Source: Reason
by Stephanie Slade
“The Dissident Right is furious with Neil Gorsuch for saying America is a creedal nation. That just goes to show how out of touch its obsessions are.” (05/09/26)
https://reason.com/2026/05/09/right-wing-influencers-dont-understand-what-makes-america-great/
Source: Responsible Statecraft
by Trita Parsi
“The war in Ukraine shattered a core assumption about great-power dominance: that size and military strength are enough to impose one’s will. Ukraine showed otherwise. With the right strategy, geography, and resolve, a weaker state can survive and blunt — and in key respects even defeat — a much stronger adversary. The United States now faces an uncomfortable parallel. The war with Iran is exposing similar limits to American power. For decades, U.S. grand strategy has rested on primacy — the belief that America’s unmatched military capabilities enabled it to uphold global stability and shape outcomes across regions. After the failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, many Americans have reached a stark conclusion: the cost of primacy is no longer sustainable — and no longer serves U.S. interests.” (05/08/26)
Source: Free Association
by Sheldon Richman
“If today, compared to the past, you need to work only half the time to earn the money for a television, in effect, you’ve acquired half of the television for free! (Actually, you’ve done better than that because it will be a better television.) And you have the time to acquire other things or enjoy leisure. This is more or less true for everyone whose society is amenable to freedom of enterprise, the division of labor, and world trade.” (05/08/26)
https://sheldonrichman.substack.com/p/tgif-abundance-keeps-increasing
Source: Fox News
by David Marcus
“For almost the entirety of the half century I have lived on Earth, I have had experts, teachers, politicians and activists hectoring me about how climate change is going to destroy the planet. But this week, in The New York Times, of all places, is evidence that climate alarmism is finally cooling down.’Democrats Do Not Have To Campaign On Climate Change Anymore,’ blared the headline, this week, as author Matt Huber argues that voters are rather turned off by the subject. I would like to suggest that this is because it is the single most expensive lie in human history.” [editor’s note: I’d say the single most expensive lie in history is “the state is necessary” – TLK] (05/10/26)
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/david-marcus-new-york-times-announces-end-climate-change-hoax
Source: Quillette
by Ian Nieves
“Despite the dangers, we must seize the gifts bequeathed by existential dangers, since these amount to life in unprecedented abundance.” (05/09/26)
https://quillette.com/2026/05/09/creators-and-destroyers-of-worlds-ai-alignment-nuclear-war/
Source: The American Conservative
by Leonid Ragozin
“If you were exclusively on a mainstream Western media diet in recent weeks, you’d be excused for thinking that the Russian President Vladimir Putin’s regime now lies on its deathbed. Signs of ‘public discontent’ are all over the place, you see. Silicon-lipped beauty blogger Viktoria Bonya attacked the government on YouTube. So did the notorious Kremlin propagandist Ilya Remeslo, fresh from a stint at a psychiatric ward. Meanwhile, the former defense minister Sergey Shoygu might be plotting a coup, according to CNN. But if you talk to people inside Russia, as this author does on a daily basis, you’ll find them perplexed and doubting the West’s sanity upon hearing about this fresh bout of ‘Russia is finished’ sentiments.” (05/09/26)
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/no-russia-isnt-finished/
Source: The American Prospect
by David Dayen
“Three years ago, the Biden Justice Department’s antitrust division sued a company called Agri Stats that should have made us all wonder what capitalism even means anymore. After all, is it a capitalist system when one company can get every participant in a market to give them proprietary information about inventory, production costs, pricing, and profit margins, allowing those participants to know exactly what their competitors are doing, enabling them to restrict supply or raise prices without consequences? The initial lawsuit against Agri Stats, which dealt in data for broiler chicken, turkey, and pork processors, described a collusion machine, complete with clip art of little stick figures pulling profits upward.” (05/08/26)
https://prospect.org/2026/05/08/meat-industry-agri-stats-department-of-justice-price-fix-trump/
Source: Wired
by Steven Levy
“Philosopher Nick Bostrom recently posted a paper, where he postulated that a small chance of AI annihilating all humans might be worth the risk, because advanced AI might relieve humanity of ‘its universal death sentence.’ That upbeat gamble is quite a leap from his previous dark musings on AI, which made him a doomer godfather. … His more recent book, Deep Utopia, reflects a shift in his focus. Bostrom, who leads Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, dwells on the ‘solved world’ that comes if we get AI right.” (05/08/26)
Source: New York Post
by Bethany Mandel
“Few figures loom larger in the moral and legal history of the 20th century than Raphael Lemkin, the Polish Jewish jurist who coined the word ‘genocide’ after losing nearly his entire family in the Holocaust. Lemkin witnessed the epitome of evil, and then gave the world the language to describe it. The word ‘genocide’ exists because he understood that what had been done to the Jewish people was so unprecedented that existing legal vocabulary could not define it properly. He spent the rest of his life ensuring that the world would never again lack the words — or the legal framework — to confront such crimes. That is precisely why what is happening now is so grotesque. The family of Raphael Lemkin is taking legal action against the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention, a Philadelphia-based nonprofit that has hijacked his name and repurposed it for its own warped woke agenda.” (05/10/26)
https://nypost.com/2026/05/10/opinion/group-hijacked-a-zionist-heros-name-to-suit-its-woke-purposes/
The Dispatch
by Nic Rowan
“When thinking about travel, I have always found [Nancy] Mitford’s distinction between the tourist and the visitor useful. ‘The tourist tours, he seldom spends a week in the same place,’ she writes. ‘The visitor stops in a town and leads the life of its inhabitants.’ In Mitford’s case, ‘visiting’ meant parking in Venice for a season and living simply in a small apartment. Under these conditions, she was able to focus on her writing and produce those wonderfully catty French court histories that remain among the most entertaining books of the genre. To say that she was leading the life of the city’s inhabitants is perhaps a bit precious — but she certainly seems to have gotten more out of Venice than the tourists gawking at Saint Mark’s Basilica or crowding into the garishly painted gondolas. I try to stay on the visitor side of Mitford’s distinction whenever I go somewhere new.” (05/08/26)