Source: The American Conservative
by Peter Van Buren
“Anonymized political hits are a different beast from principled whistleblowing.” (05/04/26)
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/not-all-leaks-are-created-equal/
Source: Town Hall
by Jay Rogers
“Picture yourself at the kitchen table on a Saturday morning, coffee getting cold, sorting through the mail. Among the usual suspects (credit card statements, HOA notices, something from the DMV that is probably not good news), you find a bill you did not ask for. The federal government has quietly added a line item to your household tab: $18,000 a year. No vote. No debate. Just arithmetic catching up with decades of bipartisan borrowing without consequences. That is precisely what the Brookings Institution’s 2026 fiscal chart book shows is required to keep the debt-to-GDP ratio capped at its current level through 2036. Budget fellow Jessica Riedl calculates that stabilization demands an extra $2.6 trillion in annual revenue by that year. Spread across approximately 144 million American households, the arithmetic is brutal: roughly $18,000 per household, per year.” (05/04/26)
Source: NBC News
“The cruise ship at the center of a deadly outbreak of hantavirus has been refused permission to dock, with 149 people still on board — two of them seriously ill. The virus is suspected to have killed three people and sickened three more, with one patient hospitalized in critical condition. … The remaining passengers, who are from 23 different countries, including 17 Americans, are required to follow strict precautionary measures, including isolation and medical monitoring, the cruise operator said. The west African nation of Cape Verde said it had decided not to let the cruise ship, the Hondius, dock at the port of Praia as a precautionary measure, Reuters reported. The cruise operator, Oceanwide Expeditions, said in a statement Monday that the ship may sail from Cape Verde to Las Palmas or Tenerife in the Canary Islands and dock there.” (05/04/26)
Source: Libertarian Institute
“Dave DeCamp: The Ceasefire Is Dying, Israel Waits for Trump’s Greenlight to Restart War.” (05/04/26)
Source: Libertarian Institute
by Thomas Karat
“The neocons got their war. The question every taxpayer and every voter who believed Trump’s promises should be asking is: who else got what they wanted? The answer is not difficult to find. It is sitting in earnings calls, stock filings, and futures trading records. Washington does not even bother to hide it anymore.” (05/04/26)
https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/pay-day-learn-who-cashed-in-when-trump-went-to-war
Source: Foreign Policy In Focus
by Edward Hunt
“Some lawmakers have grown so alarmed by the Trump administration’s actions in Latin America that they are beginning to accuse the administration of gangsterism. Representative Stephen Lynch (D-MA) saw the possibility of gangsterism at the start of the second Trump administration when he warned that the United States could ‘join the ranks of gangster nations,’ but there is a growing sense in Congress that the day has arrived. At a congressional hearing last month, Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-TX) asserted that the Trump administration is exploiting the US military to take Latin American resources for US corporations. Castro seemingly channeled the anti-war critiques of Smedley Butler, the US military hero of the early 20th century, who condemned war as a racket and lamented his exploitation as a racketeer for capitalism.” (05/04/26)
Source: ABC News
“An Iraqi court on Monday sentenced four people to six years in prison on charges of promoting the ideas of the banned Baath Party led by former leader Saddam Hussein. The Karkh Criminal Court said in a statement that those convicted were found in possession of the banned materials on their cellphones in Kirkuk province during 2025 and 2026. After the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq toppled Saddam’s autocratic rule, the country implemented a broad de-Baathification policy aimed at removing the influence of the Baath Party from state institutions.” (05/04/26)
Source: Lions of Liberty
“The Truth About Chronic Disease with Dr. Darrell Wolfe.” (05/04/26)
https://www.lionsofliberty.com/episodes/ff-the-truth-about-chronic-disease-with-dr-darrell-wolfe
Source: Reason
by Katherine Mangu-Ward
“One of the more encouraging developments in artificial intelligence is that some of the people building it have started acting like it might be dangerous. Not in the Skynet sense or the HAL 9000 sense or even the ‘oops, it deleted all my emails’ sense, though AI might be dangerous in all of those ways too. The question is whether the latest models are dangerous to infrastructure, dangerous to privacy, dangerous to security, and dangerous to the blurry line between public and private. For years, Big Tech has been heavy on the gas, light on the brakes — and we have all benefited tremendously, even as angry debates about the downsides have raged. But with AI, at least in a few notable cases, the companies themselves have begun doing something unusual. They have started saying no.” (for publication 06/26)
https://reason.com/2026/05/04/ai-companies-learn-the-word-no/
Source: Persuasion
by Julie Guirado
“Earlier this year, a prominent company with millions of customers announced a major product upgrade — albeit with one little catch. If this new product was released to the public, the company said, it could be used to disrupt — and perhaps destroy — civilizational infrastructure, from financial markets to transportation systems to power and water utilities. But fear not! The company hastened to reassure the public that it had the situation under control. The company would decide, on its own terms, what the world needed to know, who should be called in to contain the problem, and how much gratitude the rest of us should feel for being spared a catastrophe we never knew was coming. No public accountability or government intervention required. This, of course, is the story of Anthropic and its latest AI model.” (05/04/26)
https://www.persuasion.community/p/the-case-for-ai-regulation