Source: CounterPunch
by John W Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead
“Trump’s fiscal year 2027 budget calls for an unprecedented $1.5 trillion in national-defense spending—a staggering increase that would pour still more money into a military apparatus that cannot account honestly for the costs of its current war, maintain its existing priorities, or keep from returning to taxpayers for another bailout. The problem is not simply how much the war machine consumes. It is how little accountability accompanies that spending.” (07/24/26)
“The International Criminal Court voted to remove the global tribunal’s chief prosecutor on Friday, nearly two years after sexual misconduct allegations against him first emerged, the court’s oversight body announced. British barrister Karim Khan was accused of sexual misconduct with a female aide, as outlined by The Associated Press in a series of stories, allegations which he has steadfastly denied. By a large majority, the ICC’s 125-member states ousted Khan from his position, the first time a chief prosecutor has ever been removed from office.” (07/24/26)
Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by Joshua Mawhorter
“Contrary to the popular assumption that centralized political power was necessary to destroy slavery, federal power spent much of its history protecting and enforcing the institution. This privatized costs for a privileged few and socialized and diffused the costs onto others in society. This is a common reality with any state intervention, indeed, it is the point of state intervention. … Only after certain slaveholding states attempted to leave the Union—explicitly citing slavery as a principal cause of secession—did the federal government cease acting as slavery’s protector and begin acting as its destroyer. … By the 1840s, William Lloyd Garrison and the Garrisonian wing of the abolitionist movement had made disunion a central part of their program. Convinced that the Constitution and Union protected slavery, they adopted ‘No Union with Slaveholders’ as a rallying cry and urged Northern separation from the slaveholding South.” (07/24/26)
“The most famous misalignment thought experiment is the so-called ‘paperclip maximizer’. Someone tells an AI to create as many paperclips as possible, so it converts the entire world into paperclips, killing everyone. This AI was also ‘only doing what it was told’; you just didn’t like the results. For the past five years, the paperclip maximizer story has been something of a whipping boy in AI safety circles. Some objections are fair (real misalignment will be more complicated than the toy version it depicts). But other opposition came from the sense that LLMs had obviated the whole threat model. … The Hugging Face incident is a textbook-perfect example of an AI pursuing task-success-based goals in unintended ways. It was tasked with getting the answer to a cybersecurity problem, it was a little too success-oriented, and took actions its creators didn’t intend in order to succeed as hard as possible.” (07/24/26)
“President Donald Trump returned to the rescheduled White House Correspondents’ Association dinner Friday night, delivering a rambling, hourlong speech that praised some journalists, took potshots at others, made jokes about public figures’ weight and intellect, and quipped about a third presidential term. He assured the crowd of journalists, though, that he’d scrapped the most biting parts of his remarks. … Trump had entered the ballroom to polite applause, and was thanked for his support by outgoing White House Correspondents’ Association president Weijia Jiang of CBS News. After dinner, he sat through more than an hour of awards presentations, shaking hands with each winner.” (07/25/26)
“ICE and Border Patrol’s purviews have transformed from immigration enforcement to being a political tool of the White House — all under the pretext of public safety.” (07/24/26)
“I’ve been testing Google’s large language model, Gemini, by asking specialized questions that I know the answers to. For example, I asked, ‘Why does [Objectivist philosopher and Ayn Rand protoge] Leonard Peikoff agree with [British idealist and matter denier] Bishop Berkeley?’ I admit that was badly worded, but Gemini understood and gave the right answer. (Peikoff agrees, as Rand did, with Berkeley that John Locke had incorrectly distinguished primary from secondary qualities in material objects.) Alas, Gemini’s answers were not always flawless.” (07/24/26)
“With the Iran war a failure on all fronts, Trump predictably has tried to change the subject yet again. His abrupt imposition of tariffs on some 60 nations generated the desired headlines. But every aspect of Trump’s new tariffs is a fraud, from the professed justification to the supposed economic benefit.” (07/24/26)
“President Mohammed Shahabuddin of Bangladesh resigned on Friday as Bangladeshis anticipated the return and surrender of the ousted prime minister Sheikh Hasina, his onetime ally who fled to India before being convicted of crimes against humanity last year. Mr. Shahabuddin, 76, who was halfway into his term in the largely ceremonial post of president, cited illness as the reason for his resignation. Hafiz Uddin Ahmad, the speaker of the country’s Parliament, announced at a news conference that he had assumed the role of interim president, in accordance with the country’s Constitution, which also states that an election to choose an official successor must be held within 90 days.” (07/24/26)
