“Nowadays, any Revolution extolled on campus might best be symbolized not by fife and drum or quill on parchment, but by a raised red fist.” (05/22/26)
“Everyone’s angry with Donald Trump. It’s true that things are getting ragged with just over five months left until the midterms. The president’s agenda is being stymied in the courts and in Congress by bloody-minded Democratic obstructionism, and by a handful of lily-livered naysayers in his own bare-majority party. His poll numbers are as bad as they’ve ever been, apart from a rough patch in the aftermath of Jan. 6, 2021. The war with Iran has hit gas prices and exacerbated the cost of living. It may be heading to some sort of deal, but cheerleaders are thin on the ground. His enemies at home are desperate for Trump to fail, even if it means America is dealt a savage blow.” (05/24/26)
“Opposition leader Angus Taylor said a government he led would stop targeting net zero greenhouse emissions. It would increase use of fossil fuels, running coal-fired power generators ‘as long and as hard as possible.’ Mr Taylor wants ‘cheap energy.’ He blamed the renewables push and the energy bureaucracy for high energy prices. The reality is that the impact of high world prices for oil, gas and coal on electricity costs are also relevant. There is a certain irony in Mr Taylor’s rejection of net zero 2050. It was he as Energy and Climate Minister with then Prime Minister Scott Morrison who, in October 2021, first announced Australia’s commitment to net zero. Subsequently, in opposition, the Liberal Party followed its smaller coalition partner, the Nationals, in walking away from net zero 2050.” (05/22/26)
“On an evening at the end of December 2025, a woman in Switzerland opened a grocery-delivery app on her phone. She filled a basket and typed in a delivery address in Brussels — a flat she had visited many times, whose owner could no longer leave Belgium and could no longer pay for anything from within it. She entered her Swiss card at checkout. The payment declined. She tried again. It declined again. The man waiting for the groceries is Jacques Baud, seventy years old, a retired colonel of the Swiss Army and a former officer of the Federal Intelligence Service who had worked in Brussels for NATO. On December 15, 2025, fifteen days before the blocked delivery, the Council of the European Union had placed him on a list.” (05/22/26)
“For most Americans—or at least most Americans with even a remedial education in civics—the phrase ‘separation of powers’ usually explains the tripartite nature of the federal government. The Founders, in their wisdom, divided that government into branches: the legislative branch, which debates and enacts laws; the executive branch, which enforces the laws; and the judicial branch, which interprets the laws and ensures that they are compliant with one another and with constitutional principles. It’s a nice, clean, simple, and, above all, effective system for limiting the power of the federal polity. … People (understandably) tend to forget that the Founders’ separation of powers referred not only to the construction of the federal government but also to the construction of the federal republic.” (05/25/26)
“Americans now experience war more as an economic abstraction than a human catastrophe. Amid endless debt-financed conflict, have we forgotten war’s tragic cost?” (05/22/26)
“One popular objection to AI concerns is to declare that LLMs can never be AGI. You need a ‘new paradigm.’ Therefore, AGI is so far in the future that it’s not worth worrying about. A common counterargument is to claim that no, LLMs can become AGI. But even without that counterargument, I think the ‘therefore’ fails on its own terms. The key question is: how much of a new paradigm do we need?” (05/22/26)
Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by Joshua Mawhorter
“While not entirely consistent in every respect, the Declaration of Independence — as an act of secession — can be understood as one of the earliest major challenges to centralized, modern, sovereign authority within the emerging nation-state system. Although it created new states rather than abolishing state power itself, it decentralized and imposed limits upon British imperial sovereignty through an appeal to self-government and national self-determination. To their great credit, Locke and Jefferson both affirmed pre-political natural rights, that the only legitimate role of government is to protect those rights, and that rights remain rights and crimes remain crimes whether one is a private individual or a state elite.” (05/22/26)
“Exactly one year and six days ago, the Prospect posted a piece I’d just written about Colorado’s Jared Polis, under the headline ‘The Democrats’ One and Only Union-Busting Governor’. As of a couple weeks ago, that headline is no longer accurate. Polis is still a union-buster and even more out of sync with Colorado Democrats, who’ve just formally censured him for complying with President Trump’s demand to commute the sentence of Tina Peters …. But Polis no longer holds that ‘one and only’ status when it comes to Democratic governors who bust unions. Two weeks ago, Virginia’s Abigail Spanberger did just that by vetoing a bill that would have given Virginia’s public-sector workers the right to bargain collectively.” [editor’s note: So now she has lied to ALL sectors in that state; can an impeachment be far behind? – SAT] (05/25/26)