“Anthropic signed a contract with the Pentagon last summer. It originally said the Pentagon had to follow Anthropic’s Usage Policy like everyone else. In January, the Pentagon attempted to renegotiate, asking to ditch the Usage Policy and instead have Anthropic’s AIs available for ‘all lawful purposes.’ Anthropic demurred, asking for a guarantee that their AIs would not be used for mass surveillance of American citizens or no-human-in-the-loop killbots. The Pentagon refused the guarantees, demanding that Anthropic accept the renegotiation unconditionally and threatening ‘consequences’ if they refused. … The idea of declaring a US company to be a foreign adversary, potentially destroying it, just because it’s not allowing the Pentagon to unilaterally renegotiate its contract is not normal practice. It’s insane Third World bullshit that nobody would have considered within the Overton Window a week ago.” (02/25/26)
“There are three things to remember if the U.S. goes to war with Iran: It was never about nuclear weapons, it was never about helping the Iranian people, and Iran was genuinely negotiating a diplomatic solution.” (02/26/26)
“A grand jury in Texas has rejected indictments against a federal immigration agent following the fatal shooting of a US citizen during a traffic encounter last year. Ruben Ray Martinez was killed on March 15, 2025, by an agent from Homeland Security Investigations. The Department of Homeland Security had not publicly disclosed the incident until The Associated Press and other media outlets reported it last week. Prosecutors confirmed the grand jury’s decision on Wednesday, stating that indictments were declined after the case was presented.” (02/26/26)
Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by Ryan McMaken
“Toward the end of my recent lecture at the Oklahoma City Mises Circle, I mentioned that one peculiar aspect of small businesses, as a group, is that they are very bad at lobbying the government for special favors. We can contrast this, for example, with the financial sector and commercial airlines, or with large manufacturers in areas like steel, aerospace, and automobiles. All of these industries have received major bailouts or subsidies in recent decades, or have been direct recipients of government spending and protectionist policy.” (02/25/26)
“Cuba said its forces fatally shot four heavily armed people attempting to ‘infiltrate’ its territory on a Florida-registered speedboat on Wednesday, amid simmering tensions between the communist island and the US. Cuban border guard troops approached the boat after it entered their territorial waters in Falcones Cay, Villa Clara province, just over 100 miles from Florida, the country’s interior ministry said in a statement. A passenger on the speedboat shot at the Cuban vessel, wounding its commander, and prompting Cuban forces to return fire, according to the statement. Six other people aboard the speedboat were wounded and are in custody and receiving medical attention. The passengers were Cuban residents of the US and were armed with assault rifles, handguns and Molotov cocktails, and had ‘intended to carry out an infiltration for terrorist purposes,’ according to a later statement from the ministry.” (02/25/26)
“Free immigration would appear to be in a different category from other policy decisions, in that its consequences permanently and radically alter the very composition of the democratic political body that makes those decisions. In fact, the liberal order, where and to the degree that it exists, is the product of a highly complex cultural development. One wonders, for instance, what would become of the liberal society of Switzerland under a regime of ‘open borders.’ Mises’s embrace of the economic benefits offered by free migration … is offset according to Raico by the political threat that migrants supposedly pose due to the illiberal cultures of their countries of origin. … Mises makes a crucially important point that Raico failed to acknowledge, namely that immigrants are not mindless puppets of the culture of their country of origin.” (02/25/26)
