“Russian president Vladimir Putin continues to posture as a peacemaker – even as he pushes on with Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine. He struck his latest pacifist pose on Saturday, when he suddenly announced a truce for Easter, which would begin at 6pm that evening and end at midnight on Easter Sunday. ‘For this period, I order all military actions to cease,’ declared Putin. It was a grand gesture, made without the knowledge of Kyiv or indeed many within Putin’s own administration. And it proved predictably empty. Within hours of the truce supposedly beginning, Russian forces were busy violating it. … He tried, once again, to give the impression of being the peacemaker, while continuing to act as the aggressor.” (04/23/25)
“This week, the Kremlin said it was finally satisfied with Washington’s position on future NATO membership for Kiev. ‘We have heard from Washington at various levels that NATO membership for Ukraine has been ruled out,’ Russian spokesman Dmitry Peskov explained. ‘And of course this is something that brings us satisfaction and coincides with our position that Ukraine should not be a member of NATO and should not have prospects of integration with the North Atlantic Alliance.’ Since 2008, the North Atlantic Alliance has been promising to one day add Ukraine as a member of the bloc. However, Moscow protested Kiev accession to the alliance, arguing that it would present a major national security concern for Russia.” [editor’s note: It was never a “red line” because all concerned parties knew it was never going to happen – TLK] (04/23/25)
Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Jacob G Hornberger
“Amidst the horrific U.S. abuse of foreigners through the use of tariffs and police-state enforcement of immigration controls, it’s easy to forget that the U.S. government abuses foreigners in other ways, such as sanctions, embargoes, invasions, occupations, wars of aggression, torture, indefinite detention, and state-sponsored assassinations. Perhaps the longest-lasting, continuous example of this foreigner-abuse syndrome is the U.S. government’s horrific abuse of the Cuban people, which has gone on for more than 60 years. Given that there is no good reason for abusing the Cuban people — and there never has been one — this would be a good place to begin breaking with the longstanding, ongoing U.S. policy of abusing foreigners.” (04/22/25)
“President Donald Trump wants to fire Jerome Powell, chair of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve. No word yet on what Powell thinks about Trump’s job performance, but Powell says he doesn’t intend to quit before the end of his term next year. If Trump does try to fire him, he’ll see Trump in court. It’s a mess. It’s like being a little kid in a big crazy family watching the grown-ups have a nasty, screaming fight in front of the neighbors. It’s embarrassing. But it’s more than that. This big crazy family needs the neighbors – which includes everyone in the world who participates in our financial system – more than ever. There’s probably not much we can do about the fight. The grown-ups clearly don’t care much about us kids – if they did, they’d quit fighting and figure all this out.” (04/23/25)
“The last twelve years have been turbulent. We have witnessed the rapid rise of populist politics, the advent of new, earth-shattering technologies, and the fracturing of a tenuous international peace. Throughout all of the chaos, the Catholic Church has been steered by the firmly gentle hand of Pope Francis. Even as the instability of the twenty-first century bled into religion, Pope Francis attempted to guide the church in the direction of compassion and humility. That he did not always succeed at this task is not entirely surprising and no doubt he could have gone much further. Yet the simple, unadorned goodness of the late Pope is something that will be missed in this age of bombastic cruelty.” (04/22/25)
“In high school in West Texas in the late 1970s, psych meds were Veblen goods; that is, products desired as markers of status. They were conspicuously consumed by the children of the well-to-do with profound awareness that their schoolmates could afford neither the treatment nor the supposed cure. … in the decades since, this Veblen good went the way of all luxury purchases over time. It became mainstream. Psych meds are now common among adults and children. It’s a massive industry: like cell phones and TVs generations ago, they migrated through the class structure year by year. Now comes Unshrunk by Laura Delano, a book that could change everything. If it were not an autobiography, it would make great fiction of the gothic sort popular in the Victorian period.” (04/22/25)
“Usually, one hears one of two arguments for liberalizing immigration — the conservative, self-interested argument or the progressive, altruistic argument. The self-interested case for immigration basically emphasizes the economic benefits of immigration for the host country. The progressive case stresses the benefits for the immigrants themselves. But there is a third, classical liberal case, for immigration — namely that border controls and immigration restrictions lead to state violence not just against immigrants but citizens themselves. They curtail the liberties of native-borns because attempts to control outsiders inevitably result in controlling insiders as well.” (04/22/25)
“Amid the chaos of Donald Trump’s misrule (with his on-again, off-again trade war causing a sharp slide in the dollar, a rise in American borrowing costs, accelerating inflation, and possibly a severe recession), his attack on basic medical research is getting less attention. Elon Musk’s DOGE goons have slashed federal grants across the country, and Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is putting through further sweeping layoffs and budget cuts. Meanwhile, Trump’s war on immigrants is targeting top medical researchers. In particular, cancer research and treatment in America is being gored. Development of promising diagnostics and treatments has been called into question or frozen, clinical trials are being halted, and (unless the cuts are stopped) hospitals around the country will be bankrupted. Many Americans will die soon, and many more will die in future who could have been saved.” (04/23/25)
“The Trump administration’s breakneck pace is obviously no accident. While citizens are busy processing their shock over any one shattered norm or disregarded law, Trump is already on to the next one. This is the playbook authoritarians have used all over the world: First the leader removes those with expertise and independent thinking from the government and replaces them with leaders who are arrogant, ignorant, and extremely loyal. Next he takes steps to centralize his power and claim unprecedented authority. Along the way, he conducts an all-out assault on the truth so that the truth tellers are distrusted, corruption becomes the norm, and questioning him becomes impossible. The Constitution bends and then finally breaks. This is what tyrants do. Trump is doing it now in the United States.” (04/22/25)
“The Fed shouldn’t lower — or raise — interest rates. The Fed should dissolve, or be dissolved, and the job of ‘creating money’ should be left entirely to a free market. There’s simply not enough room in an op-ed column to explain the intricate processes through which the Fed has debased the value of American money over the last 112 years, but lengthy explanations aren’t really necessary. The results of giving a banking cartel a monopoly on the creation of ‘money,’ the power to create that ‘money’ from thin air, and a mandate to loan that ‘money’ to politicians who can borrow as much as they want as often as they want, were predictable from the start.” (04/22/25)
