“Mike Lindell, the CEO of MyPillow and a leader of the election denial movement who was endorsed by President Donald Trump for Minnesota governor this week, acknowledged that he is not registered to vote in the state he seeks to lead. … In Minnesota, voters are allowed to register to vote on Election Day. Lindell, who is registered in Texas, said he was not concerned that he was not yet registered in his home state, something first reported by The Minnesota Star Tribune. Lindell said he was registered to vote in Texas when he moved there for one year in 2024, soon after he married his current wife, Kendra. He said he returned to Minnesota, where he was born and raised, the following year, because he wanted to run for governor.” (07/18/26)
Source: Persuasion
by Damon Silvers & Matt Scherer
“The AI boom is already the largest capital investment project in history, running a price tag greater than the Manhattan Project, Interstate Highway System, and Apollo program combined. Estimates of the total cost of the data center buildout run as high as $7 trillion. The issue is not whether AI will transform our economy and society—maybe it will, maybe it won’t. But the conversation around AI’s long-term impact misses the more urgent question: whether AI companies can increase revenues and profits fast enough to pay their bills.” (07/17/26)
“So it seems the United States is looking at a reinvigorated COINTELPRO for the 2020s, this time with police drones and AI-assisted mass surveillance. As Americans become more and more hostile toward US warmongering, more and more fed up with the state of Israel, more and more convinced that their government doesn’t care about them, and more and more discontented with what unbridled capitalism is doing to their bank accounts, their society, and their world, their rulers are responding with the iron fist of tyranny. And what makes all this especially threatening is that you know whatever measures they roll out while the Republicans are running things will remain in place when the Democrats are in power, because as we have discussed here many times before, it is the Democratic Party’s job to prevent leftward movement in the United States.” (07/18/26)
“A Chinese steel giant demanded compensation from the United Kingdom government on Sunday, claiming thetakeover of its subsidiary, British Steel, was ‘outright robbery.’ The UK government took operational control of British Steel last year, after owner Jingye Group warned that Britain’s last factory capable of making steel from scratch was no longer financially viable. … The company noted that nationalization could cost UK taxpayers more than 1.5 billion pounds ($2.02 billion, €1.76 billion) by 2028. Jingye said it had begun a procedure under bilateral investment agreements to seek damages, without expanding further.” (07/19/26)
“Democrats have a union problem. They have tied their political fortunes to unions, public and private, in ways that exacerbate intraparty conflict while stymieing both progressive and moderate goals. That’s not just a problem for the party. Democratic deference to unions creates economic hurdles for much of the country—almost everyone who isn’t in a union, and even some people who are—because today’s unions function as roadblocks to the future. To understand the party’s problem, consider that the two most powerful words in Democratic politics in 2026 are abundance and affordability. Both represent rival party factions.” (for publication 08/26)
Source: David Friedman’s Substack
by David Friedman
“I receive a flattering email. The sender is very impressed with my work. She runs an elite reading group, would like to include one of my books. I, of course, respond that she is welcome to do so. At the second or third round of the exchange she mentions a small financial contribution by the featured author to help cover the costs of the project. … I think this is the third I have received in the past year. Considered as a scam, it makes sense only if targeting multiple authors, since it does not seem likely to get much money from any single author. Targeting multiple authors requires multiple versions of the emails, since they contain moderately detailed references to the author’s work, hardly likely to be worth the cost of hiring someone to compose them. Unless they are written by an AI.” (07/18/26)
“We’re used to it, of course, but it still demands repeating. The president is mentally unwell — a delusional, malignant sociopath incapable of absorbing any reality that is not pure wish-fulfillment. We have never elected anyone to that office as inadequate to it as this man. The stream of consciousness we were subjected to last night is merely the latest of a series of humiliations for a country dumb and desperate enough to re-elect a global laughingstock. Have I said this before? Yes, I have said this before. It remains a fact we are currently doing our best to ignore. For appearance’s sake.” (07/17/26)
