“In a 1961 speech, President John F. Kennedy captured the imagination of the people. He asked the world to see a man on the moon. Back then, such could only be a feat of technocracy — the idea that officials can work wonders if they have enough experts and largesse. And they did it. But, the moon landing had been peak technocracy — pushing the limits of what could be achieved in terms of expense, tax funding, and complication. Prior to that, though, Kennedy had put a symbol in people’s minds.” (04/06/26)
“On March 13th, buried in the New York Times’s coverage of the U.S.-Israel-Iran conflict was a headline that would have been easy to miss amid the din of war coverage: ‘As El Niño Simmers, Scientists Warn of Weather Extremes Starting in Late Summer.’ Many readers may not even have noticed it, but that article noted that scientists at the Climate Prediction Center, a part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, had raised their estimate for an El Niño event this summer from 60% to about 80%. Admittedly, in this strange world of ours, that hardly seemed like an earth-shattering revelation. But if you had read the piece more closely, your alarm bells should instantly have gone off.” (04/05/26)
“Content-focused policies risk censoring speech without fixing the underlying business model that pushes noxious material where it will do the most damage.” (04/06/26)
“Perhaps Donald Trump was persuaded—by his generals, by his buddies in Silicon Valley, by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—that American military superiority would make quick work of the Iranian military. In addition to the aircraft carriers, the Stealth bombers, the Tomahawk missiles, and the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, Trump could also call upon the assistance of Claude and his buddies.” (04/06/26)
“Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-Queens) is now opposed to funding defensive shields that could save the lives of innocent civilians — if they are Israelis. Seems like she’s trying to win back the endorsement of the Democratic Socialists of America that spurned her in 2024 for not hating the Jewish state enough. Or maybe she’s just showing her true colors. Her re-hardened anti-Israel position comes even though she isn’t facing any significant opposition in her re-election campaign, which raises and spends so much money it’s more like a good-sized business than a scrappy Bronx-Queens political operation; she doesn’t need the DSA’s endorsement. But she got her fellow antisemitic socialists mad at her because she abstained from voting to deny funding for Israel’s strictly defensive Iron Dome project, which protects Israelis — Jewish and Arab — from the tens of thousands of missiles that have been lobbed from Iran’s regional terror proxies.” (04/06/26)
“In 2023, the families of persons who had died because of Boeing’s lies about safety were told that it was too early to challenge the Justice Department’s deferred prosecution agreement (DPA) with Boeing. Now, in 2026, the same Fifth Circuit says that their challenge is too late. When was the perfect Goldilocks moment?” (04/06/26)
“To understand U.S. trade policy, it’s best to think of chaos theory: the search for a pattern behind seemingly haphazard events. Donald Trump is the chaos agent in this case, threatening countries on a whim with sky-high tariffs like the Queen of Hearts thundering, ‘Off with their heads.’ But beyond the seeming disorder, there is more of a Washington consensus on trade policy than is often not commonly recognized — and it dates back to the late Obama years.” (04/06/26)
“Donald Trump and his partner in war crimes, Benjamin Netanyahu, are jointly waging a war of murderous aggression against Iran, a nation of 90 million people. They are in the grip of three cascading pathologies. The first is personality: both are malignant narcissists. The second is the arrogance of power: men who possess the power to command nuclear annihilation and feel, in consequence, no restraint. The third, and most dangerous of all, is religious delusion: two men who believe, and are told daily by those around them, that they are messiahs doing God’s work. Each pathology exacerbates the others, so that together they put the world in unprecedented danger.” (04/06/26)
