“President Trump lost. The war he waged against Iran promises to conclude in a humbling whimper with the signing of a cease-fire agreement later this week. The United States is left weaker — diminished militarily, strategically, economically, and perhaps morally. The war, which the United States fought alongside Israel, accomplished none of the goals that Trump named at the outset. Instead, it only empowered the hard-liners in Tehran and arguably emboldened them to someday seek a nuclear weapon. … Trump won’t admit to any of this. He has spent recent days furiously spinning the tentative deal as a clear win, and has seethed at unflattering comparisons with the deal that President Obama struck with Iran more than a decade ago, aides and outside advisers told me.” (06/17/26)
“The Trump Administration’s initial demand for renegotiating the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) includes an opening position that vehicles covered by the deal be composed of at least 50 percent American-made components, in terms of dollar value. It’s a revealing concession, because if the goal is truly to manufacture everything in America, the threshold would be 100 percent, not 50 percent. As it turns out, executive orders cannot unwind a global economy. The White House’s concession should jump-start a more honest accounting of what their tariffs actually are: a consumption tax, paid by American households, spread across nearly every goods-producing sector in the economy.” (06/17/26)
“I hear a lot of people saying the community should have this or that. Or pointing out things they believe should be improved. But they always seem to want government, or at least someone else, to provide what they want or to fix their problems. If you have complaints about the community, don’t wait for government to fix them. See what you can do for yourself, maybe with help from others, with or without government permission. Government wants you to depend on it for solutions, but its solutions can be worse than the original problem.” (06/17/26)
Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Laurence M Vance
“This year’s [Social Security] COLA was 2.8 percent — the fifth straight year of a COLA at or above 2.5 percent. The COLA was called a ‘Trump bump’ because Trump’s tariff increases led to increased prices on certain goods, which increased the CPI-W, which increased the COLA. Retirement analysts are expecting an even larger ‘Trump bump’ next year due to the tremendous increase in fuel prices due to Trump’s war in Iran. … These ‘Trump bumps’ are nothing more than welfare increases that will be eaten up by inflation, higher premiums for Medicare Part B (which are deducted from Social Security checks), and taxes on Social Security benefits.” (06/17/26)
“Any reimagining of the university in the age of AI must begin with an honest reckoning with what AI cannot do — and what therefore becomes relatively valuable precisely because AI can do everything else. The key distinction is between work that AI does well (such as synthesis of known patterns, argument elaboration, template instantiation, and generating local coherence) and work it structurally cannot do because of the architecture of the technology as such. AI cannot build the trust on which institutional cooperation depends, because trust is not a conclusion reached by processing information about another agent but instead is a relationship constituted over time between persons who have staked something on each other, and who can be betrayed. AI cannot give a person good taste or style, because taste and style are about personal distinctiveness within a community which shares an aesthetic.” (06/17/26)
“Trustees of the Social Security program just issued their annual report. Each year, the picture of the program’s solvency is dismal. But this year it’s even worse. Rather than falling short in 2033, as reported last year, this year the shortfall is projected to be in late 2032. That’s six years from now. Without action taken, benefits, per the report, will be cut 22% late in 2032. That means that every young working person is now forced to pay, by law, 12.4% of their pay — half paid by them and half paid by their employee — into a bankrupt system. As I recall, this is a free country. So, the fault is ours. We, the voters, sit by and allow this to be done to us. Even if the system was not broken and could pay benefits as promised, it still is a horrible situation.” (06/17/26)
“The protection that the framers wrote into our Constitution was not a general right to privacy. Rather, it was a specific warrant requirement for specific records — the same records that federal agencies can now reach through administrative subpoenas that require no judge’s signature. This is because of two key and relatively recent Supreme Court decisions. U.S. v. Miller in 1976 and Smith v. Maryland in 1979 replaced the Fourth Amendment’s requirement with a doctrine the Founders never intended. They established that information voluntarily shared with a third party loses Fourth Amendment protection.” (06/17/26)
Source: The American Conservative
by Eldar Mamedov
“The threat of war had preserved American leverage, and the waging of war destroyed it. So long as the prospect of the use of force remained ambiguous, Iran had to hedge. Once force was actually applied and failed to produce decisive results, Tehran learned that the United States could not achieve its maximalist objectives militarily. That knowledge permanently shifted the bargaining dynamic. But this outcome need not be seen as catastrophic. It can instead produce a realistic reassessment of American presence and partnerships in the Middle East.” (06/17/26)
“Simon Kuper is 56 now. His first memory of a World Cup, if not his first-ever vivid memory — for many of us who grew up outside the United States, the two are often the same — was the 1978 final between the Netherlands and Argentina. ‘I recall that night as vividly as almost anything else in my childhood,’ he writes in World Cup Fever. ‘A World Cup is like Proust’s Madeleine. Each new World Cup reminds you of past World Cups, and the people you watched them with.’ The book is a history of the World Cup through a few dozen madeleines. For Americans, it’s as good a guide as any to a tournament of paradoxes, this too-big-to-fail quadrennial festival of corruption, cheating, profiteering, nationalist chauvinism, and mostly crappy soccer that nevertheless can hypnotize and transport to a utopia of competition as idealized and convincing as Pelé’s deification of the sport as ‘the beautiful game.'” (06/17/26)
Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Cláudia Ascensão Nunes
“When a government grants a monopoly in certain industries, it is protecting itself from competition it cannot control. The cost of that decision always falls on the people who depend on services that become more expensive, slower, and less innovative by decree. This is exactly what the European Commission proposed on June 3, 2026, this time applied to the digital infrastructure that supports hospitals, universities, public administrations, and businesses across Europe. It is called the Cloud and AI Development Act (CADA), and it is the centerpiece of the Tech Sovereignty Package. The logic behind it is protectionist: restrict who can compete, and guarantee market share for alternatives selected by the state.” (06/17/26)
