“If you wanted to create a classic recipe for political crisis, you could well choose a mixture of a stagnant economy, a huge and growing public debt, a perceived need radically to increase military spending, an immigration crisis, a deeply unpopular president, a government without a majority in parliament, and growing radical parties on the right and left. In other words, France today. And France’s crisis is only one part of the growing crisis of Western Europe as a whole, with serious implications for the future of transatlantic relations.” (08/28/25)
“U.S. President Donald Trump has repeatedly stressed the need for both Russia and Ukraine to make difficult but reasonable compromises if progress is to be made toward peace. He has expressed hope that Russian President Vladimir Putin ‘will be good’ and that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky will ‘show flexibility as well.’ But Trump has shown no such sign of flexibility or compromise when it comes to his conflicts with Iran and Venezuela. Rather than engage in give and take and nuanced steps towards compromise, Trump has thrust maximalist demands on his interlocuters that are backed by military threats.” (08/28/25)
“Medford, a city of 60,000 people in Massachusetts, voted to pass a historic ordinance to divest from weapons companies that contribute to human rights violations. Their vote included Israel’s ongoing genocide, starvation, and destruction of everything that makes life in Gaza possible. The Medford City Council passed the Values-Aligned Local Investments Ordinance in August 2025, making Medford one of a handful of municipalities (and the only city in liberal Massachusetts) that has barred investments in companies that profit from genocide. Others include Dearborn, Michigan; Iowa City; Richmond, California; and Portland and Belfast, Maine. In December 2024, Alameda County, California, a populous county of 1.7 million people, became the first county to divest from Caterpillar, Inc., a complicit company that sells bulldozers to Israel to demolish agricultural fields, roads, buildings, and other infrastructure in Gaza and Palestinian territories.” (08/28/25)
“Mainstream economics explains the law of diminishing marginal utility in terms of the satisfaction that one derives from consuming a particular good. For instance, an individual may derive vast satisfaction from consuming one cone of ice cream. However, the satisfaction he will derive from consuming a second cone might also be great but not as great as the satisfaction derived from the first cone. The satisfaction from the consumption of a third cone is likely to diminish further, and so on. From this, mainstream economics concludes that the more of any good we consume in a given period, the less satisfaction, or utility, we derive out of each additional, or marginal, unit. … Now, in the mainstream approach there is a strong emphasis on indifference curves, which supposedly could be helpful in understanding individuals’ choices. Indifference, however, has nothing to do with individuals’ purposeful conduct.” (08/28/25)
“John Lennon was always the most controversial Beatle. In 1966, he infamously declared, ‘We’re more popular than Jesus,’ sparking a backlash that led to public bonfires of Beatles records. In 1968, he appeared nude on an album cover with Yoko Ono, leading retailers to be jailed on obscenity charges. And, in 1969, he starred in a short film focused on a single part of his body in varying states of tumescence — the less said about that, the better. Even today, 45 years after his death, Lennon continues to ignite controversy. The latest surrounds a recently announced twelve-disc boxset, focused on Lennon and Ono’s recordings of 1971-72. These were their most politically direct songs …. The new controversy stems from the boxset’s omission of a key Lennon-Ono song from the period: ‘Woman Is the Nigger of the World.'” (08/28/25)
Source: Expression
by Mertcan Güngör & Chapin Lenthall-Cleary
“If we want a campus culture of tolerance and free speech, it turns out who students talk to about politics matters — and friends matter most of all. But here’s the catch. Conservatives who talk politics with friends are more tolerant toward both sides, while liberals who do so are more tolerant only of their own side, and less tolerant of the other. … The difference between conservative and liberals in talking with friends may be because conservatives, as a minority on most campuses, regularly face opposing views, which ends up boosting tolerance more over time. Liberals, meanwhile, can more easily stay in their bubbles, and the data seems to suggest that’s what they’re doing.” [editor’s note: Or perhaps it’s that discussion tends to reveal truth and Stephen Colbert (“reality has a well-known liberal bias”) is correct? Or do he and the authors even mean the same thing by “liberal?”- TLK] (08/28/25)
“I don’t blame Cracker Barrel for this sorry state of affairs. The company is a victim of the internet’s endless search for something to be mad about. During L’Affaire Sausage, I pointed out that very few people were actually mad that Cracker Barrel had added a meat substitute to its offerings; copy-hungry journalists had scoured the company’s Facebook page and plucked a few lunatics out of the much larger number of vegetarians thanking the company for catering to their needs. I reminded people that you can always find a few fringe souls on the internet who are angry about anything. I begged them to ignore the shouting, just as they would if people were doing it on a random street corner. Alas, I was shouting into the social media void, because here we are again, trying to turn a struggling restaurant chain into a metaphor for American politics. ” (08/27/25)
“An explosion of enthusiastic applause for Joseph Stalin followed a Communist Party conference in 1937. The ovation went on for three minutes, four, five … Palms were getting sore, arms were aching, and the older members of the audience were panting with exhaustion. According to dissident author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the clapping continued for 11 minutes. … It was only after the director of a local paper factory, ‘an independent and strong-minded man,’ sat down that the hall finally fell quiet. ‘They had been saved,’ wrote Solzhenitsyn. ‘The squirrel had been smart enough to jump off his revolving wheel.’ During Tuesday’s marathon 3-hour and 16-minute Cabinet meeting at the White House, Special Envoy Steve Witkoff offered a masterclass in sycophancy.” (08/27/25)
“On Wednesday, one of Europe’s smallest, poorest, and most rural countries, Moldova, received a visit by the leaders of France, Germany, and Poland. Why this abundant attention from European elite? It was not only to celebrate the 34th Independence Day of the former Soviet republic. It was also an appeal to Moldovan voters before a crucial Sept. 28 election not to fall for the ‘Kremlin’s propaganda,’ as French President Emmanuel Macron put it. ‘Unlike Russia, the European Union threatens no one and respects everyone’s sovereignty,’ the French leader said alongside German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk in the capital, Chisinau. After recently losing much of its economic leverage over its tiny neighbor, Russia now backs an immense disinformation campaign in Moldova, along with paid public protests and vote-buying, to help pro-Russia political parties win the election.” (08/27/25)
