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At this very moment, humanity is venturing beyond the limits of Earth.

NASA’s Artemis II mission to the far side of the moon was a reminder that this is no longer science fiction. Commercial launches are becoming more frequent, private missions are expanding, and durable off-world habitats—once the stuff of far-flung imaginings—are well within reach. What was once a set of hypothetical word problems has become a collection of real-world challenges to solve.

Those of us who believe in America’s ideals, political structure, and folkways have to start thinking now about how to preserve them in outer space. Human nature is not going to change. But the parameters of human life will—and dramatically. The question is how, in this unprecedented scenario, we can make the American way of life one of the things we carry with us. We are taking our humanity to space. How can we take our freedom too?

To meet this challenge, the University of Austin has initiated the Torchlight Summit. Torchlight convenes astronauts, scientists, engineers, classicists, and political theorists to address a question that is too often ignored: What are the political and institutional consequences of life beyond Earth, and how can we shape them before they solidify?

The summit is structured around three core pillars:

Listen to the full conversation on the Perspectives Journal podcast, available to subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Amazon Music, and all other major podcast platforms.

At the 2026 Progress Summit, David Adler highlighted the organized right-right’s network of actors and institutions — what he calls the ‘Reactionary International.’ Adler is the Co-General Coordinator of the Progressive International, an group that unites, organizes and mobilizes the world’s progressive forces to fight for democracy.

Most corporate mission statements are real snoozers. Especially in the case of large public defense companies, they’re designed to present boilerplate language to the public: “We develop science and technology to help people, and we produce some other things (weapons) that we won’t directly mention here, but which you can find on page five of our annual report.”

Palantir recently broke from this mode of anodyne corporate communication in a manifesto-style post titled “The Technological Republic, in brief,” which itself is a summary of a book of the same title by Palantir executives Alex Karp and Nicholas Zamiska.

Here are some paraphrased highlights from the 22-point declaration:

This is the end of the U.S. global monetary system Steve Keen The US-dollar-based international monetary system will not survive this Presidency. There is, of…

The post This is the end of the U.S. global monetary system appeared first on Economic Reform Australia.

On The Wealth of Nations Susan Borden 250 years on, Jason Furman’s essay goes wrong, not in what it says about Adam Smith, but in…

The post On The Wealth of Nations appeared first on Economic Reform Australia.

Even before I got sick, I’d wonder about people in airplanes. I live in DC, and they’re constantly overhead. Taking off and landing at nearby DCA. Distant blinking lights at cruising altitude, heading for some foreign city.

I love to travel, and no matter the day, time or occasion, a plane passing by always incites a pang of envy. I imagine myself huddled up in my window seat (always window), trying to catch some sleep on a newly-purchased neck pillow (I have about 11, because I never remember to bring them and end up getting ripped off at the airport bookshop again). I’m excited, loopy and dreamy, because I always take benzos to fly; ironically, I’m terrified of flying, even though I know air travel is statistically extremely safe.

But after years of nail biting, whiskey drinking, hyperventilating and panic-attacking my way across the Atlantic, my doctor relented and prescribed me some Ativan. Now flying has an easy, dreamlike quality to it. I actually look forward to being released, not just from the land, but from The Land of Worries. I chat with my seatmates, if they like.

Once, as our flight took off, the woman next to me yelped and grasped my arm in fear.

I looked over at her lazily. “Hey,” I smiled easily, “do you want a xanax?”

She didn’t.

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The Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Louisiana v. Callais may dramatically alter congressional districts in Southern states. Writing for a 6-3 majority, Justice Samuel Alito unraveled decades of confusing and misguided caselaw construing the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA) to hold that states may not engage in racial gerrymandering—or be forced to do so by federal courts—when drawing congressional districts. The Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause forbids race-based discrimination, Alito pointedly declared, preventing Section 2 of the VRA from being interpreted to require the creation of “majority-black” districts to comply with the VRA.

Nowhere have the ramifications of “the long march through the institutions” been more apparent than in colleges of education.

New revelations seem to emerge every day of yet another program being stuck in the mud of critical theory. A University of Minnesota K-12 model curriculum includes lesson plans about “settler colonialism” and creating protest art. Harvard’s Graduate School of Education offers dozens of courses explicitly rooted in social justice themes, with one issuing a call to “liberate” youth. Many of Stanford’s general education courses have students respond to drag ballet troupes, ICE incidents, and the war in Gaza.

The RBA today lifted the cash rate from 4.1% to 4.35%, back to its highest point in 15 years, effectively undoing the three rate cuts which were delivered last year.

“Today the RBA made the wrong decision,” said Matt Grudnoff, Senior Economist at The Australia Institute.

“Higher interest rates will do nothing to open the Strait of Hormuz. Higher interest rates cannot change the world price of oil and bring down fuel prices.

“All this does is heap more pain on already stretched households.

“The only tool the RBA has to fight inflation is to change interest rates. But interest rates are ineffective at stopping inflation caused by supply shocks.

