Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.
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My mother and I got into it yesterday about writing.
Now, I adore my mother: she’s fantastic; most of the time.
Yesterday, however, she took issue with my word usage.
Preface: Mom is Catholic. Went to Catholic high school and university. She knows her St. Thomas Aquinas, Grotius, Pascal, and a good smattering of just war theory. She’s good coming heavy with the ethics when I screw up, Buddhist or not. When she aims, she doesn’t miss.
12 lbs of joy and discovery
So in an email yesterday we were discussing Catholic and Buddhist ethics. Mom wanted to know specifically how Buddhists view the Three Soures of Catholic Morality. I resisted a flashback to Sister Agnes and the 12 inch wood ruler with which she routinely slapped my hand. Transgression, unknown. She was a sadist but I learned my Latin declensions perfectly, especially for pain: dolor, masculine, Third declension”
Dolor, doloris, dolori, dolorem, dolore, dolor
But I digress. . .
“In Catholicism,” my Mom wrote, “for an action to be morally good the object, the intent and the circumstance must all be morally sound or the action is corrupted.”
“Interesting that there are three sources in Catholicism, because in Buddhism ethics are rooted in the Noble Eightfold Path through three main components: right speech, right action, right livelihood,” I replied. “However, to achieve merit and harmony in Buddhism one is not required to act in a supererogatory manner, whereas some Catholic actions imply it.”
She laid into me in the next email. “See, you’re grandstanding–she meant grandiloquent, a vice I am very guilty of–with your words again,” she said. “What does that even mean? It sounds like something out of the Kama Sutra!”
“First, the Kama Sutra is Hindu. Second, what did I say?” I replied.
“You’re a word snob. Supererogatory is what you wrote. What does that even mean?”
“Mom, it’s actually a Catholic concept,” I replied. “It’s something that is morally good, but not required to be done; it is to go above and beyond what is morally or ethically required.”
“Why didn’t you just say that?” She said.
“Why use eleven words when one gets the job done?”
And then I mouthed off to her, like a dumb-ass.
“How hard is it to use a dictionary app on your iPhone?”
“If you weren’t an adult I’d beat you, right now.”
“I know, Mom, but still. I’m a logophile, a verbivore. I can’t help myself.”
“You’re insufferable.”
“I love you too.”
Gustave Flaubert believed in the perfect word in the perfect place.
So do I.
Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – May 24, 2026
by Tony Wikrent
Americans are leaving the U.S. in record numbers and spending hundreds to learn how to do it
Jennifer Liu, May 17 2026 [CNBC, via DailyKos]
…A record number of Americans are leaving the U.S.: The country saw a net negative migration of between 10,000 and 295,000 people in 2025, according to research from The Brookings Institution. The widest estimated range was among people who left voluntarily, with Brookings estimating that between 210,000 to 405,000 people did so last year.
It’s the first time in at least 50 years that more people moved out of the country than moved in. Restrictive immigration policies and deportation efforts play a role, according to Brookings. Some U.S. citizens are emigrating for school, work, raising a family, retirement and everything in between.
Expatsi, a company that offers relocation tours for Americans, is becoming a sought-after resource for some….
The company, launched in 2022, held its second annual Move Abroad Con in San Diego on May 9 and 10. Some 600 Americans from around the country attended, double the number of people at the inaugural event held in May 2025, Expatsi co-founder Jen Barnett tells CNBC Make It.
A majority, 89%, said they want to leave the U.S. for political reasons, according to a sampling of 218 of the weekend’s attendees, per Barnett. Others say they hope to move for adventure and growth (73%), as well as to save money (57%). Roughly two-thirds of respondents hope to move within two years, they have an average monthly budget of $3,856 to work with, and hopeful movers are split among 44% individuals, 39% couples and 17% families with kids….
LinkedIn Is Doing What Bluesky Was Supposed to Do
[Popular by Design, via The Big Picture, May 20, 2026]
Rebuilding a public square on the platform you least expect. For a brief moment about a year ago, it really did look like Bluesky might work. Researchers and left-of-center intellectuals were flooding in, swapping starter packs, reassembling what felt like a nostalgic reunion of old Twitter. Then everyone arrived, and the center could not hold. A sharp argument that the post-Twitter intellectual conversation didn’t move to Bluesky or Threads — it quietly migrated to LinkedIn, of all places. Uncomfortable for everyone involved, but not wrong….
