“Joe Biden’s elaborate game of hide-and-seek over his suspected theft of highly classified government documents may finally be coming to an end. The Department of Justice announced, ‘Ready or not, here I come!’ So, the former president scampered to a federal court on Tuesday, begging for protection to prevent the public release of audio recordings and transcripts in which he is known to have incriminated himself. Asking a judge to effectively cover up evidence of crimes — whether charged or not — is a fanciful proposition. The recordings were obtained lawfully in 2023 by then-special counsel Robert Hur. Hence, Biden can no longer legitimately claim a Fourth Amendment privacy interest in them. Once they entered the public and prosecutorial domain, they were stripped of privacy protections.” (05/27/26)
Source: Independent Institute
by K Lloyd Billingsley
“Candidates for Congress, governor, and various state offices promise to make California affordable again, build new housing, fight the ‘special interests,’ and so forth. Missing in the rhetoric are the powerful agencies that operate beyond the reach of the voters. Consider, for example, the California Air Resources Board.” (05/28/26)
“There’s a common trope among people who have collateralized debt that, until the debt is cleared, they never truly own their property. For example, the bank holds the mortgage, and if mortgage payments aren’t made, the bank can seize the house. The trope says that the ‘pay to stay’ nature of the loan means the bank truly owns the house, not the person who purchased it using their mortgage. Despite how common this trope is, it is incorrect. It fundamentally misunderstands the legal nature of ownership.” (05/28/26)
“Last week, OpenAI announced that an internal AI model had disproved the Erdős unit distance conjecture, a famous problem in discrete geometry that had stumped human mathematicians for the last 80 years. … It’s arguably the first time that an AI system has found a proof resolving a major open conjecture. That’s impressive, but I don’t view it as a radical break from the previous trajectory of AI progress in mathematics.” (05/28/26)
“Republicans who have tried to walk a careful line with President Donald Trump are having a rough stretch in primary season. Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy and Texas Sen. John Cornyn both lost to Trump-backed challengers despite years of attempting, in different ways, to accommodate the president politically. But accommodation is rarely enough with Trump. Republican senators hoping selective loyalty will protect them should pay attention to what happened to Cassidy and Cornyn: If Trump decides you are insufficiently loyal, you are replaceable no matter how often you vote with him. Republican senators deciding whether and when to break with Trump should take that lesson seriously. The time to do it is when you still hold power, not once you’ve become a lame duck. The former requires courage. The latter does not.” (05/28/26)
“The companies that once competed primarily on mining outcomes are increasingly being judged by a broader set of capabilities: infrastructure control, power access, cooling capacity and the ability to serve demand beyond Bitcoin alone. In other words, Bitcoin mining is evolving from a pure commodity hash business into a broader energy-backed compute infrastructure industry.” (05/28/26)
“Donald Trump’s America is a scary place in significant part thanks to an unholy alliance of MAGA devotees who don’t believe in science and see intellectuals as public enemy number one, and a gaggle of Silicon Valley militarists who think that they’re the smartest people in the room, if not the universe. Add in White Christian nationalists who abuse religious precepts to sow hatred and division and you have the foundations of the political base that elected Donald Trump (twice!). And worse yet, those groupings are likely to be with us long after our current president has gone off to that great cheeseburger stand in the sky.” (05/28/26)
“Media outlets are filled with stories about how AI is taking all the jobs. There are also plenty of stories telling us that soaring deficits and rising debt are going to bankrupt the government. These problems are 180-degree opposites, sort of like saying that someone is seriously overweight, but needs to put on a few pounds. Either can be true, but they can’t both possibly be true. There is zero recognition of this fact in elite intellectual circles. To make the logic clearer, the AI taking all the jobs story is one of abundance. … The out-of-control debt and deficit story is one of scarcity.” (05/28/26)
