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“. . . applying tariffs means that we are insisting now on paying more for the things that we used to get for less. It’s like going to the grocery store with reverse coupons and insisting that, because you are mad that you have to pay money for things, you will now insist on paying more money for those same things.” ~Timothy Snyder

“President  Donald Trump  has been fixated on how he’ll be remembered in history as advisers try to shift his attention to other matters, like the economy, and  Republicans  express concerns that he’s hurting their chances in the midterms,  The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday .”   Probably something like Benito Mussolini   https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-officials-legacy-mode-wsj-report_n_6a9458dee4b0e9dbd39bc800?origin=home-latest-news-unit

I just finished reading “G-man,” Beverly Gage’s Pulizer-winning biography of J. Edgar Hoover. During his lifetime, Hoover became synonymous with the FBI, the agency he founded, developed and controlled until his death. In the beginning, Hoover conceived of the FBI as a purely investigative agency, apolitical and devoted to the most up-to-date technologies of crime-solving and record-keeping. Early on, he created a huge database of fingerprint, a database that proved key in, among other cases, the identification of James Earl Ray as Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassin. Hoover accepted the FBI role in law enforcement only grudgingly. Much of his career he was consumed with his war on communism. It began with the first red scare at the end of WWI, then flared again in the 1950s with the McCarthy era. Hoover was deeply conservative, sexist and racist. He hired blacks and women only for menial jobs, never as agents. He maintained a life-long association with the Kappa Alpha fraternity, which ...

What’s going on? In short, over the last couple of weeks Republicans and Donald Trump have decided they’re losing this election. It’s not clear to me that anything has actually changed — except to the extent that for the party on the ropes “nothing changing” becomes a bigger problem the closer you get to Election Day. What’s focused people’s attention is Donald Trump yesterday reposting a fan’s tweet (on Truth Social) basically arguing that Republicans are heading toward an electoral tsunami and don’t seem to realize it. He’s also reportedly gearing up to have all the GOP’s election ads focus on him — which has Democrats basically ecstatic.   ~Josh Marshall

When I was in college, I competed in a peanut eating contest: how many peanuts could someone eat in one minute. For a short time, I held the record by simply eating whole peanuts without removing the shells.     Eventually, someone else won by the same trick. Years later, I learned that this is a bad idea, since peanut shell often carry aflatoxin from Aspergillus mold. Aflatoxin is hepatotoxic and can cause liver cancer. Two of the most familiar threats to a healthy liver are viral hepatitis and alcoholism. But an increasing source of liver damage is herbal and dietary supplements that people imagine are health foods.   “These herbal and dietary supplements include ashwagandha, turmeric, and green tea extract. Researchers note that green tea extract is often marketed as preventing liver disease. “This latest review cites research from the US Acute Liver Failure Study Group that found that acute liver failure caused by herbal and dietary supplements rose from 9.7% from 199...

Elections are a pageant of democratic life, with all the boisterousness, intensity, and sometimes crassness that goes with that. They’re about values, identity, our collective trust or lack or trust in particular candidates, music, rallies, emotion. If we really believe in popular democracy and decision-making we shouldn’t be bothered or worried that some of it mirrors the sports enthusiasm, celebrity culture, enmities, pugilism, hopes and dreams that animates so much of our popular culture — and always has. How would it be any other other way? Just speaking for myself, I don’t see this as well, we can’t expect any better. I think it’s mostly a wonderful thing, how a big impossibly diverse country with a deep obstreperous streak makes collective decisions about its future and governance. This is why when I hear people decrying “horse-race journalism,” I mostly see red. I think they want it to be the civics class. Or more specifically, I think they want it to be the civics class for...

In all the brouhaha surrounding the latest US-Canada trade dust-up, this detail isn’t getting the attention it deserves: “One of the most affected categories would be paper products. American-made toilet paper and paper towels sold into the Canadian market will now face steeper tariffs at the border.” In the end, there’s still time for TACO. But just to be safe, there are DYI bidets for sale. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/economists-trump-canada-trade-war_l_6a8f09c6e4b02b26136e477a?origin=home-latest-news-unit  

By simultaneously mandating the creation of Trump-approved eligibility lists and targeting state officials who allegedly issue ballots to ineligible voters, the White House is sending a clear message to its political enemies: Use its list, or else. The Court’s treatment of these provisions as independently innocuous is roughly analogous to arguing that because a bank robber hasn’t actually opened fire, the teller staring down the barrel of his gun should not understand “empty the safe” as a threat.   ~Jay Willis

