“When I survey the long parade of presidents who led this country, from giants like Washington and Lincoln to the mediocrities and failures, one man stands apart as uniquely destructive: Woodrow Wilson. When he entered the White House in 1913, he brought unusual credentials: a doctorate from Johns Hopkins, a scholarly reputation, and experience leading Princeton University. Americans thought they were getting their first true scholar-president. What they got instead was the worst president in American history, a man whose toxic blend of intellectual arrogance, racial prejudice, and authoritarian instincts inflicted wounds on this country that we are still trying to heal. Wilson’s academic background shaped everything in his presidency, sometimes for better, often for worse. He approached governing like a professor addressing a stubborn class, convinced that if he explained things clearly enough, everyone would eventually see the wisdom of his vision.” (06/08/26)
“This year’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner should have been the same as any other: a beloved, annual tradition that brings together the media, politicians, and administration officials to celebrate our free press, build relationships, and honor the First Amendment. Instead, the event served as a reminder of the urgent need to modernize and secure the White House complex. The third assassination attempt of President Donald Trump proves these are no longer random acts. This is a pattern.” [editor’s note: And yet Trump is going out to a basketball game. Apparently security is only a considerration when he wants to build something – TLK] (06/08/26)
“‘We had the idea of a beacon,’ said the architect who designed the Obama Presidential Center.
It looks like … a triumph of brutalist … whimsy? (Is that even possible?) A science-fictional housing for our ET overlords, maybe. Or something worse. Perhaps Baphomet poses inside. You’ve probably seen the outside of the monstrosity by now. If you’re like me, you’ve marveled at this triumph of bad taste. It surely symbolizes something, but what?” (06/08/26)
“Friedrich Hayek spent much of his later life thinking about a tension at the heart of civilization. The rules that make large-scale social life possible are often not the ones our evolved instincts would tend to generate on their own. Humans evolved for life in small, familiar groups, but eventually we learned to live within a far more impersonal civilization — one sustained by property, contract, law, and market exchange, and by standards of conduct that no one designed. That order did not arise from a blueprint or command. … That insight still has force, but it leaves a critical question open.” (06/08/26)
“Progressives once embraced minimum wages as a tool to exclude marginal workers from the labor market. Modern advocates have different goals, but the same economic effect.” (06/08/26)
Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Matt Fleming
“Forming a state-run bank in California would be a massive undertaking for which the state is woefully unqualified. It’s also a big risk to taxpayers and is totally unnecessary. But lawmakers were pushing forward anyway.” (06/08/26)
“The human spirit cannot comprehend the reality of tens of thousands of Palestinians entombed beneath mountains of pulverized concrete. The very air of Gaza carries the heavy toxic dust of war and of extinguished lives. To gaze upon the ruins, is to confront not only its physical erasure, but the malign systematic campaign of the Israeli regime to wholly erase Palestinian ethnic, cultural and national identity – the very definition of genocide.” (06/08/26)
Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by George Ford Smith
“For now, at least, we know what computers can and cannot do. Whatever their limitations, it is clear their development is on an exponential path, and any shortcomings will be short-lived. … The combination of these strengths will be formidable, to say the least. And these strengths will continue to grow exponentially. It’s quite possible this technology could become the exclusive domain of the state, the only organization that ‘legitimately’ acquires its revenue by theft, which it enforces with a vengeance. Despite its elaborate pretensions and propaganda, the state, by its nature, is the enemy of the people, as all criminals are.” (06/08/26)
“To understand the hold that Trump has on his party, it is useful to look back to the 1938 midterms, when Franklin D. Roosevelt — one of the most consequential presidents in U.S. history — failed to keep his party on the same page. When Roosevelt tried to purge the Democratic Party of conservative Southern legislators who were holding back his New Deal, the president found himself on the losing end of the battle, empowering the very forces he was trying to stop. … The irony, though, is that, despite his defeat in 1938, Roosevelt ultimately helped build a far more enduring Democratic coalition. … Trump, by contrast, has tied his party to a deeply unpopular leader and agenda.” (06/08/26)
