“[P]eople hate crime and think it’s going up. But actually, crime barely affects most people and is historically low. So what’s going on? In our discussion yesterday, many commenters proposed that the discussion about ‘crime’ was really about disorder. Disorder takes many forms, but its symptoms include litter, graffiti, shoplifting, tent cities, weird homeless people wandering about muttering to themselves, and people walking around with giant boom boxes shamelessly playing music at 200 decibels on a main street where people are trying to engage in normal activities. When people complain about these things, they risk getting called a racist or a ‘Karen.’ But when they complain about crime, there’s still a 50-50 chance that listeners will let them finish the sentence without accusing them of racism. … might this explain why people act like crime is rampant and increasing, even when it’s rare and going down?” (02/19/26)
“Monthly transaction volume on the Bitcoin Lightning Network, a secondary layer for BTC that enables payment use cases, surpassed the $1 billion milestone in November 2025, according to a report from Bitcoin financial services company River. … The Bitcoin Lightning Network helps scale the Bitcoin network, enabling Bitcoin payments between parties that settle in seconds instead of minutes, encouraging Bitcoin’s use as a medium of exchange, instead of just a risk asset or store of value.” (02/19/26)
“Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is upending professions as diverse as art, cinema, accounting, national defense, and education. Some even argue that AI will render almost all work obsolete. They say its ability to ‘think’ and accomplish tasks previously solely in the realm of human ability will mean that humans will not need to work; the machines will do everything for us. Whether this would be a good thing or a bad thing depends on the story one wants to tell.” (02/19/26)
“President Donald Trump accused Barack Obama of disclosing classified information in comments the former president made recently about aliens, then acknowledged hours later the ‘tremendous interest’ in the topic and said he was ordering the government to release more information. ‘He gave classified information, he’s not supposed to be doing that,’ Trump told reporters Feb. 19 aboard Air Force One, adding Obama’s comments were a ‘big mistake.’ Podcast host Brian Tyler Cohen asked Obama if aliens are real in an interview published Feb. 14 and the former president replied: ‘They’re real, but I haven’t seen them.'” (02/19/26)
Source: The American Conservative
by Eldar Mamedov
“lexandria Ocasio-Cortez went to the Munich Security Conference to introduce herself to the world as a foreign policy thinker. She returned having demonstrated something else entirely: that the Democratic Party’s progressive star has absorbed the establishment’s worst ideas while shedding only its least popular rhetoric.” (02/19/26)
“A massive blackout left nearly five million people without electricity in Paraguay amid a heat wave that pushed temperatures above 108 degrees Fahrenheit across large parts of the country and as high as 116 degrees Fahrenheit in some areas, according to local meteorological reports. The outage affected 90% of customers of the National Electricity Administration, or ANDE, the state-run company that supplies nearly the entire population of 6.4 million people. The interruption on Wednesday also disrupted drinking water services in urban areas due to reliance on electric pumping systems. Nearly 24 hours after the blackout, service had not been fully restored.” (02/19/26)
“There is no cause for war. The U.S. government is preparing to attack another country not because of anything that its government has done or threatened to do to us, but solely because the president feels like doing it. The president created the current crisis by making reckless threats and then by ordering a massive buildup in preparation to carry them out. We know that he has been goaded into doing this by the Israeli prime minister and hardliners here at home, but in the end the decisions and the responsibility are his and his alone. No one can explain what the president wants to achieve by attacking Iran.” (02/19/26)