The people on LinkedIn are the people we should be trying to reach: policymakers, congressional staffers, civil servants, industry analysts, foundation program officers, and journalists at general-interest outlets. A 2025 Avoq survey of DC policy insiders found that 81 percent of Democrats, 84 percent of Republicans, and 78 percent of MAGA-aligned respondents use LinkedIn. Good representative data on LinkedIn compared to other platforms is notoriously hard to find, but this looks like a bipartisan footprint no other platform comes close to matching….
Discussion that actually moves understanding. The clearest evidence I have for all of this is my own cross-posting experience. I have often shared the same piece, including the more controversial ones, simultaneously on Bluesky, X, and LinkedIn, and the pattern has been remarkably consistent. On Bluesky, the reaction is usually either silence or a small pile-on when the piece challenges prevailing consensus, and substantive engagement is rare. On X, responses are a mix of real engagement and the usual ratio of slop, bad-faith screenshotting, and reply guys.
On LinkedIn, the pushback I get is both the most civil and the most productive: named professionals who actually work on the topic, often from perspectives I don’t share, who write multi-paragraph responses that engage with the argument rather than perform outrage about it. This holds even for pieces and takes I expected to trigger the most hostility, because people disagreeing under their own name with their employer looking over their shoulder have strong incentives to be reasonable.
Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – May 17, 2026
by Tony Wikrent
War
[Drop Site Daily: May 12, 2026]
American consumers have paid more than $37 billion in additional gasoline and diesel costs since the war with Iran began on February 28, according to a real-time tracker developed by Brown University’s Watson School of International and Public Affairs.
Trump not violating any law
‘He who saves his Country does not violate any Law’
Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025
Trump Isn’t Mentally Ill; He’s Evil
Thomas Meisenhelder, May 14, 2026 [Common Dreams]
…Nor are the mentally ill immoral. It is somewhat commonplace to find public figures, journalists, and other “experts” express that a person who commits a horribly immoral act must be mentally ill. This is a faulty presumption. Mental illness does not necessarily affect moral reasoning or understanding….
Donald Trump is not crazy, he is evil. The America Heritage Dictionary definition of evil has three components. The first one is that evil means morally bad or wrong. The list of the immoral acts of our president is too long to be included listed completely here, but consider just a sampling: participating in Jeffrey Epstein’s abuses, illegally detaining and deporting veterans, children, and others; using charitable donations for personal desires; separating innocent children from their families; fomenting racism and racial hatred; ridiculing the disabled; daily misogyny; supporting white supremacy; inciting violence; lying for personal gain; harming the lives of LGBTQ+ people; taking food and medical care from children and their families; and the list goes on and on.
The dictionary also defines evil as harmful or causing injury and pain. Rather than repeating the cruel and hateful list above, please consider this sampling of the harmful consequences of decisions of President Trump: ordering the murder of hundreds of people who have been in boats attacked because they were supposedly carrying illegal drugs; murdering nearly a hundred people in Venezuela when the country was attacked and he ordered its president arrested; causing death and injury to tens of thousands of Iranians during his war against the government of that country; partnering with Israel’s raining of death and destruction on the people of Lebanon, Gaza, and Palestine; expanding the embargo against Cuba causing pain, injury, and death to ordinary Cubans; and his administration’s defunding of the medical aid and food assistance provided to less developed nations by the US Agency for International Development, which has damaged the lives of millions of people around the world….
INSIDER Exposes Trump’s SECRET EMERGENCY Midterm Plan!! (YouTube video)
[Legal AF, YouTube, May 15, 2025]
Sidney Blumenthal and Sean Wilentz interview Jonathan Winer, former State Department official, on the secret Presidential Emergency Action Documents, Trump’s intention to manipulate the midterm elections, his devilish designs, and how to foil them….
Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – May 10, 2026
by Tony Wikrent
Mother’s Day
Heather Cox Richardson, May 10, 2026 [Letters from an American, May 9, 2026]
If you google the history of Mother’s Day, the internet will tell you that Mother’s Day began in 1908 when Anna Jarvis decided to honor her mother. But “Mothers’ Day”—with the apostrophe not in the singular spot, but in the plural—actually started in the 1870s, when the sheer enormity of the death caused by the Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War convinced writer and reformer Julia Ward Howe that women must take control of politics from the men who had permitted such carnage. Mothers’ Day was not designed to encourage people to be nice to their mothers. It was part of women’s effort to gain power to change society….
War
Iran used Chinese spy satellite to target US bases
[Financial Times, via The Big Picture, May 05, 2026]
Leaked documents show IRGC secretly acquired system and used it to guide strikes during war in March. Iran secretly acquired a Chinese spy satellite to target US military bases across the Middle East. The China-Iran axis just became a lot more concrete — and a lot more dangerous.
Iran has hit far more U.S. military assets than reported, satellite images show
Evan Hill, Jarrett Ley, Alex Horton, Tara Copp and Dan Lamothe, May 6, 2026 [Washington Post]
Iranian airstrikes have damaged or destroyed at least 228 structures or pieces of equipment at U.S. military sites across the Middle East since the war began, hitting hangars, barracks, fuel depots, aircraft and key radar, communications and air defense equipment, according to a Washington Post analysis of satellite imagery. The amount of destruction is far larger than what has been publicly acknowledged by the U.S. government or previously reported….
Experts who reviewed The Post’s analysis said the damage at the sites suggested that the U.S. military had underestimated Iran’s targeting abilities, not adapted sufficiently to modern drone warfare and left some bases under-protected.
“The Iranian attacks were precise. There are no random craters indicating misses,” said Mark Cancian, a senior adviser with the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a retired Marine Corps colonel, who reviewed the Iranian images at The Post’s request. The Post previously revealed how Russia provided Iran with intelligence to target U.S. forces….
Shaun King, May 07, 2026
Satellite images show extensive damage to at least 15 U.S. military sites, with over 225 essential pieces of equipment destroyed — and the American people were never told the full scale of it….What The Washington Post has now documented is something altogether different: a state adversary damaging U.S. military infrastructure across an entire region. Bahrain. Kuwait. Qatar. Saudi Arabia. Jordan. The United Arab Emirates. Multiple bases. Multiple categories of targets. Multiple forms of military infrastructure.
That is the point.
Iran did not merely “respond.” Iran demonstrated that the U.S. military footprint across the Middle East is not some invisible, invincible architecture of empire.
It is a map of fixed targets.
Demand destruction vs fuel-superseding infrastructure
Cory Doctorow, 04 May 2026) [Pluralistic]
… In starting this stupid, unforgivable war, Trump has vastly accelerated the process of demand destruction. Rather than buying American oil, the whole world has undertaken a simultaneous, rapid, irreversible shift to electrical substitutes for fossil fuel applications, from induction tops to balcony solar to ebikes and EVs:
https://thepolycrisis.org/01-demand-destruction-us-oil-is-not-winning-the-iran-war/
As Solnit writes, Trump’s stupid war follows on the heels of another unforgivable and cruel blunder: Putin’s quagmire in Ukraine, which catapulted Europe into the Gretacene, with a wholesale, continent-wide shift away from fossil fuels to renewables and the devices they power. Now, the rest of the world is following suit. In South Korea, President Lee Jae Myung is leading the charge to transition the country to renewables, framing fossil fuels as an existential geopolitical risk.
Trump’s demand destruction accelerates Putin’s demand destruction: China and India both increased their energy consumption in 2025 – but reduced their fossil fuel consumption over the same period. In 2025, coal accounted for less than a third of the world’s energy for the first time in modern history. 2025 was the year that solar and wind overtook coal globally.
Meanwhile, Trump and his oil baron buddies keep trying to make fetch happen. On the campaign trail, Trump told the oil industry that if they slipped him a $1b bribe, he would give them anything they wanted, and he’s kept his promise. Trump will let Big Oil drill anywhere they like, from sacred sites like New Mexico’s Chaco Canyon to the Arctic. He’ll even let them take all of Venezuela’s oil. The problem is that banks can see the demand destruction writing on the wall, and they are conspicuously declining to loan the oil companies the money they’d need to get that oil.
