“Of all the names that could appear in a Western-backed plan for postwar Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad may be the strangest. The former president was once known for Holocaust denial, anti-Israel speeches, claims that gay people don’t exist in Iran, support for his country’s nuclear program, and the violent repression of domestic dissent. Yet according to a new report in The New York Times, the United States and Israel considered him as a possible political leader after the killing of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei …. The story sounds too crazy to be true. But if it is true, it shows just how little the Trump administration understands the way power works in the Islamic Republic.” (05/21/26)
“Beginning about 25 years ago, shortly after ending my rural primary care practice as a Board Certified Internist, I began to recognize that from the 1960s through the end of the 20th century, there were a series of illnesses that I initially referred to as ‘fad’ diseases. Given that each of these diseases were in vogue for at least a decade (a bit too long to be a fad), and in an attempt to be more ‘woke,’ I now refer to these conditions as ‘meme’ diseases.” (05/21/26)
“It’s not just crackpot antisemite podcaster Candace Owens who is giving Hunter Biden uncritical attention so he can rewrite history. Inexplicably, top Trump administration officials are also validating the former crackhead first son’s outrageous lie that he was prosecuted only because he was Joe Biden’s son. It’s not clear why Acting AG Todd Blanche and VP JD Vance cited Hunter this week as their exemplar of bipartisan largesse to defend the new $1.7 billion ‘Anti-Weaponization Fund’ for victims of lawfare, but it was a terrible idea. It’s so terrible, you could be forgiven for wondering if it was dreamed up by deep-staters intent on denying justice to the real victims of the Biden administration’s lawfare.” [editor’s note: Wow, what a day — Miranda Devine, like Derek Hunter, got something right! But the whole “weaponization fund” idea is stupid and evil, regardless of whether Biden fils gets a cut – TLK] (05/20/26)
“[T]he American frontier A.I. companies aren’t betting everything on A.G.I. even if it looks like they are. The value of dominating A.I. and getting your models embedded everywhere is enormous even if they are just a ‘normal’ revolutionary technology. The winner doesn’t necessarily take all, but it can take a lot. They aren’t betting everything on A.G.I.—but America might be, in the sense that, if we focus exclusively on giving these companies what they want, their wins might not translate readily into American “wins” in the economic and geopolitical contest with China.” (05/21/26)
“The president, along with his Republican cheerleaders, counts his first-term abrogation of the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, as a signature achievement. This week, yet again, he falsely claimed that had he not done so, Iran would have a nuclear weapon. In fact, his action in 2018 taking the United States out of the multinational deal subsequently led to Iran’s rebuilding of its nuclear program, the emboldening of the Iranian hard-liners now in power and the Middle East morass in which the United States is now mired. That quagmire has left Trump seeming desperate for a deal — almost certainly a worse deal than the one Obama struck.” (05/21/26)
“Only a day after President Donald Trump spoke of unity following a gunman’s abhorrent attempt to kill him and members of his administration at the White House Correspondents’ dinner, the president quickly returned to his regularly scheduled programming of berating members of the press that ask him unwanted questions. In a ’60 Minutes’ interview with CBS correspondent Norah O’Donnell taped and aired the day following the assassination attempt, Trump repeated many of his now-tired insults about the press, referring to the media in general as ‘horrible people’, and calling O’Donnell a ‘disgrace’ who should be ‘ashamed’ of herself for raising excerpts of the alleged gunman’s manifesto in a question to the president. At this point, understandably, many of us have simply begun to tune out Trump’s now-frequent diatribes against the press.” (05/21/26)
“An outfit in the United Kingdom called Ofcom, the main enforcer of the U.K.’s Online Safety Act, is requiring social platforms to implement onerous procedures to censor ‘hate,’ including stripping users of anonymity — or face mammoth fines, bans in the U.K., and other draconian penalties. Nobody would object to compelling the removal of content that is clearly criminal. But is that what most so-called ‘hate’ content really is? Of course not. Much of what irks censors and the merely censorious is merely vituperative, and no small part of what gets their goat is nothing other than sharp disagreement with those authorities who decide what ‘hate’ is — that is, the censors themselves.” (05/21/26)
“We’ve seen before that students who frequently attend religious services as well as students who are studying religion are unusually tolerant of controversial speakers, meaning they are willing to let them speak on campus. (We measure left- and right-wing tolerance by whether students say they would allow those controversial speakers on those sides.) This raises a few questions. Are religious people more tolerant? More specifically, which religions’ members tend to be more tolerant?” (05/21/26)
