“Hundreds of supporters of the Cockroach Janata Party, an online joke that has drawn millions of followers across India, gathered for the first time in the capital on Saturday for its biggest real-world test yet. The protest near Parliament in New Delhi marked the movement’s first step into street politics after weeks of dominating social media feeds and news headlines, attracting widespread support among young Indians. … The event was an early test of whether the movement can channel its online popularity into a broader grassroots support around growing frustration among young Indians over education, jobs and economic prospects. Another challenge is how the party would navigate the kind of pushback that earlier protest movements have faced under Modi’s government.” (06/06/26)
“The next time you sign a mortgage, finance a car, or open a credit-card statement and wonder why the number keeps creeping upward, here is your answer: you are paying a tax that no one in Washington had the nerve to call a tax. Here is how the bill reaches you: the bond market — the millions of investors who lend the federal government its money — is getting nervous about lending to a government this deep in the red. When they get nervous, they demand higher interest, and the yield on the 10-year Treasury note climbs. That single number quietly sets what you pay on your mortgage, your auto loan, and your credit card. You never saw a ballot. You never got a vote. But the borrowing gets charged to your account all the same.” (06/05/26)
“The corporate press has a new obsession, the so-called K-shaped economy. This metaphor is meant to describe a system in which one group of people, represented by the top, inclining line of the K, watches their fortunes rise as the other group’s fortunes fall. The idea is that Americans who are already doing well financially are doing better, while conditions worsen for those already struggling to make ends meet. The problem is that when we use this letter K shorthand, we lose almost all of the information that’s important to analyzing the broader problem, and we therefore help an extremely concentrated ruling class hide the truth of what has happened.” (06/05/26)
“President Donald Trump said he will likely meet with AI companies at the White House next week to discuss what he called a federal government ‘partnership’ that would allow the American people to profit in their success. The president said Friday that the program, which could include sending company dividends to Americans, would help secure buy-in from a public that remains skeptical about long-term disruptions — including to the labor market — of the technology. ‘There’s a concept out there, there’s so much money and it’s so big that there are concepts where pieces could be given to the American public, where the American public essentially becomes a partner with the companies,’ Trump told reporters en route to an unrelated event in Wisconsin.” (06/05/26)
“If Zohran Mamdani intended to come across as an Ayn Rand villain when he pledged to ‘“replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism,’ he succeeded. Unfortunately, socialism continues to appeal to young people on the left, as both parties jettison free market principles. If there is one author who has inspired young people to think differently about these big ideas, it is Ayn Rand, who is remembered as the author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. While the philosophical system she created, Objectivism, remains at the fringe of culture and academia, her moral defence of capitalism has inspired figures such as former Speaker Paul Ryan and former Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan. Yet one of her lesser-known books, We the Living, deserves more attention than it gets.” (06/05/26)
“Man, Nietzsche wrote, is ‘the unfinished animal.’ He meant that nature goes only so far in shaping human beings. We become who we are through the distinctively human capacity to produce and understand speech. That’s why Aristotle called us the animal that possesses logos, whose meanings include everything from word to speech, thought to reason, order to logic, proportion to account. This extraordinary semantic richness tries to capture the manifold articulate intelligence that makes us human — an intelligence that, in the first instance, answers to the nature and shape of things as they present themselves to our minds. But today, logos — and therefore our humanity — is under intellectual, political, technological attack. It’s not that people have stopped talking. Rather, the difference between speech and what Aristotle called ‘voice’ (phōnē) — the verbal expression not of reason, thought, and judgment, but emotion — is rapidly being effaced.” (06/05/26)
“Private property enables individuals to pursue happiness through their own free choices. It also shields our individual and institutional projects from arbitrary power.” (06/05/26)
“Miami-Dade is forcing a developer to sell property to make sure PortMiami continues to operate smoothly, the county’s mayor said Friday. Mayor Daniela Levine Cava announced the county is proceeding with an eminent domain action to acquire the fuel facility on Fisher Island, after negotiations with the property’s owner ‘concluded without an acceptable agreement.’ Eminent domain is used when private property is [allegedly] needed for [politicians’] use, forcing a sale at a [supposedly] fair market price.” (06/05/26)
