Essayist Charles Dudley Warner once observed that “Politics makes strange bedfellows.” True in the 19th century.

True now.

Warner drew upon Shakespeare’s "The Tempest" in conjoining politics with strange bedfellows. It’ s an awkward relationship driven by misery, yet useful to overcome the mutual misery.

Of all the smallish towns I have stayed in along France’s Rhône Valley, Tournon-sur-Rhône is my least favourite. It’s a loud town with an old expressway, Route Nationale 86, running through it.

Argentine President Javier Milei caught the world’s attention at the Davos’ World Economic Forum after delivering a fiery speech in which he warned of the perils of socialism and outlined plans to pull his country out of economic gloom.

On a summer’s day, TikTok influencer Gwen The Milkmaid can be found frying up all-American comfort food dressed in a floral prairie dress. “I don’t want to be a boss babe. I want to be a frolicking mama. I want to spend my days baking bread, cuddling chickens, and drinking raw milk straight from the udder,” she writes in her TikTok caption. In another video, she smiles beatifically at her nearly 50,000 followers, giving the camera a view of her ample breasts as she bakes a fresh sourdough loaf.

What many deemed impossible just months ago is reality: Right-wing populist Javier Milei resoundingly won Argentina’s presidency.

The fiery freshman lawmaker’s victory Sunday night has thrust the country into the unknown regarding how extreme his policies will be following a campaign in which he revved a chainsaw to symbolically cut the state down to size.

Javier Milei may have won an unexpectedly large majority in Argentina’s presidential election but the self-declared “anarcho-capitalist” faces huge obstacles to implementing his radical programme to shrink government and dollarise the economy.

Argentina’s dire state, with inflation running at 143 per cent a year, a wildly unrealistic official exchange rate and unsustainable public finances, would pose a daunting challenge for any new head of state.

When there’s no real alternative, there’s no problem, as the saying goes. And that may be the logic of Argentina voters on Sunday who rejected the catastrophe of Peronist rule in favor of impulsive and charismatic outsider Javier Milei, who promised what for Argentina is the radical change of free-market economics.

This November, rock's most successful and pugnacious communists will be inducted, six years after they became eligible, to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Rage Against the Machine, a band that kicked the doors down on the 1990s with a then-novel mix of brutally heavy guitars and hip-hop vocals, also blended in unlikely tandem two other disparate traditions of American life.

Ecuador’s leftist candidate Luisa Gonzalez took the lead in the country’s presidential election held yesterday (Aug. 20). Backed by the powerful party of Rafael Correa—the fugitive ex-president who held the apex post between 2007 and 2017—45-year-old lawmaker Gonzalez has harked back to the economic and security situation under the Correa administration, when homicide rates were far from the current record highs and poverty was a diminishing.

"Greed of the fossil fuel industry" is "destroying our planet," says Sen. Bernie Sanders. Young people agree. Their solution? Socialism.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says socialism creates "an environment that provides for all people, not just the privileged few."

"Nonsense," says Tom Palmer of the Atlas Network in my new video.

Palmer, unlike Ocasio-Cortez and most of us, spent lots of time in socialist countries. He once smuggled books into the Soviet Union.