Source: Fox News
by Carlos Trujillo & Alberto Martinez
“On May 20, 1902, the Cuban flag flew for the first time over an independent country. One hundred and twenty-four years later, the Cuban people are still not free. Every president before Donald Trump either did nothing about Cuba, did too little, or did too much for the regime. Trump is the first to recognize that the regime is a threat to America itself and to resolve to confront it once and for all. That his predecessors failed to do so is not only the Cuban people’s tragedy. It is ours. Cuba’s communist regime is a designated State Sponsor of Terrorism. It ran two of the most damaging espionage operations against the United States in modern memory. It was the intelligence backbone of the Maduro narco-state. It has served as a coordinating hub for the migration flows and drug routes flooding American communities. The suffering Havana exports has cost American lives.” (05/26/26)
Source: Responsible Statecraft
by Karthik Sankaran
“For all the uncertainty about what will happen next on the military and diplomatic front in the Iran war, there is certainty about what has already happened on the economic front. And it is not good.” (05/26/26)
“A two-millennia-old institution with one foot in the Roman Empire challenges Silicon Valley’s masters of AI and automation to do better. That’s the generic read on Pope Leo XIV’s debut encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, dramatized by photos from the Vatican of the pontiff shaking hands with Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah. And that’s true enough: ‘artificial intelligence’ is right there in the encyclical’s subtitle, and many of its 245 paragraphs are devoted to the topic. Yet Magnifica Humanitas only incidentally concerns the promise and peril of the AI revolution. A closer examination reveals that Leo’s ultimate project is nothing less than a defense of moral and political universalism — the collective struggle for ‘a universal truth about the good, knowable by human reason,’ as the pope puts it — just when universal reason is menaced on every side by various irrationalisms.” (05/26/26)
“I’ve spent much of my career as a historian criticizing any idealization of 1950s marriages. Domestic violence and child abuse were much more common then than today. It was perfectly legal for a man to forcibly rape his wife. And depression among homemakers was so widespread that by the end of the decade, physicians had labeled it the ‘housewife’s syndrome.’ … But I now believe I’ve been too dismissive of such nostalgia. The sense of loss that underlies it is not ‘all in people’s heads.’ Instead, I’ve come to see it as an example of what physicians call ‘referred pain,’ like when a problem in one part of the body is experienced as pain elsewhere. So too, I think, much of the pain we feel in our social and family relations originates in a deeper part of the economy and the body politic.” (05/26/26)
“In a controversial conversation platformed by the New York Times and recently discussed in The Atlantic, streamer Hasan Piker implied that he might steal a car if it carried no consequences. In the interview, author Jia Tolentino also casually admits to shoplifting lemons from Whole Foods. Although petty theft is common, the interview clip spread quickly because the justification for looting felt oddly assertive. Piker referred to the iconic anti-piracy campaign that sought to use moral vibes (rather than rational arguments) against taking physical property to convince people to further control their impulses and not copy music without paying. The anti-piracy clip ‘You Wouldn’t Steal a Car’ indicates an implicit assumption from 2004 that American society was broadly agreed on the stability of physical property. In other words, most Americans do not think ‘property is theft.'” (05/26/26)
“On May 24, Iran rejected President Trump’s latest fake peace deal, confirming that he had misrepresented what Iran had agreed to and that the two sides are still very far apart, on nuclear enrichment, on control of the Strait of Hormuz, on peace in Palestine and Lebanon, and on lifting US sanctions, paying war reparations, and Iran’s $100 billion in frozen assets. Iran’s conditions for a peace agreement are necessarily uncompromising, in response to the US record of using negotiations as cover for sneak attacks, and the charade of one-sided ‘ceasefires with Israeli characteristics,’ in which the US and Israel routinely ignore and violate every ceasefire they agree to, including the present ones in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran.” (05/26/26)
“Americans have been fed a comforting fairy tale about Islamic terrorism. Radical jihadists attack the West simply because they despise freedom, democracy, and the American way of life. This narrative flatters domestic audiences while conveniently obscuring a far more troubling reality. For decades, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Israel have armed, financed, tolerated, and tapped into Sunni Islamist extremists as geopolitical tools to destabilize rivals. The evidence spans multiple theaters and rests on declassified documents, congressional investigations, and credible investigative journalism.” (05/26/26)
“The founder of Marxism once wrote movingly about faith and virtue before taking what his own father feared might be a ‘Faustian’ turn toward revolution and resentment.” (05/26/26)
“Public Safety Canada, an agency responsible for safety, security, emergency preparedness and this kind of thing, recently urged Canadians to protect themselves when using public Wi-Fi by also using a VPN. ‘Using a VPN protects your data,’ the agency said. True. Unless — unless others in the government succeed in requiring VPN companies to uniformly sabotage the privacy of their customers. The mechanism for crippling VPNs? That would be the pending legislation to force VPN providers to retain personal data which users expect them not to retain, in this way killing these companies’ very reason for being as well as Canadian Internet users’ reasons to employ these companies.” (05/26/26)
