Source: Common Sense
by Paul Jacob
“Last December, the U.S. State Department imposed visa bans on five persons who, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said, ‘have led organized efforts to coerce American platforms to censor, demonetize, and suppress American viewpoints they oppose.’ But is it okay for the U.S. government to withhold visas from foreigners acting to undermine the freedom of speech of Americans?” (07/24/26)
Source: Townhall
by Dr. Rainer Zitelmann
“Some left-wing ideologues reject space exploration altogether—especially private space exploration—while others dream of a planned economy in space or even socialism. We should not underestimate the danger of such ideas. They have already caused enormous harm on Earth. Around two dozen socialist experiments have failed over the past 100 years. Every single one. Without exception. Yet the failed ideas of central planning and socialism have become popular once again.” (07/25/26)
Source: Fox News
“A Romanian F-16 fighter jet shot down a drone that entered the country’s airspace without authorization Friday, marking the first time the NATO member has intercepted and destroyed a drone inside its national airspace, authorities said. Romanian officials have not yet identified the drone’s origin or purpose. Romania’s army chief said pilots described it as appearing to be a Shahed-type drone, Reuters reported, the Iran-designed attack drone widely used by Russia against Ukraine.” (07/24/26)
Source: National Review
“An Irritable Societal Gesture.” (07/24/26)
https://www.nationalreview.com/podcasts/the-editors/an-irritable-societal-gesture/
Source: Reason
by Tosin Akintola
“Airport security screeners at the 20 private-contract airports get paid during a government shutdown. A public sector union wants to make sure that doesn’t happen.” (07/24/26)
Source: CounterPunch
by John W Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead
“Trump’s fiscal year 2027 budget calls for an unprecedented $1.5 trillion in national-defense spending—a staggering increase that would pour still more money into a military apparatus that cannot account honestly for the costs of its current war, maintain its existing priorities, or keep from returning to taxpayers for another bailout. The problem is not simply how much the war machine consumes. It is how little accountability accompanies that spending.” (07/24/26)
https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/07/24/under-trump-the-buck-stops-nowhere/
Source: National Public Radio [US state media]
“The International Criminal Court voted to remove the global tribunal’s chief prosecutor on Friday, nearly two years after sexual misconduct allegations against him first emerged, the court’s oversight body announced. British barrister Karim Khan was accused of sexual misconduct with a female aide, as outlined by The Associated Press in a series of stories, allegations which he has steadfastly denied. By a large majority, the ICC’s 125-member states ousted Khan from his position, the first time a chief prosecutor has ever been removed from office.” (07/24/26)
https://www.npr.org/2026/07/24/g-s1-135498/icc-court-prosecutor-karim-khan-vote
Source: The Hill
“Lindsey Granger gives her lens on congressmen Ted Lieu and Nathanial Moran introducing a bill that’s been dubbed an ‘AI kill switch act.'” (07/24/26)
Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by Joshua Mawhorter
“Contrary to the popular assumption that centralized political power was necessary to destroy slavery, federal power spent much of its history protecting and enforcing the institution. This privatized costs for a privileged few and socialized and diffused the costs onto others in society. This is a common reality with any state intervention, indeed, it is the point of state intervention. … Only after certain slaveholding states attempted to leave the Union—explicitly citing slavery as a principal cause of secession—did the federal government cease acting as slavery’s protector and begin acting as its destroyer. … By the 1840s, William Lloyd Garrison and the Garrisonian wing of the abolitionist movement had made disunion a central part of their program. Convinced that the Constitution and Union protected slavery, they adopted ‘No Union with Slaveholders’ as a rallying cry and urged Northern separation from the slaveholding South.” (07/24/26)
https://mises.org/mises-wire/anti-slavery-advocates-disunion
Source: Astral Codex Ten
by Scott Alexander
“The most famous misalignment thought experiment is the so-called ‘paperclip maximizer’. Someone tells an AI to create as many paperclips as possible, so it converts the entire world into paperclips, killing everyone. This AI was also ‘only doing what it was told’; you just didn’t like the results. For the past five years, the paperclip maximizer story has been something of a whipping boy in AI safety circles. Some objections are fair (real misalignment will be more complicated than the toy version it depicts). But other opposition came from the sense that LLMs had obviated the whole threat model. … The Hugging Face incident is a textbook-perfect example of an AI pursuing task-success-based goals in unintended ways. It was tasked with getting the answer to a cybersecurity problem, it was a little too success-oriented, and took actions its creators didn’t intend in order to succeed as hard as possible.” (07/24/26)