Author: nick

[ad_1] First, Trump attempted to enrich himself and his family by suing the federal government for $10 billion — almost the entire annual budget of the IRS — for releasing Trump’s tax returns. This is a first on so many levels. Trump is the first nominated presidential candidate since the 1980s not to release his tax returns. Every other presidential candidate has voluntarily disclosed their tax returns as a gesture of openness. Trump is the first president in history to sue the federal government for personal damages, and to the whopping tune of $10 billion. But legal experts, including many at the Justice Department,…

[ad_1] Photo by Uladzislau Petrushkevich Who is actually running the government? That is no longer a rhetorical question. As America’s war with Iran lurches from escalation to ceasefire to renewed threats of military force, Americans are being asked to trust that someone, somewhere, knows what they are doing. But who? This is the constitutional crisis hiding in plain sight. The question is not merely whether Donald Trump is fit to lead. The question is whether any president still leads in any meaningful constitutional sense once the permanent war government gets moving. The Iran war is merely the latest test case.…

[ad_1] Photo by Joseph Corl In a recent essay for The Atlantic, “History is Running Backwards,” David Brooks argues that ever-more people are disillusioned by the moral chaos and uncertainty that characterizes our society. They believe there is no hope for the future if progress no longer provides rational answers to the issues that matter. So they’re turning toward tradition and history for meaning, especially conservative religion, frustrated as they are with the corrosive secularism they believe has contributed to this problem. On this journey the disillusioned beings’ search for the correct history will likely be filtered through the lens…

[ad_1] Photograph Source: Vox España – CC0 Javier Milei’s government took office in December 2023 with a strong rhetoric about the need to expand freedom. However, rather than expanding it, his economic policy reduces it. Neoliberal policy advocates a model of free enterprise, free trade, and free movement of capital that favors the extraction of national surplus toward core countries, limiting the possibilities for local development and reinforcing the conditions of societal impoverishment. Tricontinental’s Political Economy Substack, The Financial Leash, analyzes the mechanism by which the capitalist system deepens the dependence of peripheral countries through the global financial system, describing the…

[ad_1] To mark the centenary of Claude Monet’s death, the auction house Sotheby’s sold Les Îles de Port-Villez and Vétheuil, effet du matin, two Monets that had gone unseen by the public for a century, hidden away in a private collection. The plein air works sold for a staggering $19.7 million in April, smashing pre-sale estimates. One hundred years after his death, Monet’s stature appears more secure than ever, even as the art world enters a new age of imitation and fakery. Far from the auction houses of Paris and the climate-controlled vaults of private collectors, Monet was being litigated…

[ad_1] Israel: What Went Wrong?By Omer BartovFarrar, Straus and Giroux244 pages, $28.00 An Israeli defense minister received a stunning letter from a history professor at Tel Aviv University. The academic, a veteran of the Yom Kippur War in his early 30s, warned the country’s top civilian defense official that Israeli soldiers were at risk of being indoctrinated to abuse Palestinian civilians in ways similar to how German soldiers had been conditioned to brutalize “subhuman” Slavs and Jews on the Eastern Front. The defense minister was Yitzhak Rabin. It was the late 1980s. The first intifada was underway. Rabin had allegedly…

[ad_1] But the real problem is that the train should never have been built. Today, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Arkansas are experimenting with nitrogen gas executions, a method officials claim is more humane. But from noose to needle to nitrogen, our constant search for a more acceptable way to kill is a story of failure — not moral progress. There’s no acceptable way to practice a form of state killing that, for Black Americans especially, has long been intertwined with terror. Take my home state of Arkansas. Within a year of becoming a state in 1836, Arkansas adopted laws establishing a racial…

[ad_1] Britain is a country where political discussion is carefully stage-managed. The government, the national broadcasters, the legacy press, and the courts all in their own ways try to fetter political discussion, especially around issues of immigration and crime. This is particularly the case when these two issues overlap.  Since the 1960s, the British government has introduced a range of laws intended to manage the tensions of multiculturalism, which emerged after the earliest waves of postwar mass immigration. Unsurprisingly, the public did not especially like the advent of multiculturalism and mass-immigration. The state, however, decided that the correct response was…

[ad_1] From Judge Mark Kearney (E.D. Pa.) yesterday in Doe v. Trustees of the Univ. of Penn.(for more on the quote in the title of this post, see here): A white non-Jewish male sues the University of Pennsylvania for denying him admission to its Wharton business school master’s program because he is not Jewish…. He claims widespread animus in the business community to non-Jewish men and disclosing his name will subject him to physical harm because of “Jewish agencies” ability to harm non-Jewish men. He does not show reasonable fear of severe harm resulting from litigating without a pseudonym. And…

[ad_1] An Anti-Erdoğan moves past the Berlin State Opera. Photo: David Yearsley. The last in the series of European spring holidays brought with it another long weekend. The occasion was Pentecost, when the mighty gusts of the Holy Spirit buffeted the Apostles gathered in a room in Jerusalem and set them to babbling in diverse languages, their belief bolstered not just by wind power but by heavenly, and therefore presumably carbon-neutral, Tongues of Flame. A couple of millennia later, the Pentecostal weather in northern Europe was searing. Like a climatological cathedra-cum-sauna, a heat dome had erected itself over the continent.…