I never cared much for fish growing up in East Tennessee. At home, fish came in brown squares out of the freezer. On family camping trips, we’d have salmon patties made with canned salmon. Once, on a family vacation down east, I raked for clams in the Chesapeake Bay, and my mom steamed them. They were OK, but not special.   My mind began to change when I became a faculty and would be invited to dinner with out-of-town seminar speakers. Restaurants get the best cuts of meat and fish, and for many types of fish, the preparation makes a lot of difference.    Now, I love sushi and sashimi and regularly grill salmon, trout and tuna. Since we’re ensconced in the Ocean State, I’m looking forward to a greater variety.    I’m not a believer in food as medicine. Yes, moderating intake of fats and oils and of sugar is a good idea, but the lettuce in your salad isn’t an antidote for the fats in your salad dressing.    For years, we’ve been told that the omega-3 fa...

The US is a net exporter of total petroleum (crude and refined), but we’re a net importer of crude oil, much of it from Canada. “ The US is by far the largest buyer of Canadian crude, accounting for 90% of Canada's crude exports in 2025, or roughly 126 billion Canadian dollars of a total CA$140 billion. The dependence runs in both directions: Canada supplied roughly 63% of all US crude imports last year.” *snip* “Along the Gulf Coast, refineries built and expanded in the 1980s and 1990s to process heavy crude from Venezuela and Mexico were also well suited to processing Alberta's heavy barrels as Canadian supply expanded. “That refining system has created an unusual mismatch with America's own oil production. “The shale boom has made the US the world's largest crude producer, but much of its production is light, sweet oil. Many US refineries, meanwhile, are configured to process heavier crude profitably. The US, therefore, exports large quantities of domestic light crud...

The simple fact is that for all the other evils of Trumpism they simply don’t understand the basis of American power, military or economic. That’s the basis of the absurdity of the last decade in which the US is somehow the defiant rebel against the system it created for its own prosperity and security and which has secured both for going on a century. Listen to their thinking and you see it clearly:   We’re the big power. We’re in charge. But we don’t act like we’re in charge. We let ourselves get pushed around. Now we’re going to be in charge.   They simply don’t understand that to the extent we are “in charge” the underlying basis of the agreement that puts us in charge. It’s the comparatively easy terms of American global power. They really do imagine that US allies are something like colonies or finlandized client states that we’ve just let get over their skis.   ~Josh Marshall

This is what happens when you put someone with the emotional maturity of a middle school boy in charge of the world’s largest economy and the world’s most powerful military. “What is striking about this picture, setting aside all these nitty-gritty details, is how much it mirrors Trump’s Iran debacle, another war not so much of choice but of whim. Both illustrate the difference between theoretical and de facto power. On paper, the U.S. could convincingly defeat Iran militarily. It could invade the country, dismantle its military and government, eliminate the threats to the Strait of Hormuz. But that would require vast sums of blood and treasure, in addition to huge domestic economic pain, something the U.S. simply has no appetite for. That lack of appetite became clear soon after the war started and it’s shaped everything since. There’s zero domestic support for that in the U.S. And the U.S. has no pressing strategic interest to do that, certainly not at the cost it would require. Mean...

For Canada, the choice came down to either severe but temporary economic instability or binding itself to a pseudo-democratic fiscal basketcase of a nation, whose only apparent foreign policy objective has become domination for the gratification of its president’s slapdash vanity. ~Stephen Marche

Chomsky ... wrote that the old motto about 'speaking truth to power' is overrated. Power, as he points out, quite probably knows the truth already and is mainly interested in suppressing or limiting or distorting it. We would therefore do better to try to instruct the powerless.   ~Christopher Hitchens  

Historically, the party in power loses seats in the midterm. The smart money seems to be on that happening again in 2026. Since GOP margins in both houses are slim, so only a few seats can make the difference in control. As of today, Nate Silver has strong odds for Democrats taking the House, but the Senate is close to a toss-up. It’s still a couple months out, but Trump seems to be doing everything in his power to help the Democrats.   The Democrats seem to be doing a lot of navel-gazing about the strength of the Democratic Socialists. But less remarked on it Trump fatigue on the right. Sarah Longwell at The Bulwark has been reporting on focus groups in, for instance, Georgia, where Trump voters are expressing enthusiasm for John Ossoff. Voters are looking for candidates who understand their concerns with grocery and gas prices and who will fight data centers. Come November, I don’t expect a lot of Trump voters to vote blue, but if they just decide to stay home rather than vote fo...

