Podbit · Up First from NPR
The war in Iran is the same as Iraq — politicians treating military force as a toy to protect themselves politically and enrich their friends. And the end game may just be returning to the exact status quo that existed before the war started, at the cost of 13 American lives and $50 billion.
The Senate has one week to pass $1 trillion in government funding, $100 billion in Pentagon spending, and confirm a Director of National Intelligence who already fumbled his confirmation hearings. The 60-vote threshold makes every bill dependent on Democratic cooperation — but Democrats have little appetite to fund a war in Iran that Congress never authorized, or an immigration crackdown they oppose.
In 12 years of Narendra Modi's government, not a single cabinet minister had ever resigned under public pressure — until now. A youth movement born from a single tweet about cockroaches forced the education minister out, marking a seismic shift in India's political culture.
Tens of thousands — perhaps hundreds of thousands — marched on Delhi in India's largest protest in over half a decade. Students carried copies of the Constitution and dressed as Gandhi to pre-empt BJP accusations of anti-nationalism. Less than three hours later, riot police without name tags attacked them with sticks, tear gas, and pellet guns — a weapon previously reserved for conflict-ridden Kashmir.
Under a decade of BJP rule, publicly criticising Modi became something Indians feared. Now India's Gen Z has leapfrogged criticism entirely — they're cracking jokes about him. Kira Huju says that shift is potentially more politically fatal for Modi than any opposition party.
The precautionary principle sounds sensible but leads to one outcome: you freeze the technology at whatever stage the government is most comfortable with. If applied to the internet in the 1990s, we'd all still be using Yahoo and AOL with no video, no audio, no commerce.
New AI-specific laws are almost entirely redundant. Non-consensual nudity is already illegal. Discriminatory lending is already illegal. Dangerous drugs are already illegal. Even AI practicing medicine without a license is already impossible under existing licensing law. The only thing new regulation does is give companies a way to kneecap competitors.
Before writing a single new AI law, governments should audit the 2 million laws already on the books and ask: do they apply to AI? This is what happened with EVs — engineers had to verify that car safety rules designed for combustion engines still made sense for batteries. Do the same for AI, and you'll know what's actually missing.
Strickland argues illegal immigration is a pure wealth transfer upward: it lowers blue-collar wages, increases demand for housing investors own, grows consumption for big companies investors hold. Rich people love it. Working Americans pay for it with compressed wages and saturated housing markets. He says any honest Republican investor should admit they benefit financially from open borders.
Strickland and Ryan dissect how the Iraq War resulted from aligned interests — the Israeli lobby's desire to remove Saddam, the military-industrial complex's financial incentives, oil industry backing of the petrodollar security pact — not a single grand conspiracy. They argue the government is so compromised by these interlocked lobbies that only a radical election or violent revolution could fix it.
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