“On paper, Sanae Takaichi is the kind of leader Japanese people ought to hate. Bossy, opinionated, conspicuously unbothered by the rituals of consensus that grease every surface of Japanese official life, she comes across as everything the country’s political culture is designed to sand down. She doesn’t schmooze with captains of industry over kaiseki dinners at fancy Tokyo restaurants. She goes home and reads her briefing papers. She plays drums in a heavy metal band — or used to in college, and still can …. She has opinions about Taiwan and isn’t shy about sharing them, which in the context of Japanese-Chinese diplomacy is roughly equivalent to setting your hair on fire at a funeral. Something for everyone to hate. And so the three months since Takaichi took office have been a bit of a surprise.” (02/12/26)
“Former CNN anchor Don Lemon is under federal indictment for participating in a Minnesota protest group’s obstruction of a church service. He is scheduled to be arraigned Friday. News of his prosecution took me back more than five decades to when I was a young university professor in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo). At that time, President Mobutu Sese Seko’s government threatened to arrest me for my alleged involvement in student disruptions. In both cases, increasingly authoritarian governments decided to clamp down on independent observers (journalists or others) who sympathized with community activists. To do so, they distorted what actually happened to serve their political interests. Yet, I suspect that the last person President Donald Trump wants to be compared to is a corrupt, fallen, disgraced African dictator.” [editor’s note: He performed as a part of the story, not as a real journalist, and should pay the penalty for violating the rights of the pastor and parishioner, End of story – SAT] [additional editor’s note: I’d chide SAT every time he was wrong, but nobody wants two editors’ notes EVERY time – TLK] (02/12/25)
“Ajeya Cotra’s Biological Anchors report was the landmark AI timelines forecast of the early 2020s. In many ways, it was incredibly prescient — it nailed the scaling hypothesis, predicted the current AI boom, and introduced concepts like ‘time horizons’ that have entered common parlance. In most cases where its contemporaries challenged it, its assumptions have been borne out, and its challengers proven wrong. But its headline prediction — an AGI timeline centered around the 2050s – no longer seems plausible. The current state of the discussion ranges from late 2020s to 2040s, with more remote dates relegated to those who expect the current paradigm to prove ultimately fruitless — the opposite of Ajeya’s assumptions. Cotra later shortened her own timelines to 2040 (as of 2022) and they are probably even shorter now. So, if its premises were impressively correct, but its conclusion twenty years too late, what went wrong in the middle?” (02/12/26)
My mom used to call me every Sunday between 8:30 and 8:45 p.m. In 13 years, she has never missed a call. Like most moms, if I don’t respond, she immediately assumes I’m dead. Two weeks ago, her calls stopped coming. The Islamic Republic of Iran has cut all internal and external communications during the ongoing protests. They even jammed Starlink. It’s been radio silence. Not a word, in or out. And in that silence, they’ve been killing people. At least 16,000 in just a few days. … my mom sold her jewelry, her prized Persian rug, even her house to make sure I went to a good school, got into a good university, and got out — to America. What has the Islamic Republic done to this mother (and millions of other families) that she’d rather never see her son again than have him trapped with her?” (02/12/26)
“Your representatives may finally grab the feared ‘third rail’ of U.S. politics. When the Social Security and Medicare trust funds run out in the early 2030s, the law is clear: Benefits must be slashed. That would mean a roughly 24 percent cut to Social Security checks and an 11 percent cut to Medicare benefits. But Congress almost certainly won’t let that happen. The easy, though irresponsible, political path may seem obvious: Change the law, keep benefits whole, and pay by borrowing the money. This way legislators won’t have to cast unpopular votes for spending cuts or tax hikes. This makes sense only if the consequences won’t become clear until much later, after voters have forgotten all about it. What most people are missing is that this time, the consequences may show up quickly.” (02/12/26)
“The world’s most important divided nation, Korea, hosts one of the world’s most volatile international confrontations. Renewed conflict there could be as intense as the ongoing Russian–Ukrainian war, potentially drawing in the United States, China, Russia, and Japan. Healing the division that led to the Korean War would be the most obvious way to preempt a military rerun—this time with nuclear weapons. Germany’s experience demonstrates the great benefits of reversing artificial national divisions resulting from, and threatening to restart, conflict. Indeed, German reunification was the single event that most dramatically illustrated the end of the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Unfortunately, the possibility of Korean reunification is looking ever more like an impossible dream.” (02/12/26)
Source: Libertarian Institute
by Joseph Solis-Mullen
“William J. Watkins Jr.’s The Independent Guide to the Constitution: Original Intentions, Modern Inventions is an admirably clear-eyed and disciplined examination of a document that has, over the course of two centuries, been transformed from a charter of limited and enumerated powers into a font of nearly unlimited federal authority. Watkins writes with alarm at how far modern constitutional doctrine has drifted from the Founders’ design — but his book is more than a lament. It is a structured, systematic guide to how the Constitution was meant to work, how it has been distorted, and what might yet be salvaged.” 902/12/26)
“This legislative session in California, there is considerable discussion about a state domestic violence registry, a publicly accessible, searchable list of those who have been convicted of domestic violence. While obviously well-intentioned, a registry of this kind would list many wrongfully charged and convicted abuse survivors. Such a registry would also likely decrease domestic violence reporting and keep survivors in abusive situations.” (02/11/26)
“Ding dong, the climate hoax is dead. Twenty years after Al Gore’s apocalyptic movie ‘An Inconvenient Truth,’ the Trump administration has put the final nail in the coffin of the lie that scared a generation into believing the planet was about to explode in flames if they kept using fossil fuels. In what the White House calls ‘the largest deregulatory action in American history,’ the EPA on Thursday will repeal an Obama-era proclamation that has mandated greenhouse-gas regulations for 17 years. The 2009 ‘endangerment finding’ has been the primary climate handbrake on American industry, forming the legal justification for increasingly punitive greenhouse-gas regulations. Rescinding it ‘would save the American people $1.3 trillion in crushing regulations,’ White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said this week, with the EPA projecting an average saving of $2,400 per vehicle and further savings on farm machinery, soon to be freed from the complex extra circuitry required to restrict emissions.” (02/11/25)
“South Korea’s former interior minister was sentenced Thursday to seven years in prison for abetting then-President Yoon Suk Yeol’s brief declaration of martial law in 2024. The verdict for Lee Sang-min came a week before a different judge at the same Seoul court rules on whether Yoon’s actions amounted to rebellion, a crime for which prosecutors are seeking the death penalty. Lee, who led the ministry of interior and safety, was convicted for helping carry out the declaration and passing along Yoon’s orders to the country’s police and fire chiefs to cut water and electricity to news organizations that were critical of his policies. The instructions weren’t carried out since martial law was lifted quickly after lawmakers broke through a military and police blockade at the National Assembly and unanimously voted to lift it.” (02/12/26)
