equation; it has also undermined Trump’s credibility. Reprinted with permission from Trita Parsi’s Substack. Israel has now responded militarily to Iran, defying Trump’s publicly expressed wishes. Israeli commentators have been explicit that Israel could not allow Iran to establish a new regional equation – one in which Tehran successfully extended deterrence over Lebanon. But by defying Trump, Israel has done more than challenge Iran’s new equation; it has also undermined Trump’s credibility. The ball is now back in both Tehran’s and Trump’s court. If Israel’s defiance carries…

[ad_1] The now-irrelevant Mike Pence still knows how to get back in the news. The former vice president has a new book out warning America of the GOP’s “dangerous” lurch to progressivism. Among his complaints is that he believes his old party is at risk of abandoning the fiscal conservatism it was built on in favor of left-wing economics.  “Some right-wing populists have decided that American families need the support of industrial policies and the welfare state,” he argues in his new book. He claims all this rhetoric amounts to “a warmed-over version of big-government Republicanism.” It’s become fashionable to…

[ad_1] Mikis Theodorakis in the Netherlands, 1972. Wikipedia Commons. Prologue Mikis Theodorakis was an internationally recognized Greek symbol of resistance to capitalism and foreign influence in Greece. When I left Greece for the United States in 1961, he was 36 years old. He was supporting communism, which the United States considered enemy of enemies. Indeed, the Cold War, 1945-1989, mirrored the irrational hatred plutocrats had for the Soviet Union that, officially, had adopted communism as state ideology and policy. This international weaponization of class conflict became history with the return of the Soviet Union without its empire back to Russia…