“[T]he American people and the rest of the world saw the president of the United States threaten to destroy the 2,500-year-old Persian civilization. More than half of the Iranian population is ethnic Persian. It’s my policy not to compare anyone to Hitler, but I’ll say this: Trump’s threat was Hitlerian. Further, anyone who stuck by Trump after that post exhibited the same disgusting reverence that many Germans felt for Hitler.” (04/0/26)
“Social media giant Reddit has been ordered to appear before a grand jury in Washington, D.C., as part of a federal effort to unmask anonymous online critics of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. According to a subpoena obtained by The Intercept, Reddit has until April 14 to provide a wide range of personal data on one of its users, whom U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have been trying unsuccessfully to identify for more than a month. Attorneys for the Reddit user say their client’s posts and their anonymity are squarely protected under the First Amendment and that ICE’s use of a grand jury marks a disturbing escalation for the agency after seeing its previous efforts to investigate political speech quashed in court.” (04/10/26)
Source: The American Conservative
by Harrison Berger
“On Tuesday morning, President Donald Trump took to Truth Social to declare that ‘a civilization will die tonight.’ By 8 p.m., the U.S. announced a two-week ceasefire with Iran had begun. Whether the ceasefire holds (or even takes hold) is already in question …. The best hope that it might stick comes from Israel, where TV presenters who spent Monday salivating over a clock counting down the minutes and hours until Trump’s planned genocide of Iranians were left confused and outraged when the president backed down shortly before the deadline. But whether or not Trump ultimately goes as far as the Israelis would like him to, Americans must now reckon with the destruction already carried out in our name, the civilization-destroying actions Trump has threatened, and the barbarians we have become in the process.” (04/10/26)
“People on numerous subreddits have rallied to support the recent warehouse arson in Ontario, California. This fire, allegedly started by a disgruntled employee, destroyed a 1.2 million-square-foot warehouse that supplied toilet paper to approximately 50 million people. According to the United States Attorney’s Office, this fire caused approximately $500 million in damage. As he started the blaze, the suspected arsonist recorded a video of himself saying, ‘All you had to do was pay us enough to f***ing live.’ … While the economic frustration the suspect and people on Reddit feel is perhaps understandable, they should blame the real culprits behind the cost-of-living crisis, not a toilet paper company.” (04/10/26)
“I have been pounding this for literally decades and I’m going to continue to pound it as long as the good Lord gives me breath and the ability to do so: our Founding Fathers created a limited government, but one that required virtuous people. And the latter is FAR more important than the former. And today’s America has very little of either, on either side of the aisle. Democrats are certainly the greatest problem America has right now, but they aren’t the only problem. I see far too many foul-mouthed, promiscuous, pleasure-oriented, unvirtuous Republicans in the country now to ever make the nation great again. Some people need to get the logs out of their own eyes before they start talking about the specks in other people’s eyes.” (04/12/26)
Source: David Friedman’s Substack
by David Friedman
“Our legal system has two different sets of rules to do the same thing, deter people from injuring others by making it costly to do so. O. J. Simpson was first acquitted of the crime of killing his wife and then convicted of the tort of killing his wife. The essential difference between tort and crime is that a tort is treated as an offense against the victim, a crime as an offense against the state. The victim of a tort prosecutes or settles the case, agents of the state prosecute or settle a crime. Legally speaking, I can never be the victim of a crime; if I am robbed, assaulted or murdered the victim is not me but the state of California. If my attacker is Mr. Smith the case will be not ‘Friedman vs Smith’ but ‘People of the state of California vs Smith.'” (04/10/26)
“U.S. relations with NATO ally Spain appear to have hit a modern low. On the very first day of the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez condemned the countries’ actions as violations of international law and denied Washington the use of airfields in Spain for the purposes of conducting attacks. Spain eventually closed its entire airspace to U.S. aircraft involved in the conflict. … Spain’s bold and consistent stance is much more in line with international law. Not only that — by opposing the war with Iran, Madrid is also doing a better job looking out for U.S. interests than the U.S. government.” (04/10/26)
“War is the most unrestrained expression of humanity’s destructive capacity, a setting where order disintegrates, moral boundaries are tested, and life is reduced to its most vulnerable state. Medicine, by contrast, stands as a deliberate act of resistance against that collapse, a disciplined and unwavering commitment to preserve life even when surrounded by death. Despite these opposing identities, war and medicine have remained deeply intertwined across history, not by design, but by inevitability.” (04/10/26)
