Source: The Daily Economy
by Kimberlee Josephson
“When Jonathan declares his artistic ambitions are anti-capitalist, it clashes with everything the show has relied on for five seasons. The finale demonstrates better jobs, bigger dreams, and individual agency rely on voluntary exchange.” (02/19/26)
https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/the-capitalism-stranger-things-runs-on-but-pretends-not-to-like/
Source: The Bulwark
by Catherine Rampell
“For MAGA Republicans, the root cause of every problem is immigrants. Populist Democrats, by contrast, prefer to scapegoat billionaires and Big Business. But lately, President Donald Trump has started to bogart Democrats’ favorite villains, too, by casting them as the baddies conspiring to increase housing costs. There’s now bipartisan (and yet wrong) agreement that Wall Street’s ‘institutional investors’ are to blame for high home prices, and Congress appears on the verge of making the problem worse.” (02/19/26)
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/everyones-favorite-slopulist-scapegoat-institutional-housing-investors
Source: OtherWords
by Sonali Kolhatkar
“Attorney General Pam Bondi’s contentious House hearing about the Justice Department’s handling of the Epstein files offered a clear message to the nation: Sex trafficking of women and minors is perfectly acceptable as long as wealthy white men do it. Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced late sex trafficker, fixer, and political networker, was found to have ties to huge number of the world’s elites on both sides of the political aisle—including Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Ehud Barak, Bill Gates, Steve Bannon, Larry Summers, Bill Clinton, and of course, Donald Trump. For years, Trump’s conservative backers have attacked LGBTQ+ people, drag queens, immigrants, and others, claiming a desire to protect women and children from rapists and groomers. Trump even boasted that ‘whether the women liked it or not,’ he would ‘protect’ them from migrants, whom he slandered as ‘monsters’ who ‘kidnap and kill our children’.” (02/19/26)
https://otherwords.org/the-epstein-class-they-are-the-elites-they-pretend-to-hate/
Source: Sex and the State
by Cathy Reisenwitz
“It’s too early, obviously, to know whether LLMs like ChatGPT will make people more or less lonely on-net. In a new paper, (which I just wrote about) called Vicious Circles: Social Isolation and Poverty, my friend Michael Tanner cited research showing that some AI features moderately reduced loneliness in the near-term. However, people felt more lonely, more dependent, and did less socializing in the real world after heavy daily use. I think this matters because six years ago I wrote that loneliness is the biggest problem facing modernity. I have not changed my mind.” (02/19/26)
https://cathyreisenwitz.substack.com/p/maybe-we-should-make-chatgpt-less
Source: Mother Jones
by Clive Thompson
“I was doomscrolling again. It was a fall evening in 2023, and I found myself sucked into a stream of posts about our collapsing climate: droughts causing billions in Dust Bowl–style crop damage, Florida’s worst-ever coral bleaching, a record melt in Greenland. To distract myself, I picked up The Lost Cause, the latest sci-fi novel from author Cory Doctorow, a friend and fellow nerd. To my deep surprise, it stirred something unexpected: a feeling of hope. … Doctorow’s book is part of a sci-fi trend that’s gained traction in recent years, picking up on the threads Le Guin and Robinson laid down. Solarpunk poses a fascinating question: What would a world that had seriously tackled climate change look like?” (02/19/26)
Source: Orange County Register
by Veronique de Rugy
“Despite what progressives have been arguing lately, the United States does not have a tax problem. Federal revenues, even after last year’s extension of the Trump tax cuts, are running above their historical average as a share of GDP. What America has is a spending problem so large that the Congressional Budget Office’s latest 10-year outlook reads less like a fiscal forecast than a warning label.” (02/19/26)
Source: New York Post
by Ken Girardin & John Ketcham
“Budgets are usually about choices, but Mayor Mamdani’s fiscal 2027 budget proposal presents Gov. Hochul and state lawmakers with just one: They can sign off on the suite of tax hikes he’s demanded, or he’ll ask the City Council for a painful property tax increase of almost 10%. The mayor has complained — not without some merit — that the Adams administration lowballed expenses. If the city’s finances are truly in ‘crisis’ condition, the appropriate response is triage. But the mayor has yet to administer even basic first aid. The ‘chief spending officers’ he tasked with trimming spending haven’t yet made suggestions, and the phrase ‘hiring freeze’ hasn’t been uttered. Instead, he’s sending property owners to the hospital with a 9.5% property tax hike.” (02/18/26)
Source: Wired
by Andy Greenberg & Lily Hay Newman
“From threat modeling to encrypted collaboration apps, we’ve collected experts’ tips and tools for safely and effectively building a group — even while being targeted and tracked by the powerful.” (02/19/26)
Source: Popular Information
by Judd Legum
“Trump Media and Technology Group (TMTG), the parent company of Truth Social, has an unrivaled free source of publicity. President Trump, who is also TMTG’s largest shareholder, posts extensively on the Truth Social platform, sometimes dozens of times in a single day. He is essentially leveraging the full weight of the presidency, the world’s most powerful office, to drive awareness of TMTG’s offerings. Yet, by all objective metrics, TMTG is failing. The stock price, which trades under the ticker symbol DJT, peaked at nearly $62 in March 2024, shortly after the company went public through a merger with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC). On February 17, DJT stock closed below $10 per share, an all-time low. (It rallied modestly on Wednesday, closing at $10.48.) What happened?” (02/19/26)
Source: spiked
by Tom Bailey
“By 2020, China accounted for almost 30 per cent of global manufacturing output vs America’s 17 per cent. As useful as America’s immense power over the global financial system is, the relative decline of its industrial strength compared with its primary geopolitical competitor is a major source of weakness. … Trump brought this to the fore of American politics. His 2016 election campaign tapped into the social dysfunction wrought by the decline of manufacturing, while his attitude and rhetoric toward China was driven by a sense of loss of national power. Policy, however, was light. … the industrial revival didn’t really get going until the election of Joe Biden. While the Biden administration kept, and expanded, tariffs on China, it was its explicit turn to industrial policy that changed the trajectory. … Meanwhile, Trump’s tariffs have likely already led to shedding of US manufacturing jobs.” (02/19/26)