Source: Reason
by Tosin Akintola
“Before demanding more money from America’s wealthiest, lawmakers should account for the billions of dollars the federal government wastes each year.” (05/20/26)
Source: Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression
by Matthew Harwood
“By the time of his death and subsequent desecration, Paine had fallen out of the American pantheon of Founding Fathers, reviled as an alcoholic infidel. But as we celebrate the 250th anniversary of both Common Sense and the American independence his pen sparked, Paine deserves his due and our gratitude. Without the words of Paine, the most modern of the Founding Fathers, there may be no United States of America to even celebrate today.” (05/20/26)
https://www.fire.org/news/thomas-paine-american-historys-winter-soldier
Source: BBC News [UK state media]
“The US has charged former Cuban leader Raúl Castro with conspiracy to kill US nationals and other crimes over the downing of two planes between Cuba and Florida in 1996. The case unveiled on Wednesday – a revival of charges originally from 2003 – accuses Castro and five others in the shooting down of an aircraft belonging to Cuban American group Brothers to the Rescue and killing four people, including three Americans. Castro, now 94, was the head of the country’s armed forces and faced international condemnation over the crash.” [editor’s note: There’s significant debate over whether the aircraft were in the Cuban regime’s claimed airspace, but no debate whatsoever about the fact that they weren’t in the US regime’s claimed airspace. Also, let’s talk about the recent US regime’s publicly confessed murders of boat crews, also outside areas of US jurisdiction – TLK] (05/20/26)
Source: The Daily Economy
by Matt Zwolinski
“The term ‘libertarian’ first emerged in the 1850s as a self-description for a French anarcho-communist who thought private property and the state were two sides of the same coin. By 1913, Charles Sprading was using it to describe a tent that included Republicans, Democrats, Socialists, Single-Taxers, Anarchists, and Women’s Rights advocates. By the mid-twentieth century, under the influence of Leonard Read and the Foundation for Economic Education, it had narrowed to mean support for free markets and limited government. By the 1970s, the Nozick-Rand-Rothbard synthesis had narrowed it further still — to a particular form of rationalist, rights-based, free-market absolutism. Then, in the 1990s and 2000s, the label fragmented again. Bleeding-heart libertarians, left-libertarians, paleolibertarians, neoreactionaries — all under the same tent, none in agreement about what the tent contains. The current crackup isn’t an aberration. It’s what libertarianism has always done.” (05/20/26)
https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/why-libertarianism-keeps-splintering/
Source: Washington Post
“What Thomas Massie’s loss means for MAGA.” (05/20/26)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/podcasts/make-it-make-sense/what-thomas-massies-loss-means-for-maga/
Source: Reuters
“Ukrainian drones struck Russia’s Rosneft-owned Syzran oil refinery in Samara region overnight, Ukrainian military and President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Thursday. ‘Another Ukrainian long-range sanction against Russian oil refining – and we are continuing this line of action,’ Zelenskiy said on the Telegram messaging app. … Two people were killed in a drone attack on the town of Syzran in Samara region, the local governor said, without mentioning whether any infrastructure was damaged in the attack. Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces said the attack caused a large fire at the refinery, whose annual processing capacity ranges from 7 to 8.9 million tons of crude oil.” (05/21/26)
Source: The Atlantic
by Russell Berman
“For a long time, Representative Thomas Massie confidently defied an ironclad law of modern Republican politics — that to oppose President Trump was to start a ticking clock on your electoral career. ‘I’m not worried about losing,’ he told me last spring inside the Capitol, as he explained to a group of reporters the strength of his support within his Kentucky district. … last night Massie met the same fate as so many of Trump’s Republican critics: He lost his primary. … For months leading up to the primary, Massie had held up his race as an important test case for the Trump era: If he could criticize the president and win anyway, his victory would embolden other Republicans to speak out and vote against Trump when they felt compelled to, loosening his viselike grip on the party.” (05/20/26)
Source: US News & World Report
“Two police officers who defended the U.S. Capitol from rioters on January 6, 2021, filed a lawsuit on Wednesday seeking to halt President Donald Trump’s nearly $1.8 billion fund to compensate victims of political ‘weaponization.’ In a complaint filed in federal court in Washington, former Capitol Police officer Harry Dunn and Metropolitan Police Department officer Daniel Hodges alleged Trump has ‘created a $1.776 billion taxpayer-funded slush fund to finance the insurrectionists and paramilitary groups that commit violence in his name.’ The lawsuit seeks a court order blocking payments from the fund, calling it ‘the most brazen act of presidential corruption this century.’ Trump settled on Monday with the Internal Revenue Service, agreeing to drop his $10 billion lawsuit over the leak of his tax returns during his first term. As part of the settlement, the Justice Department created the fund to compensate victims of political ‘weaponization.'” (05/20/26)
Source: Reason
by Robby Soave
“Data center panic is fueled by concerns about electricity and water usage. Many Americans wrongly believe that data centers are driving up their electric bill, even though evidence suggests the exact opposite: Data centers may actually decrease electricity costs for their neighbors. Water use fears are even more unreasonable. Data centers don’t actually use all that much water. … California’s almond farms consume 4.2 billion gallons of waters per day, according to Reason‘s Christian Britschgi. Data centers consume just 46 million gallons per day. Those numbers will certainly rise over time, but compared to all the other things that use water — golf courses account for 1.4 billion gallons per day — it’s just a drop in the bucket.” (05/20/26)
https://reason.com/2026/05/20/data-centers-use-less-water-than-almond-farms-and-do-more-good/
Source: Al Jazeera [Qatari state media]
“Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has said it coordinated the transit of 26 vessels through the Strait of Hormuz in the past 24 hours, as talks between Washington and Tehran over the resumption of traffic through the narrow waterway remain stalled. ‘Traffic through the Strait of Hormuz is being carried out with permission and in coordination with the IRGC Navy,’ the statement carried by Iran’s state-affiliated ISNA news agency said on Wednesday.” (05/20/26)