Source: Los Angeles Times
by Thomas Renard and Colin P Clarke
“Terrorism is evolving, sometimes almost beyond recognition. The pace of radicalization is accelerating. Attacks have become increasingly basic, unsophisticated and cheap. For some, terrorism seems to be like a craving, a source of dopamine to satisfy carnal impulses. Quick preparation, convenience and mass production: Welcome to the age of fast-food terrorism.” (06/17/26)
“From time to time, we liberals must rethink the world. Deglobalization, the rise of economic decoupling, the return of tariffs, and the increasing salience of weaponized interdependence have come to define the current landscape. Where once the dominant terms were efficiency, integration, and mutual gains, now they are geoeconomics, resilience, chokepoints, and decoupling. The vocabulary shift is an indicator and a diagnostic. Rhetorical change of this order reflects structural change in how economic exchange and political power actually relate. A liberal position adequate to that new reality cannot be built by repeating arguments shaped by an earlier phase of globalization. We must rebuild — analytically and institutionally — for the world that integration, pushed to its limits, has actually produced.” (06/17/26)
“The shooting portion of the Iran ‘War’ lasted about 40 days, far shorter than Barack Obama’s 2011 congressionally unauthorized seven-month bombing campaign against Libya. Bill Clinton’s unauthorized 78 days of bombing Serbia in 1999 hit bridges, schools, hospitals, monuments, and power plants—far more indiscriminate targeting than anything in the Iran War so far. No one yet knows the ultimate verdict on the war, given all the economic, military, political, and strategic variables still in play. A memorandum of understanding released this week might end the war, or result in further American strikes, depending on the degree of Iranian concessions and compliance. But in this confusing, ongoing drama, many fabrications and distortions still circulate.” (06/18/26)
“If a lab could create the perfect congressional candidate for a particular district at this political moment, it might spit out Alexis Goldstein. She was a federal worker who was fired amid the Trump administration’s push to cripple the administrative state, and she’s running in the Sixth Congressional District in Maryland, a state full of federal workers downsized in the DOGE push. Goldstein, a former program manager in the chief technologist’s office at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, was fired, in fact, for confronting DOGE functionaries at the CFPB offices last February. Plus, Goldstein is a highly skilled financial analyst—she worked as a programmer on Wall Street before quitting to join Occupy Wall Street in 2010—at a time when one of the most operatic and unusual financial schemes of the century is playing out in the highly leveraged data center build-out.” (06/18/26)
“Thomas Jefferson, John Dickinson, and the Second Continental Congress said those were their two terrible options less than three months after the battles of Lexington and Concord and the ‘shot heard ‘round the world.’ This is the story of the forgotten declaration in which they explained why they fought back.” (06/17/26)
“President Trump lost. The war he waged against Iran promises to conclude in a humbling whimper with the signing of a cease-fire agreement later this week. The United States is left weaker — diminished militarily, strategically, economically, and perhaps morally. The war, which the United States fought alongside Israel, accomplished none of the goals that Trump named at the outset. Instead, it only empowered the hard-liners in Tehran and arguably emboldened them to someday seek a nuclear weapon. … Trump won’t admit to any of this. He has spent recent days furiously spinning the tentative deal as a clear win, and has seethed at unflattering comparisons with the deal that President Obama struck with Iran more than a decade ago, aides and outside advisers told me.” (06/17/26)
“The Trump Administration’s initial demand for renegotiating the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) includes an opening position that vehicles covered by the deal be composed of at least 50 percent American-made components, in terms of dollar value. It’s a revealing concession, because if the goal is truly to manufacture everything in America, the threshold would be 100 percent, not 50 percent. As it turns out, executive orders cannot unwind a global economy. The White House’s concession should jump-start a more honest accounting of what their tariffs actually are: a consumption tax, paid by American households, spread across nearly every goods-producing sector in the economy.” (06/17/26)
“I hear a lot of people saying the community should have this or that. Or pointing out things they believe should be improved. But they always seem to want government, or at least someone else, to provide what they want or to fix their problems. If you have complaints about the community, don’t wait for government to fix them. See what you can do for yourself, maybe with help from others, with or without government permission. Government wants you to depend on it for solutions, but its solutions can be worse than the original problem.” (06/17/26)
Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Laurence M Vance
“This year’s [Social Security] COLA was 2.8 percent — the fifth straight year of a COLA at or above 2.5 percent. The COLA was called a ‘Trump bump’ because Trump’s tariff increases led to increased prices on certain goods, which increased the CPI-W, which increased the COLA. Retirement analysts are expecting an even larger ‘Trump bump’ next year due to the tremendous increase in fuel prices due to Trump’s war in Iran. … These ‘Trump bumps’ are nothing more than welfare increases that will be eaten up by inflation, higher premiums for Medicare Part B (which are deducted from Social Security checks), and taxes on Social Security benefits.” (06/17/26)
“Any reimagining of the university in the age of AI must begin with an honest reckoning with what AI cannot do — and what therefore becomes relatively valuable precisely because AI can do everything else. The key distinction is between work that AI does well (such as synthesis of known patterns, argument elaboration, template instantiation, and generating local coherence) and work it structurally cannot do because of the architecture of the technology as such. AI cannot build the trust on which institutional cooperation depends, because trust is not a conclusion reached by processing information about another agent but instead is a relationship constituted over time between persons who have staked something on each other, and who can be betrayed. AI cannot give a person good taste or style, because taste and style are about personal distinctiveness within a community which shares an aesthetic.” (06/17/26)
