Source: Libertarian Institute
“We sit down with Nick Cleveland-Stout of the Quincy Institute (and a writer at Drop Site News) to track a sweeping Israeli influence campaign in the United States that goes far beyond the usual Capitol Hill lobbying.” (05/13/26)
Source: Aaron Ross Powell’s Blog
by Aaron Ross Powell
“Let a thousand mutually suspicious communities bloom.” (05/13/26)
Source: The UnPopulist
by Mohammed Nosseir
“The Western right’s smearing of the entire religion and the left’s romanticization of it are both misguided.” (05/13/26)
https://www.theunpopulist.net/p/political-islam-is-rank-populism
Source: Associated Press
“A ship anchored off the east coast of the United Arab Emirates has been seized and is heading toward Iranian territorial waters, the British military said Thursday. The United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations center said it received reports that the vessel was taken by unauthorized personnel while anchored 38 nautical miles (70 kilometers, 44 miles) northeast of the UAE port of Fujairah, near the Strait of Hormuz. … UKMTO did not name the ship and said it is investigating. There were no immediate claims of responsibility for the seizure.” (05/14/26)
Source: Law & Liberty
by Jeffrey Bilbro
“Whenever a new technology comes down the pike, some people identify themselves as agents who can benefit from it, and others see themselves as victims who will be harmed by it. Agents get excited about how AI will enable them to get work done more easily and quickly. They can generate code, whip out targeted ad campaigns, analyze data, cheat on quizzes, respond to customer inquiries, or eliminate military targets. Victims fear that AI will empower the systems that already constrain or oppress them. They will suffer from software bugs or security vulnerabilities, be inundated with AI slop, get surveilled by governments and corporations, have their relationships infected by mistrust, get lost in labyrinthine bureaucracies, or be eliminated (perhaps erroneously) by an autonomous drone. This distinction helps make sense of the wildly varying responses to AI technologies: Agents generate utopian hype narratives while victims succumb to doomer fears.” (05/13/26)
https://lawliberty.org/forum/the-decline-and-fall-of-human-agency/
Source: The Political Orphanage
“Fighting Crime Like an Economist.” (05/13/26)
https://politicalorphanage.libsyn.com/fighting-crime-like-an-economist
Source: BBC News [UK state media]
“Two people have been killed and children are among dozens wounded after Russia launched a massive wave of strikes against Ukraine overnight, officials have said. Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko said it was an ‘especially difficult night for Kyiv,’ where rescuers are searching through the rubble of a residential building after a combined missile and drone attack on the capital. At least 40 people have been injured, including two children, the city’s mayor said. Some 31 of those are being treated in hospital. It marks the third day in a row Ukraine has reported deaths, as Moscow ramps up its assault after a three-day ceasefire expired on Monday.” (05/14/26)
Source: Liberalism.org
by Radley Balko
“At the state and local level, police officers (and government employees in general) are protected from lawsuits by a policy called qualified immunity. The policy isn’t in the Constitution, nor was it ever enacted by Congress. It’s a legal fiction that the U.S. Supreme Court invented from whole cloth. In fact, qualified immunity’s very existence cuts against the clear intent of the Fourteenth Amendment. … We commonly hear that ‘ignorance of the law is no excuse’ — you can’t defend yourself from criminal charges by claiming that you didn’t know that what you did was illegal. Qualified immunity not only provides an excuse for law enforcement officers when they violate someone’s constitutional rights, it’s an incentive for police agencies to keep their officers ignorant of how courts expect officers to treat members of the public.” (04/13/26)
Source: Al Jazeera [Qatari state media]
“The Philippine Senate President says that a politician wanted by the International Court (ICC) was no longer in the Senate building where he had been taking refuge, fearing his arrest. Senator Ronald ‘Bato’ dela Rosa, the former national police chief and top enforcer of former President Rodrigo Duterte’s bloody ‘war on drugs,’ has been under Senate protection and is wanted for crimes against humanity, the same charges Duterte is accused of. ‘The sergeant-at-arms has confirmed that he is no longer in the building,’ Senate President Alan Peter Cayetano told reporters on Thursday. The announcement comes a day after gunfire rang out at the Senate, where dela Rosa had been holed up. Confusion and chaos filled the legislature as people inside scrambled for cover on Wednesday, hours after dela Rosa, had appealed to his supporters on social media to mobilise and said law enforcement agents were planning on arresting him.” (05/14/26)
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/5/14/philippine-politician-wanted-by-icc-flees-senate
Source: Eastern New Mexico News
by Kent McManigal
“People find many reasons to reject liberty. Fear. Envy. Ignorance. Tradition. In fact, there are probably as many reasons to reject liberty as there are people on this planet. Those whose careers depend on violating liberty will use any excuse they are handed. If they use envy, they can impose socialism and raise taxes on the rich. They can make people believe they have a ‘right’ to things that others must work to provide them. It can never be your right to enslave others! Using ignorance, political criminals lie and hope that too few notice to do anything about it. It’s how we get things like ‘assault weapon’ rules, carbon credits, and the war on (some) drugs. They also combine ignorance with envy, so those cheated in the brain department will demand to be coddled to dumb down society so that no one feels stupid.” (05/13/26)