  Spotted this headline for an article in The Atlantic: ‘Find Your Passion’ Is Awful Advice A major new study questions the common wisdom about how we should choose our career. The article is paywalled, so I can’t read it. But the headline provoked me to think about my career. I don’t recall being told to find my passion. The closest I can come is my dad’s advice to ask myself what I think about in my spare time. Or my postdoc mentor, who said that a scientist thinks about science in the shower. Those guides fall a bit short of manifesting “passion” as I understand the word. But my 47-year post college-career in science is consistent with a certain enthusiasm for science. It’s easier to get up in the morning and go to work when you are looking forward to your job. There’s a useful distinction to be made between work and toil. Work, while sometimes difficult and challenging, provides opportunities for personal growth and rewards beyond the paycheck. Toil, in contrast, is effort with...

Can we afford Medicare for All? Given that health care in America costs per capita twice that of all the other industrialized nations with some form of single-payer with the same or worse outcomes, I should think so. But even with our current Medicare system, there’s an identifiable source of waste, fraud and abuse that could be eliminated—Medicare Advantage. “A recent Congressional Budget Office (CBO)  analysis  projects that the federal government will pay between 5% and 10% more for Medicare Advantage (MA) enrollees than traditional Medicare (TM), and estimates that for a given person MA costs about  15% more  than TM. This suggests the federal government will spend about  $1 trillion  on  MA overpayments  over the next decade, which is in line with other estimates.  Reducing these overpayments  can help to  lower health care costs  and reduce budget deficits.   “Medicare Advantage (MA) is the privately-managed, governm...

Governments tax labor at much higher rates than capital for what used to be good reasons: labor is less mobile, making such taxes easier to collect, and capital investments tend to boost human productivity and wages, meaning that taxes on labor indirectly capture the upside from capital spending. But if machines start to replace humans rather than complement them, levies focused on labor may fail to capture revenues from AI-generated growth, leaving governments without the resources needed to help the losers in AI disruption. Meanwhile, heavy labor taxes add to companies’ incentives to replace workers with machines, accelerating displacement and driving up unemployment. If the AI industry’s own projections of mass job displacement prove even half true, taxes on labor that accelerate firings will cause voters to revolt against the entire AI project. ~Sebastian Mallaby

Trump has threatened new economic sanctions on Iran in a tacit admission that his bombing war hasn’t brought Iran to capitulate to his masculine dominance. It’s not clear how these sanctions will relieve the stranglehold Iran holds on the Strait of Hormuz. It’s more likely that they’ll increase the cost of food and gas in the US. “This week the   news broke   that the price spread (“crack”) between the price of a barrel of crude oil and the price refiners want to be paid to produce a refined barrel rose above $100. This statistic translates into a warning that gasoline and diesel prices will remain high for some time to come. That is bad news for Western economies. When you go to the grocery store, there is food to buy there because a truck running on diesel shipped it over. No diesel, no food. Or at least pricey diesel, expensive food. Trucks run on diesel, and some   70% of commodities  shipped in the US are transported by truck. High diesel prices mean high  ...

Stalinism is one way of achieving industrialization like cannibalism is one way of achieving a high-protein diet. ~Robert Conquest

There’s a lot of controversy surrounding Flock cameras. The cops say they help catch crooks. The civil libertarians say big brother is watching you. Some camera operators are using them to spy on girlfriends. Turns out that retail stores have been using them to reduce “shrinkage,” aka shoplifting. But digital surveillance comes at a price. “ Sainsbury’s has paused the use of AI face scanning in one of its stores after a customer was wrongly identified as a shoplifter and ejected from the shop.   “I was embarrassed, mortified even, and felt quite humiliated and powerless,” Matt Arnold, 46, said of his ordeal.   “The comedy promoter was buying supplies in the store in East Dulwich, in south-east   London , for a standup event at Dulwich Hamlet football club when, after scanning his items and a Nectar card, he was approached by two managers who told him he could not be served owing to an earlier incident. He was then asked to leave and they tried to escort him from the store...

