“Seeking to rally the troops for his unholy war, Christian nationalist, TV-carnie and war fanboy Pete Kegseth just passed off some vengeful Gospel According to Tarantino as scripture at his (unconstitutional) Pentagon prayer service, and yes we have them now. Added to the ‘shameless blasphemy’ of quoting — without credit — Samuel Jackson’s homicidal hitman Jules as ‘prayer,’ Pete moronically misses the redemptive point: As he cites the ‘tyranny of evil men,’ he, unlike Jules, doesn’t friggin’ get that he is one.” (04/18/26)
“This month marks the third anniversary of the war in Sudan. Estimates of the death toll range from 150,000 to 400,000 or more; 2025 was, according to the United Nations’ internal estimates, a particularly deadly year for civilians. The humanitarian impacts are even broader: the U.N.’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs calculates that, as of April 2026, nearly two-thirds of Sudan’s 46.8 million people need humanitarian assistance.” 904/17/26)
Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Walter Block
“Everyone is now concerned about the unemployment rate, it would appear. The scribes are busily scribbling as to the possible causes of this economic debilitation. Their list is long, creative, and clever. One explanation is that the quit rate has plummeted. People are sticking around in jobs they would have left in rosier markets. Well, yes, if this replacement source of new job openings is decreasing, that could well account for fewer new employment slots opening up. But this is a two-way street. Presumably, people are not downing tools for fear that new appointments will not be open to them, at least not on better terms, overall, than they now enjoy. So, it is likely that the unemployment rate is at least partially a cause of this phenomenon, not only a result. Further, this is a sign of economic health, rather than disarray.” (04/17/26)
“There are moments in public health when the path forward is unusually clear, when the evidence aligns with behavior, when risks are well understood, and when policy has a genuine opportunity to reduce harm at scale. This should be one of those moments. Non-combustible nicotine products — vapes, heated tobacco, and especially nicotine pouches — are widely understood to be far less harmful than smoking, a point I and many others have covered repeatedly, and one that no longer sits at the frontier of scientific debate. … One might expect regulators to respond accordingly, adjusting policy to reflect both the risk gradient and the changed behavioral landscape, but that has not happened. Instead, the system has stalled, quietly but decisively, with approvals for new products slowing to a near standstill.” (04/17/26)
“The Ivory Tower was an image, medieval like the university itself, of an institution made of a valuable material and grounded in society but towering above it. In this view, any university in America depends on America for its survival but does its best to rise above its politics. Politics is argument, for example about welfare policies. As an Ivory Tower, the university tries to define the bigger, more abstract question of what is welfare. Policies are about society; abstract definitions come from the Ivory Tower. In abandoning the Ivory Tower Harvard was denying its independence.” 904/19/26)
Source: Law & Liberty
by Claudia Franziska Brühwiler
“New technology is changing how human beings learn. But preserving both humanity and democracy means we have to cling to traditional ways of knowing.” (04/17/26)
Source: Center for a Stateless Society
by Kevin Carson
“Part I of this two-part paper will examine a number of loosely related and considerably overlapping conceptual issues concerning the nature of money and credit: metallism vs. chartalism, money theories of credit vs. credit theories of money, and advance vs. synchronization economics. They all hinge, in one way or another, on the question of whether money and credit are ‘real’ material entities, on the one hand, that must be in some way ‘saved’ or ‘accumulated’ before they can be ‘lent’ or ‘invested,’ or simply units of account for allocating resources and tracking the balance of exchange of material goods, on the other. That is, is money a store of value — a commodity with intrinsic value in its own right — and does credit require a stock of past savings to be lent against?” (04/17/26)
“The knives are out for OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, both figuratively and pretty close to literally. Last week—a few days after publication of a New Yorker piece featuring tons of anonymous attestations to Altman’s duplicitousness, and a few days before a Wall Street Journal piece about his conflicts of financial interest—an anti-AI extremist threw a Molotov cocktail at Altman’s house. Altman suggested a causal link between the two kinds of attacks.” (04/18/26)
