“Bayer bought Monsanto in 2018 for $63 billion — a few months before Monsanto lost its first liability case for causing non-Hodgkins lymphoma. I was not a close observer of the case, but the win seemed to hinge on documents obtained during discovery that revealed Monsanto knew a great deal about the injuries its product caused but deliberately hid those findings. Once there was a win — and the jury awarded the plaintiff with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma hundreds of millions, later reduced — the bandwagon effect began, with other lawyers seeking plaintiffs to sue Monsanto. … Bayer, a German company, hired a Texan, Bill Anderson, as CEO to come to its aid. CEO Anderson’s career hinged on stanching Bayer’s bleed. He initiated a very expensive series of legal and political strategies in the hopes that one would be successful. He also formed a new agricultural industry lobby group with a huge advertising budget.” (04/14/26)
“I no longer trust ‘we the people,’ because of the powers influencing them. Media and government schooling form their general ideas on reality and governance. Therefore, it’s not a case of the voter choosing the politicians. Instead, the system is conditioning and conforming the voter to the authorities’ desires. In democracies, the people are kept occupied working and paying taxes, too busy to acquire information outside the approved sources. You will find they know and care far more about the next iPhone than political philosophy. Of those who hold some interest, 95% just toe the party line, holding the same opinion as the primary media source they listen to. They lack both the desire and time to expand their horizons.” (04/14/26)
Source: RealClearPolitics
by Mark Mayfield & Megan Cannedy
“Headlines for the past few weeks have capitalized on the cruel connotations surrounding conversion therapy, proclaiming that the United States Supreme Court struck down ‘a conversion therapy ban.’ The problem is that the Supreme Court, in an 8-1 decision that included Justices Kagan and Sotomayor, told Colorado something that needed to be said: Your law was never actually about that. Chiles v. Salazar is being reported as a ‘conversion therapy’ ruling. That framing is a political bait-and-switch. What the court struck down was a government mandate on what therapists may say to a consenting minor, forbidden words depending entirely on which direction they pointed. That is not a ban on conversion therapy. That is ideological discrimination dressed in therapeutic clothing.” (04/14/26)
“Like the old Wild West, the Moon offers the prospect of resources to exploit and land to settle. Artemis II’s successful mission is just the beginning.” (04/14/26)
“Thanks to NCLA, I paid nothing to sue the Commonwealth of Massachusetts for violating my Fourth Amendment rights except some of my time, a little here and a little there, spread over half a decade. The suit never went to trial, so I did not even have to appear in court, though I could have gone to a preliminary hearing once if I wanted. I declined because I had already fled Massachusetts for distant freer climes. I also received nothing from the settlement except the satisfaction of helping to make my fellow Americans a little less like the subjects of a monarchy and a little more like the citizens of a free country. My name came first on the plaintiff side because I was the first to sign on, blazing a trail that made it easier for others aggrieved to join later.” (04/14/26)
“Although the international community still knows very little about the highest-level peace talks between the US and Iran in 47 years, facilitated by Shehbaz Sharif, the Prime Minister of Pakistan, some obvious red flags appeared in the morning-after news reports—as JD Vance, Steve Witkoff, and Jared Kushner flew home less than 24 hours after their arrival in Islamabad. As The New York Times reported: ‘Vice President JD Vance summed up the failure of 21 hours of negotiations with Iran in one sentence: ‘They have chosen not to accept our terms.’ To Iranian officials, that line reflected their biggest problem with the talks: The United States they argue, had not come to negotiate.'” (04/14/26)
Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Lawrence W Reed
“When Liberty International in collaboration with Libertarianism.org engaged me a year ago to apply the insights of Leonard E. Read’s famous 1958 essay, ‘I, Pencil,’ to the smartphone, I eagerly accepted the challenge. All of us involved in the project believed that it was time to ‘update’ the essay by adapting its message to a product everybody uses today. Why? Because, we thought, pencils are fading into memory, overtaken by a growing number of competing writing implements. Then I ran across some information that surprised me. Global pencil production is actually setting records year after year.” (04/14/26)
“To build public support for rolling back marriage rights, new campaigns have been repeating the claims that legal recognition of same-sex marriages may harm children or even the stability of different-sex marriages. These are some of the same concerns that were raised in the years prior to the Obergefell decision. They were groundless then, and, more than 10 years later, the data confirm these fears to be unfounded.” (04/14/26)
“Donald Trump loathes mail-in voting — except, of course, when he uses this method to cast his own ballot, as he did in a recent Florida special election. Frustrated by Congressional inaction, Trump issued an executive order last week to restrict what he likes to call ‘mail-in cheating.’ Actual proven cases of mail voting fraud? Those amount to a whopping 0.000043 percent of total mail ballots, according to Brookings experts. Trump’s real fear: that vote by mail gives Democrats an edge. In reality, broad, cross-partisan swaths of our electorate benefit from access to this convenient means of exercising our most basic democratic right.” (04/14/26)
Source: The American Conservative
by W James Antle III
“There is simply nothing that has happened in American politics between Trump’s epic 2024 political comeback and the Democrats’ romp in last year’s off-year elections running on an affordability mantra that would suggest voters prioritize a foreign war over higher prices. A thousand clips of Trump expressing his distaste for the ayatollahs or a hundred polls showing rank-and-file Republicans still support him do not prove otherwise. … Salvaging the Republicans’ midterm election prospects is going to require extricating the U.S. from the war in Iran while keeping the Strait of Hormuz open, whether GOP lawmakers know it (or are willing to publicly admit it) or not.” (04/14/26)
