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Quote of the Day
”The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd.”
- Bertrand Russell
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Bob Dylan & the Grateful Dead | Pledging My Time | (May/June 1987 Rehearsals)
Long Read of the Day
The “Learned Helplessness” Of 2026
What happens when a mad king rules and liberal democracy disappears into thin air. Prescient (and utterly depressing) essay by Andrew Sullivan.
Here’s a sample:
If I were to describe my own state of mind observing the world and America right now, “learned helplessness” is pretty close. You may well be feeling it too. Each day, you read the news and see something completely beyond belief and yet feel utterly disempowered to do or even say anything about it. And then another story hits you again. And another. Again. And again. Trump shocks and shocks and shocks you some more. Even after all these years, you take it in the gut each time. And he feels nothing. This has been his entire life.
What the mad king announced this week — that he has not just pardoned but will now financially reward all the thugs who attacked the police and desecrated the Congress on January 6 — is the latest shock from the Trump taser. Another one hits when you find out he’s also exempted himself and his entire family from any past or future tax audits by the IRS. Then another one, as we learn he is making countless stock trades for huge amounts in companies very much affected by federal policy:
The new financial disclosure reports cover the first three months of 2026 …showing a cumulative value of between $220 million and around $750 million. The purchases included securities linked to companies such as Microsoft, Meta Platforms, Oracle, Broadcom, Bank of America and Goldman Sachs.
Trump does not have a blind trust; it’s a revocable one managed by his sons and an old buddy. And if you think Trump maintains a saintly distance from how his own money is invested, well, you should join the administration. It’s where amoral tools like Todd Blanche belong. It’s hard to put it better than Derek Thompson:
Within one 24-hour period, Trump: got out of a $100 million IRS fine, secured “immunity” from all future tax investigations for his family and friends, created a $1.8 billion slush fund for lawbreaking supporters, and was reported for likely insider trading worth nearly $1 billion. … Nobody even tries to defend it.
As for the “learned helplessness”, is it just a confirmation that fear is viral, or a revelation of a deeper truth: that most people are not interested in politics (or indeed in governance), which explains why liberal democracy rots from within. Sigh.
Ukraine has taught us that drones are the new machine gun
My latest Observer column
wo truisms: armies are always preparing for the last war; and military necessity is the mother of invention. Britain learned about the latter with radar in the late 1930s. The Ukrainians did the same in February 2022, when Vladimir Putin’s forces invaded their country, and they have turned out to be very fast learners. In particular, they spotted the potential of drones; specifically consumer models adapted for military use. Their imaginative use of the technology has allowed them to inflict casualty rates as high as five to one on Russian forces in recent months, while giving up little or no territory. More than 96% of those casualties are estimated to have been caused by drones.
This means that the age of the infantryman is coming to an end. Ukraine has shown that drones can incapacitate battleships and disable tanks, but their most devastating lesson for Russian soldiers is that being seen in the open is like signing your own death warrant. Surviving or avoiding a drone attack has become an almost impossible task on the battlefield. If you doubt that (and have a strong stomach), then a video montage of Ukrainian drones hunting down Russian troops – even in the interiors of buildings into which they have fled – should give you an idea of what the technology can do, and why the enemy’s mortality rate is so high.
Coincidentally, drone capability on the battlefield seems to have rendered even the most skilled humans redundant…
May be behind a paywall. Pdf version here.
Books, etc.
This might be interesting. Here’s the blurb:
Liberalism has always suffered from messaging challenges. It simultaneously implies a pursuit of individual liberty and social equality, two projects often regarded as at odds. Or: Liberal means the opposite of conservative. Except when it doesn’t. The list goes on.
Liberal bard Deirdre Nansen McCloskey understands these rhetorical troubles. Equality of Permission is her stirring and career-defining intervention on this essentially contested yet critical topic―a forceful case for liberalism as our best hope, and an essential vision of the political conditions necessary for its survival. McCloskey prescribes a liberalism built around liberty from the bottom up: “equality before the law and equality of political and economic permissions,” lightly administered.
The state, McCloskey argues, is increasingly the source of our discontents―an illiberal institution, hindered by a quixotic fixation on pursuing equality of wealth or opportunity. Equality of Permission evangelizes for a better, and earlier, version of liberalism―that of John Locke, Adam Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Henry David Thoreau―as against a top-down quest for an unattainable utopia. McCloskey shows that statism in pursuit of a chimerical general will, even when well-intentioned, leads to tyranny.
Brimming with energy and erudition, drawing on wisdoms from Alexis de Tocqueville to Mae West, Equality of Permission is McCloskey at the peak of her powers―brilliant, lacerating, garrulous, funny, worldly, and warm. Amid intense debate over the use and abuse of government institutions, McCloskey shares her singular vision for a true democracy, one grounded in respect and conducive to universal human flourishing.
Coming out in November, after the US mid-terms!
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