“‘Police warn families of Tiananmen crackdown dead not to visit graves on 37th anniversary,’ reads the headline of yesterday’s story in New York’s Newsday. How rude of those families! How dare they show such utter disregard for the right of the Chinese Communist Party to ‘grind you up and crush your bones!’ Or to have your ‘heads bashed bloody,’ as CCP top Pooh Bear Xi Jinping has more recently been fond of saying. Especially after all the trouble Xi and Chinese authorities have gone to easing all this unnecessary tension by facilitating a thoughtful and therapeutic four-decade ‘campaign to erase what happened from public memory.'” (06/05/26)
Source: National Priorities Project
by Hanna Homestead
“Our country’s massive weapons budget has directly enabled the US-Israeli led war on Iran that has caused thousands of deaths and is exacerbating the nation’s affordability crisis. Even if the war on Iran ends soon, it will have cost somewhere in the range of $50 billion to $72 billion, or more. The US weapons and war budget already exceeds $1 trillion, and President Donald Trump and his cronies want even more. Trump’s Pentagon budget request for FY 2027 includes $95 billion to buy more bombs and missiles, and specifically to restock munitions used in the US-Israel war of aggression on Iran and those fueling ongoing genocide and ethnic cleansing in Palestine and Lebanon. The administration plans to continue to arm Israel, which the Trump National Defense Strategy identifies as ‘a model ally’ that the United States has ‘an opportunity now to further empower’. ” (06/06/26)
“The most consequential weakness of philosopher and journalist Kathleen Stock’s new polemic against assisted dying is its failure to engage with the empirical record.” (06/05/26)
“Once a dominant force in global energy markets, OPEC is facing growing fragmentation from within and intensifying competition from without.” (06/05/26)
“The traditional blowback from Middle Eastern adventures has been in terms of refugee inflows and a less stable, more risky MENA region that produces knock-on effects across the European political frame. Going beyond destabilizing Europe to destabilizing the entire world as a function of Middle Eastern wars is unlikely to win converts to the Western cause, unless they share its dedication to their own destruction.” (06/05/26)
Source: The American Prospect
by Dylan Gyauch-Lewis
“After months of speculation and anger, the Democratic National Committee finally released its autopsy of the party’s loss in the 2024 presidential election just before Memorial Day weekend. Despite pledging to release the document publicly when first elected to lead the Democratic Party’s organizational arm in early 2025, DNC Chair Ken Martin reversed course in December of last year, announcing that the report would not be published. Why? Some speculated it was merely a way for party insiders to avoid accountability for their failures; many others that it showed Kamala Harris lost because of her refusal to disavow Joe Biden’s policy toward Israel. As it turns out, the coverup was due to a much more banal and embarrassing reason: Martin’s friend whom he hired to complete the report turned in a pile of garbage.” (06/05/26)
“‘Social construction’ is prominent: we are told in various places that this or that is a ‘social construct’: think of gender, race, or money. One book that played a central role in the emergence of that concept is Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s 1966 The Social Construction of Reality. That work can proudly claim more than 90,000 citations as of today — only in its English version, that is. Its influence within sociology, and then beyond, is thus enormous. … social constructivism shares roots with Austrian school thinking. Somewhere along the way, however, a fine but crucial distinction has been blurred within social constructivist thought.” (06/05/26)
Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Wendy McElroy
“The U.S. border and the requirements for U.S. citizenship or residency are defining issues of this decade. But almost all the attention they receive focuses on one side of the coin: namely, how to control immigration and who is entitled to citizenship or residency. The other side: how easily can Americans emigrate and renounce their citizenship? Expatriation is rare in comparison to the deluge of immigration in recent years, but the ease with which a citizen can become an expatriate is a litmus test of a government’s authoritarianism. How tight a grip does America claim to have over an individual and his wealth because of a geographical accident of birth? Exit taxes provide an answer.” (06/04/26)
“It may be 64 years after the New York Mets losing 120 baseball matches in their debut season led manager Casey Stengel to plead ‘Can’t anyone here play this game?’ Yet The Wall Street Journal columnist William A. Galston notes that the same question could still apply to another ‘two monumentally inept teams.’ … Galston has in mind the Democrats and Republicans, ‘Capitol Hill’s Unlovable Losers’ (May 27). Less than two full years after the 2024 presidential election, Galston has merely to nod at the former party’s abject failure to learn from their loss, and the latter’s squandering of what little momentum remains from their win.” (06/04/26)
“Some argue that to sacralize others is not a legal contrivance, but an ontological discovery. Rights are real, some insist. Rights are a derivation, others argue. We need not settle that debate. Every tradition that has ever produced wisdom — whether Mosaic, Stoic, Vedic, or Taoist — arrives at the same conclusion: To trespass upon others without cause is not merely a crime, it is a desecration. … The very foundation of law, in every civilization that has not entirely lost its way, is an elaboration on this. One may not injure the innocent. One may not seize what is not his. One may not constrain a person without justification sufficient to meet the scrutiny of a free people who seek similar protections.” (06/04/26)
