“Section 702 was added to FISA in 2008 with a provision that requires Congress to periodically reauthorize it. The measure allows national security agencies like the NSA, FBI and CIA to collect and monitor – without a warrant – any electronic communications sent to and from non-US persons ‘reasonably believed to be located’ outside the US. Notably, Americans who send messages to people abroad may likewise have their data surveilled. Law enforcement agencies have consistently abused this loophole to spy on US citizens in clear violation of their Fourth Amendment rights.” (04/29/26)
“Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels taught us that capitalism is a system primarily characterized by private control over the means of production. In other words: Factories and banks are privately owned. Business decisions are guided by whether they generate surplus value that can be appropriated as profit by the owners. Workers become a commodity, one that must, however, market itself and generate exchange value. In this context, the state’s primary role is to safeguard these relations of production and balance the interests of the various factions of capital. In doing so, the construction of neoliberal ideologies sought to minimize state benefits for the poorer strata of society, destroy the protective mechanisms of poorer societies, and simultaneously transfer state resources to capitalist oligarchies. Those who demanded the elimination of subsidies were, in fact, the very ones who benefited from them.” (04/29/26)
“John Locke’s A Letter Concerning Toleration is widely regarded as a foundational text of religious liberty. For centuries, thinkers have praised its clarity, moral confidence, and rejection of the coercive religious politics that prevailed in early modern Europe. On the surface, Locke offers a simple and powerful claim: the state has no authority over the salvation of souls, and therefore it ought not to coerce religious belief or practice. But this framing, so often viewed as self-evident, rests on claims that are highly contestable.” (04/29/26)
“The idea that artificial intelligence could usher in a ‘post-money’ world — and that such a world would also render firms obsolete — rests on a misunderstanding of what firms are and why they exist. Even if, for the sake of argument, we accept the highly implausible premise that money would disappear beneath an AI/robotics explosion of superabundance, it does not follow that firms would disappear with it. Firms are not artifacts or by-products of monetary exchange; they are organizational responses to coordination problems, uncertainty, and the costs of markets.” (04/29/26)
“Because politicians win by working their base into a lather, there currently exist within American politics no incentives to be wrong with decency. Every opponent must be an enemy, every disagreement a threat. I helped in my small way to create that mess; I’m resolved to help in a similarly small way to fix it. This doesn’t mean no longer speaking to what I believe to be good policy even on questions where bad policy is non-catastrophic to our republic. It does mean not strategically catastrophizing them, and not vilifying their adherents. … the only way to get incentives pushing back in that right direction is for enough people to decide they don’t care about differences on policy when those differences do not radically reshape the world.” (04/28/26)
“The United Arab Emirates (UAE) shocked the world on Tuesday when it announced that it’d be leaving the world’s largest oil cartel this week. While there’s no immediate impact for the US, in the long run it’ll mean lower gasoline prices and much-needed relief for American consumers. For decades, the UAE has been part of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), which has artificially limited global oil supplies and thereby put upward pressure on prices. … The idea behind the cartel was simple: gather all the major oil-producing countries into a room and agree to act like a monopoly, thereby maximizing profits at the expense of the rest of the world. But as other nations began discovering and pumping more oil of their own, it became increasingly difficult for a dozen or so countries to control global prices.” (04/29/26)
Source: Rutherford Institute
by John & Nisha Whitehead
“In the wake of the reported assassination attempt on President Trump, the Trump administration has wasted no time advancing a dangerous narrative: that criticism of the president — especially criticism labeling him authoritarian or fascist — is not just wrong, but responsible for violence. The implication is as chilling as it is unconstitutional: if you criticize the government too harshly, you may be to blame for what happens next. Taken to its logical conclusion, the government’s argument is this: criticism fuels anger, and anger leads to violence against the Trump administration. Which means the solution, in the government’s eyes, is simple: silence the criticism — but only when it is leveled at the Trump administration.” (04/28/26)
“The Right keeps waiting for the Weather Underground to shoot at President Trump. Not literally, not the specific organization — Bill Ayers is a comfortably retired professor in his 80s — but the type: the black-masked antifa supersoldier; the DSA chapter secretary with a tote bag full of Marx, oat milk, and bolt cutters; the blue-haired radical with a ‘Fuck ICE’ bicep tattoo; the leader of a trans gun club called ‘Trigger Warning.’ But we keep getting a very different type of would-be assassin: not the antifa militant from central casting, nor even the Proud Boy thug — but the deranged centrist. … ‘Centrist terrorism’ is, of course, not a serious analytical category. Yet neither, in these cases, is the bogeyman trumpeted on the Right as ‘radical leftist terrorism.'” (04/28/26)
“‘Debate’ almost never corresponds to mappable arguments. The simplest ‘solve debate’ proposal is the argument map. Some technology helps people decompose arguments into premises and conclusions, then lets skeptics point out where the premises are wrong, or where the conclusion doesn’t follow from the premise. But almost no real argument works that way. Even in the best-case scenario, where an argument almost works that way, it doesn’t really work that way. Suppose you’re having an argument about COVID lockdowns. Someone says ‘lockdowns hurt the economy.’ Now you’re stuck in a giant fight about whether that claim is true (answer: compared to the counterfactual, certain kinds of lockdown measures hurt certain economic indicators in certain situations). But even if it is true, so what? What conclusion can you draw from that premise?” (04/28/26)
“German Chancellor Friedrich Merz recently said that America is being ‘humiliated’ by Iran: ‘The Iranians are obviously very skilled at negotiating, or rather, very skillful at not negotiating, letting the Americans travel to Islamabad and then leave again without any result,’ he said. The only issue with this argument is that Donald Trump is such an erratic lunatic that arguably no real negotiation has ever taken place and may not actually be possible. Principally what Trump has done is post random nonsense online. Among Tuesday’s posts was one in which he claimed that ‘Iran has just informed us that they are in a ‘State of Collapse.’ They want us to ‘Open the Hormuz Strait,’ as soon as possible.’ This did not happen. It is what it is, and it’s not going to get better so long as Trump remains president.” (04/29/26)
