“Finalization of the much-heralded Pandemic Agreement, the flagship of the World Health Organization’s pandemic agenda, has just been postponed again after another failure to resolve disagreements. Despite heavy pressure from the WHO and European Union in yet another meeting, in Geneva, Switzerland, a large bloc of African states are refusing to sign on to what they consider a clear colonialist agenda. Which of course it is, aimed at putting Covid-era wealth transfers on a more permanent footing. The WHO, for reasons explained below, is doing what it is paid to do. Major financial sponsors of the WHO have much to gain from getting this Agreement through.” (05/06/26)
“In the week since the Supreme Court barred gerrymandering of districts intentionally based on race, many state legislatures have been busy debating how to redraw electoral maps. Some lawmakers have offered non-race-based ideas – including proportional representation – to ensure all disadvantaged voters have a voice. Such ideas, however, might first entail a dialogue, both across the aisle and across races. In Alabama, one legislator, Rep. Curtis Travis, offered a different kind of dialogue Monday.'” (05/05/26)
“Washington blocked the merger that might have saved Spirit Airlines—then stood by as it collapsed. The result: fewer flights, higher prices, and a textbook case of policy backfiring on the consumers it aimed to protect.” (05/06/26)
“Most Americans appear to be unaware of the fact that life expectancy in the United States is substantially lower than in other advanced countries; we’re on a par with poorer nations in Europe like Albania. Surely even fewer people know that this wasn’t always true. In the early 1980s Americans lived about as long as citizens of other rich nations. Now we die substantially earlier …” (05/06/26)
Source: The Volokh Conspiracy
by Jacob Mchangama & Jeff Kosseff
“While governments around the world have imposed speech restrictions to fight misinformation and hate speech, they also have attempted to curb free speech for a less controversial reason: protecting children. But many of these restrictions stem from vague, unspecified, or speculative harms and corral wide swaths of speech that do not harm children. Censoring speech in the name of protecting children is not a terribly new phenomenon, especially in authoritarian countries. In 2012, for instance, Russia’s parliament passed a law allowing the country’s media censorship agency to unilaterally blacklist websites and take them offline, without any court approval. The lawmakers’ justification was protecting children from online harm, but civil liberties groups correctly predicted that the government would use these powers to curb far more speech. In recent years, such efforts have moved beyond authoritarian countries and taken hold in Western democracies.” (05/06/26)
“On May 6, 1866, exactly one hundred and sixty years ago today, Thaddeus Stevens, US Congressman from Pennsylvania and the leading Radical Republican in the House of Representatives, rose to introduce the Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution on the floor of the. Stevens, chair of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, was also co-chair of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction set up by Congress, in late 1865, to promote a radical Reconstruction, a program advanced over the consistent objections of President Andrew Johnson. … The Amendment passed in the House on June 13, by a vote of 138 in favor and 36 opposed, having passed in the Senate five days earlier, on June 8, by a vote of 33 in favor and 11 opposed. In other words, roughly a quarter of US Representatives and Senators, serving in houses of Congress that did not include representatives from the seceded Confederate states, voted against the amendment.” (05/06/26)
“Is the U.S.-Iran conflict becoming a forever war? At first glance, it doesn’t look that way. Rising oil and gas prices, growing congressional pressure around the War Powers Resolution, and scant public support are putting pressure on U.S. President Donald Trump to end the conflict soon. But if history is any guide, there’s a real chance the war continues to drag on. Why? Because a few core elements that have turned past conflicts into forever wars are present in this one, too. Those three components are high resolve by the weak, erosion of cost-benefit thinking by the strong, and weak institutional constraints to warfighting on at least one side. Combined, they mean resisting the expansion of the Iran conflict into a forever war won’t be easy.” (05/06/26)
Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Jacob G Hornberger
“In the midst of massive death and destruction inflicted by the U.S. government in Iran, Venezuela, the Caribbean, and here economically in the United States — and, before that, in Iraq and Afghanistan — and, before that, in Vietnam and Korea, it is easy to forget that the U.S. government is still inflicting economic destruction here at home with its immigration police state. There are, of course, countless horror stories of human suffering that the Trump administration has inflicted on people with its ruthless and brutal immigration police state, especially with ICE and Border Patrol raids, masked kidnappings, squalid detention centers, and forced deportations.” (05/06/26)
“Trump’s team is crafting a narrative that provides them with an off ramp to a war they have lost that tells the story of a war they have won. The U.S. had no legal reason for its war on Iran, and what publicly stated reasons they had were forever shifting. But there seem to have been four key goals: 1. Regime change. 2. Removing Iran’s ballistic missile program. 3. Severing Iran from its forward deterrent network, or proxies. 4. Zero enrichment of uranium. … The rest is fiction: a narrative fiction crafted by Trump’s team to give them a way to tell an angry and betrayed public that they won the war when none of the goals – and all of the nightmares — have been achieved.” (05/06/26)
“‘It is in my memory banks,’ Eric Peters wrote last month, referencing an android on an old Star Trek episode, ‘the long-ago time when GM was a car company.’ Yes, in the “long-ago” they ‘made an almost infinite variety of vehicles to suit almost any need and budget, all of them designed and engineered to free their owners. Some were utilitarian. Others were beautiful. Some were arrogant. None were parenting. They were made by adults who respected other adults. What became of that GM?’ The answer? Government.” (05/06/26)
