“the idea that people—especially young men—would not be radicalized if it weren’t for social media belies most of human history.
I’ve been listening recently to a podcast called A Twist of History. One episode details Adolf Hitler’s attempt to overthrow the Weimar Republic in 1923. Another episode features a riot during a Shakespearean performance in New York City in 1849, fomented by Ned Buntline, a nativist newspaper pundit with ambitions of fame and notoriety. Both instances featured fringe political elements, violence, and deaths.
History is littered with examples like these: men driven to violence by people in close physical proximity, sometimes with the help of inflammatory political rhetoric printed in pamphlets and newspapers.
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if he encountered bad ideas online, it’s because the internet is now where we encounter ideas. If he cloaked his violence in the language of internet memes, it’s because that’s where culture is these days.
In another era, he may have encountered bad ideas at a town hall and dressed up his horrific act in different slogans. But a man with a capacity for such premeditated and dramatic violence is a man with a capacity for such things in any era. And conversely, countless billions of people encounter the same online ecosystem without committing assassinations.”
“Economists have long known that tax expenditures make our taxes unnecessarily complicated, distort pragmatic economic decision making, and mostly benefit hand-selected political constituencies. My Mercatus Center colleague Jack Salmon and I have spent time demonstrating that most tax expenditures don’t offer broad-based relief but rather narrow carveouts that erode critical tax revenue while tilting the scales toward the special interests that sell whatever we’re nudged into buying.
Tax expenditures stand in sharp contrast to a neutral tax system—one that taxes income and consumption consistently and only once, trusts individuals to make buying decisions without manipulation, and leaves resource allocation to markets. Special-interest tax credits should ultimately be terminated.
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Deducting the interest on mortgage payments has virtually no effect on whether someone buys a house. It mostly leads to larger mortgages and bigger homes for wealthier households. That’s a subsidy for the upper middle class.
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The exclusion of employer-sponsored health insurance (ESHI) payments is the single largest individual tax break, costing in excess of $3 trillion over the next decade. Most employees would take the insurance their employers offer with or without this incentive. It ends up inflating the size and cost of plans, driving up health spending, making it more necessary to insure through one’s employer, and entrenching workers in their current jobs.
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The implications are clear: Tax credits and deductions are generally not harmless ways to help taxpayers. They are costly, distortionary privileges captured by industries and interest groups. They complicate the tax code, mask the true size of government, and fail to deliver the promised bang for the buck.”
Trump’s H1b Visa 100k fee will increase the cost of doing business in America, which means a smaller economy and less jobs. It also incentivizes companies to offshore labor rather than use people in the U.S. who spend some of their salaries in-country.
Deaths from people dying directly from a natural disaster are down, but long-term indirect deaths are not. Many people die from the variety of long-term effects of natural disasters.
“What began as an initiative to improve seismic safety and veteran care now serves as a case study in bureaucratic drift. But this type of administrative breakdown is nothing new; the V.A. has long struggled to manage large capital projects and follow through on institutional commitments. From the Phoenix wait-time scandal in 2014—where staff falsified records to hide long delays in veteran care—to the more recent, failed $16 billion rollout of its Electronic Health Records (EHR) system, which was plagued by cost overruns and usability issues, the agency has a well-documented history of dysfunction.
The OIG report calls on the V.A. to reevaluate whether the project should continue. While that’s a difficult call after spending almost half a billion dollars (as of February 2025), it is very clearly a necessary step if the wasteful project is to be shut down. The center’s board of directors might think so too; it did not prioritize the ambulatory care facility in its FY 2026 budget request, and has been indecisive on how to proceed with future budget requests necessary to finance the project.
These actions, along with the implementation of updated contract guidelines in May and the call for a full departmental review in July, might suggest the V.A. finally recognizes that it has serious problems. However, until systemic accountability becomes ingrained in the V.A., boondoggles like the one in Palo Alto will continue at the expense of taxpayers and veterans’ health.”
“Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy was sentenced to five years in jail on Thursday for criminal conspiracy over attempts to raise campaign funds from Libya and will soon become the first former president of France to serve time in prison.
The sentence was harsher than many expected and Sarkozy, who was president between 2007-2012, will spend time in jail even if he appeals the ruling – which he said he would do…
“What happened today … is of extreme gravity in regard to the rule of law, and for the trust one can have in the justice system,” he told reporters.
“If they absolutely want me to sleep in jail, I will sleep in jail, but with my head held high,” he said, adding that he was innocent. “I will not apologise for something I didn’t do.”
Sarkozy was found guilty of criminal conspiracy over efforts by close aides to procure funds for his 2007 presidential bid from Libya during the rule of late dictator Muammar Gaddafi.”