The Surveillance State Found Its Philosopher

Source: Libertarian Institute
by Thomas Karat

“There is a line in the Fourth Amendment that was supposed to settle this. The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated, and no warrant shall issue but upon probable cause. It is not a suggestion. It does not contain an exception for emergencies, for terrorism, for immigration, or for your own good. It was written by men who had watched a government treat a population as a thing to be catalogued, and who meant to draw a line that no administration could cross no matter how frightened the public could be made to feel. That line is being erased right now, not by a vote and not by an amendment, but by a software contract. And the man holding the pen spent his academic career studying exactly how this happens.” (06/05/26)

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/the-surveillance-state-found-its-philosopher

Israel Could Solve Its PR Problem By Simply Ceasing To Be Evil

Source: Caitlin Johnstone, Rogue Journalist
by Caitlin Johnstone

“Israel’s +972 Magazine reports that the Israeli military establishment has launched a training program designed to ‘influence public consciousness’ around the world, with courses aimed at training hundreds of operatives per year in strategies for ‘actively disrupting or manipulating the beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors of target audiences.’ … It’s such a trip how Zionists just take it as a given that the only way to improve public perception of Israel is to ramp up efforts to manipulate the thoughts people think about it. They never give serious attention to the possibility that Israel would have a lot more public approval if it stopped fucking murdering innocent civilians all the time and fucking torturing people and raping captives with trained rape dogs. Israel can’t possibly be wrong; only our thoughts about Israel can be wrong.” (06/06/26)

https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2026/06/06/israel-could-solve-its-pr-problem-by-simply-ceasing-to-be-evil/

Eli Lilly says next-gen obesity drug curbs sleep apnea, among other benefits

Source: Reuters

“Drugmaker Eli Lilly presented trial results to medical professionals on Saturday showing its next-generation ​obesity drug retatrutide curbed sleep apnea severity in ‌addition to boosting weight loss and helping knee pain. In a Phase 3 trial, Lilly found a weekly injection of retatrutide reduced ​moderate-to-severe obstructive sleep apnea severity by 60.6% ​in adults with obesity. Lilly’s older drug Zepbound ⁠is approved for the condition. In the same trial, the ​drug reduced knee osteoarthritis pain by up to 73.1%, ​Lilly found. The results were presented at an American Diabetes Association conference in New Orleans.” (06/06/26)

https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/eli-lilly-says-next-gen-obesity-drug-curbs-sleep-apnea-among-other-benefits-2026-06-06/

Civilizations Are Transaction Costs

Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by Vladyslav Manzyuk

“A state works when its formal institutions align with and reinforce the informal order beneath it. It fails when it overrides that order. Yugoslavia assembled populations whose informal institutions — Austro-Hungarian civil law in Slovenia and Croatia, historically distinct legal traditions further east, shaped by Ottoman frameworks, distinct religious frameworks governing commercial obligation — had long created high transaction costs across the same lines the state tried to erase. Iraq assembled three distinct Ottoman administrative provinces. Borders do not erase gradients. These are not failures of tolerance or political will — and it is worth noting that no amount of well-intentioned, constitution-drafting has ever repealed an institutional gradient. They are the predictable outcome of a constructed order imposed on an incompatible spontaneous one, which pushes back through informal markets, parallel institutions, and eventually political fragmentation.” (06/06/26)

https://mises.org/mises-wire/civilizations-are-transaction-costs

A financial catastrophe is looming. America forgot to care.

Source: Washington Post
by Matthew Lynn

“The price that the U.S. government has to pay to borrow money for 30 years has already punched through 5 percent a year, its highest level since the financial crisis of 2007. For 10-year money, the annual price is 4.6 percent and climbing. Amid all the noise about the rise of artificial intelligence and the booming space economy, something far more significant is happening in the financial markets. The cost of borrowing is being reset. And that raises some intriguing questions. Could the politics of deficit reduction stage a comeback? And are voters in any mood to pay attention if it does?” (06/05/26)

https://archive.is/AFyZt

Child’s play is more than just that

Source: Christian Science Monitor
by staff

“As schools across the United States let out for summer vacation, more parents and policymakers are trying to make sure kids can get out there and just be kids – by stepping away from screens, playing in the open air, or biking to a friend’s house or the local store. And, they say, kids should be allowed to do all of this without a parent hovering over them – or that parent being held liable for not doing so. In May, the U.S. House introduced a bipartisan bill to promote ‘childhood independence and protect parents who allow their children to play outside unsupervised, get off screens, and develop social skills.’ Earlier this year, Indiana became the 13th state to pass a measure shielding parents from child neglect allegations for certain unsupervised activities.” (06/05/26)

https://www.csmonitor.com/Editorials/the-monitors-view/2026/0605/Child-s-play-is-more-than-just-that

NY: Court Pauses Default Judgment After Lawyer Argues 39,069 Bitcoin Wallets Were Not Abandoned

Source: Bitcoin.com

“A New York attorney intervened to stop what could have been the largest courtroom judgment in bitcoin in history, filing an amicus brief that persuaded a judge to freeze proceedings targeting nearly 40,000 dormant wallets collectively holding an estimated 3.8 million BTC. The legal battle is unfolding alongside a wave of onchain activity from some of bitcoin’s oldest addresses. On June 6, 2026, Galaxy Research flagged a transaction involving 47.26 BTC, worth approximately $2.88 million, moving out of a wallet that had been untouched since June 17, 2011, a dormancy period of more than 15 years. … Each of these movements chips away at the central premise of the lawsuit: that these wallets were abandoned.” (06/06/26)
https://news.bitcoin.com/ny-court-pauses-default-judgment-after-lawyer-argues-39069-bitcoin-wallets-were-not-abandoned/

AI’s Facelessness Risks Soullessness — and With It Liberalism

Source: The UnPopulist
by Michal G Holzman

“Progress and technological development brought the atom bomb and death camps, too. To some extent the mid-century crisis led to an expansion of liberalism under the umbrella of U.S. global hegemony. The question of the 1940s Civil Rights Movement — ‘How can we fight for human equality overseas and then return home to Jim Crow?’ — became the philosophical underpinning for massively expanded access to the liberal project. The universal message of human dignity was on the march, literally and figuratively. It extended its reach across lines of race, religion, sex, and sexuality in ways that would have been practically unimaginable a generation before. But even as liberalism expanded it was being undercut. In response to both the perverted turn of modernity and the creeping spread of a postmodern nihilism, traditionalism grew, and people began to give up on progress and retreat into pre-modern bubbles of ritual, isolated community, and centralized authority.” (06/05/26)

https://www.theunpopulist.net/p/ais-facelessness-risks-soullessnessand