“In 1863, Francis Lieber, the Prussian-American jurist commissioned by Abraham Lincoln to codify the laws of land warfare, wrote that no soldier may kill an enemy ‘who has laid down his arms.’ War, however brutal, must remain an act performed by a morally responsible agent who can account for what he has done and to whom it has been done. The Lieber Code was imperfect. Its application was racially selective and its humanitarian ambitions frequently betrayed in practice. But its foundational premise survived two world wars, the drafting of the Geneva Conventions and the development of every weapons system from the machine gun to the precision-guided munition. Its premise is that lethal force requires a human being who can be identified, interrogated, and held to account. Today, AI-powered targeting systems fundamentally break this premise.” (04/24/26)
Source: Center for a Stateless Society
by Kevin Carson
“It makes no sense to seek the historical origin of money unless we start from a definition of what money is. I start from L. Randall Wray’s contention that the defining feature of money is providing a unit of account, and that all the other conventionally assigned attributes of money are secondary where they exist at all.” (04/25/26)
“Israel’s bombing of Lebanon has reportedly killed more than a thousand civilians this year. Israel also drove out more than a half million civilians from southern Lebanon as part of an effort to commandeer that territory. Israel’s bombing has been so indiscriminate that even President Donald Trump objected. … I have the same recommendation now that I had in a 1987 USA Today piece opposing deployment of the U.S. Navy to the Persian Gulf: ‘This is not our war, and there is no profit in U.S. intervention.’ GTFO remains the best Middle East policy for America.” (04/24/26)
Source: Caitlin Johnstone, Rogue Journalist
by Caitlin Johnstone
“One of the most frustrating things about Israel apologists is how they constantly pretend to believe things they don’t really believe in order to push Israeli PR. There’s a tweet going around by a rabbi named Elchanan Poupko that says ‘I had never met a Zionist who does not care also for the lives of innocent Palestinians. I have never met an anti-zionist who does care for the lives of israelis. That is the difference between us.’ This person does not believe his own claim. He is knowingly lying about what he thinks is true about Zionists. A Penn State survey published in Israeli media last year found that 82 percent of Jewish Israelis support the forced expulsion of all Palestinians from Gaza. Nearly half, 47 percent, said the IDF should kill all inhabitants of any city they capture — that’s inhabitants, not combatants.” (04/25/26)
“As the age of artificial intelligence dawns, the various people who make a living as Blobsters — the think tankers, the past and present government officials, the military-industrial-complex titans, the influential media figures — show few signs of getting the picture. Whereas the atomic age spawned lots of creative and even enlightened thinking about its revolutionary implications for national and international security, the age of AI seems so far to be having roughly the opposite effect.” (04/25/26)
“I suspect that, considering how most commentators talk about the matter, many people think the U.S. tax system favors the rich, the public’s favorite scapegoat. But according to Adam N. Michel, the Cato Institute’s director of tax policy studies, ‘We actually have one of the most progressive income taxes in the developed world.’ … The average tax rate on upper-tier earners is as high as 33.4 percent. ‘[A]s a share of adjusted gross income (AGI), the top half of income earners paid 97.1 percent of federal income taxes.’ That leaves less than 3 percent for the rest.” (04/24/26)
“The contrast between Washington’s caution in dealing with a nuclear-armed North Korea and the flagrant U.S. coercion of Iran, which possesses no such weapons, could hardly be more striking. It has not gone unnoticed. Pyongyang’s successful defiance of the United States regarding the nuclear issue could well produce an important lesson for Iran’s leaders. Pyongyang has covertly built a small arsenal of approximately 50 nuclear warheads and an increasingly sophisticated fleet of ballistic missiles to deliver them. U.S. and other leaders now treat North Korea with caution and restraint, however grudgingly. Conversely, an Iran without nuclear weapons is being pounded severely. Iranian leaders would be obtuse not to at least try to acquire (through construction or purchase) a modest deterrent similar to North Korea’s.” (04/24/26)
“When you break a promise as clear as ‘No new wars,’ you shouldn’t be surprised when even your most loyal supporters revolt. And that’s exactly what is happening to President Trump. One such disillusioned supporter is Tucker Carlson — who on a recent podcast with his brother Buckley admitted, in essence, ‘My bad.’ … let’s be clear-eyed about what Carlson is — and isn’t — saying here. Specifically, it’s worth noting that the apology doesn’t extend to validating those of us who opposed Trump from the beginning. In fact, it almost can’t. Doing that would require the confessor to reinterpret not just Trump’s presidency, but also the entire ecosystem that made supporting Trump a viable option in the first place. It would mean admitting that the framework he used to evaluate Trump was flawed, not just the outcome.” (04/24/26)
“British-American philosopher Mick Jagger put it best: ‘You can’t always get what you want.’ A universal verity. But what about a sadder situation? ‘You must always get what you don’t want.’ Only the deepest pessimist thinks this pertains to our lives, our ‘lived experience’ in even these our mixed-up times. But it does apply to one huge domain of life: our representation in Congress.” (04/24/26)
