“Is the Trump administration trying to reshape American capitalism? Recent moves by Washington, such as taking a 10% share of semiconductor maker Intel, point to a shift in that direction. For decades, Washington has supported free-market capitalism. Today, the government appears to be supporting a new direction – state-directed capitalism. As a professor at the Questrom School of Business who studies different economic systems, I find this reversal striking.” [editor’s note: Even if such a thing as “free-market capitalism” existed — the free market and capitalism are opposites — the notion that DC has ever supported it would be nonsense on stilts – TLK] (09/03/25)
“Last week President Trump took steps to re-name the Department of Defense the ‘Department of War.’ The President explained his rationale for the name change: ‘It used to be called the Department of War and it had a stronger sound. We want defense, but we want offense too … As Department of War we won everything … and I think we … have to go back to that.’ At first it sounds like a terrible idea. A ‘Department of War’ may well make war more likely – the ‘stronger sound’ may embolden the US government to take us into even more wars. There would no longer be any need for the pretext that we take the nation to war to defend this country and its interests – and only as a last resort. … But at the same time, the US has been at war nearly constantly since the end of World War II, so it’s not like the “Defense Department” has been in any way a defensive department.” (09/03/25)
“On Labor Day, National Review pointed out that less than 10 percent of all U.S. workers currently belong to unions. This percentage has been declining for decades. Even during the Biden administration, when the president and his puppeteers did their best to pump up unions, the percentage declined. In the private sector, only 5.9 percent of workers are union members. This is great news because unions are typically bad news.” [editor’s note: Absent government force, unions are just market actors like any others – TLK] (09/02/25)
“Whew, better late than never! That was my first reaction to the news that President Trump intends to give Rudy Giuliani the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The announcement followed the serious weekend car crash in New Hampshire that sent the 81-year-old Giuliani to the hospital. Thankfully, his injuries, said to include a broken vertebrae, are not life-threatening and he has been released from the hospital. A likely result is Trump’s presentation will focus almost exclusively on Giuliani’s greatest achievement: His stellar tenure as New York’s mayor. Although he later served as Trump’s pugnacious lawyer during the disputed aftermath of the 2020 election, it was during Giuliani’s two terms as Gotham’s fearless leader that he proved he is fully worthy of America’s highest civilian honor.” [editor’s note: Giuliani moved NYC’s emergency center to the most likely place for a terror attack, failed to get first responders on radio frequencies, and tried to screw the 9/11 cleanup workers who got sick – TLK] (09/02/25)
“Households across America are feeling the pinch of rising energy bills. Policymakers are desperate for fixes — subsidies, new power plants, or small upgrades to local grids — but costs keep climbing. What’s needed is a different solution. And that’s where transmission comes in. Think of transmission like Ozempic. At first glance they couldn’t be more different, one being a groundbreaking diabetes medication, and the other long wires stretching across the nation. Yet they share a common role: both are systemic fixes that can replace stopgap solutions and provide ripple effects benefitting long-term stability.” [editor’s note: Centralized generation and long-distance transmission over vulnerable lines are both inherently unstable. Decentralized hyper-local generation, not “grids,” is the fix – TLK] (09/02/25)
Kheriaty: “If you take transhumanism far enough, you get to the point where essentially there is no such thing as a human nature or a healthy, well-working human body that would be normative. The idea is that we’re just raw biological material. We’re a blank slate that you can refashion or remake with whatever technologies we’re capable of developing. And there’s this implicit idea in traditional Hippocratic medicine that there is a natural norm of health that the body tends toward when it’s working well. … that’s what medicine needs to aim toward. But for someone like Bostrom, what we have instead is raw biological material that can be hacked and upgraded and the hardware is potentially infinitely malleable.” (09/02/25)
“Social media platforms are having a First Amendment moment. From content moderation to so-called ‘addictive’ features such as unlimited scrolling, lawmakers are putting bipartisan pressure on these companies to change their policies and even the fundamental designs of their platforms. But to do so, they have to first define what a social media platform is.” (09/02/25)
“In October 2023, I was part of an online training on self-managed medication abortion. The workshop was hosted on Zoom by two women living in a state with an abortion ban, tailored for attendees who also live in ’red’ states that restrict abortion to varying degrees, and covering the medical basics about how to self-manage a medication abortion. The majority of the training, however, focused on how participants could pass the lessons along — educating other people about those medical basics, the practical realities of what to expect during a first-trimester medication abortion, how to recognize the signs of problems and, importantly, how to do all this while remaining within the law. The last part required some role-playing for participants to practice staying within the boundaries of ’sharing information’ without crossing over into anything that could potentially be prosecuted as giving medical advice.” (09/03/25)
“As far as modern-day affronts to our autonomy go, the outlawing of drugs is one of the most egregious. Since the mid-to-late 19th century when drug laws started to crop up in the US, it has been the status-quo for the government to have the power to partly command what we choose to put into our bodies and dole out punishment when we fail to comply. There is no argument in favor of outlawing drugs that isn’t characterized by excessive paternalism …. it was pleasing to learn that the Trump administration is considering rescheduling marijuana …. it’s a step in the right direction. It’s also a step that the government should be taking with all other drugs.” (09/02/25)
“Why are some governments cruel, whether we are speaking of the Russian government intentionally attacking Ukrainian civilians and torturing prisoners of war, or the American government inflicting pain or distress on immigrants? (Of course, there is a difference in degree between these two cases of cruelty.) It is a matter of incentives: if those who disobey government decrees risk not only punishments but cruel punishments, disobedience is reduced. In short, governments use cruelty when it contributes to the realization of their policies, and no constitutional or other binding constraints exist. A government (or ‘the state’) is not a supernatural being or a biological organism, but an organization of individuals who determine policies or enforce them. Cruelty in public policy depends on the costs and benefits of the individual rulers, their agents, and their supporters (at least their important supporters).” (09/02/25)
