Medicine by Captivity: The Rise of the Hostage Physician

Source: Brownstone Institute
by Joseph Varon

“I have now spent four decades practicing medicine. … Most physicians did. That is the part many people outside medicine still do not fully understand. Doctors do not sacrifice years of their lives, miss holidays, destroy their sleep schedules, and carry this kind of emotional burden because they dream about maximizing throughput metrics or documentation compliance. We entered medicine because we wanted to help people. It sounds simple saying that now, maybe even naïve, but it is true. Somewhere along the line medicine changed. Hospitals changed. The language changed first because that is always how these transformations begin. Patients slowly became ‘throughput issues.’ Beds became ‘capacity management.’ Discharges became ‘flow optimization.’ … Everything slowly started sounding less human and more operational. And eventually, hospitals stopped feeling like places centered around caring for human beings and started feeling like giant processing centers where movement itself became the priority.” (05/18/26)

https://brownstone.org/articles/medicine-by-captivity-the-rise-of-the-hostage-physician/

How Marco Rubio morphed his way into Trump’s inner circle

Source: Christian Science Monitor
by Linda Feldmann

“As a United States senator from Florida, Marco Rubio was a high-profile ‘neocon’ – a hawk on China and Russia, a strong supporter of Taiwan, Ukraine, and NATO, and an advocate for free trade and human rights. Today, not so much – at least on those issues. As both secretary of State and acting national security adviser, Secretary Rubio is fully on board with President Donald Trump’s approach to foreign policy: more ‘Art of the Deal’ use of American leverage, including tariffs, less hard-line absolutism with other major powers. Mr. Rubio’s evolution shouldn’t come as a shock. After all, he is no longer his own boss; he works for President Trump – in two key capacities, the first to hold both titles since Henry Kissinger in the 1970s.” (05/18/26)

https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2026/0518/rubio-trump-foreign-policy

Nonprofits in the age of doubt

Source: hypertext
by David Dagan

“Nonprofits face a series of interlocking crises in the second Trump administration. Most obviously, there are broadsides from the White House: indiscriminate funding cuts for human services providers, targeted pressure campaigns and cuts to research funding for higher education, threats to investigate and prosecute left-leaning philanthropies. But this challenge is layered on top of a deeper crisis of trust.” (05/18/26)

https://hypertext.niskanencenter.org/p/nonprofits-in-the-age-of-doubt

Dems’ idiotic rhetoric on courts reveals what they’re really after

Source: New York Post
by David Harsanyi

“The contemporary leftist [sic] is a consequentialist with no limiting principles. After the Virginia Supreme Court stopped the Democrats’ unconstitutional gerrymandering scheme, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, now the favorite Democratic Party presidential prospect 2028 in a number of polls, claimed that the court ‘didn’t overturn a map’ but ‘overturned an election.’ ‘The power of the American people, that should be the ultimate check on all three branches,’ she declared. In any other age, vocalizing illiterate nonsense about our system of governance might be an embarrassing career-ending flub. Today, it’s the norm among progressives.” (05/18/26)

https://nypost.com/2026/05/18/opinion/dems-idiotic-rhetoric-on-courts-reveals-what-theyre-really-after/

There Is No Freedom in an Assassination Nation

Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Jacob Hornberger

“To date, President Trump and the U.S. national-security branch of the federal government (i.e., the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA) have assassinated around 200 people in small boats on the high seas near South America. Such assassinations are quickly becoming a normalized part of American life, especially within the mainstream press. There is no question but that the American people, as of now, can do little to stop these assassinations. Trump controls the congressional branch of government as well as the Justice Department. Ever since the conversion of the federal government to a national-security state, the Supreme Court has made it clear that it will not enforce the Constitution against anything the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA do in the name of ‘national security.'” (05/18/26)

https://www.fff.org/2026/05/18/there-is-no-freedom-in-an-assassination-nation/

Economics is Intuitive: Rejoinder to Craig

Source: Bet On It
by Bryan Caplan

“Basic economics makes psychologically normal humans angry and disgusted. Usually mildly, but the uglier the economic lesson, the more extreme the anger and disgust become. … They don’t think very carefully, but they still have strong opinions against, say, letting developers buy up townhomes in San Francisco to replace them with skyscrapers. Which is very weird. Why would anyone have strong opinions about issues they haven’t thought about very carefully? Because they’re relying on emotion instead!” (05/18/26)

https://www.betonit.ai/p/economics-is-intuitive-rejoinder

Trump’s Cabinet dramatically changed American foreign policy while the president made noise – a scholar of presidential rhetoric explains

Source: The Conversation
by Kevin Maloney

“The president’s rhetorical style, heard most recently on his mid-May trip to China, is explained by political allies as part of Trump’s strategic approach and criticized by his opponents as the dangerous musings of an unstable leader. In either case – whether it’s Trump’s defenders or detractors – it is increasingly difficult to ascertain whether the language of the president signals actual policy positions from the White House. If the words of the American president no longer function as reliable indicators of U.S. foreign policy, where can the public, U.S. allies and America’s adversaries look to better understand the administration’s geopolitical priorities? One answer may be found by examining the words of key Cabinet members.” (05/18/26)

https://theconversation.com/trumps-cabinet-dramatically-changed-american-foreign-policy-while-the-president-made-noise-a-scholar-of-presidential-rhetoric-explains-281307

Decades of Bad Energy Policy Left Oil Markets Vulnerable to Iran Shock

Source: The Daily Economy
by Rebak Attila

“Current energy prices reflect the delayed costs of regulatory priorities that misallocated investment and undermined energy resilience.” (05/18/26)

https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/decades-of-bad-energy-policy-left-oil-markets-vulnerable-to-iran-shock/