Source: Property and Environment Research Center
by staff
“As American summers grow drier and hotter, the institutions built to manage lands, water, and wildlife have not kept pace. These institutions, made up of laws, policies, contracts, and other rules that govern how we allocate water, manage forests, prevent wildfire, and conserve wildlife, were designed for a cooler, wetter, and more stable environment. This report focuses on helping institutions adapt to our changing reality. It proposes practical recommendations within five topical areas that can help people and ecosystems weather this summer as well as the years ahead.” (06/18/26)
“In a society where a woman’s status is still largely viewed as subordinate to that of a man, a recent ruling by India’s Supreme Court spotlights the significant, and largely unacknowledged, contributions of women to both individual households and the national economy. In dry legalese, the June 11 verdict establishes a monetary value for ‘loss of domestic care’ in a compensation case for a 2001 vehicle crash that claimed the life of a young wife and mother of three. The court granted the woman’s family a sum of 6.3 million rupees (about $66,000) – more than 25 times the initial award offered in 2003. And the judges also set a minimum estimate for domestic ‘homemaker’ duties at 30,000 rupees ($317) per month – which is about 10 times the amount previously used. Arriving at the current award and the benchmark for future compensation is about much more than numbers, however.” (06/17/26)
Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Christopher Snowdon
“In my new book, Inside the Sausage Factory, I examine four campaigns for ‘public health’ policies in the 2010s and examined all the evidence that was marshalled for and against them. It turns out that the evidence for them wasn’t very good and there wasn’t much evidence marshalled against them, but that isn’t really the point. Nor does it matter that all the policies failed. A bad policy introduced on the basis of poor evidence is still an evidence-based policy. The question—or my question at any rate—was whether the four policies were evidence-based at all.” (06/18/26)
“I do not know my favorite Founder’s name. I just know that in 1788 a Baltimore newspaper published a series of pseudonymous essays where he warned against standing armies, called for a bill of rights, and declared, paraphrasing Jonathan Swift, that ‘laws are cobwebs, catching only the flies and letting the wasps escape.’ See-sawing between fears of an aristocratic legislature and a tyrannical executive, he argued that we’d be best off with the highly decentralized democracy found in certain Swiss cantons.” (06/18/26)
Source: Caitlin Johnstone, Rogue Journalist
by Caitlin Johnstone
“It’s all about the impulse to control. We come into this world boundless and free with eyes full of wonder, but within a few years our minds create and solidify a sense of self around which our mental lives revolve. We do this because we are helpless when we are born, and things happen which are uncomfortable or startling, so we naturally begin seeking out strategies to control what happens to us. Before you know it we’ve got vast spires of psychological architecture within us dedicated to using thought to promote the interests and security of an entirely symbolic me-character that we made up in our minds. And from that point on we are cut off from the Eden of perception.” (06/18/26)
“There is an indisputably crucial history of very close relations between Beijing and Pyongyang. In late 1950, PRC forces intervened in the war between communist North Korea and anti-communist South Korea (whose government was massively supported with military personnel and weaponry from the United States and other Western countries). The armistice that ended the fighting in 1953 left the Korean Peninsula split between two intensely hostile countries, with the United States and the PRC firmly backing their respective clients throughout the remainder of the Cold War. Despite that history, the current connection between the two communist states is decidedly more nuanced, ambiguous, and even contentious than the lips and teeth cliché would imply.” (06/18/26)
“From semiconductors to artificial intelligence, modern proposals for public ownership risk repeating the mistakes Smith identified 250 years ago.” (06/18/26)
“Code is speech (as ruled by a US district court and affirmed by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in Bernstein v. Department of Justice). AI models are code. Therefore, AI models are speech, and the government doesn’t get to control them. Not that the current administration, or any other, or Congress, or the courts, can be counted on to respect the Constitution. The ink wasn’t dry on that document before the American political establishment started ignoring its inconveniences. Which leaves Anthropic and other artificial intelligence firms in a bind. … As a practical matter, if Anthropic et al. want to innovate and compete in a growing market that’s already changing how the world works, they need to get away from the US government, which means getting away from the US.” (06/18/26)
Source: Washington Monthly
by David Lingelbach & Valentina Rodríguez Guerra
“Rule by the rich may look inevitable, but history shows it’s not. From ancient Greece to New Deal America to today’s Hungary, democracies have found ways to separate private fortunes from public power.” (06/18/26)
“Excuses protect us from guilt, but they also rob us of hope. The habit of denying responsibility may be one of the greatest obstacles to personal and social flourishing.” (06/18/26)