“ President Donald Trump has declared the Strait of Hormuz as US territory in a new post on Truth Social.   “Sharing a bizarre map of the region with a large blue circle over Hormuz, the picture declared the vital shipping route as “US territory”.” Putin just needs to grab a map, draw a circle around Ukraine and label it “Russian territory.” Think of all the lives that would have been saved if he’d done that four years ago. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/iran-us-war-live-trump-oman-hormuz-peace-nuclear-weapons-b3034640.html?utm_source=taboola&utm_medium=editorial-push

Democracy is not an easy form of government. It has none of the certainties of the various forms of tyranny. It demands that the governed as well as the governing make compromises, learn to to listen, and sometimes resist impulses. The champions of democracy are not the people who cling to power in its name, but those who put that greater consultation, that larger discussion, that continuing project, above themselves ~Timothy Snyder

Whisky Pete Hegseth is bleating about testosterone testing and supplementation for US servicemen. He seems to believe that testosterone augmentation means a more effective military in the age of missiles and drones. But is testosterone an unalloyed good? “This is what we're seeing in clinic,” she says. “Men will come to see us with zero sperm counts, and will often deny that they've been taking testosterone – but usually from their blood tests and their physique, it's very evident that they’re on testosterone.”   “If you give yourself testosterone […] you're telling your body, ‘I've actually got enough testosterone’,” Satchi explains. “So that signal going to your testicles to produce testosterone and sperm is switched off.” “Like Clavicular, many of these patients will have sourced their testosterone from less-than-reputable suppliers: “they're getting it from their friends at the gym,” she explains, or online – and without the input of a legitimate endocrinolo...

President Trump won’t even be straight with the country about how he’s running out of weapons – when his war has depleted well  upwards of 90%  of certain crucial munitions, as  Zeteo  has learned. When reporters have dug in on this topic, he’s huffily accused them of “ treason ,” and pledged that those responsible for leaking the information “are being hunted down” aggressively.    The staggering rate of U.S. weapons exhaustion is one of many indications of how   colossally disastrous the Iran war has been   for the American side since the very moment Trump launched the conflict in February. And the extent to which Trump has routinely ordered the Justice Department to open sprawling leak investigations and browbeat journalists underscores just how much this president is attempting to make it functionally illegal for a free American press to report on how horribly the war is going.   After all, the only thing “ treasonous ” (to use a term so ...

Trump recently claimed that he would make the Strait of Hormuz American territory. Claiming sovereignty over someplace means more that just writing your name on a map with a sharpie. “Western powers have attempted to control the Strait of Hormuz before. Basically, however, they only held it at Iranian sufferance. When, as in 1622, the Iranians determined to expel the foreigners, they proved able to do so. Nowadays they have 50,000 drones and have damaged or destroyed all 17 US bases in the region, so I don’t think trying to occupy Hormuz would be any fun. “It was known as a strategic trading port even before the age of the great maritime empires.” Marco Polo visited twice and wrote about it. “Portugal took the island of Hormuz briefly in 1507-1508, and then came back to rule it 1515 to 1622. This occupation was during the Little Ice Age and we don’t hear as much about fatal heat. Although the Portuguese were now imperial administrators, they ruled through a vassal dynasty of the kings ...

When my dad was a Naval officer in the 1950s, he was part of the team that designed the USS Saratoga, an aircraft carrier. I remember him explaining to me in excited detail about the arresting gear, the device that stopped a landing jet. He spent most of his career as a chemical engineer, so this was a bit of an excursion. Regardless, I’m confident that he possessed more engineering expertise about aircraft carrier design than failed real estate businessman Donald Trump. “ President Trump has decided that he prefers the look of the World War II era battleships where the tower is in the middle of the ship. And he is pushing the Navy (and considering ordering the Navy) to move the tower forward on the Ford class ships. This comes after Trump just a few days ago ordered the Navy to go back to steam-powered catapults (the thing that hurls the planes forward off the ship for takeoff) from the new electromagnetic catapults. He apparently wants to do this because he once talked to a catapult ...

