Author: nick

[ad_1] With the Trump administration asking Congress for a staggering increase in military spending, you might expect Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to have a clear vision for how all that extra taxpayer money will be used. That does not seem to be the case. At this week’s appropriations hearings in the House and Senate, Hegseth and other top Pentagon officials offered few concrete answers for why the Pentagon needs $1.5 trillion next year or what huge new threats would justify that spending. Probably the best illustration of the vapidity of the Pentagon’s massive budget request comes from the department’s…

[ad_1] Does it bother Berenson that the press has refused to cover his case? It does. [ad_2] Source link

[ad_1] A very interesting article by my Hoover Institution colleague Andy Hall (who is also at the Stanford Graduate School of Business); here’s the Introduction, though the whole thing is much worth reading: There has never been an economic shock in modern American history like the one the leaders of the AI industry are telling us is coming. Dario Amodei has warned of “unusually painful” labor impacts “bigger than any before,” predicting that AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs and push unemployment to 10–20 percent within five years. He is hardly alone. Both OpenAI and Anthropic have begun laying out, in expansive policy memos,…

[ad_1] You don’t even have to turn on the financial news. You can tell whether oil prices will be up or down in the morning by simply reading the president’s midnight social media posts. If he announces confidence in the ceasefire with Iran, oil will be down in the morning. If he posts about Iran glowing in the dark or about the stone age, you don’t want to be short petroleum. Here’s a representative example from May 6, posted by The Kobeissi Letter, a capital market commentary: “At 3:40 AM ET today, nearly 10,000 contracts worth of crude oil shorts…

[ad_1] Photo by Markus Spiske If you are filling a scrapbook with little odds and ends on the end of the American democratic experiment, you might want to save an entire album for the Trump family’s $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), which the Trump administration is close to settling with its patron Trump. The origin of the lawsuit is a 2019 leak (by an IRS outside contractor) to the New York Times of certain Trump tax returns over a fifteen-year period. The leaked filing showed that in many years—in theory, when Trump was raking in billions,…

[ad_1] According to reports, President Xi Jinping did a little saber-rattling over the Republic of China on Taiwan with President Trump. More or less, he seemed to be saying if America doesn’t handle Taiwan properly, the two countries will clash — and put the relationship in great jeopardy. No one really knows what that means, forever and ever we’ve had a policy of strategic ambiguity, which amounts to an American defense of Taiwan’s autonomy and independence. I don’t think any of that is going to change. Nor do I think Mr. Trump wants it to change; it’s not really negotiable.…

[ad_1] Why turbulence will make Beijing more assertive. [ad_2] Source link

[ad_1] KEY EVENTS FIMI narratives downplayed Russia’s unease over Ukrainian drone strikes Victory Day served as a pretext to refresh ‘Nazi Ukraine’ claims Pro-Kremlin outlets sought to deflect attention from Russia’s abduction of Ukrainian children LAST WEEK IN REVIEW Russia’s Victory Day saw a surge of disinformation, with the Kremlin weaponising history to justify its war. Pro-Moscow outlets falsely painted Ukraine as a ‘‘Nazi state’’ for rejecting Russia’s May 9 celebrations, ignoring Kyiv’s alignment with Europe’s May 8 remembrance. Meanwhile, threats of Ukraine’s ‘’total destruction’’ for drone strikes on Russian soil reveal Moscow’s desperation amid battlefield failures. Most shockingly, Russian…

[ad_1] Thursday, May 14th on RealClearPolitics – Joined by RCP Contributor Richard Porter and Michael R. Auslin, Hoover Fellow and Author of National Treasure: 00:0… [ad_2] Source link

[ad_1] The last gasp of failing political leaders is to scapegoat companies that decide they cannot continue to operate, due to terrible policies [ad_2] Source link