“Once a deal is reached, the Trump administration will apply buckets of lipstick to this pig and insist that it is some sort of strategic victory. Few observers will be convinced, however, and such efforts will just make the president and his coterie of sycophantic advisors look silly. There’s just no credible way to spin this debacle as a success. The more they try to do so, the more delusional they’ll appear. That got me thinking: What if Trump just admitted that he’d made a mistake?” (05/28/26)
“Yes, data centers use a lot of water. Yes, data centers use a lot of electricity. But the builders of those data centers are constantly working to reduce water and electrical requirements because supplying those requirements is costly. Unless there’s some really bizarre change to the historical arc of invention and innovation, we are at the peak, not the low point, of data center resource usage.” (05/28/26)
Source: David Friedman’s Substack
by David Friedman
“Libertarians differ from left liberals, including Abundance liberals, in their view of rights, positive or negative, but I want to argue policy instead. Most libertarians accept the existence of a government that provides courts, law enforcement, and national defense and collects taxes to pay for them. The policy difference between the generic libertarian and the generic left liberal is what the latter adds to that: a welfare state and government regulation of the economy viewed as a correction to market failures and to the failure of individuals to correctly see their own interest and act on it.” (05/28/26)
“The United States loves to remember the Second World War and the Gulf War, because they resulted in the United States smashing the huge conventional armies of diabolical adversaries such as Adolf Hitler, the Imperial Japanese, and the former American ally Saddam Hussein. Yet most recent U.S. wars haven’t gone all that well. Although the outcome of the Korean War against countries using conventional armies — North Korea and China — didn’t provide the expected decisive victory over adversaries, the real trouble started in Vietnam, when such opponents began to realize that the center of gravity when fighting the United States abroad was really at home in the United States.” (05/28/26)
Source: Caitlin Johnstone, Rogue Journalist
by Caitlin Johnstone
“One of the more asinine liberal Zionist talking points is conceding that you are technically allowed to criticize Israel while insisting that it veers into antisemitism if you place more emphasis on Israel’s abuses than on abuses in other countries. If you believe Israel is worthy of disproportionately high levels of support, then you must necessarily also concede that it is worthy of disproportionately high levels of criticism. You cannot simultaneously claim that it is appropriate and normal for the United States to be gifting billions of dollars in weaponry to Israel, AND that Americans should pay no more attention to Israel’s humanitarian abuses than those seen in places like Sudan or the DRC.” (05/28/26)
“Former Democratic National Committee Chair U.S. Democrat Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (FL-25) faces attacks by fellow Democrats for seeking to represent a heavily black congressional district in Florida. About this district, the Miami Herald wrote: ‘Under the previous map, the population of the majority-minority 20th District was 53% Black … and the newly drawn 20th District is 45% Black. At least five Black Democrats are also vying for the seat.’ Wasserman Schultz’s current district is approximately 43 percent Hispanic, 32 percent white, 15 percent black and five percent Asian. This district has been redrawn and will likely be won by a Republican. So, Wasserman announced her candidacy for the seat formerly held by former Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, a black woman who resigned in scandal but is running to regain her seat.” (05/28/26)
“In modern medicine, the zeitgeist today seems to be captured in one word: ‘more.’ We need more MRI machines, more screenings, more surgical interventions, more drugs, more doctors. More. More. More. Like the internal logic of capitalism that is built on eternal growth, so too is our health care system. Given this ever-expanding demand, we need to be asking some hard questions about whether sending even more of our collective wealth towards our healthcare system is producing good returns. We might expect that anything spent on healthcare provides good returns, but what if, frequently, those investments end in losses?” (05/28/26)
“Joseph Schumpeter, in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942), offered a starkly realistic definition of democracy: it is not the rule of the people by the people, but ‘that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people’s vote.’ In this view, democracy functions as an elite contest, politicians and their coalitions vie for office, much like firms compete in a market. Once victorious, they wield state power not primarily for the public good but to reward supporters, secure reelection, and extract rents. Kenya’s post-1992 multiparty system embodies this Schumpeterian reality: competitive elections occur, yet governance remains ‘politicians’ rule,’ where the apparatus of the state serves the victors’ networks rather than the electorate.” (05/28/26)
Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Jacob G Hornberger
“The fangs of the U.S. Empire are now being bared against not only the Cuban people but also against the American people. The Empire has issued subpoenas to two American citizens — Medea Benjamin, founder of Code Pink, and Hasan Piker — requiring them to provide Empire officials with detailed information about a trip that Benjamin and Piker recently took to Cuba.” (05/28/26)
“Will the west stand up and insist that, before anything else, Israel must fulfil its humanitarian requirements to the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip, or will they blindly follow Nickolay Mladenov in insisting that this basic obligation to keep the population of Gaza alive — before all the necessary discussions about disarmament and a just transition of power in Gaza, from which the Palestinians themselves must not be excluded — cannot take place until Hamas is completely disarmed, as though it is still, perpetually, eternally, October 7, 2023, and the genocide of the last 31 months continues to be largely irrelevant, or is even somehow magicked away?” (05/28/26)