Truly, Trump’s a machine for creating stranded assets at scale.
In starting this stupid, unforgivable war, Trump has vastly accelerated the process of demand destruction. Rather than buying American oil, the whole world has undertaken a simultaneous, rapid, irreversible shift to electrical substitutes for fossil fuel applications, from induction tops to balcony solar to ebikes and EVs:
https://thepolycrisis.org/01-demand-destruction-us-oil-is-not-winning-the-iran-war/
As Solnit writes, Trump’s stupid war follows on the heels of another unforgivable and cruel blunder: Putin’s quagmire in Ukraine, which catapulted Europe into the Gretacene, with a wholesale, continent-wide shift away from fossil fuels to renewables and the devices they power. Now, the rest of the world is following suit. In South Korea, President Lee Jae Myung is leading the charge to transition the country to renewables, framing fossil fuels as an existential geopolitical risk.
Trump’s demand destruction accelerates Putin’s demand destruction: China and India both increased their energy consumption in 2025 – but reduced their fossil fuel consumption over the same period. In 2025, coal accounted for less than a third of the world’s energy for the first time in modern history. 2025 was the year that solar and wind overtook coal globally.
Meanwhile, Trump and his oil baron buddies keep trying to make fetch happen. On the campaign trail, Trump told the oil industry that if they slipped him a $1b bribe, he would give them anything they wanted, and he’s kept his promise. Trump will let Big Oil drill anywhere they like, from sacred sites like New Mexico’s Chaco Canyon to the Arctic. He’ll even let them take all of Venezuela’s oil. The problem is that banks can see the demand destruction writing on the wall, and they are conspicuously declining to loan the oil companies the money they’d need to get that oil.
Truly, Trump’s a machine for creating stranded assets at scale….
Ukraine’s rapid rise as an anti-drone powerhouse
[New Atlas, via The Big Picture, May 05, 2026]
Necessity makes the best R&D lab. Kyiv’s counter-drone industry now exports back to NATO. In only four years after the Russian invasion, Ukraine went from being a country knocked back on its heels and scrambling for military aid to emerging as a leading provider of battlefield-tested counter-drone expertise and exporter of anti-drone weapons systems. How did this happen? Let’s find out.
Trump not violating any law
‘He who saves his Country does not violate any Law’
Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025
Insane Pre-Crime Strategy Unveiled for Leftist “Extremists”
Ken Klippenstein [via Naked Capitalism 05-07-2025]
The White House declared war on the American people today, labeling its political opponents as terrorists, including “Left-wing extremists.” The new label also claims that there are “deepening alliances” between “the far-left and Islamists” — or pro-Palestinian protesters.
The language is contained in the White House’s newly released National Counterterrorism Strategy. It is the first National Strategy to be unveiled since 2021, when the Biden administration issued its document. The Strategy identifies the “left-wing,” “anti-Fascists,” “Anarchists” and “radically pro-transgender” ideologies as threats equivalent to jihadi groups like al Qaeda and ISIS, or narco-traffickers.
The Strategy is the brainchild of White House counterterrorism czar Sebastian Gorka, an eccentric figure I have reported on, who last year hinted at terrorism charges being levied for political opponents of the administration. The document makes clear he got his wish. Gorka called the Strategy “my life’s work,” ….
“Counterterrorism” Now Officially Means Targeting Trans People
Sophie Hurwitz, May 8, 2026 [Mother Jones]
On Wednesday, the White House released a new “United States Counterterrorism Strategy,” the first such directive since a 2021 Biden-era memo emphasizing the need to combat white supremacist violence, which has now been scrubbed from the White House website.
Wednesday’s document, masterminded by White House “counterterrorism czar” Sebastian Gorka, does not mention far-right violence at all. It identifies “Violent Left-Wing Extremists, including Anarchists and Anti-Fascists” as a security threat of equal severity to “Legacy Islamist Terrorists” and “Narcoterrorists and Transnational Gangs.” The administration will now apparently “prioritize the rapid identification and neutralization of violent secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist.