Author: Thomas L. Knapp

Source: The Atlantic
by David A Graham

“Although there are many rivals for the title, this week’s FBI search at Mar-a-Lago, the apparent mishandling of classified information that led to it, and the political fallout since is close to the paradigmatic Donald Trump scandal. The story is at once totally new and unexpected and yet entirely of a piece with everything we know and have seen from Trump. Both Trump and his most bitter opponents have noted that the search of a former president’s home is unprecedented — Trump to claim it was unjust, his critics to highlight his misdeeds — but it shares three important characteristics with previous Trump scandals. First, Trump is singularly terrible at keeping secrets. Second, Trump always says that what Democrats, especially Barack Obama, did was worse or caused it. Third, there are always more developments yet to come, and it always gets worse.” (08/13/22)

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/08/trump-classified-documents-mar-a-lago-fbi-search/671124/

Source: The Intercept
by Jamie Kalven

“Harith Augustus left the barbershop where he worked on the South Side of Chicago and set out to run some errands. … he displays no unease as he passes three police officers chatting with each other at the corner of 71st and Chappel. A few minutes later, he returns, going west, and passes them again with the same air of nonchalance. Moments later, his body lay motionless in the middle of 71st Street, having been shot five times by Officer Dillan Halley. … Augustus’s death was the result of aggressive policing rather than any criminal conduct on his part. The police stopped him because he appeared to be carrying a gun, but in a concealed carry state that alone is not a sufficient basis for an investigative stop. Augustus had committed no crime, and at no point did he remove his gun from its holster.” (08/13/22)

https://theintercept.com/2022/08/13/chicago-police-killing-bodycam-harith-augustus/

Source: EconLog
by Edgar Pereira

“The world can be divided into rich and poor areas due to the cumulative differences in their rates of economic growth. In 1980, the Independent Commission for International Developmental Issues of the World Bank, led by former Chancellor of West Germany Willy Brandt, established a visual depiction between strong and poor economies now called the ‘Brandt Line.’ These differences have their roots in the processes of modern industrial capitalism, which began in England in the second half of the 18th century. Before that time, most nations shared a slow degree of economic growth, which manifested itself in the lack of adequate living standards. But then, the Industrial Revolution began. And some specific regions of the world started developing themselves at a faster rate than others, which were economically left behind.” (08/13/22)

https://www.econlib.org/capitalism-and-the-first-industrial-revolution/

Source: spiked
by Tom Slater

“The thought of it turns the stomach. A man stabbed for writing a book. And not just any man, but Salman Rushdie. The author with the price on his head. The author of the The Satanic Verses, the novel burned by Islamists around the world. The author whose act of ‘blasphemy’ at the tailend of the 20th century showed us just how deep the problem of Islamist intolerance is — and just how deep Western liberal cowardice is in the face of this most violent and unhinged variant of cancel culture. … The Rushdie affair exposed the West’s homegrown culture of censorship and its drift away from liberal values …. Across the West, the conviction that words wound and that heretics must be dispensed with has fostered a climate that is almost absurdly censorious.” (08/13/22)

https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/08/13/the-attack-on-salman-rushdie-is-an-attack-on-us-all/

Source: The Daily Beast
by Anthony L Fisher

“It’s been five years since neo-Nazis assembled on Charlottesville, Virginia, for their deadly ‘Unite the Right’ rally. That means it’s also been five years since then-President Donald Trump said that there were ‘very fine people’ on both sides of the conflict that weekend — which is to say, neo-Nazis and their allies on one side, and everyone else on the other. ‘But, wait!’ said the galaxy-brain contrarian. ‘Trump ACKSHUALLY condemned the neo-Nazis in plain English! He was referring to the other people, the regular folk that were there to protest the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue.’ This contortion of reality has been cemented in the minds of both MAGA partisans and many anti-woke heterodox commentators, who willfully ignore mounds of context in order to make Trump’s words sound benign.” (08/12/22)

https://www.thedailybeast.com/its-not-a-hoax-trumps-very-fine-people-in-charlottesville-did-not-exist