When, a couple of decades ago, Simon Rattle performed Arnold Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder in Berlin, he was asked how he could bring together Gurrelieder (whose performance demands a gigantic orchestra with an additional 400 chorus members) with Schoenberg’s well-known acerbic remark that in civilized Europe everything one needs to render the desired effect in a music performance is six, maximum seven players—we need orchestras only for the primitive Americans… Rattle provided a precise reply: Gurrelieder is simply a piece of chamber music that needs 600 players to be properly performed… I think this paradox renders perfectly the greatness of Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey.

My first reaction to Odyssey was a big surprise: after reading numerous reviews enthralled by gigantic spectacular scenes and the raw authenticity of fighting, the movie itself appeared to me almost the opposite of these descriptions—a rather modest, almost chamber drama which occasionally reminded me of B productions. We never see the beach in front of Troy with thousands of Greek soldiers and hundreds of boats in the water behind them; there is no mass battle with hundreds of soldiers fighting. The Greeks on the beach are mostly a small group of a couple dozen individuals lost in bad weather on the desolate beach sand. Troy itself is also not shown as a mega-city but more as a group of buildings with narrow, twisted streets between them. Plus, Nolan avoided directly showing excessive cruelty—just recall the passage of Odysseus’ ship between Scylla and Charybdis. Charybdis is not a gigantic whirlpool (easy to render with special effects) but a very modest circle of water posing no terrifying threat… These remarks are not meant as criticism: they point out what makes the film great.

Commentators noted long ago that, while the Iliad focuses on male exploits and struggles with women reduced to background tokens, the Odyssey also brings forward women’s inner lives. The Iliad begins with the rage of Achilles: he is furious because Agamemnon took the slave Briseis from him—however, Achilles is not hurt because of any emotional attachment to Briseis; what matters is simply that his pride was hurt. The Odyssey changes the perspective entirely, and Nolan takes an even more crucial and ingenious step further: the well-known beautiful stars who play women (Anne Hathaway, Charlize Theron…) are not made beautiful—the way they are shot, sometimes almost embarrassingly, displays their age fully. They are mostly desexualized (although Calypso kept Odysseus as her lover for years, there is no erotic tension in their relationship). This desexualization reaches its climax in the figure of Circe, superbly played by Samantha Morton. In the poem, Circe is a seductress: she turns men who reject her advances into pigs and keeps Odysseus as her lover for a year, while in the movie she is simply disgusted by male gluttony and turns them into pigs when they cannot stop eating. It is the highest male figure, Agamemnon, who is not really personalized: we mostly don’t see his face, which is hidden behind a gigantic helmet, and the same holds for the Trojan soldiers—they are anonymous and depersonalized, so that although the movie depicts Greek crimes and cheating, it does not do so by opposing them to more honest and sympathetic Trojans.

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“That was Stephen Hicks’s warning to students at Galt’s Gulch 2026, our annual student conference held this summer in San Diego. A Senior Scholar at The Atlas Society, Hicks has spent decades studying how political language gets weaponized—most notably in his book Nietzsche and the Nazis. At the conference, he walked students through the actual […]

"Gold isn't inert, it just has bodyguards protecting it". (Via H.R.)

I recently talked about the need for a “Project 2027”—an agenda for a new Democratic majority to reclaim the power of Congress against a president who has systematically attempted to concentrate all power in himself.

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I just spelled out that agenda in more detail in a new article at Liberal Currents.

Read it here.

This has to be a realistic agenda, so I set one big requirement:

That agenda should be based on what we can do with a simple majority—and with Trump still in the White House—which is the most likely outcome of the coming election. What can we do, with just the power of a congressional majority, to rein in Trump and reform the system?

And it turns out we can do a lot. Read the whole thing for more details, but the main headings are:

Declare a national emergency of national emergencies.

We should pass a law immediately suspending all emergency executive powers, requiring the president to submit such powers for review by Congress, one at a time, if he wants any of them reinstated by ordinary law.

Take away executive discretion.

Congress seems to only fitfully remember that it can just tell the executive what to do.

The one that is most relevant to my recent comments on Senator Warner:

Rediscover the power and purpose of impeachment.

[A]bove all, it brings public attention to this administration’s abuses of power—and it shows that Congress is actually serious about those abuses. The public won’t believe that what Trump is doing is unprecedented or an emergency or an attack on the foundations of the American system if we don’t act like it is. Impeachment is our way of saying that we really mean it, that these actions are beyond the bounds of legitimate power.

