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There's a clique of plutocratic, high-tech billionaires who think they're entitled to turn America's farmlands and rural communities into their personal domain of predatory AI "data centers." But a little bookstore in Tulsa, Okla., recently hit those puffed-up elites where they're most vulnerable: The funny bone.Magic City Books put up a sign that rocketed through the Internet, mocking the fatuous potentates: SUPPORT THESE DATA CENTERS Schools Libraries BookstoresArrogantly, though, the likes of Amazon, Google and Meta are frontloading trillions of dollars into creating a new social order managed by super-intelligent bots. This scheme, however, requires them to divert vast amo

Energy Secretary Chris Wright’s admission yesterday that it “could be next year” before gas prices return to below $3 a gallon is causing trauma in Republican circles because “next year” is after the November 3 midterm elections. Initially Trump said he could end the war “in two or three days.” It then became “four to five weeks.” He then stretched it to six. His so-called “cease-fire” ends Wednesday. We’re now in

President Donald Trump’s choice to lead the Federal Reserve needs to turn around America’s economy — but his surprising problem is Trump himself.“The high-wire act starts before Warsh even has the job,” wrote The Wall Street Journal’s Nick Timiraos on Monday about Kevin Warsh, who Trump has appointed to replace the incumbent Jerome Powell. “Warsh secured the nomination by convincing Trump he shares the president’s view that the Fed should be cutting rates. At his Senate confirmation hearing Tuesday, he can reaf

President Donald Trump’s conflation of himself with Jesus Christ is consistent with mental disorders involving delusions of grandeur — so why do we continue acting like this is normal?In a recent article for the New Statesman, journalist Lee Siegel argued this can be traced to the normalization of mental illness, with deinstitutionalization of people who supposedly just “problems in living” causing mass homelessness and violence.“That led to figures like Rudy Giuliani and, to a lesser extent, Michael Bloomberg, and to law and order as a prominent and permanent plank of the political right,” Siegel wrote, then telling the stories of three men from Ypsilanti, Michi

President Donald Trump’s feud with Pope Leo XIV is “deeper than politics,” wrote academic Walter Russell Mead on Monday — and that depth helps explain the Pope’s dominance over the president.While both men were born in the United States (Trump in Queens, Leo as Robert Prevost in Chicago), the Pope has spent most of his career in Peru, explained Walter Russell Mead, the Global View Columnist at The Wall Street Journal. Because he spent his formative professional years in Latin America, he can in some respects be better thought of as a second Latin American

President Donald Trump wanted to create a sculpture garden for the 250th birthday of the United States, but according to CNN, no artists have been contacted to build any. According to the report, there is fear that there won't be enough time for the artists to create any of the work for Trump's National Garden of American Heroes.“It has not been formally reviewed,” said a person familiar with planning efforts in an interview with CNN. “Based on my experience in prior approvals in the District, I don’t see how this could be in place in time by July.”There are just over tw

President Donald Trump's war in Iran has turned into such a disaster that many in Europe are encouraging other countries to side-step the U.S. altogether. Defense expert and war correspondent Robert Fox is urging the rest of the world to make a deal with Iran rather than allowing the U.S. to run the show. In a Monday column for "The iPaper," he said that a single image has made it clear that Trump doesn't know what he's doing: The attack on the MV Touska on Sunday. "When the destroyer

On Wednesday, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas delivered a speech at the University of Texas, Austin, to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. In it, he took the opportunity to offer a lengthy attack on progressive politics that was widely criticized, with New York Times political analyst Jamelle Bouie calling the Justice’s assertions “nonsense.”According to Thomas, “Progressivism seeks to replace the basic premises of the Declaration of Independence

Now in its eighth week, President Donald Trump is increasingly responding to pressure to wrap up his “little excursion” in Iran, with the clearest sign that he’s feeling that urgency being his own insistence that he is “under no pressure whatsoever.” But as the world grapples with the stark economic consequences of the war, including skyrocketing gas prices, Republicans are coming to terms with the “inconvenient truth” that there’s little they can do to avoid the electoral fallout at the November midterms. While Trump and his allies have scrambled for ways to man

President Donald Trump recently posted an AI picture comparing himself to Jesus Christ, but a prominent theologian believes the president is more comparable to the Antichrist.“My attention, however, has been turned back to the Antichrist, a figure who haunted my upbringing in the evangelical South but about whom, until the other day, I had given hardly a second of thought in decades,” Shaun Blanchard, a theologian at the University of Notre Dame Australia, wrote on Monday for the magazine America: The Jesuit Review. “For this renewed attention, I must credit not the