Source: Washington Monthly
by Roger Kerson
“The 20th-century auto titan was all in on antisemitism, until falling car sales forced his hand. Now Tesla is tanking, X is in turmoil, and its South African-born mogul is doubling down.” (07/31/25)
Source: The Dispatch
by Ilya Somin
“The Trump administration has attempted to make sweeping use of emergency powers in the areas of immigration, trade, and domestic use of the military. In each case, President Donald Trump has tried to use powers legally reserved for extreme exigencies — invasion, war, grave threats to national security — to address essentially normal political challenges. … In litigation over all three of its major invocations of emergency powers — immigration, tariffs, and domestic use of the military — the administration has also invoked the ‘political questions’ doctrine, which holds that some issues are off limits to the judiciary, because they have been left to the political process. The Supreme Court’s precedent here is an often incoherent mess. But there is no general principle holding that invocations of emergency powers are exempt from judicial scrutiny.” (07/31/25)
https://thedispatch.com/article/not-everything-is-an-emergency/
Source: Persuasion
by Yascha Mounk
“The history of the world will be split into a pre-AI and a post-AI era. Too many people are still in denial.” (07/31/25)
https://yaschamounk.substack.com/p/the-peculiar-persistence-of-the-ai
Source: CounterPunch
by Miles Whitney
“Trump’s executive order regarding sex and gender identifies ‘gender ideology’ as an existential threat to America …. Notably, the executive order did not directly identify transgender people, or others who do not fit into Trump’s tidy definition of two immutable sexes determined at conception, themselves as threats. Most likely because the regime denies that such people exist. At best, as reflected in the language of another charming executive order, such a person is simply deluded, a liar, a believer in a demonstrably false idea or group of ideas, someone who lacks honor. What the regime says it is trying to erase is an idea.” (07/31/25)
Source: EconLog
by Jon Murphy
Let’s … say we want to create a new city: Murphopolis. Murphopolis will be somewhere in the vast Arizona desert. Some 46,000 people journey to the middle of that desert and, among the spiders, scorpions, and blazing heat, start building a town. In 2025, the benefits of a sewer system are well-known. In the construction of this city, eminent domain is not necessary: property contracts can be written to incorporate the necessary easements and connections. … Moving to the more general problem of government, many advocates for government actions simply point to the action being used in the past to solve some problem and then conclude that the same action is appropriate. But the time and conditions of the current problem are not the same as in the past.” (07/31/25)
https://www.econlib.org/eminent-domain-and-the-problem-of-government
Source: Responsible Statecraft
by Mark Episkopos
“His initial instincts for talking were right; he shouldn’t let frustration or the need for a quick ‘win’ to cloud his judgement here.” (07/31/25)
Source: TomDispatch
by Tom Engelhardt
“Once upon a time, nothing in this world could have convinced me that I would be living through this moment in this America on this planet. As a start, once upon an increasingly distant time, Donald J. Trump as president of the United States would have been inconceivable. Literally beyond conception, even in some wildly dystopian satiric novel about an all-too(un)-American future. I mean, forget anything else, a man who in private life bankrupted six (yes, six!) companies has now been elected president of the United States not just once but twice. You know, the fellow who thinks of those he considers his domestic enemies (and that’s not too strong a word for it), whether Democrats, Republicans, or journalists as nothing short of (and this is the word he uses: ‘evil’).” (07/31/25)
Source: Astral Codex Ten
by Scott Alexander
“Polygenic embryo screening is a natural extension of two well-validated technologies: genetic testing of embryos, and polygenic prediction of traits in adults. Genetic testing of embryos has been done for decades, usually to detect chromosomal abnormalities like Down Syndrome or simple single-gene disorders like cystic fibrosis. It’s challenging – you need to take a very small number of cells (often only 5-10) from a tiny proto-placenta that may not have many cells to spare, and extract a readable amount of genetic material from this limited sample – but there are known solutions that mostly work. But most traits are polygenic, requiring information about thousands or tens of thousands of genes to predict. These are too complicated to understand fully at current levels of technology, but some studies have chipped away at the problem and gotten a partial understanding.” (07/31/25)
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/suddenly-trait-based-embryo-selection
Source: Common Sense
by Paul Jacob
“‘The Crown says it’s seeking an extraordinary sentence for an unprecedented crime,’ wrote Arthur White-Crummey for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation last week, ‘as court began hearing sentencing submissions Wednesday in the mischief case of Ottawa truck convoy leaders Tamara Lich and Chris Barber. The ‘Ottawa truck convoy’ is what they are calling the big anti-totalitarian protests made by truckers in Canada during the late pandemic scare. … a specific kind of government does indeed prosecute its opponents in this manner, no matter how peaceful. Tyrannical governments.” (07/31/25)
https://thisiscommonsense.org/2025/07/31/precedented-prosecution/
Source: Washington Post
by Matt Bai
“After skipping the California governor’s race, she should make the same call on the presidency.” (07/31/25)