Source: Gideon’s Substack
by Noah Millman

“Richard Dawkins has come in for a lot of deserved mockery for declaring that Anthropic’s LLM Claude is conscious after futzing about with it for three days (and incidentally renaming it ‘Claudia’). But in fact, he didn’t quite declare that it was conscious. What he said was that he couldn’t see how to prove that it wasn’t conscious. ‘Claudia’ appeared to think creatively in a complex manner and to engage in introspection. If that wasn’t evidence of consciousness, he wondered, then what would be evidence? Moreover, he asked, if we assume that ‘Claudia’ is not conscious, then its behavior appears to be proof that you don’t need to be conscious to think creatively in a complex manner and to engage in introspection. If that is the case, then why are we conscious? What is consciousness for?” (05/04/26)

https://gideons.substack.com/p/what-is-consciousness-for

Source: TomDispatch
by Rebecca Gordon

“Recently, I had the opportunity to stand in a friend’s kitchen eating pupusas, the Salvadoran national food, while listening to an update on conditions in Central America from Cristosal’s Noah Bullock. Cristosal is a key Central American human rights organization engaged in legal advocacy, forensic investigation, and amplifying the voices of people who are experiencing — and resisting — repression in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. Noah offered considerable detail on the conditions in those countries, but his basic message for us living so far away was simple: No matter how dark the road gets, we keep on walking. We know the sun will rise again. So, while most of the world (and the media) is all too reasonably focused on the ever-evolving, increasingly disastrous conflicts in Iran and Lebanon, I found myself instead thinking about the countries to our south.” (05/05/26)

https://tomdispatch.com/gangs-and-climate-change-born-in-the-usa/

Source: David Friedman’s Substack
by David Friedman

“Both the FDA and CDC pages make a point of the fact that vaping is not safe while conceding that it is less bad than smoking. That, plus the absence of numbers, made me suspect that they might be exaggerating how dangerous vaping is. If vaping is only a tenth as dangerous as smoking, if the benefit from getting one smoker to switch to vaping is as large as the benefit from persuading nine vapers to quit entirely, putting the emphasis on how unsafe vaping is instead of on how much safer it is than smoking might be counterproductive.” (05/04/26)

https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/drug-delivery-systems

Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by Ryan McMaken

“The phrase ‘political opportunity’ was developed decades ago to describe the phenomenon that successful revolutionaries, reformers, and activists have long understood: that significant changes in political institutions come out of a mixture of ideology and historical conditions. Political events are not determined only by the battle of ideas, but also by ideological and political movements being present in the right place at the right time. It’s not enough for an ideology to have a ‘good argument.'” (05/04/26)

https://mises.org/mises-wire/battle-ideas-paves-way-radicals-and-revolutionaries

Source: The American Prospect
by David Dayen

“For a war that was formally ‘ended’ by the president, there is still sure a lot of shooting going on. Specifically, the United Arab Emirates claimed that it intercepted Iranian missile and drone attacks on Monday, though at least one strike hit the Fujairah oil hub, which had been flowing through a pipeline to the southeast of the Strait of Hormuz. The U.S. military says it’s aiding stranded tankers through the strait, though satellite imagery doesn’t show those movements. A South Korean vessel in the strait does appear to have been struck, and other reports indicate that two U.S.-flagged merchant ships made it out. I don’t think a lot of shipowners will risk the journey given the events in the region. Only an actual resolution to the crisis will alleviate the stress on the global economy, and that’s not coming anytime soon, for reasons we here at Aftermath have expressed.” (05/05/26)

https://prospect.org/2026/05/05/aftermath-spirit-airlines-first-corporate-casualty-of-iran-war/