Source: Responsible Statecraft
by Muhammad Saad
“In 1863, Francis Lieber, the Prussian-American jurist commissioned by Abraham Lincoln to codify the laws of land warfare, wrote that no soldier may kill an enemy ‘who has laid down his arms.’ War, however brutal, must remain an act performed by a morally responsible agent who can account for what he has done and to whom it has been done. The Lieber Code was imperfect. Its application was racially selective and its humanitarian ambitions frequently betrayed in practice. But its foundational premise survived two world wars, the drafting of the Geneva Conventions and the development of every weapons system from the machine gun to the precision-guided munition. Its premise is that lethal force requires a human being who can be identified, interrogated, and held to account. Today, AI-powered targeting systems fundamentally break this premise.” (04/24/26)
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/ai-weapons/
Source: Center for a Stateless Society
by Kevin Carson
“It makes no sense to seek the historical origin of money unless we start from a definition of what money is. I start from L. Randall Wray’s contention that the defining feature of money is providing a unit of account, and that all the other conventionally assigned attributes of money are secondary where they exist at all.” (04/25/26)
https://c4ss.org/content/61129
Source: Common Dreams
“In the late hours of Friday night, Republicans on the Senate Banking Committee scheduled a vote to advance President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Federal Reserve, shortly after the Justice Department announced it was dropping its criminal probe into the current head of the central bank, Jerome Powell. The committee vote will take place on April 29, putting megarich financier Kevin Warsh on track for full Senate confirmation by the time Powell’s term as Fed chair ends on May 15. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), the top Democrat on the banking panel, said in a statement early Saturday morning that ‘either the Republican majority is fooled easily or they are hoping to fool the American people’, arguing that the Justice Department only agreed to drop its widely condemned probe of Powell—for now, at least—to clear the way for Warsh’s confirmation.” (04/25/26)
https://www.commondreams.org/news/kevin-warsh-confirmation-vote
Source: Crooked Media
“Trump Loses the Gerrymander War.” (04/24/26)
https://audioboom.com/posts/8894902-trump-loses-the-gerrymander-war
Source: Libertarian Institute
by Jim Bovard
“Israel’s bombing of Lebanon has reportedly killed more than a thousand civilians this year. Israel also drove out more than a half million civilians from southern Lebanon as part of an effort to commandeer that territory. Israel’s bombing has been so indiscriminate that even President Donald Trump objected. … I have the same recommendation now that I had in a 1987 USA Today piece opposing deployment of the U.S. Navy to the Persian Gulf: ‘This is not our war, and there is no profit in U.S. intervention.’ GTFO remains the best Middle East policy for America.” (04/24/26)
https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/an-all-american-retort-to-israels-invasion-of-lebanon
Source: Caitlin Johnstone, Rogue Journalist
by Caitlin Johnstone
“One of the most frustrating things about Israel apologists is how they constantly pretend to believe things they don’t really believe in order to push Israeli PR. There’s a tweet going around by a rabbi named Elchanan Poupko that says ‘I had never met a Zionist who does not care also for the lives of innocent Palestinians. I have never met an anti-zionist who does care for the lives of israelis. That is the difference between us.’ This person does not believe his own claim. He is knowingly lying about what he thinks is true about Zionists. A Penn State survey published in Israeli media last year found that 82 percent of Jewish Israelis support the forced expulsion of all Palestinians from Gaza. Nearly half, 47 percent, said the IDF should kill all inhabitants of any city they capture — that’s inhabitants, not combatants.” (04/25/26)
https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2026/04/25/israel-apologists-lie-about-their-feelings-and-beliefs-and-other-notes/
Source: France 24 [French state media]
“Tibetans outside Chinese control vote on Sunday for a government-in-exile, an election of heightened significance as they brace for an inevitable, eventual, future without their revered spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama. The India-based Central Tibetan Administration (CTA) — condemned by China as ‘nothing but a separatist political group’ — is a key institution for the exiles, especially after the Dalai Lama handed over political power in 2011. … Polling is due to take place in 27 countries — but not China. The 91,000 registered voters including Buddhist monks in the high Himalayas, political exiles in South Asia’s megacities and refugees in Australia, Europe and North America. … The five-year parliament, which sits twice a year, has 45 members from across the world: 30 representing three traditional provinces, 10 representing five religious traditions, and five representing the diaspora.” (04/26/26)
https://www.france24.com/en/asia-pacific/20260426-exiled-tibetans-elect-government-vote-condemned-china
Source: Serious Trouble
“Laura Loomer and Kash Patel lose their defamation suits, but Patel has filed a new one; a former Capitol police officer sues The Blaze for accusing her of being the pipe bomber; SPLC is indicted.” (04/24/26)
https://www.serioustrouble.show/p/this-episode-contains-no-administrative
Source: NonZero Newsletter
by Robert Wright
“As the age of artificial intelligence dawns, the various people who make a living as Blobsters — the think tankers, the past and present government officials, the military-industrial-complex titans, the influential media figures — show few signs of getting the picture. Whereas the atomic age spawned lots of creative and even enlightened thinking about its revolutionary implications for national and international security, the age of AI seems so far to be having roughly the opposite effect.” (04/25/26)
https://www.nonzero.org/p/the-new-blob-is-even-scarier-than
Source: Free Association
by Sheldon Richman
“I suspect that, considering how most commentators talk about the matter, many people think the U.S. tax system favors the rich, the public’s favorite scapegoat. But according to Adam N. Michel, the Cato Institute’s director of tax policy studies, ‘We actually have one of the most progressive income taxes in the developed world.’ … The average tax rate on upper-tier earners is as high as 33.4 percent. ‘[A]s a share of adjusted gross income (AGI), the top half of income earners paid 97.1 percent of federal income taxes.’ That leaves less than 3 percent for the rest.” (04/24/26)
https://sheldonrichman.substack.com/p/tgif-who-pays-federal-taxes