If everyone always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but that no one believes anything at all anymore—and rightly so, because lies, by their very nature, nave to be changed, to be “re-lied,” so to speak. So a lying government which pursues different goals at different times has constantly to rewrite its own history. That means that the people are deprived not only of their capacity to act, but also of their capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please. ~Hannah Arendt  

When a columnist writes that Trump has reached a new low, the columnist is doing something that looks like moral reporting and is not. The columnist is administering the fiction that the object has an interior. The fiction says: somewhere, in there, is a person who could have chosen otherwise, and today he did not, and we register the failure. The sentence keeps the person alive on the page after nine years of evidence that there is no person on the page. The sentence has an author, and the author does not know how to describe a machine, so the author keeps writing about a man. ~Mike Brock

Businesses fail all the time in America. The owners and investors pay the price (yes, the employees too). But if the businesses are large banks that gamble with other peoples’ money, they become too big to fail and instead are bailed out by the government, a form of financial socialized medicine.   “. . .  the 2008 bailout   was a political albatross   around the establishment’s neck, seen as a rescue of the very rich and connected people who caused mass unemployment and foreclosures. Whoever was in power as this anger built would get singed by it.   “More recently,   a loud chorus   of venture capitalists and tech magnates   pressured the Biden administration   into bailing out depositors at Silicon Valley Bank. This crash, much like 2008, stemmed largely from inane financial practices, with fintech and crypto firms keeping massive amounts of cash in regular bank accounts at SVB instead of using   basic risk management practices . ...

The Citizenship Clause was indeed written to repudiate  Dred Scott , the 1857 Supreme Court decision holding that Black people could never be citizens. But the Reconstruction Congress did not swap one caste rule for a narrower one; it  extended the promise  to “every free-born person in this land.” The idea wasn’t just to retroactively protect “the babies of slaves”; it was to prospectively forestall  all  future efforts to deny citizenship based on whatever other non-sovereignty-based criteria might be politically popular in any given moment.  ~Steve Vladeck

Sound economic projections are critical in assessing investment and public policy. I try not to let the fact that I’m philosophically valanced towards Medicare for all blind me to the need for rigorous study of its likely economic impact. “ Previous research has   shown   that shifting the   United States   to a   Medicare for All   system could   save   roughly 68,000 lives and $650 billion per year, but a new   study   by experts at Yale University suggests the savings would likely be even greater on both fronts.” *snip* “We estimate that such a system would reduce national health expenditure by $1,041 billion annually,” they explained. “Sources of savings include reductions in administrative overhead, pharmaceutical prices, fraudulent billing, and avoidable emergency care. Combined with the reversal of recent retractions, universal coverage would save over 114,000 lives annually.”   “Specifically, as Sanders’ office detailed in a...

The first time I recall using a map was in boy scouts. Travel in unfamiliar places on foot, bike or car required maps for me for decades. The first time I saw GPS in action was when my brother and I were on Ride the Rockies. We were invited to dinner by a friend in Aspen. After being dropped off in town by a bus, he navigated to our host’s condo with his GPS. A couple years later, I borrowed an old car of his to drive across Colorado for a meeting. The speedometer on the car was broken, so he clamped a GPS receiver to the dashboard that gave a read-out of the speed. Now, any trip I take out of town requires Siri. It has become essential for us as newcomers in New England. I barely recall what it was like before GPS. Little Blue Dot, by Katherine Dunn, is a history of GPS. It begins in England during the Blitz, when the Royal Air Force figured out how German bombers were using ratio signals to guide Luftwaffe aircraft for nighttime bombing raids. This led to efforts to jam or spoof thos...

Big personnel news out of the White House yesterday: Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt is leaving the administration. Leavitt, who had her second child in May and returned from maternity leave last month, wrote in a post that “I cannot be the best mom my two young children deserve while devoting the constant time, energy, and attention required of the White House Press Secretary.” She will remain, she said, a top outside White House adviser. Leavitt, who had already richly earned a reputation as a virtuosic, remorseless spin artist and dissembler on the president’s behalf, now gets a second one as an icon of work-life balance. Trump will find it difficult to track down a replacement with her same combination of easy, cheerful dishonesty and panache. ~Andrew Egger

Let’s hand the microphone to Garrett Graff: “ Most people think of  Jurassic Park  as a cautionary tale for science, when really it’s a cautionary tale for corporate trust and safety teams, board oversight, and regulatory compliance. The dinosaurs’ entirely predictable rampage should really be seen as a failure of the security teams and the fence builders. The mistakes we’re seeing from these frontier AI companies are similarly the failures of the fence builders. *snip* “The battle between OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind is something like if Leo Szilard, Arthur Holly Compton, and Edward Teller had each led their own competing private effort to develop an atomic bomb and thermonuclear bomb — with no government assistance or coordination, all backed instead by private equity money — simultaneously building their own competing Los Alamos-style labs and negotiating with the military about how (and if) the military could use their own proprietary individual nuclear weapons."...