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The Useless Eaters: How Oligarchy Revives a Nazi Lie

Shy’tyra Burton could lose about $330 a month because she lives with her father. She is 22. Her Supplemental Security Income payment is $994 a month. Rondell Burton earns about $2,000 a month as a Philadelphia sanitation worker. His daughter uses her payment for her phone, internet access, and many of her meals. A proposed federal rule would deduct the value of her bedroom from her SSI payment. It would apply even to disabled adults whose relatives are poor enough to receive food assistance. ProPublica reported the proposal in April 2026, citing internal emails, a regulatory listing, and federal officials. The rule had not been finalized in that reporting. ProPublica estimated that as many as 400,000 disabled or older people could have their support cut or eliminated. For Burton, the issue is not an abstract lesson in household economics. It is her room, her father’s paycheck, and the food she buys for herself.

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The Escape From Politics

Somewhere in the source code of a website the public was never meant to see, a secret society for the people who run the world kept a list of its members in plain text, sitting in the page where anyone who thought to look could read it. On the morning of Monday, June 15, somebody looked.[1] The group is called Dialog, an invitation-only network founded in 2006 by the investor Peter Thiel and the Silicon Valley entrepreneur Auren Hoffman, and for two decades it kept one promise to its members above all the others: that nothing said inside the room would ever be written down where the rest of us could find it.[1] That promise held until the society’s own code broke it.

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Did the Business School Ruin the University?

Society is materialistic.  The university used to be a safe haven where ideas mattered and thoughts were given greater standing than finding ways to make more money.  Peter Thiel believes higher education is a bubble ready for the bursting — but you can only agree with Thiel’s thesis if you also believe students attend university to get a job.  I don’t happen to purchase his premise.  I believe students should attend university in order to learn what they do not know.

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