“You have to give Donald Trump some credit. He was making plenty of money selling pardons, ripping off Venezuela’s oil, and selling seats on his ‘Board of Peace,’ but all of these required something resembling work. … Trump’s latest grift is far simpler. He just sues the government and then orders Attorney General Pam Bondi to give him the money. He already did this several months back when he filed a $230 million suit because the government tried to prosecute him for the crimes he committed. … now Trump has decided he needs more money, so he’s demanding more than 40 times as much, suing the Internal Revenue Service for $10 billion for releasing information from his tax returns. One of the ironies of this story is that the leak took place in Trump’s first term, so ostensibly, as president, he is responsible for the harm for which he is suing the government.” (02/02/26)
“There are two morals to today’s quixotic quest. First: ‘All theories are false’ is false. Some theories are true. Indeed, we’re awash in true theories. Many of these are only true to a few decimal places, but that’s fine. Some theories are true only under normal conditions, but that, too, is fine. Most listeners take such qualifications for granted — and any remaining ambiguity is easy enough to fix with explicit caveats. Second: Scientists are bad at philosophy of science.” (02/02/26)
“It’s the first thing you learn when you go to some rough-and-tumble new school—if you run into a bully, the trick is to stand up to them. More than the particular situation, what matters is the underlying psychology. The point is that, whatever else seems to be going on, bullies usually prefer to puff up than to follow through, and, once they sniff strength, they’ll tend to move on to someone they can more readily pick on. After ten years of Trumpism — ten-and-a-half if we date our current era to Trump’s descent down the golden escalator — the great wisdom of our time may simply be to confirm the schoolyard adage.” (02/02/26)
Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Jacob G Hornberger
“During the entire Cold War racket, when U.S. officials repeatedly said that the Reds were coming to get us, did you ever think for a moment that the U.S. government, led by the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA, would be actually partnering with a Red regime? Yet, here we are — the national-security branch of the federal government and President Trump partnering with the Red regime in Venezuela to oust the Red regime in Cuba. That’s amusing, but what is pathetic is that the U.S. Empire is targeting the Cuban people with death and economic privation as a way to effect a change in policy of the Cuban government or, better yet, an entire change to a pro-U.S. regime that will loyally obey the orders of the U.S. Empire, as the Venezuelan Red regime is now doing.” (02/02/26)
“‘Terrorist’ is the word that the Trump administration employs to describe the victims of its most egregious acts of state violence. President Donald Trump has used the word ‘terrorist’ to justify the extrajudicial killings of civilians in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean. And his deputies used it to explain away the killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minneapolis by federal agents. … These killings were conducted thousands of miles apart by different agencies in very different contexts. But the connection between them could be more than semantic.” (02/02/26)
“The pro-democracy protesters in Iran deserved so much better. They deserved the support of a democratic United States that could sincerely urge the rule of law and habeas corpus (allowing people to legally challenge their detentions) be respected, not to speak of freedom of speech, the press, and assembly in accordance with the Constitution. Unfortunately, President Donald J. Trump has forfeited any claim to respect for such rights or a principled foreign policy and so has proved strikingly ineffective in aiding those protesters. The arbitrary arrests and killings committed by agents of Trump’s authoritarian-style rule differ only in number, not in kind, from the detainments and killings of protesters carried out by the basij (or pro-regime street militias) in Iran. In fact, they rendered his protests and bluster about Iran the height of hypocrisy.” (02/02/25)
“For the last two decades, Republican leaders have governed the state to satisfy their base – pandering to the issues important to those voters and ignoring what most Texans wanted. That was largely because independents, even though they frequently disagreed with the positions state leaders were taking, found Democratic candidates even further outside their comfort zone. But the Tarrant County results and the polling trends over the last year suggest Republican leaders may have gone so far that independents now view Democrats as the lesser of the two evils.” (02/03/26)