And finally:

Use the power of the purse.

The power of the purse is the big stick the Constitution gave us to keep the president in line. We don’t need to settle just for symbolic victories. We should make it clear that we can make the gears of the executive grind to a halt until the president makes real concessions. This is the leverage we can use to get everything else on this agenda.

But this one comes with a warning:

This will be the toughest piece of advice to convince the timid Democratic leadership to implement. But to assume ahead of time that Congress using the power of the purse won’t work and we shouldn’t even try would mean that we are preemptively abandoning the most fundamental and effective weapon Congress has. Democratic leadership needs to show that they are willing to use all the tools they have.

Using all the tools we have is the basic thread behind this agenda. Read the whole thing.

I’ve been saying that this is why I’m running. We need someone in Congress who has not just the desire but also the determination and the plan to restore the power of Congress and rein in an out-of-control president. This is the plan.

If you agree, vote for me in the Democratic primary on August 4—early voting is already open.

And support my campaign so we can bring this fight to the US Congress!

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Save the credit card processing fees and mail a check to Tracinski for Congress, PO Box 6997, Charlottesville, VA 22906.

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One of the most remarkable feats in political history has been convincing millions that the free market has failed—even though few can point to a society that consistently practiced its defining principle.

Ask what a free market is and the answer is surprisingly simple: a system in which individuals are free to produce, trade, invest, compete, and keep the products of their labor under a government limited to protecting individual rights and then getting out of the way.

Notice what is absent from that definition: subsidies, bailouts, price controls, tariffs, industrial policy, central planning, corporate favoritism, or politicians deciding who wins and who loses. Yet when those interventions produce shortages, inflation, stagnation, or corruption, the verdict is announced with complete confidence: the free market failed.

Imagine judging aviation after replacing half the aircraft's controls with government committees, forcing the pilots to obey contradictory instructions, and then blaming flight itself when the plane crashes. That is remarkably similar to how capitalism is judged today.

The economies most often called "capitalist" are mixed economies. They combine voluntary exchange with taxation, regulation, subsidies, monetary intervention, licensing, trade restrictions, and political favoritism. Whenever the voluntary portion produces prosperity, politicians congratulate themselves. Whenever the interventionist portion produces problems, capitalism receives the blame.

It is a convenient arrangement. Success belongs to the government; failure belongs to the market.

The accusation is usually accompanied by another claim: that "the market" is merely a system rigged by billionaires. This confuses capitalism with political privilege. A market is not a boardroom conspiracy. It is simply millions of people making voluntary decisions every day about what to buy, sell, invest in, and produce. Billionaires cannot compel customers to buy from them. Politicians, however, can compel taxpayers to subsidize favored firms, restrict competitors, and shield failure from competition.

The irony is difficult to miss. Those who denounce a "rigged market" rarely advocate removing the political machinery that makes rigging possible. Instead, they ask for more of it. More regulations. More subsidies. More discretionary power. More authority to decide who deserves success and who does not. The complaint is not that the game is rigged; it is that someone else is benefiting from the rigging.

There is another curious habit. Every failure occurring inside a mixed economy is presented as proof that markets are defective, while every departure from market principles is quietly ignored. If housing becomes unaffordable after decades of zoning restrictions, permitting delays, subsidies, monetary expansion, and planning, capitalism is blamed. If healthcare becomes expensive after layers of mandates and political management, capitalism is blamed. If inflation follows years of monetary expansion and fiscal intervention, greed becomes the preferred explanation.

The free market occupies a unique place in political debate. It is blamed for almost everything, while seldom being allowed to operate according to its own principles.

This does not mean every problem disappears wherever markets are freer. No social system eliminates scarcity, mistakes, or poor decisions. What distinguishes a freer market is not perfection but accountability. Businesses succeed only by persuading customers. Failures lose resources. Success depends on creating value for others rather than obtaining political favor.

That is why critics so often attack an imaginary version of capitalism while defending policies that move society further away from it.

The free market has become history's favorite scapegoat precisely because it is rarely judged on its own terms. It is judged after its principles have been diluted, constrained, and replaced by intervention, then held responsible for the consequences.

You cannot fairly evaluate a system that protects individual rights by pointing to societies that repeatedly abandon those rights whenever politics demands it.

The real question is not whether intervention has failed to produce the promised results. History has answered that often enough.

The real question is why so many insist on blaming the principle that intervention displaced rather than the intervention itself.