Category: Opinion

Source: The Contrarian
by Jennifer Rubin

“Democrats’ prospects are actually improving with time.” (05/14/26)

https://www.contrariannews.org/p/republicans-cannot-gerrymander-senate

Source: hypertext
by Geoff Kabaservice

“There was a time when Silicon Valley and the tech industry seemed — not cool, exactly, but vaguely countercultural and brashly anti-establishment. That was the point of Mark Zuckerberg wearing pajamas to an investor pitch, or tech execs spurning coats and ties: to emphasize that they were unlike traditional elites in every way. They consciously presented themselves as rebels whose products would liberate humanity from the old constraints of authority and tradition. Back in the early 2000s, it would have seemed far-fetched to imagine that these former outsiders would become an elite themselves.” (05/14/26)

https://hypertext.niskanencenter.org/p/what-silicon-valley-can-learn-from

Source: CounterPunch
by Dean Baker

“There is widespread concern that AI will lead to mass unemployment in the years ahead. As I and others have pointed out, we have yet to see any evidence of this in the data on job growth or productivity. But maybe we just have to wait a bit longer. But the idea that AI will eliminate all the jobs ignores the ways that creative entrepreneurs can develop new industries that require hundreds of thousands, or even millions of employees. These new industries may contribute nothing to well-being, but they create jobs. The best example of this sort of waste is the financial industry.” (05/14/26)

https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/05/14/ai-wont-necessarily-lead-to-mass-unemployment-the-case-of-the-financial-industry/

Source: New York Post
by Elaine Dezenski & Max Meizlish

“A bombshell report this week laid bare a startling truth: Hong Kong is the lifeline for the Iranian regime and its terrorist proxies. Hong Kong-registered shell companies are funneling billions of dollars in illicit oil revenue, along with weapons technology and surveillance tools, to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, fueling Tehran’s repressive military machine. But more than two months into the war, not one of Iran’s most important financial enablers — in Hong Kong or anywhere else in China — has been taken offline. Donald Trump and Xi Jinping shaking hands, with the US and Chinese flags behind them. It’s a glaring loophole in President Trump’s ‘Economic Fury’ and ‘Maximum Pressure’ campaigns that he’s promised will break the regime. So this week, as the president meets with Xi Jinping in Beijing, he should present the Chinese Communist Party with the bill for its continued support of Tehran’s terror.” (05/13/26)

https://nypost.com/2026/05/13/opinion/china-summit-is-trumps-chance-to-choke-irans-terror-cash/

Source: Reason
by Veronique de Rugy

“Central planning from Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, President Donald Trump, and others reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of what makes private markets work.” (05/14/26)

https://reason.com/2026/05/14/when-businesspeople-run-government-the-government-doesnt-become-a-business/

Source: Independent Institute
by K Lloyd Billingsley

“The contest for California’s biggest disaster may soon be decided.” (05/14/26)

https://www.independent.org/article/2026/05/14/bullet-train-or-bay-bridge/

Source: Common Dreams
by Robert C Koehler

“It’s hard to avoid noticing, and internally screaming over, the Trump administration’s proposed military budget upgrade to $1.5 trillion annually, as though the present trillion-dollar annual gift to the end of the world weren’t enough. It’s not just the proposed taxpayer bleed. It’s the collective assumption that ‘self-defense’ requires an ever-present readiness to kill lots of people, and beyond that the utter certainty that we have soulless enemies out there who want what we have, hate our freedoms, and will take what they can the moment we relax. This is just the way it is. No questions allowed. And our enemies aren’t pussycats. One of them, for instance, is China. … Nothing holds a country together like a good enemy.” (05/14/26)

https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/department-of-peace

Source: The Daily Economy
by Christopher Freiman

“Many socialists condemn trade barriers while supporting bans on wage labor and private ownership. Can that logic be reconciled?” (05/14/26)

https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/can-socialists-support-commerce-but-not-capitalism/

Source: Brownstone Institute
by Yaffa Shir-Raz

“On the surface, an international cruise ship experiencing serious illnesses and deaths during a voyage would seem destined to become an immediate global news story. But that did not happen. Only weeks later, on May 1, the story suddenly received intense international coverage. Within a short time, headlines around the world warned of a ‘plague ship’ at sea, passengers from 23 countries under monitoring, quarantine measures, and fears of human-to-human transmission. After the Covid years, and the way the crisis unfolded in early 2020, the sense of déjà vu was almost unavoidable. … This time, the timing is particularly striking. On May 1, three days before the MV Hondius story received widespread international media attention, the World Health Organization announced yet another one-year delay in negotiations over the PABS annex of the Pandemic Agreement.” (05/14/26)

https://brownstone.org/articles/return-of-the-next-pandemic-script/

Source: Washington Post
by Ramesh Ponnuru

“Trump has made next to no attempt to justify his Iran policy using the traditional criteria for just war, and sometimes he broadcasts contempt for the idea that war could be subject to moral evaluation. When he threatens to end Iran’s civilization, it can’t plausibly be spun as anything but placing large-scale war crimes on the table. Though just-war theory is frequently associated with the Catholic Church, its influence extends to non-Catholics and it rests on no distinctively Christian premises. It holds that war is permissible when (among other conditions) it serves a just cause, is declared by a legitimate authority, has a reasonable chance of success and can be expected to do more good than harm.
There is plenty of room to debate when these conditions have been met, but they clearly rule out some wars.” (05/14/26)

https://archive.is/u3LYa