“At airports across the US, Transportation Security Administration agents have been ‘working’ — that is, impeding, harassing, ogling, and groping air travelers — without pay since Valentine’s Day due to a congressional feud over funding for their parent department. Well, some of them, anyway. Several hundred have quit; quite a few are calling in sick more often. On March 27, US president Donald Trump directed the Department of Homeland Security to start paying TSA employees again, using ‘funds that have a reasonable and logical nexus to TSA operations.’ They may start getting paid again as soon as Monday. They should also STOP getting paid again as soon as possible. Permanently. The very existence of the TSA has been a costly 25-year mistake.” (03/28/26)
“Louisville, Kentucky, Detective Joshua Jaynes lied when he applied for the March 2020 search warrant that resulted in Breonna Taylor’s death. Then he lied about his lies. Sgt. Kyle Meany, the supervisor who approved the warrant application, also tried to cover up its shortcomings. According to an August 2022 federal indictment, both officers knew that police did not have probable cause to search Taylor’s apartment. … Taylor’s death did not flow inexorably from the warrant that Jaynes obtained. It is nevertheless true that Taylor would not have died in a hail of gunfire but for Jaynes'[s] fraudulent and misleading affidavit, which Meany approved. That reality underlines the potentially grave consequences of letting police officers make shit up to manufacture probable cause—a danger that does not seem to trouble the main Justice Department official charged with protecting Americans’ civil rights.” (03/28/26)
“What is the information state? It is a regime that governs not through legislature or courts or votes, but through the invisible digital architecture that now mediates nearly every dimension of public life. Siegel’s definition is evolutive: ‘a state organized on the principle that it exists to protect the sovereign rights of individuals’ is replaced by ‘a digital leviathan that wields power through opaque algorithms and the manipulation of digital swarms.’ … Its goal, Siegel insists, was never simply to censor, never merely to oppress. It was to rule. The kind of brazen censorship we observed during the Biden era and that is so tempting to our warring rulers again is not a bug; it is a feature of the new normal.” (03/28/26)
“I have little sympathy for the multibillion-dollar tech companies, Meta and Google, which were this week forced to pay out a combined $6million in damages to a 20-year-old woman. But I have even less sympathy for the notion of ‘social-media addiction’ that led to this extraordinary payout. … The real issue raised by this case is the aversion to responsibility that now prevails in the West. This is aided by the commanding influence of the narrative of ‘addiction.’ We live in a world where bad habits, as they used to be called, have been rebranded, medicalised and diagnosed as addictions. … The flourishing of the addiction industry is partly driven by individuals’ demand to be relieved of responsibility for their bad behaviour. It is also fuelled by the Therapy Industrial Complex, which aims to turn people into vulnerable patients.” (03/28/26)
“As the world understandably focuses on the Middle East, the Russia-Ukraine war shifts to a fulcrum moment. This new juncture provides President Trump with an opportunity to prove that he is still, indeed, a president for peace. He can reaffirm to his base, and to the world, that he is the negotiator-in-chief who brokers diplomatic solutions across the globe, including the historic Abraham Accords. Regarding the Trump base, polling shows that only 38% of Republican voters now believe that the war vs. Iran will conclude in the days or weeks to come. Moreover, 37% of GOP voters oppose any ground troops in Iran. So, opportunity beckons in the Black Sea region. In a recent breakout interview by the Associated Press of General Valerii Zaluzhnyi, the former top military commander of Ukraine, provides startling revelations regarding his battles with Zelensky – and the relevance for the future of postwar Ukraine.” (03/28/26)
“Shortly after Trump deployed ICE agents to airports, his former chief strategist Steve Bannon may have tipped the administration’s hand. Bannon speculated on his ‘War Room’ podcast that the immigration force’s presence at TSA security checkpoints was a ‘test run’ ahead of the November midterms. Maybe, Bannon seemed to suggest, it was a rehearsal, meant to test how far the administration can stretch our tolerance for agents as part of the landscape of our daily lives without pushback. … If we can accept the reality that Trump’s personal army is requiring more documentation from us just to board an Airbus, how long until we are forced to tolerate them in our voting booths and beyond?” (03/28/26)
“One of the funniest things about the Trump era is how people have realized how to appeal to Trump’s conception of self-interest. That’s why everyone is giving him awards and gold statues: He’s a sucker for flattery and praise, and he’s incapable of grasping how small it makes him look. Donald Trump has a similar challenge understanding the Iranians because he thinks everyone eventually just wants a ‘deal.’ That assumption worked out for him pretty well — so far — in Venezuela, because the Maduro regime was basically just a bunch of mobsters pretending to be socialists. But the Iranians want different things because they believe different things. And they are willing to watch a lot of the world burn to get them. In fact, they’re willing to light the matches.” (03/27/26)
“Growing barriers to homeownership are prompting financial firms to redefine how wealth is evaluated, with Coinbase partnering with Better Home & Finance Holding Company to enable crypto-backed mortgages supported by Fannie Mae that allow borrowers to use bitcoin or USDC instead of cash for down payments. … Forced liquidation introduces tradeoffs, including forfeiting potential price appreciation and triggering tax liabilities, which can discourage participation in the housing market. Crypto-backed structures alter that dynamic by converting digital holdings into usable collateral, allowing borrowers to secure financing without selling assets.” (03/28/26)
“Donald Trump’s impulsive decision to deploy large numbers of ICE agents to hang out at America’s airport Cinnabons — there’s no indication that they are actually helping demoralized, unpaid TSA employees deal with long lines at airport security — may have unintended political consequences: it will remind Americans about how much they dislike ICE and the great harm that it’s doing. Nonetheless, recent data show that the administration’s crackdown on immigration is working. Immigration to the United States is plunging and may be about to go into reverse. And that plunge is making America poorer and weaker – now and in the long-run.” (03/27/26)
“Time has a way of compressing history. The Hundred Years’ War was a series of three separate wars that must have felt as distinct to its contemporaries as the World Wars feel to us now. But those three wars were a long time ago, so we lump them together into one conflict. Besides, we are wise. We have seen the direction of History and know they were all fought over the unresolved question of England’s rivalry with France. I suspect future historians will apply the same compression to the three Gulf Wars of the unipolar era. While 1991, 2003, and 2026 are distinct in many ways, they all revolve around repeated attempts by the hegemon to impose its order on a region that it appears to understand less and less each time.” (03/27/26)
