Source: Chris’s Substack
by Chris Matthew Sciabarra
“My life with disability has been the subject of several interviews through the years, including one that appeared in Folks magazine in January 2018, and an interview conducted in February 2023 by Léa Hirschfeld that is finally being released today as part of an Out of Sync Podcast series, which explores ‘life through disability, one story at a time.’ Listening back to the interview, recorded less than three months after my sister’s death, I was struck not by how much had changed, but by how much had endured. The interview is broader in its subject matter than I’d remembered. It deals not only with my medical challenges, but also with my work on Ayn Rand, libertarianism, and dialectics. It explores the dangers of ideological rigidity in the face of real-world constraints, the need to live in a known reality, rather than an unknown ideal.” (04/28/26)
Source: The Daily Economy
by Logan Tantibanchachai
“Is a product defective if it gives you too much of what you want? And are social-scroll algorithms regulated products — or protected speech?” (04/28/26)
“Menger’s ‘saleableness’ is a lot like our term ‘liquidity.’ A more saleable good can be more easily sold at any time without having to lower the price. A house, for example, is not very saleable, because it might take months to find a good buyer, as contrasted with Girl Scout cookies, which have much broader appeal—even children can sell them. Because it’s hard to find someone willing to make a direct exchange for exactly what you want, Menger argued that people traded for more saleable items, which they would then use for exchanges. Over time, the most saleable commodities became the naturally emergent money. If people tend to trade for more saleable goods, why would they ever buy a gift card?” (04/28/26)
“On April 19, 2026, an image circulated of an Israeli soldier standing before a statue of Jesus Christ in Debel, a Maronite Christian village in southern Lebanon, bringing a hammer down upon the sacred face while another soldier recorded him. The image spread within hours because it seemed to compress a moral education into one gesture. Tucker Carlson was furious. So was a segment of the American right that has, for years, supplied the political and theological conditions that produced this soldier. That is the story the image tells, if you are willing to read it past the shock. Since October 7, 2023, Israeli soldiers have assembled one of the most extensive self-incriminating records in the history of modern warfare.” (04/28/26)
Source: David Friedman’s Substack
by David Friedman
“One result of reading a book many times is that I start looking at the world and the plot for internal consistency. … It would be nice if[Naomi] Novik paid attention to the internal consistency of her story and world; it is, after all, supposed to be our world plus the wizards and mals that the rest of us don’t know about. But it doesn’t really matter, because factual consistency is not what the books are about. Novik is a painter, a very good painter, and she is painting in emotions.” (04/28/26)
“According to [Andrew David] Edwards, differing conceptions of money between Britain and the colonies lay at the heart of the imperial conflict. As he presents it, the main differences rely on the ‘temporary’ nature of colonial money versus the ‘permanent’ nature of imperial money, and the fact that colonial money, in his account, had no link to precious metals. Yet these distinctions, while rhetorically powerful, ultimately collapse under scrutiny. The divergences he identifies appears less substantial than he suggests, though—a point that becomes clearer when one considers the broader economic context. Both sides of the Atlantic were, in practice, grappling with the same fundamental constraint: the scarcity and high cost of precious metals.” (04/28/26)
Source: Antiwar.com
by Ivana Nikolić Hughes and Peter Kuznick
“False historical narratives abound in our contentious and divided world, as leaders and complicit historians endeavor to use public understanding of the past to push policies and gain control in the present. One of the most egregious cases is the widely accepted account of the decision by U.S. leaders to drop the atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9 of 1945, respectively. The generally held view, which is frequently taught in schools across the U.S. and beyond, is that the bombings were necessary to save lives, both American and Japanese …. This assessment is not only disputed by the facts, but it ignores the realities of what the bombings meant for the initiation of the Cold War and the future of humanity, in a world long awash with civilization-ending weapons.” (04/28/26)
