Source: Common Dreams
by Martin Burns & Mary Liz Burns
“At a campaign-like rally at The Villages, a retirement community near Orlando, Florida, President Donald Trump continued his campaign of deception about his record on Social Security. As he has many times in the last several months, Trump falsely claimed that his ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’ eliminated taxes. This time however Trump took his campaign of deception to a higher level. The background for Trump included the words ‘Golden Age for Your Golden Years’ and ‘No Tax on Social Security’. Unfortunately, many in the mainstream media simply ignore Trump’s continued falsehoods on Social Security. Let’s look at the facts. The ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’ did not eliminate taxes on Social Security. Indeed, the legislative process, ‘reconciliation,’ which the Republicans used to pass the legislation, prohibits these types of changes in Social Security.” (05/05/26)
“Abortion access has once again been called into question, jeopardizing the health of millions of American women in the process and creating chaos. This is the reality of what the 2022 ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization did to our ability to access health care. On May 1, a federal appeals court in Louisiana temporarily halted the prescription of the abortifacient mifepristone via telehealth, effectively kneecapping abortion services nationwide. Then, on May 4, the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated mail-order abortion services for a week while the justices considered the issue. This kind of confusion has been part of the goal all along.” (05/05/26)
“Mass deception is a cornerstone of the state’s ability to maintain total control. One of the main methods used by government to convince the population of their legitimacy is the tool of propaganda. This is nothing new, and states throughout the world have engaged in this practice for all of human history. What is new, however, is the mass awakening that is occurring in this moment of imperial decay.” (05/05/26)
“Spirit has been struggling for years. In 2022, the airline sought to get on better financial footing by merging with fellow discount airline JetBlue. The merger may have allowed for more effective competition with the dominant carriers. However, the Justice Department successfully opposed the merger in court on the grounds it would lead to more concentration in the discount airlines market. This is one of many examples of how an aggressive approach to antitrust enforcement can harm businesses and consumers.” (05/04/26)
“No one ever quite knows the nature of the aftermath of any war in the Middle East. The current effort to disarm and neuter the Iranian theocracy is no exception. But contrary to European and American left-wing consensus, the ripples of the Iran war are already remaking the postwar world as we knew it, and in ways that are all bad. For more than half a century, OPEC has terrorized the industrial world with threats of oil shortages and sky-high prices, with members often agreeing to cut back to 70–80 percent of their capacities. But recently, the hard-pressed United Arab Emirates announced — at a time of high oil prices — that it was leaving the cartel and freelancing.” (05/05/26)
“Richard Dawkins has come in for a lot of deserved mockery for declaring that Anthropic’s LLM Claude is conscious after futzing about with it for three days (and incidentally renaming it ‘Claudia’). But in fact, he didn’t quite declare that it was conscious. What he said was that he couldn’t see how to prove that it wasn’t conscious. ‘Claudia’ appeared to think creatively in a complex manner and to engage in introspection. If that wasn’t evidence of consciousness, he wondered, then what would be evidence? Moreover, he asked, if we assume that ‘Claudia’ is not conscious, then its behavior appears to be proof that you don’t need to be conscious to think creatively in a complex manner and to engage in introspection. If that is the case, then why are we conscious? What is consciousness for?” (05/04/26)
“Recently, I had the opportunity to stand in a friend’s kitchen eating pupusas, the Salvadoran national food, while listening to an update on conditions in Central America from Cristosal’s Noah Bullock. Cristosal is a key Central American human rights organization engaged in legal advocacy, forensic investigation, and amplifying the voices of people who are experiencing — and resisting — repression in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. Noah offered considerable detail on the conditions in those countries, but his basic message for us living so far away was simple: No matter how dark the road gets, we keep on walking. We know the sun will rise again. So, while most of the world (and the media) is all too reasonably focused on the ever-evolving, increasingly disastrous conflicts in Iran and Lebanon, I found myself instead thinking about the countries to our south.” (05/05/26)
Source: David Friedman’s Substack
by David Friedman
“Both the FDA and CDC pages make a point of the fact that vaping is not safe while conceding that it is less bad than smoking. That, plus the absence of numbers, made me suspect that they might be exaggerating how dangerous vaping is. If vaping is only a tenth as dangerous as smoking, if the benefit from getting one smoker to switch to vaping is as large as the benefit from persuading nine vapers to quit entirely, putting the emphasis on how unsafe vaping is instead of on how much safer it is than smoking might be counterproductive.” (05/04/26)
Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by Ryan McMaken
“The phrase ‘political opportunity’ was developed decades ago to describe the phenomenon that successful revolutionaries, reformers, and activists have long understood: that significant changes in political institutions come out of a mixture of ideology and historical conditions. Political events are not determined only by the battle of ideas, but also by ideological and political movements being present in the right place at the right time. It’s not enough for an ideology to have a ‘good argument.'” (05/04/26)
