Source: SFGate
“Police have arrested a 36-year-old Mountain View woman in connection with a fire at the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center in Carmel Valley earlier this year. Announced Tuesday by the Monterey County Sheriff’s Office, the arrest comes after an investigation that revealed GuoGuo Lu was allegedly making online statements tied to the fire and threats toward other Buddhist temples in the state. The fire happened on March 27 at the oldest Japanese Buddhist Soto Zen monastery in the country, officials said. The sheriff’s office said Lu is facing several charges, including arson, making criminal threats and committing a felony hate crime.” (06/03/26)
https://www.sfgate.com/centralcoast/article/monastery-fire-arrest-carmel-22290279.php
Source: Liberal Currents
“The Two American Reconstructions: An Appraisal, Reflection.” (06/04/26)
https://www.liberalcurrents.com/the-two-american-reconstructions-an-appraisal-reflection-half-the-answer-86-with-thomas-zimmer/
Source: Paul Krugman
by Paul Krugman
“Another failing war Trump won’t end.” (06/04/26)
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/illegal-tariffs-round-3
Source: Libertarian Institute
by Joseph Solis-Mullen
“Famed for his contributions to the hard sciences—most notably his theory of heliocentricity—the sixteenth-century astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus was also an acute analyst of monetary policy. To that end, Ralph Benko has done us all a great service with this new edition of Copernicus’s classic, if neglected, treatise On the Minting of Money. Indeed, its lessons, though nearly five centuries old, remain evergreen.” (06/04/26)
https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/copernicus-at-500
Source: The Bulwark
by Bret Devereaux
“Homer is back in the discourse on account of Christopher Nolan’s upcoming film, The Odyssey. The latest controversy began with Elon Musk, among others, protesting the supposed inaccuracy of casting Lupita Nyong’o as Helen, a fictional character, who among other fantastic elements is the daughter of the god Zeus and was laid as an egg by her human mother. … the fight over Homer represents just another skirmish in the campaign mounted by bigoted very-online right-wing self-described ‘chuds’ to claim Greek and Roman culture for their own fascist, or at least fascist-adjacent, ideology, which demands the exclusion of minorities, women, and LGBTQ people.” (06/04/26)
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/why-stone-faced-fascists-keep-getting-antiquity-wrong-x-twitter-elon-musk-ancient-greece-roman-empire
Source: Politico
“The oil industry is warning the Trump administration that a Hormuz-sized hole in the world’s petroleum market is steadily draining inventories to levels that are likely to send global energy prices surging in the next several weeks, according to four executives. Industry executives have flagged the issue to senior White House officials and Cabinet members in recent weeks as part of the Trump administration’s ongoing dialogue with the U.S. energy industry, the people said. The warnings came as recently as late last month as data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration and other sources began showing that fuel makers were increasingly relying on oil and fuel from their storage tanks to replace products no longer arriving from the Middle East.” (06/04/260
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/06/04/oil-price-spike-white-house-hormuz-00949435
Source: The Hill
“Robby Soave gives his radar on the recent anniversary of a tweet from NPR about public health experts signing a letter that supported the anti-racism protests during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.” (06/04/26)
https://thehill.com/hilltv/5903632-rising-june-4-2026/
Source: Cobden Centre
by Max Rangeley
“There is a particular kind of financial wisdom that used to be passed down at kitchen tables. A grandparent, someone who remembered harder times, would explain that the first obligation of a responsible person was to spend less than they earned, put something away, and let patience do its quiet work. The savings account was not a sophisticated instrument. It was a vessel for deferred consumption—a way of translating present discipline into future security. The interest it paid was modest, but it moved in the same direction over time. That world has not merely changed. It has been, in a precise and largely unacknowledged sense, inverted.” (06/04/26)
https://www.cobdencentre.org/2026/06/there-is-no-reprieve-in-the-feds-war-on-savings/
Source: Los Angeles Times
by Jackie Calmes
“Just a month out from America’s celebration of its 250th birthday, the national capital is a mess. And I’m talking about the sites central to the pilgrimages that millions of Americans make each year to Washington, especially the White House. The once-verdant park remains a construction site, with makeshift fencing only partly obscuring the vast scar that was once the East Wing and the Jacqueline Kennedy Garden. Cranes sway in place of the felled trees, to build President Trump’s billion-dollar ballroom despite court orders and overwhelming public opinion against it. The South Lawn has been replaced with a gargantuan circus-tent-like arena for Ultimate Fighting Championship cage matches and a Trump-picked audience of thousands. Yes, cage matches. To mark not the nation’s birthday but the president’s 80th on June 14. Because it’s all about Trump.” (06/04/26)
https://archive.is/Lgc8x
Source: New York Post
“A massive fire tore through multiple buildings of an historic psychiatric facility in the Hudson Valley, wild footage shows. The blaze erupted Wednesday at the abandoned Hudson River Psychiatric Center in Poughkeepsie, which was established in 1867 and placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2007 after closing years earlier, according to Pix 11. … The cause of the fire remains under investigation, but officials confirmed the campus is not connected to the electric grid.” (06/04/26)
https://nypost.com/2026/06/04/us-news/inferno-tears-through-historic-new-york-psychiatric-center/
