“It was his last show and it was the only episode of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert I’ve ever watched. Yes, I’d seen clips, but I had honestly never watched a full episode ever. I never actually watched an episode of The Colbert Report either, or The Daily Show for that matter. Watching liberals pretend to be honest brokers on the news of the day never appealed to me. But Colbert’s last show did, mostly because I wanted to see one fresh before it was too late and I figured he and his ample staff would bring their A-game. Boy, was I wrong.” (05/26/26)
Source: David Friedman’s Substack
by David Friedman
“My usual explanation for why I call myself a libertarian instead of a liberal is that after the enemies of liberalism stole its name we needed a new one. In a recent Substack post, however, Matthew Yglesias writes that: ‘while some classical liberals have called the Republican Party home, liberalism has largely been a Democratic Party project.’ His view is that ‘liberals’ in the modern American sense, classical liberals and libertarians are all liberals in the same sense. Is he right?” (05/25/26)
“Rebuilding state capacity is not just about saving money or improving efficiency. It is about reclaiming our collective sovereignty.” [editor’s note: Individual sovereignty is the only real sovereignty – TLK] (05/26/26)
“[O]ne way of looking at an audience is ‘anyone who experiences the art.’ This expansive view is, I think, is a vital and true way of defining audience. It’s important to hold the expansive idea of audience in mind, and to be open to it. Another way to think about audience is to say it is the community with whom the artist is in conversation. In this sense, audience moves closer to the artistic intent. It’s not that the art is closed to anyone else; it’s that it is entering an already-existing conversation and speaking into it, and so it exists within that specific conversation in a specific way. Which version of audience is true? I think both are true.” (05/25/26)
Source: Independent Institute
by Alvaro Vargas Llosa
“One problem with raising expectations, as a government such as Javier Milei’s did in Argentina, is that when things don’t look as bright as one would like, people begin to lose faith in the ideas. Much emphasis was placed at the beginning on the superiority of the libertarian ideas the president professes, and they were proclaimed with such forceful, aggressive assertiveness that, even though he himself made clear it would take time and sacrifices to clean up the disaster he inherited, people became convinced of the inevitability of progress. Such faith inevitably carried with it high expectations and impatience. Now, almost two and a half years into his administration, many Argentines are losing sight of the legacy of so many years of failed policies he had to confront when he came into office and beginning to associate what is happening today … with the present administration rather than past ones.” (05/25/26)
“Last New Year’s Eve, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) posted an image online of an inviting, deserted beach with a classic mid-20th-century car parked on the sand. In the sky were the words ‘America After 100 Million Deportations,’ and above the image was a caption, ‘The peace of a nation no longer besieged by the third world.’ This fantasy scenario, the removal of more than a quarter of the U.S. population, didn’t come from a random online troll. It was posted on X by the official feed of the federal agency charged with immigration enforcement. The driving force behind the Trump administration’s efforts to stop the ‘third world’ from ‘besieging’ the United States is Stephen Miller, the president’s deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security adviser.” (05/26/26)
“In 2022, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin put together a Suicide Prevention and Response Independent Review Committee (SPRIRC). This body released a report full of recommendations for reducing suicides among current and former military personnel. … According to the SPRIRC, the military promotion system is so broken that it’s on par with firearms availability and access to mental health professionals as meaningful contributors to suicide risk. If that’s true, imagine how much money that broken system wastes outside of suicides. It’s hard to fathom.” (05/25/26)
“Remember, they say,
Through the long mists of time,
Our heroes and legends and leaders sublime.
Think not of their flaws, for of flaws they had none.
Remember that freedom springs forth from a gun.
Recall them as Caesar, but ne’er Cincinnatus.
Recount conquered glories; reject e’ry malice.” (05/25/26)
“‘Support our troops’ is a catchphrase, almost a mantra, often used by cynical politicians to suppress dissent about their disastrous wars of choice. Basically, dissenters are accused of being unpatriotic because their criticism allegedly betrays the troops and weakens national resolve. It’s a BS argument but it’s often compelling and even convincing to some. Americans have a civic religion defined by the Pledge of Allegiance, the flag, the National Anthem, military parades and pageantry, and U.S. history taught as heritage and as a celebration of American goodness and greatness. When you step outside of that, when you criticize it, dissent from it, you must be prepared to be attacked as a heretic.” (05/25/26)
“Every Monday, Donald Trump announces an impending genocide of biblical proportions and every Tuesday he backs down at the last minute while reminding us that doomsday could still come at any given second but a big-beautiful peace deal is also really, really fucking close. The mainstream news mostly just seems to take all this diplomatic madness at face value while reminding us how impossibly complicated diplomacy is and that only their Washington trained experts can lead us through it. The only problem with that explanation is that all their think tank wonks seem to be chasing Donald from one flip-flop to the next like small-town weathermen covering big-town storms.” (05/24/26)
