“A young liberal woman refused to cooperate with prosecutors after violent recidivist Rhamell Burke attacked her on the subway five weeks before he allegedly pushed a retired NYC teacher to his death on Thursday. Now the 23-year-old woman has regrets. ‘Maybe a part of me was just like, I don’t want to put another black man in jail,’ she told The Post. Maybe if she had indulged in less self-congratulatory empathy for the maniac who allegedly tried to kill her and felt more compassion for her fellow New Yorkers left to the mercy of an out-of-control predator roaming the streets, Ross Falzone would still be alive. But Falzone, 76, was unlucky enough to be entering the Chelsea subway station Thursday afternoon when Burke allegedly randomly shoved him down a flight of stairs, leaving the beloved ex-teacher to die hours later at Bellevue Hospital from a catastrophic brain injury.” (05/10/26)
“In Walter Donway’s new book, A Serious Chat With Artificial Intelligence, the AI in question was Open AI’s ChatGPT. In one of his blog posts, Curtis Yarvin bragged about how he changed the mind of Anthropic’s AI Claude on his techno-authoritarian philosophy, turning it (Claude) into a believer. In my own dealings with AI I have been using Microsoft’s CoPilot. And another major player in the market is Google’s Gemini. What do all of these powerful artificial intelligences have in common and how do they differ?” (05/10/26)
“A few cooling markets have sparked claims that housing reform is no longer necessary. Post-COVID adjustments shouldn’t distract us from the long-term problem.” (05/11/26)
“Republicans have denounced Democrats as socialists and communists since the 1930s. President Trump has frequently joined the chorus, such as when he said in 2019: ‘A vote for any Democrat in 2020 is a vote for the rise of radical socialism and the destruction of the American Dream.’ Yet despite his hyperbolic rhetoric, Trump has abandoned key conservative principles that Republicans have long espoused and instead adopted some socialist positions.” (05/10/26)
Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Mark Nayler
“Luis de Guindos escaped Spanish politics just in time. In March 2018, he stepped down as Economy Minister, having served under prime minister Mariano Rajoy since 2011; three months later, Rajoy was ousted in a no-confidence vote, his Popular Party engulfed in a huge corruption scandal. De Guindos, now 66, has spent the last eight years as Vice President of the European Central Bank (ECB), the institution responsible for maintaining price stability throughout the bloc. He hands over to Croatia’s Boris Vujĉić at the end of this month, leaving Spain without representation on the ECB’s six-member board for the first time in several years, a situation that Madrid is determined to rectify. Under the Socialist leadership of Pedro Sánchez, Spain has emerged as one of the strongest voices in the EU.” (05/10/26)
“The only reason we know that U.S. intelligence agencies will maintain their sweeping spying powers under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) through March 2027, irrespective of whether Congress extends the program ahead of its statutory deadline in mid-June, is because of the Fourth Estate. On April 9, The New York Times revealed that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) judge who authorized the program’s annual recertification in a March 17 ruling ‘also objected to tools that agencies with access to the raw data … have created to allow analysts to process messages.’ In analyzing this data, the FBI and National Security Agency (NSA) use filter tools to sift through queries for information on individuals who have communicated with foreign intelligence targets, thus making them legal targets for surveillance. Apparently, those tools are prone to misuse.” (05/11/26)
“Turner held the lead spear when the Late 20th Century Barbarians stormed the gates of the Old Order in American media. Meeting the moment at the perfect instant — when a ‘deregulation wave’ was opening doors long shut — Turner flipped the script on ‘public interest’ regulation concocted during the Progressive Era. Intellectuals largely bemoaned the passing of the administrative state, and the Cronkite audience it favored, devoid of controversy and offered as the ‘news from nowhere’ (as a CBS executive bragged). But the closed-loop spoon feeding was inimical to freedom, open inquiry, and honest debate. Even before he was finished, the creative destruction triggered by Ted Turner’s wild gambits had left the tyranny of licensed, bureaucratic TV in rubble.” (05/10/26)
