“Whenever a new technology comes down the pike, some people identify themselves as agents who can benefit from it, and others see themselves as victims who will be harmed by it. Agents get excited about how AI will enable them to get work done more easily and quickly. They can generate code, whip out targeted ad campaigns, analyze data, cheat on quizzes, respond to customer inquiries, or eliminate military targets. Victims fear that AI will empower the systems that already constrain or oppress them. They will suffer from software bugs or security vulnerabilities, be inundated with AI slop, get surveilled by governments and corporations, have their relationships infected by mistrust, get lost in labyrinthine bureaucracies, or be eliminated (perhaps erroneously) by an autonomous drone. This distinction helps make sense of the wildly varying responses to AI technologies: Agents generate utopian hype narratives while victims succumb to doomer fears.” (05/13/26)
“At the state and local level, police officers (and government employees in general) are protected from lawsuits by a policy called qualified immunity. The policy isn’t in the Constitution, nor was it ever enacted by Congress. It’s a legal fiction that the U.S. Supreme Court invented from whole cloth. In fact, qualified immunity’s very existence cuts against the clear intent of the Fourteenth Amendment. … We commonly hear that ‘ignorance of the law is no excuse’ — you can’t defend yourself from criminal charges by claiming that you didn’t know that what you did was illegal. Qualified immunity not only provides an excuse for law enforcement officers when they violate someone’s constitutional rights, it’s an incentive for police agencies to keep their officers ignorant of how courts expect officers to treat members of the public.” (04/13/26)
“People find many reasons to reject liberty. Fear. Envy. Ignorance. Tradition. In fact, there are probably as many reasons to reject liberty as there are people on this planet. Those whose careers depend on violating liberty will use any excuse they are handed. If they use envy, they can impose socialism and raise taxes on the rich. They can make people believe they have a ‘right’ to things that others must work to provide them. It can never be your right to enslave others! Using ignorance, political criminals lie and hope that too few notice to do anything about it. It’s how we get things like ‘assault weapon’ rules, carbon credits, and the war on (some) drugs. They also combine ignorance with envy, so those cheated in the brain department will demand to be coddled to dumb down society so that no one feels stupid.” (05/13/26)
Source: CounterPunch
by John Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead
“Call it what it is: a heist. The corruption, cronyism, and self-dealing that now define the American government—under Donald Trump in particular—amount to a slow-motion stick-up carried out in broad daylight. But here’s the trick: it’s a heist hidden behind spectacle. The Trump administration is flooding the stage with noise so ‘we the people’ don’t notice what’s happening behind the curtain. We’re being manipulated into watching the wrong thing. The distractions are part of the plan to rob us blind. You don’t have to look far to see how the con works. Nowhere is the hustle more obvious than in how the presidency itself is being used.” (05/13/26)
Source: Libertarian Institute
by Ted Galen Carpenter
“The previous proxy wars over the decades have had one important feature in common. The two great power rivals have successfully exploited ill-advised military ventures that the other country pursued. Taking advantage of such folly enabled the opponent to score relatively rewarding victories with minimal risk and effort. The Soviet Union took advantage of the foolish decision by multiple U.S. administrations to intervene in Vietnam’s civil war. … In the late 1970s, the Kremlin helped topple Afghanistan’s royalist government and install a communist successor. That ill-advised power play gave Washington an opportunity to achieve revenge for Moscow’s geopolitical success in Southeast Asia. … It’s still too early to be certain about the ultimate results of the ongoing proxy wars in Ukraine and Iran. There are opportunities for geopolitical triumphs on either side, but the potential for spectacular failures also exists.” (05/13/26)
“Attempts to restructure government at the federal level are mostly on the Democrat agenda. Pack the US Supreme Court. Elect presidents via popular vote. Turn Puerto Rico and Washington, DC, into states with two senators each. Implement national mail-in voting, automatic voter registration, legalize ballot harvesting, lower the voting age to 16, let felons vote, let noncitizens vote. And, of course, end the Senate filibuster. If they could, Democrats would do all of this. Meanwhile, however, there is a growing bipartisan movement to implement term limits for members of the House and Senate. A bill has been introduced in the 119th Congress, and President Trump has supported term limits consistently since he first ran for president in 2016. But federal term limits would do more harm than good.” (05/13/26)
Source: Electronic Frontier Foundation
by Rindala Alajaji
“As statehouses ramp up for 2026, we’re seeing a familiar and concerning trend of lawmakers rushing to regulate the internet based on shockingly shaky science. From the California State Assembly to the Massachusetts and Minnesota legislatures, a wave of bills is crashing against the digital lives of young people, with proponents of these measures framing social media access as a ‘public health epidemic,’ or a ‘mental health crisis,’ even though we have yet to see any of the settled science that those labels usually invoke. As a digital rights organization dedicated to the civil liberties of all users, EFF’s expertise lies in reminding lawmakers that young people enjoy largely the same free speech and privacy rights as adults.” (05/14/26)
“Yesterday, almost 2,000 people, mostly young children, died of malaria because they could not access effective and relatively cheap treatment quickly enough. About 4,000 people died of tuberculosis (TB), including many young adults leaving orphans. This happens every day. Progress in reducing these numbers is stalling, as partly due to the continuing economic damage from the Covid-19 response. … The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that 10,000 to 100,000 hantavirus cases occur every year, spread across the Americas, Europe, Africa, and Asia. The current media coverage and WHO news conferences therefore concern about one-thousandth of the cases expected this year. The United States averages about 30 – they simply have not been newsworthy. … So, among the 170,000 average deaths in the world each day, and thousands from the WHO’s traditional focus diseases, why the excitement over Hantavirus?” (05/13/26)
“This week’s Africa Forward summit in Nairobi, Kenya, signals both continuity and change – or, to put it differently, continuing change in perceptions of the continent’s opportunities and abilities to decisively shape its future. Co-hosted by Kenya and France, the May 11-12 event has drawn some 30 heads of state and 7,000 government and business representatives to the East African capital city. Discussions are focused on investment (in artificial intelligence, renewable energy, and infrastructure) and on ways to reform international trade and finance systems to address indebtedness and unlock capital flows.” (05/12/26)
