“It is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception and compassion and hope."

I hope we all now understand that forging strategic policy partnerships with fascists is like trying to develop an intimate relationship with a running chainsaw.

Some of us have to live with the consequences of another legislative session (5/7/2026) Iowa's public approval of President Donald Trump has dipped to 42 percent in 2026, according to the World…

How Iran is parking the bus on 'America'

image by AI, of course; my own prompt Climate change may be a mechanism through which the planet eases its human burden…[or] new patterns of disease could trim the human population…War could have a…

A day of trecking in the not too green wilds. This is Scotland a few minutes before the rain. Not very wild either, just a bit dangerous underfoot for those of a certain age. I may have parked up on…

Do you remember Pat Tillman? He was a former NFL player who famously quit football and joined the military after 9/11, only to die by friendly fire in Afghanistan a few years later. What I’ve…

What happens when someone generates a front-end comp for you and says this must be the way? Of course this hasn’t happened with any of our clients, since this is unallowable into the field. But we’ve…

Wayne Ford is the executive director of Wayne Ford Equity Impact Institute and co-Director of the Brown and Black Forums of America. He is a former member of the Iowa legislature (1997 through 2010)…

When it comes to war, knowing what the other side is up to is a huge advantage. As a result, nations invest a lot of money hiding what we’re up to — classifying critical information, speaking in…

Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQIA+ people are at a significantly higher risk of becoming a victim of violent crime than other people in Canada. In Canada, thousands of Indigenous women have been…

For my entire life, I have been against the death penalty. Murder is wrong. Period. Even if (insert ghoulish crime here)? Yes, even then. A life sentence without parole is acceptable to me. Except.…

BYD, Tesla May Face Import Caps as Canada Works Out China EV Quota – Bloomberg Honda reconsiders Canada plant as U.S. demand for EVs slows – Japantimes Elon Musk tried to recruit Sam…

The New York Times had a story a few days ago about the Trump administration prepping an executive order regulating AI models:The administration is discussing an executive order to create an A.I.…

Barbara Fried’s recent post on Substack , to my mind, lays out a devastating critique of the prosecution’s misappropriation theory of criminal liability in the trial of her son, Sam Bankman-Fried. If…

It is right that the murder of many people be mourned and lamented.

Mexican authorities have arrested Audias Flores Silva (aka El Jardinero…not the scariest nickname I’ve heard), a senior figure in the Jalisco New Generation Cartel. El Jardinero had been…

Some self-described "public health scholars" have called on doctors to stop talking in public about drugs that could save their lives. I look at their backgrounds and possible motivations for wanting…

Was is Joseph Goebbels who first put forward the thesis of the big lie? That is “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” Was it Goebbels? Or…

The U.S. and China represent the two largest national economies on Earth. Since President Trump's 2 April 2025 "Liberation Day" global tariff announcement , trade between the two nations has…

Prosperity rests not on intentions, but on foundations. In Germany’s case, those foundations were historically not only institutional and industrial, but energetic: the stable supply of power that…

I like the Internet. I am old enough to remember the pre-Internet era and despite the younger generations pining for those simpler days, I was there. Paper maps were absolutely horrible, just you and…

There are local elections being held across the UK today. Voters in Scotland and Wales will elect representatives to their respective national parliaments, while in England the voting is for local…

Friend of the newsletter Sam Jeffers from WhoTargetsMe has, for his sins, been monitoring the online campaign ahead of today's local elections in Britain. Reform has taken a fundamentally…

Cuckooing is when criminals take over someone’s home to use for dealing drugs, storing weapons, sex work or other illegal activities. They target vulnerable people: someone with a drug or…

Transit carried 84.8 percent as many riders in March of 2026 as the same month in 2019, according to data posted by the Federal Transit Administration yesterday. This is the highest level of transit…

The UK’s cyber security data does not describe a single reality; it describes three filtered views of it. By overlaying Breaches Survey, ICO, and NCSC data, a clearer model emerges: one of layered…

There are three main engines: Businesses for Wealth Creation. Politicians for Tax Collection. Monks for Allocation of Collected Taxes. But the power dynamics are in reverse. Monks sit on top of…

heathercoxrichardson.substack.com Global affairs journalist David Rothkopf wrote today in The Daily Beast: “Not since Vietnam have we seen a more systematic effort by an administration to lie…

Bernie the Dupe by Jack Butler What is Mr. Sanders thinking? It isn’t the first time he’s found solace in a communist country. But there’s more going on here than that. The supposed model for this…

the industrial revolution type of thing once again

The European Union took four years to draft the AI Act - with OpenAI shipping GPT-4 to a hundred million users in two months. By the time Brussels finalised its definitions of…

Here’s a good catch by journalist Norman Spector. From The New York Times corrections page for May 2, 2026 (emphasis mine): An article on April 15 about the success that Mark Carney, the…

March 1943. "Santa Fe R.R. train stopping for coal and water. Laguna, New Mexico." Kodachrome transparency by Jack Delano for the Office of War Information. View full size.

What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art. My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice. When I sit down to…

I analyse the problems that leftists in Europe face in dealing with European Union affairs.

The plane that took my love away Must fly again another day To bring her back home, here to me But maybe that won’t come to be The Strait of Epstein’s all clogged up I’m buying diesel by the cup And…

Preface to the Japanese translation of Ben Morea's "Full Circle: A Life in Rebellion"

The forecast is: record-breaking heat, wildfires in the West, and extreme rainfall mayhem across the world. Maybe the strongest El Niño in 150 years. Following breaking climate news, we explore a…

" O nly Trump could be stupid, ignorant and immoral enough to start a (just) war against an evil regime, and to leave them better off and more powerful than before the war. What a complete pile of…

The MSM narrative seems to be that superpowers like US and China are about to crack down on AI. www.wsj.com #

I’ve been canvassed more in the past month than for any other election I can remember, whether Scottish (like this […]

Dave Altimari and Ginny Monk of The Connecticut Mirror and Sophie Chou and Haru Coryne of ProPublicaI’m honored to share that I am officially a Pulitzer Prize winner.Our series on unscrupulous towing…

Pastor Tim has already written about this in light of another assassination attempt on either President Trump or other members of the administration. Many people are unhealthily and dangerously…

TV interview with Scott Budman / WNTV (NBC Bay Area) regarding the Elon Musk versus OpenAI / Sam Altman trial in Oakland, CA, for TODAY: NBC. https://www.nbcbayarea.com/author/scott-budman/

This open letter to the Council of Cardinals is to beg you to demand the Pope excommunicate J. D. Vance. Nobody threatens a Pope. Nobody […] The post An Open Letter to the Council of Cardinals…

Moralized Epistemology I recently read a sentence by the German labor minister: “Nobody immigrates into our social welfare systems.” What struck me about the sentence was not primarily whether it was…

How the conferences FediForum and 2mr.social this week show how fediverse is trying to build connections with European politics, as well as with the atmosphere.

How you can help the RIFL Act become law, and pass one of the biggest wins for gun safety legislation in American historyThis is a guest piece by Lauren Harper & Dr. Anthony Douglas II, MD MPH.…

We get so trapped inside the logic of the UK’s crazy electoral systems we often do not see what is really happening. Two thirds of active voters, voted against Starmer’s Labour at the…