“In the week-plus since the latest attempt on President Trump’s life, many on the Right and in the political Center are, at long last, waking up to the possibility that the political opposition today is not entirely normal. It’s not unprecedented either, but it’s far from what we have come to expect in the so-called ‘civilized’ world. As the polymath and public intellectual Eric Weinstein put it on Twitter/X, ‘These aren’t deranged liberals. They are normalized revolutionaries.’ By now, the story of how these revolutionaries came to be normalized is well-worn.” (05/04/26)
Source: ProSocial Libertarians
by Andrew Jason Cohen
“All borders, including those of voting districts and nation-states, are legal constructs. Legal constructs serve a purpose, of course. That a country extends to the ocean tells us something, but without a legal ruling about how far into the ocean it controls, we risk repeated skirmishes at sea, for example. The same is true of voting districts. Should Joe’s vote count in district 2? Or one of the other 5? Should he be allowed to decide for himself? Perhaps he’d choose 2 because the polling place is closest to his home or his kids’ school. Perhaps he’d choose 3 because the polling place is closest to his office. Perhaps he’d vary by year. It’s apparently important to people — and is obviously important to the duopoly — that people only vote in set areas. Do you actually care about that? Is it really problematic to let people vote where they choose?” (05/04/26)
“The Pentagon claims that attacks on civilian boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific have severely curtailed the import of illegal drugs to the United States. And President Donald Trump says this has saved more than 1 million American lives. Experts call these assertions laughable and reporting by The Intercept shows that claims by the White House and War Department are baseless, phony, or both.” (05/04/26)
“Unlike every other TomDispatch piece, this one won’t be broken up with section titles for a simple reason. It’s all about Donald J. Trump and when it comes to him, in this strange world of ours, no one ever really gets a break. In that context, here’s my advice to you: Don’t get old. For years, I managed not to do so, but unfortunately that’s all over now and I’m increasingly an old man. In fact, I’m not quite two years older than Donald J. Trump.” (05/03/26)
“Picture yourself at the kitchen table on a Saturday morning, coffee getting cold, sorting through the mail. Among the usual suspects (credit card statements, HOA notices, something from the DMV that is probably not good news), you find a bill you did not ask for. The federal government has quietly added a line item to your household tab: $18,000 a year. No vote. No debate. Just arithmetic catching up with decades of bipartisan borrowing without consequences. That is precisely what the Brookings Institution’s 2026 fiscal chart book shows is required to keep the debt-to-GDP ratio capped at its current level through 2036. Budget fellow Jessica Riedl calculates that stabilization demands an extra $2.6 trillion in annual revenue by that year. Spread across approximately 144 million American households, the arithmetic is brutal: roughly $18,000 per household, per year.” (05/04/26)
“The neocons got their war. The question every taxpayer and every voter who believed Trump’s promises should be asking is: who else got what they wanted? The answer is not difficult to find. It is sitting in earnings calls, stock filings, and futures trading records. Washington does not even bother to hide it anymore.” (05/04/26)
“Some lawmakers have grown so alarmed by the Trump administration’s actions in Latin America that they are beginning to accuse the administration of gangsterism. Representative Stephen Lynch (D-MA) saw the possibility of gangsterism at the start of the second Trump administration when he warned that the United States could ‘join the ranks of gangster nations,’ but there is a growing sense in Congress that the day has arrived. At a congressional hearing last month, Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-TX) asserted that the Trump administration is exploiting the US military to take Latin American resources for US corporations. Castro seemingly channeled the anti-war critiques of Smedley Butler, the US military hero of the early 20th century, who condemned war as a racket and lamented his exploitation as a racketeer for capitalism.” (05/04/26)
“One of the more encouraging developments in artificial intelligence is that some of the people building it have started acting like it might be dangerous. Not in the Skynet sense or the HAL 9000 sense or even the ‘oops, it deleted all my emails’ sense, though AI might be dangerous in all of those ways too. The question is whether the latest models are dangerous to infrastructure, dangerous to privacy, dangerous to security, and dangerous to the blurry line between public and private. For years, Big Tech has been heavy on the gas, light on the brakes — and we have all benefited tremendously, even as angry debates about the downsides have raged. But with AI, at least in a few notable cases, the companies themselves have begun doing something unusual. They have started saying no.” (for publication 06/26)
“Earlier this year, a prominent company with millions of customers announced a major product upgrade — albeit with one little catch. If this new product was released to the public, the company said, it could be used to disrupt — and perhaps destroy — civilizational infrastructure, from financial markets to transportation systems to power and water utilities. But fear not! The company hastened to reassure the public that it had the situation under control. The company would decide, on its own terms, what the world needed to know, who should be called in to contain the problem, and how much gratitude the rest of us should feel for being spared a catastrophe we never knew was coming. No public accountability or government intervention required. This, of course, is the story of Anthropic and its latest AI model.” (05/04/26)
