“We are told that we have no expectation of privacy on public roads. But is a Flock of a.i.-backed cameras the kind of thing we want spying on us, tracking our every move? While we say that ‘it’s only a conspiracy if they do it in secret,’ what is it when the people who seek to destroy the last vestiges of our privacy demand their own privacy even as they plot against us?” (08/25/26)
“Since the degenerative brain disease known as CTE was first scientifically linked to football about 20 years ago, and as hundreds of former professional football players have been diagnosed with the disease after their deaths, a haunting question has lingered: Just how many NFL players will end up with CTE? New data provides a sobering indication: At least 1 in 4 of all the people who have played in the NFL might expect to end up with chronic traumatic encephalopathy, according to a study of hundreds of cases over a recent six-year period. … Researchers involved in this study, published Tuesday in The BMJ, hope to produce a subsequent paper in the coming months estimating the overall rate of CTE in all NFL players at the time of their death.” (08/25/26)
“A full refund may balance an airline’s books, but it doesn’t make a stranded passenger whole. The difference illustrates one of economics’ most important insights: value is subjective.” (08/25/26)
“OpenAI has banned a cluster of ChatGPT accounts originating in Russia that it said were being used to support a covert online influence campaign to spread misinformation. The company discovered the issue after investigating AI-generated social media posts, which led it to a ‘much broader influence operation,’ OpenAI said in a blog post on Tuesday. The campaign was ‘built around a website containing copied and misattributed academic work, a ‘sovereignty’ index that cast Russia in a favourable light, and efforts to disguise the operators’ Russian origins,’ the company added. It’s the latest incident of pro-Russia actors using AI to spread misinformation. OpenAI does not allow access to its models in Russia, but the company said VPNs were used to disguise location.” (08/25/26)
“Roepke was born near Hanover, Germany, in 1899. He died in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1966. After serving in World War I, he attended the University of Marburg and graduated in 1921, and later became one of the youngest professors in Germany; he served on the Brauns Commission of the Brüning administration to propose policies to deal with the growing unemployment crisis during the early days of the Great Depression. He actively opposed the National Socialists, and when Hitler was inaugurated as chancellor in January 1933, he left Germany, heading first for the Netherlands, and then finally to the University of Istanbul.” (08/25/26)
“Don’t worry, America. As you lament the high cost of living, the president is here to protect you from the menace of … imported goods from Canada that he has decided are too cheap. … The self-described ‘affordability president’ keeps coming up with new ways to make goods more expensive.” (08/25/26)
Source: Brownstone Institute
by David Bell & Ramesh Thakur
“The recent release of Anthony Fauci’s diaries, followed by his refusal to answer questions in an appearance before a US Senate committee by invoking the Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination 111 times, highlighted a stark divide in how the Covid pandemic was handled by public health authorities. … their private contemporaneous conversations confirm that even the top scientists were making decisions based on scientific uncertainty. Consequently, one of the key legacies of the public-private gap is growing distrust of official claims. That scepticism should extend to the future pandemic agenda. We rely on the World Health Organisation to coordinate among countries to prevent scourges such as pandemics reaching our shores, or at least mitigate their effects. In doing so, we must defer to an army of international bureaucrats who work in such institutions. A deference that relies on trust.” (08/25/26)
“I have never been a deficit hawk, and I’m not about to change my religious affiliation now. But whatever we think of debt and deficits, there is one point that should be very clear: it has been run up almost entirely due to Republican tax cuts and their inept management of the economy. Every Democratic president of the last half century has left with a deficit that was lower, measured as a share of GDP, than the one they came in with, except Obama, who left it unchanged. By contrast, every Republican president has left with a considerably higher deficit than what they inherited.” [editor’s note: There have been no “tax cuts,” Republican or otherwise. If spending isn’t going down, taxes aren’t going down. Debt is just deferred payment of taxes – TLK] (08/25/26)
