Source: Eastern New Mexico News
by Kent McManigal
“If you count on government providing something, before long you may not have it at all. It’s the fox watching the henhouse. At the very least, government involvement doesn’t stop the inevitable. If something is not sustainable, putting government in charge won’t save the day.” (08/12/26)
Source: WION [India]
“A top adviser to the commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said on Wednesday that Iran could ‘prolong’ the war with the US until President Donald Trump is out of office. ‘We have to attain deterrence so that the enemy never dares to attack us, so we can live with security,’ Mohammad Reza Naqdi told PBS in an interview. … ‘One way is to prolong this war until we get to the next term of the presidency and cause attrition so that if anyone else wants to attack Iran, they will know there is a cost,’ he said.” (08/13/26)
Source: The Hill
by Glenn Farley
“With the cost of living on every voter’s mind, an old idea is getting a new push on Capitol Hill: fixing a flaw in the tax code that makes everything more expensive. Anyone who has ever sold a home, stock, or even a collectible is familiar with it. When you sell an asset that has risen in price, the IRS taxes the gain. But that gain is measured against the price you paid, not your true cost. If you bought a stock, a bond, or a business many years ago, and its price merely kept pace with inflation, you are no richer in purchasing power than the day you bought it — yet the tax code treats the difference as income and taxes it anyway. This is especially noticeable in periods of high inflation, like the last five years. It is a tax on rising prices, dressed up as a tax on profit.” (08/12/26)
https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/5980648-index-capital-gains-inflation/
Source: Axios
“Karoline Leavitt will be stepping down from her role as White House press secretary at the end of the month, President Trump announced Wednesday in a Truth Social post. Leavitt is leaving to spend more time with her family, the president said. A member of Trump’s team who followed him from his presidential campaign to the White House, she’s been a fiercely loyal face of the White House. Trump said in the surprise post that Leavitt will become one of his top outside advisers and ‘an influential voice within the Republican Party’ heading into the midterm elections.” (08/12/26)
https://www.axios.com/2026/08/12/trump-karoline-leavitt-white-house-press
Source: Liberalism.org
by Rachel Lomasky
“The AI alignment problem asks whether the autonomous agents derived from Large Language Models and other AI technologies can reliably internalize the objectives for which they are optimized. The problem is magnified because human objectives are complex and hard to formalize, it is not possible to monitor the internals of the systems, and previous behavior is not necessarily a reliable predictor of how the AI will behave in novel situations. Worries that AIs might find goals that ‘score well’ but don’t match human intent have become a fashionable topic, driven in part by news stories about AI tools behaving in unexpected and disturbing ways, which can be difficult to monitor and reverse. … Human alignment, by comparison, has never been effectively enforced, although significant effort is spent on trying to determine our fellow humans’ motives.” (08/12/26)
Source: Associated Press
“Crews rescued 211 people and recovered the body of a passenger from a ferry that caught fire in rough seas Wednesday near the Indonesian tourist island of Bali, authorities said. The Putri Yasmin ferry was traveling from Bali to the neighboring island of Lombok in West Nusa Tenggara province when the fire broke out at about 4:15 a.m. The ferry was also transporting 44 vehicles and 53 motorcycles. … The rescue agency said that as of Wednesday afternoon, rescuers evacuated 211 people from the burned vessel, including 2 Australian tourists, and recovered the body of a 19-year-old Indonesian woman.” (08/12/26)
https://apnews.com/article/indonesia-bali-lombok-ferry-fire-ab527cf29730147f86c4c82f341584eb
Source: Reason
“What if the Future Is Actually Good?” (08/12/26)
https://reason.com/podcast/2026/08/12/what-if-the-future-is-actually-good/
Source: Bluegrass Institute
by Caleb O Brown & Dan Canon
“Kentucky’s new license plate camera law is now in effect, and it already looks out of step with the Constitution. Just before it took effect, the U.S. Supreme Court handed the commonwealth a warning its lawmakers cannot afford to ignore. On June 29, the Court ruled in Chatrie v. United States that police conduct a Fourth Amendment search when they obtain a person’s location data — even from a private company, and even for a short window of time. … That case was about cell-phone data. But the reasoning lands squarely on the surveillance network Kentucky’s local governments have spent the last few years building through a single vendor: Flock Safety.” (08/12/26)
Source: Ron Paul Liberty Report
“Trump: ‘WE Control Strait Of Hormuz!'” (08/12/26)
http://www.ronpaullibertyreport.com/archives/trump-we-control-strait-of-hormuz
Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by Connor O’Keeffe
“Around two and a half years ago, as the Biden administration was entering what we now know was its final year, the then-president’s re-election campaign was growing frustrated. … In one of the most unsurprising developments in modern American politics, it turned out that people who were struggling to navigate the aftermath of the government’s destructive economic shutdowns and keep up with rising prices did not like being told by establishment-approved economic ‘experts’ that they were essentially stupid if they didn’t understand how excellent the economy actually was. … now, as the midterms approach and he and his party are the ones in charge, the Republicans are faced with the exact same choice the Democrats had been faced with before 2024. And, notably, they have decided to adopt the same strategy that helped torpedo the Democrats last time around.” (08/12/26)