“You can now eat a steak grown from cow cells that never saw a pasture, taste cheese made with whey protein brewed by microbes that have never passed through an udder, wear a diamond formed from lab-coaxed carbon, and shake hands with someone who has an ear 3D printed from her own cartilage cells. For a couple of decades now, we’ve been replacing bladders and tracheas and sections of burned flesh with living tissue that started in a sterile lab and ended up integrated into someone’s body, pumping blood, producing mucus, or just sitting there looking pretty and unscarred. There’s always a backlash. Words such as unnatural, fake, Frankenfood, and synthetic get thrown around like accusations. The assumption is that anything born in a lab must be lesser, or at least deeply suspicious.” (for publication 10/25)
“One common criticism of capitalism is that it has sparked an epidemic of loneliness. This is often attributed to the individualistic nature of capitalism, and to the fact that markets have replaced a variety of more personal and communal connections with commercial activities. Karl Marx indeed expected that this trend will go as far as replacing even family relations and friendships with commercial interactions. How could that not make people more lonely? And yet, the reason why markets have been expanding into personal life is that markets provide a certain convenience.” (09/02/25)
“This week’s Air Canada flight attendants’ strike brought the country’s largest airline to a halt with picket lines set up at airports across the country. After the federal government attempted to send the attendants, represented by Canadian Union of Public Employees’ (CUPE) Air Canada Component, back to their jobs, the workers refused, becoming the first union to resist this kind of order from the federal government, which has issued a spate of them in the past year. The union’s refusal to back down led to new negotiations with Air Canada, and a tentative agreement was announced the following day. Alison Braley-Rattai, a professor of labor studies at Brock University, told PressProgress the government’s pattern of sending workers back to their jobs, combined with the particularities of the flight attendants’ struggle, created ‘a perfect storm.'” (09/01/25)
“It appears that the free global internet, such as it was, which many of us loved and grew up with, is nearly dead. Long gone are the days of anonymous IRC chats or where only paranoiacs thought their emails were monitored. The growing standard is the government demanding websites know who you are all the time to ‘protect’ you from a myriad of trivial things such as ‘hate speech’ or videos of people eating too much. As has become common, it is not any of the ‘authoritarian’ states we hear about leading the way to the end of internet freedom, but instead the ethnic European parts of the former British Empire.” (09/01/25)
“Disappointed prosecutors often find other charges to file, or hand the same facts over to other levels of government for different framing (‘he was found not guilty of murder, but now we’re charging him with violating the civil rights of the person he murdered’). And unfortunately, as noted above, prosecutors can bring the same case before a grand jury (or more than one grand jury) over and over until they finally find enough servile citizens in one place to get the indictment they want … or just ‘re-charge’ the same allegation as a misdemeanor if grand jurors won’t indict for it as a felony. That seems to me to violate the Fifth Amendment’s prohibition on ‘any person be[ing] subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb.'” (08/29/25)
“[T]here is quite literally no legitimate reason for the most powerful people on earth to even associate with such well-renowned lecherous scum and yet associate they did, over and over again. … Bill Clinton, rode on Epstein’s Lolita Express on 27 known occasions and invited the man to the White House four times during his presidency, he even visited the bastard in prison after his first arrest …. former prime minister of Israel, Ehud Barak, held three dozen meetings with the by then convicted child predator between 2013 and 2017, at one point hooking up once a month for eleven months straight. This isn’t fucking normal, and you don’t have to be paranoid to want some goddamn answers here. Even if these relationships don’t qualify as criminal they are at the very least indefensibly immoral, as is the Donald’s own account of his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.” (08/31/25)
“I regret it, but George Santayana’s famous statement, ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,’ is misleading at best. The statement implies that if we do remember the past, we will not repeat it. But, based on the history I’ve learned, that’s not true. We see a regrettable repetition right now: In 1930, more than a thousand economists signed a statement opposing the Smoot-Hawley Tariff bill, warning it would lead to a destructive trade war. Congress passed high tariffs anyway, and they contributed to the Great Depression. This year, nearly two thousand experts, also led by economists, warned against raising tariffs. Yet our president is slapping on tariffs right and left, and Congress is silent. There are three major reasons why historical remembrance does not bring enlightenment.” (08/29/25)
“‘… do we live under a limited or an unlimited government?’ To you, that question probably sounds naive because the answer feels obvious. But in 1792, Thomas Jefferson saw it as the moment of truth. Alexander Hamilton had just laid out his vision for the ‘general welfare’ clause. His answer was simple. ‘The power … is … indefinite.’ To Jefferson and his allies, this was a scam. A complete betrayal of the constitutional system that was adopted. The clash over the meaning of these two words – general Welfare – set the stage for what became the largest government in history.” (08/30/25)
“The order announces that Trump seeks to use content-neutral laws, which are agnostic about the message an act might convey, to prosecute flag-burners precisely because he doesn’t like their message. In so doing, Trump has furnished future defendants, and possibly the protesting veteran, with evidence to support a ‘selective prosecution’ defense. When the government selectively enforces an otherwise content-neutral law — say, by prosecuting those who burn flags but not those who burn trash — and does so because it disagrees with the message an individual expresses, the Constitution requires that the charges be dismissed. The difficulty in most cases is proving that the government’s purpose was illegal. But the Trump order proudly pronounces it.” (08/30/25)
