“[T]he American pontiff doesn’t appear to agree with the American president’s war policy with Iran. And Trump doesn’t take kindly to people who disagree with him. He can be downright ugly to those not on his side. Even popes. As for Leo, he’s unafraid. He sees his job as preaching the Gospel fearlessly, and he said so from the very outset of his papacy. What he said ought to inspire and uplift all of us at a time when so much else in the world seems to be falling apart.” (06/10/26)
“There is a strain of anti-liberalism regarding women’s rights that goes from one end of the horseshoe to the other. Thirty years ago, it was post-modern scholars arguing that liberalism did not know how to adequately approach women’s womb-bearing bodies, and so the liberal political system ought to be dismantled. More recently, Christian nationalists have argued that women’s rights upset the natural order. As Doug Wilson, a Christian nationalist pastor, put it in an interview with CNN, women shouldn’t exert individual rights because they ‘are the kind of people other people come out of.’ While one’s inclination might be to scoff at these arguments, their common conviction that women’s rights expose the weakness of liberalism should give all of us pause.” (06/11/26)
“The colonists despised monarchy, having risked their lives fighting for independence and autonomy. Consequently, when the newly independent states created their first constitution, the Articles of Confederation, there was no executive branch. The people feared that a strong central government would threaten citizens’ rights. That weak government failed, so a new framework of government was created that included a President. Under the Constitution, this executive would be constrained by Congress. Congress issues orders, and the President executes them. Two hundred and fifty years later, our country is facing a crisis. Donald J. Trump is acting more like a monarch than an elected executive.” (06/11/26)
“Prime Minister Netanyahu has been the longest serving prime minister of Israel, having assumed the office in 1996 and served off and on for a total of almost two decades. His upcoming election looks to be a tossup, so there’s a fair chance voters will show him the door. Even if they do, analysts would be fools to write him off altogether, as they’ve tried to do many times before. And even if ‘Bibi,’ as he is known, doesn’t find a way back to power, the hardline militarism he represents will probably dominate Israeli politics for a long time. … for all the blame the man receives, he is doing what he was elected to do, and even his most hawkish supporters are far from the fringes of Israeli politics.” (06/11/26)
Source: Karl Dickey’s Freedom Vanguard
by Karl Dickey
“Trump threatens strikes on Iran, seizes oil islands, then cancels everything and claims a phantom peace deal. This erratic foreign policy spikes energy markets, expands government power …” (06/11/26)
Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by Joseph Solis-Mullen
“Throughout history, innovation has often provoked worry, and artificial intelligence has become the latest source of economic anxiety. Workers fear displacement, recent graduates worry that entry-level jobs may disappear, and politicians increasingly speak of the need to manage the transition. Across the world, governments are searching for ways to soften the disruptive effects of a technology that promises dramatic increases in productivity. The debate is often framed as a struggle between technological progress and employment. But that is not the real issue. The more important question is whether economic decisions will remain economic or become increasingly political. China’s response to artificial intelligence offers an early glimpse of this dilemma.” (06/10/26)
Source: David Friedman’s Substack
by David Friedman
“I had a post on the subject a few months ago; a recent online discussion started me thinking about it again and I have some new ideas. One was due to a poster whose list of ways government could reduce the birth rate included banning divorce. I suspected he had it backwards. The obvious reason to think that is that modern societies have both easy divorce and low birth rates. But correlation is not causation; there are other plausible reasons for low birth rates, some discussed in my earlier post. There are better reasons.” (06/10/26)
“War Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a great speech on D-Day in Normandy. He told the Europeans they were committing civilizational suicide by allowing themselves to be ‘invaded’ by unassimilable migrants. It was the kind of warning you give to a friend who you see is making a terrible mistake. ‘Sadly, today different European beaches are stormed by different dangerous ideologies,’ he said in northwestern France during commemorations for the 82nd anniversary of the June 6, 1944, landings of American and other Allied troops on the beaches of Normandy to liberate Europe from Hitler’s dangerous ideology. … Naturally, he was pilloried by out-of-touch elitists on both sides of the Atlantic.” [editor’s note: When Devine refers to “out-of-touch elitists,” she means anyone who’s not batshit insane – TLK] (06/10/26)
“On Tuesday, Anthropic released two new models — Claude Mythos 5 and Claude Fable 5. Under the hood, the two models are very similar. Both are variants of Claude Mythos Preview, the model Anthropic announced — but didn’t release publicly — two months ago. What differentiates them is how they’re being released. The new version of Mythos, like the original, will only be available to handpicked organizations under Project Glasswing. These trusted partners will have relatively unfettered access. Fable, in contrast, is available to the general public. But it comes with some significant restrictions.” (06/10/26)
“The U.S. has led the world in several innovations in recent decades: the iPhone, Facebook, and artificial intelligence. But when it comes to sunscreen, Americans have been living in the Dark Ages compared with Europe and Asia. That could be changing. This week, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) added bemotrizinol (BEMT) to its list of permitted active sunscreen ingredients, updating the list for the first time since 1999, according to National Geographic.” (06/10/26)
