“The neocons got their war. The question every taxpayer and every voter who believed Trump’s promises should be asking is: who else got what they wanted? The answer is not difficult to find. It is sitting in earnings calls, stock filings, and futures trading records. Washington does not even bother to hide it anymore.” (05/04/26)
“An Iraqi court on Monday sentenced four people to six years in prison on charges of promoting the ideas of the banned Baath Party led by former leader Saddam Hussein. The Karkh Criminal Court said in a statement that those convicted were found in possession of the banned materials on their cellphones in Kirkuk province during 2025 and 2026. After the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq toppled Saddam’s autocratic rule, the country implemented a broad de-Baathification policy aimed at removing the influence of the Baath Party from state institutions.” (05/04/26)
“One of the more encouraging developments in artificial intelligence is that some of the people building it have started acting like it might be dangerous. Not in the Skynet sense or the HAL 9000 sense or even the ‘oops, it deleted all my emails’ sense, though AI might be dangerous in all of those ways too. The question is whether the latest models are dangerous to infrastructure, dangerous to privacy, dangerous to security, and dangerous to the blurry line between public and private. For years, Big Tech has been heavy on the gas, light on the brakes — and we have all benefited tremendously, even as angry debates about the downsides have raged. But with AI, at least in a few notable cases, the companies themselves have begun doing something unusual. They have started saying no.” (for publication 06/26)
“Earlier this year, a prominent company with millions of customers announced a major product upgrade — albeit with one little catch. If this new product was released to the public, the company said, it could be used to disrupt — and perhaps destroy — civilizational infrastructure, from financial markets to transportation systems to power and water utilities. But fear not! The company hastened to reassure the public that it had the situation under control. The company would decide, on its own terms, what the world needed to know, who should be called in to contain the problem, and how much gratitude the rest of us should feel for being spared a catastrophe we never knew was coming. No public accountability or government intervention required. This, of course, is the story of Anthropic and its latest AI model.” (05/04/26)
Source: Law & Liberty
by Allen Mendenhall & Daniel Sutter
“The ESG movement — Environmental, Social, and Governance — achieved the rare feat of moving from business schools and boardrooms into mainstream public and political discourse. What began as a technical framework for evaluating firm-level risk has, over time, evolved into a sweeping set of expectations about what corporations owe not only shareholders but also society at large. In that evolution, ESG has taken on meanings far beyond its original analytic purpose, becoming a vehicle for advancing broader social priorities through financial markets.” (05/04/26)
“Iran[‘s regime has killed] three men charged in connection with political protests this January, authorities have said, the latest in a wave of hangings against the backdrop of the war against the US and Israel. Iranian authorities have carried out [killings] on a near-daily basis in recent weeks in what activists have denounced as a bid to instil fear in society at a time of international and domestic tension. Mehdi Rassouli, Mohammad Reza Miri and Ebrahim Dolatabadi, all considered political prisoners by human rights organisations, were [killed] after being convicted over unrest in the eastern city of Mashhad in January, the judiciary’s Mizan news agency announced on Monday.” (05/04/26)
Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by George Ford Smith
“In 1901, on far-away Balangiga — a village in Eastern Samar of the Philippines — an American general gave an order that stripped away any notion of ‘civilizing’ or ‘Christianizing’ a foreign people: ‘Make it a howling wilderness.’ General Jacob H. Smith’s command — accompanied by the instruction to ‘kill everyone over ten’ — was not an aberration. It was consistent with a decision made only a few years earlier about America becoming one of the ‘great’ nations. The government would abandon its anti-imperial tradition and join the ranks of empire.” (05/04/26)
“When one provider goes offline, others should step in. Mississippi’s experience shows how certificate-of-need laws prevent that — and why reform matters for public health.” (05/04/26)