“It has chosen to do something, even if that will make things worse, rather than risk being accused of doing nothing.

“Higher fuel costs and now a third interest rate increase this year is likely to impact economic growth and push unemployment higher. This will have real negative impacts on Australian households and businesses.

“If the RBA goes too hard with interest rate increases, it risks pushing the Australian economy into recession. It will then be forced to rapidly lower interest rates to stimulate the economy, which would be a humiliating backflip.

A remarkably strong claim for the form of rights-based law, as not simply homologous with the commodity form, but as internal to the dynamics of value under capitalism, lies at the heart of Evgeny Pashukanis’s book Law and Marxism. As the text indicates:

Man as a moral subject, that is as a personality of equal worth, is indeed no more than a necessary condition for exchange according to the law of value. Man as a legal subject, or as a property-owner, is a further necessary condition. Finally, these two stipulations are extremely closely connected with a third, in which man figures as a subject operating egoistically. All three of these seemingly incompatible stipulations which are not reducible to one and the same thing, express the totality of conditions necessary for the realisation of the value relation.

Read in the light of Christopher Arthur’s reframing Introduction, Pashukanis is making the argument that the contract, and all that goes with it, is internal to the wage-labour relation as a key relation of production and to commodity exchange as a key moment in the realisation of value in the reproduction of capital.

I was five miles in the woods, looking for the Last Incorruptible Thing.

“Aren’t you a brave soul,” a woman said when I emerged. She wore jogging clothes and a knowing smile. I looked like the Unabomber’s little sister.

“Not brave,” I said. “Just walking round the river. Get that springtime weather while it lasts! I went in the woods to watch birds. Plants and birds and rocks and things.”

America lyrics, the last refuge of an American mycological liar.

“Mmm-hmmm,” she said. “You find any mushrooms?”

“If I did, I’d tell you no. And if I didn’t, I’d tell you yes,” I said, since she knew my game. She laughed and jogged away.

I had a pocket full of Missouri Gold: morels, the most elusive of mushrooms. A successful morel hunt is a victory. But the search is the real reward.

The morel is the Last Incorruptible Thing. You cannot plant them. You cannot buy them in stores. You can only spot them in the wild. Morels demand complete surrender to nature’s whims. They grow for three to four weeks each spring, and no one knows when or where. They pop up like middle fingers to corporate control.

Hunter L. Clark and Gregory Simitian

Over the past year, U.S. trade policy with China has undergone enormous changes, but with surprisingly little effect on overall trade balances. In fact, the U.S.’s twelve-month trade deficit, while highly volatile due to import front-running early in the year, ended 2025 at $1.2 trillion, almost unchanged from 2024. At the same time, China’s trade surplus with the world actually increased from $1 trillion to $1.2 trillion. However, when looking at changes between individual countries, one sees large shifts in bilateral balances. In this post, we will focus on changing trade flows between the U.S., China, and southeast Asia.

Rising interest rates and a long-running cost-of-living squeeze have left mortgage holders struggling, yet the banks are milking more than ever from their home loan customers.

The research reveals that while home buyers tightened their belts last financial year, the banks’ profits grew to a massive $43 billion, $16.9 billion of which came straight from owner-occupiers with a mortgage.

Key points:

On this episode of After America, Allan Behm and Dr Emma Shortis discuss the Trump administration’s withdrawal of troops from Germany, why the United States is losing its war on Iran, and the Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act.

This episode was recorded on Monday 4 May.

The latest Vantage Point essay, Rich Kid Poor Kid: The Battle for Public Education by Jane Caro, is available now for $19.95. Use the code ‘PODVP’ at checkout to get free shipping.

Guest: Allan Behm, Advisor, International & Security Affairs, the Australia Institute

Host: Emma Shortis, Director, International & Security Affairs, the Australia Institute // @emmashortis

Show notes:

Hegseth’s ‘paranoia’ of being replaced explains purge of top general — as ally emerges for Army secretary’s role by Steven Nelson, New York Post (April 2026)

On his way to the State House on the morning of July 4, 1776, Thomas Jefferson would have walked along High (now Market) Street, Philadelphia’s main thoroughfare. Four blocks down, past the open markets, on the southeast corner of Second Street was the printing shop of John Dunlap, an Irish immigrant and publisher of the Pennsylvania Packet, a weekly newspaper reporting on the proceedings of the Continental Congress. In his shop at No. 48 High Street, Dunlap, then only twenty-nine, was about to play a key role in the first hours of American Independence.

Though Congress had adopted the Declaration in the name of the “good People” of the colonies, John Adams would later claim that only one-third of these good people had supported war with Great Britain, while another third had opposed it and a middle third remained undecided. Americans needed to know that the colonies were now a new nation fighting for its existence, and they needed to be inspired to choose the right side. As soon as the delegates voted on the statement, they ordered “That the declaration be authenticated and printed” and “That the committee appointed to prepare the declaration superintend & correct the press.” After that, the record goes silent, and the questions begin.