“Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney took to the airwaves on August 22 to explain in a speech and Q&A why he walked away from trade negotiations with the United States and thereby opened Canada to economy-crushing tariffs from the country once considered its closest friend. … the U.S., at the last minute, had rewritten items already agreed to: ‘The U.S. proposed new terms that were uneconomic, unfair, and undermined the net benefits to Canada.’ That, he said, called into question ‘the reliability of any deal.’ The Trump administration’s unreliability, the prime minister explained, was not a new problem or one likely to go away soon. … Other U.S. partners, namely Saudi Arabia and Ukraine, have made similar complaints in recent weeks. … Though Trump boasts of the art of the deal, there is a historical pattern that suggests, instead, the art of the broken deal.” (08/31/26)
“In a court victory the Trump administration effectively handed to the plaintiff, a federal judge cited First Amendment concerns in slapping down the federal government’s designation of AI company Anthropic as a ‘supply chain risk to national security.’ The company also won a due process claim. President Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth made clear their intent to punish the company for its ethical limitations on how its technology can be used when they banned federal agencies and contractors from doing business with Anthropic. The White House has been reminded that government officials can’t do that in the U.S.” (08/31/26)
“Milo Yiannopoulos, the Gamergate reporter who exposed the Left’s attempt to push feminism, LGBT and diversity into gaming; the Breitbart enfant terrible who called himself a ‘virtuous troll’ among corporate media types; the bête noire of campus lecturers, the jokester who mocked the wokesters before becoming a woke joke himself; the gay ‘conservative’ who became a straight far-right (?) influencer; the celebrity-turned-obscurity who turned everyone off, the wannabe podcaster who grifted where he could; the flimsy buddy to white nationalists who betrayed them when their association stopped paying the bills; Kanye West’s former PR guy who failed at his own PR, the guy who was ‘super-hot back in 2015, 2016 and… kind of disappeared’ according to Ben Shapiro; the male version of Sue Mengers, bad taste but lacking class, connections, common decency, or relevance; and a chief cheerleader for deporting all illegal aliens (and the above-mentioned Shapiro, disturbingly enough), has been deported.” (08/31/26)
“Administered in responsible therapeutic settings, entheogens could be a path to reckoning with the profound changes ahead. Indeed, when we realize that personality is one of the strongest determinants of cultural values, we might conclude that psychedelics could be yet another technology for the coming era—whether in preparing for or catalyzing it. We needn’t belabor this idea, though. The point is that it will be important to open our minds, consider new perspectives, and embrace new values even if it means going against the grain a little.” (08/31/26)
“The president himself will remain a disruptive—and potentially destructive—presence on the world stage. He still has more than two years left in office and powerful economic tools to wield as cudgels against allies and adversaries alike. Yet countries and companies will learn that he has peaked. His coercive capacity, so potent last year, seems lessened from overuse. This realization will alter the very nature of Trump’s power—and the discussions about a world order to come.” (08/31/26)
“On the one side, conservatives are frustrated because, to them, the Arday case is emblematic: universities today are overwhelmingly leftist; leftists dominate the humanities and liberal arts faculties, and leftists are rewarded for poor or even fraudulent scholarship simply because it reinforces the preexisting beliefs of their contemporaries and superiors. On the other side, progressives and other leftists insist that the pursuit of knowledge and enlightenment is definitionally a left-leaning enterprise, at least in contemporary society. Of course, leftists are overrepresented in academia; leftists seek awareness and understanding, while conservatives are simply less inquisitive and less interested in attaining knowledge, both temperamentally and practically, the latter for fear of learning that what they perceive as fairness and equality is, in reality, prejudice and discrimination.” (08/31/26)
“You already know the ads. They appear each fall, a sign of the season as familiar as apple cider donuts and the changing of the leaves. A former quarterback or an actor from a venerable TV show looks straight in the camera and says, warmly: you may be entitled to benefits you aren’t getting today: dental, vision, a card for groceries, a ride to your doctor. Seniors at home just have to call the number on the screen to sign up for a Medicare Advantage plan today. Operators are standing by. They certainly are, but their primary aim isn’t to find the best plan for their caller’s needs. It’s to get them to sign up for the plan that’s most profitable for them.” (08/31/26)
“Cate Hall’s You Can Just Do Things: How High-Agency People Get What They Want Out of Life sounds like a book designed to tell me what I want to hear. I’ve long believed in: 1. Literal free will. … 2. Widespread overestimation of constraints relative to preferences. … 3. Most humans are deeply conformist. … Nevertheless, reading Hall’s book starkly reminded me of the dangers of high agency.” (08/31/26)
“On NBC’s ‘Meet the Press,’ Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC) added his voice to expand the Supreme Court to a ‘baker’s dozen’, or thirteen members to allow Democrats to add justices who agree with him and Democratic members on how the law must be interpreted. In the meantime, as discussed earlier, court packing is being pushed as the new litmus test for any Democratic candidates. Clyburn’s ‘baker’s dozen’ is a telling description of an effort to bake in partisan views on a Court expanded to create an instant liberal majority. In defending this hostile takeover of the Court, Clyburn bizarrely insisted that the failure to do so might lead to a return to antebellum conditions when blacks were being given fewer rights than whites.” (08/31/26)
