“New York City is facing serious public health challenges. Drug overdoses are surging. Mental illness is rampant. Emergency rooms are under strain. Life expectancy in parts of the city has declined. So what are some employees at the New York City Department of Health reportedly studying? The effects of ‘global oppression’ on health. This is not a joke. It is a disturbing example of how ideology has displaced competence in city government — and how taxpayers are being asked to foot the bill. A public health department has a straightforward mission: protect people from disease, respond to health emergencies and ensure basic safety standards. It exists to prevent outbreaks, combat addiction, improve maternal health and keep food and water safe. It is not a political theory workshop.” (02/12/25)
“Abraham Lincoln stands not only as America’s greatest president but also as its greatest lawyer. At the time of his election to the presidency in 1860 he was the most prominent practicing lawyer in the state of Illinois. As a politician and as president, Lincoln was a profound student of the Constitution and constitutional history. Perhaps most important, Lincoln was America’s indispensable teacher of the moral ground of political freedom at the exact moment when the country was on the threshold of abandoning what he called its ‘ancient faith’ that all men are created equal. How can it be that lawyers know so little of the giant of their profession?” (02/12/26)
“It’s getting a little old at this point, but as the Deep State log rolls for another U.S. attack on Iran, it is promoting a new Iranian national savior, one with a familiar name. Here’s a graphic seen on X, much like others showing up on social media, championing Reza Pahlavi as ‘the legitimate national leader of Iran.’ Because Pahlavi calls for more U.S. intervention in Iran including airstrikes, his champions are a midnight choir of failed voices from prior regime change calamities: Richard Perle, Michael Ledeen, James Woolsey. He is featured frequently in the warmongering of the Empire’s lapdog press, in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and on Fox News. Pahlavi’s only claim to legitimacy is that he is the son of the late-Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi who was driven from Iran in the 1979 revolution.” (02/12/26)
“Let’s be clear about what’s happening here: robots and AI are taking over our culture, our politics, our way of life and our relationships to each other as social beings. They’re becoming the advance guard for a new and unprecedented technocratic form of governance — the apotheosis of Western scientific materialism. Further, these new forms of governance are being carried out by unelected Big Tech overlords operating behind the scenes and in the backrooms of a mediated society well out of public view. I certainly hope that Gioia is right about a major cultural rejection of technocracy. There are indeed hopeful signs.” (02/12/26)
Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Jacob G Hornberger
“Right-wing American statists are celebrating with great glee the U.S. government’s economic strangulation of the Cuban people through its embargo and oil siege because right-wingers say they’re opposed to socialism, which has long been the economic system of Cuba’s communist regime. What these right-wing statists and interventionists fail to recognize, however, is that they, like most Americans, fully embrace the socialist principles that undergird Cuba’s socialist economic system. They fail to recognize that communist Cuba has simply carried the socialist principles that underlie American socialism to their logical conclusions.” (02/12/26)
“Prediction markets are one key component of America’s flourishing online gambling ecosystem. And they rely on the type of wager that many experts see as being at the heart of modern problem gambling: the prop bet. Prop bets (more formally, proposition bets) are bets that can be placed on specific eventuality, from how many touchdowns a quarterback will throw in a game to, yes, whether Jesus Christ will return in this calendar year. This gamblification of the world is the business model. Prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket proudly boast that users can bet on just about any proposition imaginable.” (02/12/26)
Source: Responsible Statecraft
by Laura Mahrenbach, Narayanappa Janardhan, Gedaliah Afterman, & Maximilian Mayer
“The global order was already fragmenting before Donald Trump returned to the White House. But the upended ‘rules’ of global economic and foreign policies have now reached a point of no return. What has changed is not direction, but speed. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s remarks in Davos last month — ‘Middle powers must act together, because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu’ — captured the consequences of not acting quickly. And Carney is not alone in those fears. Leaders around the world are increasingly moving from rhetorical warnings about the systemic risks of superpower dynamics to actively experimenting with new ways of navigating what Carney called ‘a rupture in the world order.'” (02/12/26)
“On paper, Sanae Takaichi is the kind of leader Japanese people ought to hate. Bossy, opinionated, conspicuously unbothered by the rituals of consensus that grease every surface of Japanese official life, she comes across as everything the country’s political culture is designed to sand down. She doesn’t schmooze with captains of industry over kaiseki dinners at fancy Tokyo restaurants. She goes home and reads her briefing papers. She plays drums in a heavy metal band — or used to in college, and still can …. She has opinions about Taiwan and isn’t shy about sharing them, which in the context of Japanese-Chinese diplomacy is roughly equivalent to setting your hair on fire at a funeral. Something for everyone to hate. And so the three months since Takaichi took office have been a bit of a surprise.” (02/12/26)
“Former CNN anchor Don Lemon is under federal indictment for participating in a Minnesota protest group’s obstruction of a church service. He is scheduled to be arraigned Friday. News of his prosecution took me back more than five decades to when I was a young university professor in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo). At that time, President Mobutu Sese Seko’s government threatened to arrest me for my alleged involvement in student disruptions. In both cases, increasingly authoritarian governments decided to clamp down on independent observers (journalists or others) who sympathized with community activists. To do so, they distorted what actually happened to serve their political interests. Yet, I suspect that the last person President Donald Trump wants to be compared to is a corrupt, fallen, disgraced African dictator.” [editor’s note: He performed as a part of the story, not as a real journalist, and should pay the penalty for violating the rights of the pastor and parishioner, End of story – SAT] [additional editor’s note: I’d chide SAT every time he was wrong, but nobody wants two editors’ notes EVERY time – TLK] (02/12/25)
“Ajeya Cotra’s Biological Anchors report was the landmark AI timelines forecast of the early 2020s. In many ways, it was incredibly prescient — it nailed the scaling hypothesis, predicted the current AI boom, and introduced concepts like ‘time horizons’ that have entered common parlance. In most cases where its contemporaries challenged it, its assumptions have been borne out, and its challengers proven wrong. But its headline prediction — an AGI timeline centered around the 2050s – no longer seems plausible. The current state of the discussion ranges from late 2020s to 2040s, with more remote dates relegated to those who expect the current paradigm to prove ultimately fruitless — the opposite of Ajeya’s assumptions. Cotra later shortened her own timelines to 2040 (as of 2022) and they are probably even shorter now. So, if its premises were impressively correct, but its conclusion twenty years too late, what went wrong in the middle?” (02/12/26)
