“The US and Iran reached a tentative agreement to open the Strait of Hormuz and start nuclear talks, according to US officials — though President Donald Trump has not signed off on it yet. Iranian officials have not yet commented on a potential deal. US Vice President JD Vance said ‘a couple of language points’ are still under discussion but the sides are making progress in peace talks. Sources say the tentative deal would begin 60 more days of negotiation on Tehran’s nuclear program.” (05/29/26)
Source: David Friedman’s Substack
by David Friedman
“Libertarians differ from left liberals, including Abundance liberals, in their view of rights, positive or negative, but I want to argue policy instead. Most libertarians accept the existence of a government that provides courts, law enforcement, and national defense and collects taxes to pay for them. The policy difference between the generic libertarian and the generic left liberal is what the latter adds to that: a welfare state and government regulation of the economy viewed as a correction to market failures and to the failure of individuals to correctly see their own interest and act on it.” (05/28/26)
“President Donald Trump has refiled his lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal’s publisher and two of its reporters over a July 2025 report on a lewd birthday letter to Jeffrey Epstein bearing Trump’s name. Tuesday’s defamation lawsuit seeks $10 billion for damages and claims that the story had ‘glaring failures in journalistic ethics and standards of accurate reporting.’ … The president’s earlier lawsuit was dismissed last month, with a federal judge ruling that Trump failed to plausibly allege the newspaper acted with ‘actual malice’ when it reported the story. … The Wall Street Journal story published in July 2025 was about a collection of letters gifted to Epstein for his 50th birthday in 2003. One of the letters, the Wall Street Journal reported, bore Trump’s name and an outline of a naked woman. Trump has denied writing the letter.” (05/28/26)
“The United States loves to remember the Second World War and the Gulf War, because they resulted in the United States smashing the huge conventional armies of diabolical adversaries such as Adolf Hitler, the Imperial Japanese, and the former American ally Saddam Hussein. Yet most recent U.S. wars haven’t gone all that well. Although the outcome of the Korean War against countries using conventional armies — North Korea and China — didn’t provide the expected decisive victory over adversaries, the real trouble started in Vietnam, when such opponents began to realize that the center of gravity when fighting the United States abroad was really at home in the United States.” (05/28/26)
“The number of Americans filing claims for unemployment benefits increased marginally last week amid relatively low layoffs, despite the dragging war with Iran. Initial claims for state unemployment benefits rose 5,000 to a seasonally adjusted 215,000 for the week ended May 23, the Labor Department said on Thursday. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast 211,000 claims for the latest week. Claims have been tucked in a 190,000-230,000 range this year. … The unemployment rate is expected to have held steady at 4.3% in May. Continuing claims have dropped from last year’s lofty levels, though some of the decline is likely due to people exhausting their eligibility for benefits, limited to 26 weeks in most states.” (05/28/26)
“A U.S. judge on Thursday declined to block President Donald Trump’s executive tightening rules on mail-in voting in a loss for the Democratic Party, whose lawyers argued that it could disenfranchise millions of voters. The decision comes as Trump’s Republicans are locked in a tight battle to keep control of both houses of the U.S. Congress in the November midterm elections. … The executive order signed by Trump on March 31 directed his administration to compile a list of confirmed U.S. citizens eligible to vote in each state and to use federal data to help state election officials verify who is eligible to vote. It also required the U.S. Postal Service to only deliver ballots to voters on each state’s approved mail-in ballot list, and required states to preserve election-related records for five years.” (05/28/26)
“Rich, Lori, and Riley discuss the shitshow that was the Libertarian Party National Convention, and as a part of that, when it’s okay for a Libertarian guy to slap a woman.” (05/28/26)
“In modern medicine, the zeitgeist today seems to be captured in one word: ‘more.’ We need more MRI machines, more screenings, more surgical interventions, more drugs, more doctors. More. More. More. Like the internal logic of capitalism that is built on eternal growth, so too is our health care system. Given this ever-expanding demand, we need to be asking some hard questions about whether sending even more of our collective wealth towards our healthcare system is producing good returns. We might expect that anything spent on healthcare provides good returns, but what if, frequently, those investments end in losses?” (05/28/26)
