Gold broke through $4,100 per ounce for the first time on Monday, while silver rose above $52/oz, hitting another record high.

President Trump’s administration in 2025, “is broadening its rare earth metals price support policy to include more U.S. mining, refining, and magnet production companies, building on a successful precedent set with MP Materials.” US Rare Earth is the US number two rare earth metals (REM) mining company.

Jamaica is currently in the midst of constitutional reform, a process being hailed as a watershed moment in the island’s history. Much of the public debate has been consumed by two proposals: the desire to become a republic and the replacement of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London with the Caribbean Court of Justice as the final appellate court. These ideas are being advanced with great fanfare, yet they are driven more by sentiment than by sober reasoning.

Wars are mass-murder, massive theft, and unrelenting propaganda. In this country they’re lucrative overseas entanglements, as government diverts loot from taxpayers to the war industry. They’re also perpetual, as war embellishes the sanctity of the state as well as providing grounds for increased plunder of its population. Wars are government as Houdini—drawing attention to the bloody far-away while relieving attention on the corrupt close-at-hand. For the victor, the propaganda is inked as truth in the history books.

Free speech is not dead—it has just been parceled out among favored groups. This explains why the British Prime Minister Keir Starmer insisted that there is free speech in the UK, despite the fact that thousands have been arrested for social media posts that are offensive to the left. Even in the most despotic regimes there are surely pockets of free speech to be found, among those whose speech may, for the moment, be deemed unthreatening to the regime.

Whiskey never signed a treaty; neither did cocaine, nor did covid. Yet, for over a hundred years, American politicians have declared “wars” on these abstractions with the same certainty that they declared wars on foreign nations. But, unlike wars against actual enemies, these crusades can never end in a victory because they have failed to realize that nouns cannot surrender.

[Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life by Steven Pinker, (Scribner, 2025; 384 pp.)]