Nonzero, 07/31/26
Source: bloggingheads.tv
“https://bloggingheads.tv/videos/69621.” (07/31/26)
Author: Thomas L. Knapp
Censorship never stops with just two words
Source: Los Angeles Times
by Angel Eduardo
“Members of the Los Angeles City Council would like a word or two — to ban. Last July, the council adopted a motion to prohibit two terms — a racial epithet and a slur against women — during the legally required public comment periods of their meetings. … you may loathe the words in question and never use them yourself. You may share the council’s desire to make public comment more civil and appropriate. You may believe Harris-Dawson and the other council members’ hearts are in the right place. But make no mistake: The council is effectively claiming the authority to ban any words it decides are inappropriate or offensive in the future.” (08/01/26)
Icelanding pirates steal ship, abduct crew
Sourc: ABC News
“Icelandic coast guards and special forces seized a ship operated by a group founded by anti-whaling activist Paul Watson and detained its crew, officials in the Arctic island nation said Saturday. The Icelandic Coast Guard said the crew of whaling ship Hvalur 9 requested assistance on Thursday evening because they believed their safety was under threat from the protest vessel Bandero. It said the Bandero ignored coast guards’ instructions to leave Icelandic waters, and later an order to stop its engines. Coast guards and the police special forces Viking Squad boarded the vessel around midnight on Thursday and detained its crew. Watson was not aboard.” (08/01/26)
Americans Hate the Two-Party System But Don’t Know What Should Replace It, ISMA Populism Survey Finds
Source: The UnPopulist
by Andy Craig
“Complaining about the two-party system may be the last genuinely bipartisan activity in American life. It gets said at dinner tables and on cable panels, a beat before someone announces that what this country really needs is a third party. A new survey from the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, fielded through YouGov in late June, confirms Americans overwhelmingly dislike our political system. But what it also found is that familiarity with possible reform options remains low. The survey suggests a way forward for negotiating this information gap and implementing reforms.” (07/31/26)
https://www.theunpopulist.net/p/americans-hate-the-two-party-system
Cyberattacks on water systems spread to seven US states
Source: United Press International
“At least seven states have suffered cyberattacks on water systems as cities and states work to keep the water supplies safe. There has been no indication that any water supply is unsafe to drink, the New York Times reported. Minnesota first reported a cyberattack and now Michigan has also reported attacks. The Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency said in a release that it’s ‘observing a significant increase in cyber threat actors targeting programmable logic controllers in the Water and Wastewater Systems sector. CISA urges critical infrastructure owners, operators, and integrators to remove publicly exposed PLCs and other operational technology from the Internet as soon as possible. Threat actors targeting exposed PLCs have modified passwords to lock out operators and disconnected the PLCs by changing their IP addresses.'” [editor’s note: Somehow we had robust water systems without Internet connections for decades – TLK] (08/01/26)
https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2026/08/01/cyberattacks-water-systems-7-states/5441785618113/
Show-Me Institute Podcast, 07/31/26
Source: Show-Me Institute
“Declining School Enrollment with Susan Pendergrass.” (07/31/26)
https://showmeinstitute.org/article/education/declining-school-enrollment-with-susan-pendergrass/
Medical Segregation: A Coming Coup in American Medical Care?
Source: Brownstone Institute
by Wendy McElroy
“Federalization leads medicine down a very bad path toward bureaucracy and away from competitive markets, which are the best hope to deliver quality at reasonable cost. Remember Covid? Remember President Ronald Reagan’s famous comment, ‘The nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help’?’ Bureaucrats helped us good and hard with Covid; now they want to help with women’s health. They make no pretense of ‘helping’ men good and hard, of course. To men, the program offers a medical segregation that is as medically unfair as it would be to medically segregate blacks along racial lines. Clearly, medical differences between women and men sometimes require totally different hands-on care; but medical differences, like breast cancer rates, is not what is being discussed. Political and economic power is under discussion.” (08/01/26)
https://brownstone.org/articles/medical-segregation-a-coming-coup-in-american-medical-care/
The Automated Overton Window
Source: Liberalism.org
by Eli Talbert
“Consider a hypothetical tenant in Phoenix, Arizona, asking an AI assistant whether allowing five-story mixed-use apartments near a light-rail stop would make housing cheaper before she writes to her city council member. The answer cites the City of Phoenix Planning and Development Department, notes displacement, and summarizes the mayor’s affordability set-aside. Nothing feels coercive. The tenant remains free to disagree. Yet a practical risk is already present. The AI has chosen which sources to retrieve, which follow-up questions to encourage, which frame feels neutral—and which serious alternatives will take extra effort to find. By the time she reaches the public meeting, the tenant may have concluded that the boundaries of the argument are settled.” (07/31/26)
Trump Has Revolutionized Executive Power
Source: Persuasion
by Francis Fukuyama
“As we move toward the end of the Trump era, we need to reckon with the changes his administration has wrought in the American system of government. The most significant is the enormous concentration of power, not just in the executive branch as a whole, but in the office of the president. Any successor administration, Republican or Democratic, will inherit these powers, and will have to decide how it wants to define the limits of executive authority in the future.” (07/31/26)
https://www.persuasion.community/p/the-grave-choice-facing-the-next
Russia: At least three killed in Moscow restaurant bombing
Source: France 24 [French state media]
“An explosion Saturday at a Moscow restaurant that killed three people and wounded 21 others was a bombing, Russia’s national anti-terrorism committee said, the Tass state news agency reported. … An unidentified woman who attempted to carry the explosive device into the restaurant died in the blast as did a security guard and a patron, the news agency said. Ria Novosti reported the woman attempted to smuggle the bomb into the establishment but the security guard refused to let her in before the bomb exploded. … The Kommersant daily newspaper cited its own sources as saying that the bomb had been intended to maim and kill guests who were enjoying themselves on the restaurant’s summer terrace outside. It suggested that the bomb had been set off by someone else remotely and that the woman carrying it may not have known that it was an explosive device.” (08/02/26)