Source: Washington Post
“Europe promises a life many Americans envy: longer vacations, universal health care, beautiful cities and a slower pace. But those benefits come with trade-offs. Host Megan McArdle looks past the usual America versus Europe arguments to explore what economic indicators reveal about quality of life.” (05/22/26)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/podcasts/impromptu/is-life-better-in-europe-its-not-so-simple-/
Source: The Watch
by Radley Balko
“A Minneapolis prosecutor charges an ICE agent, exposing how DHS shamelessly lied after its officers shot an immigrant, tear gassed two kids, and put a bullet in the wall of a child’s bedroom.” (05/22/26)
https://radleybalko.substack.com/p/your-lying-ice-the-shooting-of-julio
Source: South China Morning Post [Hong Kong]
“Pope Leo called for the ‘disarming’ of artificial intelligence in his long-awaited manifesto on the rapidly developing technology on Monday, and warned of “new forms of slavery” behind its rise. The ‘just war’ theory – espoused recently by the Trump administration – was ‘outdated,’ Pope Leo XIV wrote in his first encyclical, which he presented in person at the Vatican, alongside AI experts including the co-founder of US giant Anthropic. The first US pope, who has clashed with the White House over the Iran war and its use of religion to justify conflict, sounded the alarm over AI-directed weaponry, saying it was ‘not permissible to entrust lethal’ decisions to tech.” (05/25/26)
Source: Lions of Liberty
“Trump Dead to Libertarians?” (05/22/26)
https://www.lionsofliberty.com/episodes/politicks-podcast-trump-dead-to-libertarians
Source: Brownstone Institute
by Max Dublin
“For many months now a historic debate about vaccine safety and effectiveness has been unfolding in America’s regulatory agencies and recently the debate has escalated into open partisan warfare. It started on June 9, 2025 when Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. dismissed all 17 sitting members of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) and replaced them with his own picks. As one might have expected such a sweeping step was very controversial.” (05/22/26)
https://brownstone.org/articles/inside-the-great-vaccine-debate/
Source: Law & Liberty
by Rachel Lu
“The Cambridge Five offer a harrowing case study in what can happen when a youthful elite hates its own nation.” (05/22/26)
Source: Washington Monthly
by Bill Scher
“New polling shows not so much ideological division among Democrats but a lack of consensus about where the party should go.” (05/22/26)
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2026/05/22/the-democratic-party-is-divided-but-not-how-you-think/
Source: The Tom Woods Show
“The Trump Assassination Plots: The Unanswered Questions.” (05/22/26)
https://tomwoods.com/ep-2763-the-trump-assassination-plots-the-unanswered-questions/
Source: David Friedman’s Substack
by David Friedman
“William Niskanen, in a book published many years ago, proposed a simple model of government bureaucracy. The more money a bureaucrat controls the more important he is, so bureaucrats want to maximize their budgets. The legislature knows how much any level of output from a bureau is worth to it. The bureaucracy knows — and the legislature does not — what a government bureau can do at what cost. So the rational bureau finds the largest level of output that it can produce at a cost below the value of that level of output to the legislature and exaggerates the cost of any lower level of output by enough to make it higher than its value, thus tricking the legislature into giving it the largest possible budget. When I first read the argument it struck me as implausible.” (05/22/26)
Source: Grist
by Tik Root
“High gas prices are driving EV growth in other parts of the world — but American drivers are favoring hybrids.” (05/22/26)
https://grist.org/solutions/why-hybrids-not-evs-are-winning-over-u-s-consumers/