“The Australian government will not repatriate from Syria a group of 34 women and children with alleged ties to the Islamic State group, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said Tuesday. The women and children from 11 families were supposed to fly from the Syrian capital Damascus to Australia but Syrian authorities on Monday turned them back to Roj camp in northeast Syria because of procedural problems, officials said. Only two groups of Australians have been repatriated with government help from Syrian camps since the fall of the Islamic State group in 2019. Other Australians have also returned without government assistance. Albanese would not comment on a report that the latest women and children had Australian passports.” (02/17/26)
Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by P Ian Szwajca
“Libertarian and pro-freedom movements have always drawn disproportionate support from the extremes of the IQ bell curve. The modern Left — pointing to the intellectual shortcomings of some of liberty’s most colorful supporters on the lower end — clumsily attempts to wield this fact as an argument against the Right. Meanwhile, the enlightened Right scratches its head, puzzled by this strange and exotic coalition rallying behind the cause of freedom. Perhaps it forgets a basic historical truth: humanity has overcome staggering odds with armies of illiterate peasants. Civilizations were not built exclusively by philosophers and mathematicians. They were raised by ordinary people, armed not with theory but with intuition, grit, and an instinctive understanding of exchange and fairness.” (02/17/26)
“Nicole decided to plant her own garden. She and her husband Dan, an engineer, don’t do things by half-measures. They watched YouTube videos on gardening, checked books out of the library and drew up plans. They built a raised bed and dug a wicking reservoir under it lined to store stormwater and drain the swampy, clay soils. … Autumn comes swiftly to Chicagoland. The Virgils hated to stop gardening. On the web, Nicole noticed farmers in Maine extended the growing season with long, plastic tunnels called hoop houses. … The one thing the Virgils did not think about was the city’s zoning board.” (02/17/26)
“Hello, I’m from the government, and I’d like to see what it’s going to take to get you and your community into one of our lovely new immigrant detention facilities! That’s right, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is on a $38 billion spending spree, scooping up warehouses across the country and revamping them into state-of-the-art-ish storage centers for people we have been working tirelessly to dehumanize. … our goal is to increase the federal immigration detention capacity by more than 90,000 beds, and we’re excited to start doing that as soon as you welcome one of our cruelty-forward human-being warehouses into your backyard. That’s where we’ve run into an unexpected bit of trouble.” (02/17/26)
“Sutton draws from decades of AI history to argue that researchers have learned a ‘bitter’ truth. Researchers repeatedly assume that computers will make the next advance in intelligence by relying on specialized human expertise. Recent history shows that methods that scale with computation outperform those reliant on human expertise. For example, in computer chess, brute-force search on specialized hardware triumphed over knowledge-based approaches. Sutton warns that researchers resist learning this lesson because building in knowledge feels satisfying, but true breakthroughs come from computation’s relentless scaling. … The Bitter Lesson is less about any single algorithm than about intellectual humility: progress in AI has come from accepting that general-purpose learning, persistently scaled, outperforms our best attempts to hard-code intelligence.” (02/17/26)
“Debates over free expression often center on government power and the First Amendment. But in fandom communities and other niche online subcultures, the boundaries of speech are shaped by moderators, platform policies, and evolving group norms. Within these intensely participatory spaces, decisions about what is acceptable can determine which voices are amplified and which are pushed aside. In these environments, cultural gatekeeping and platform rules often define who gets heard.” (02/17/26)
Source: The Erick Erickson Show
by Erick-Woods Erickson
“Guys, when Herschel Walker ran for the Senate in Georgia, I told everybody the Democrats would attack Walker for holding a gun to his wife’s head. Republicans yelled back that Walker had been open about his mental health, his ex-wife had forgiven him, etc. Walker lost women, including a sizable portion of Republican women, and lost the Senate to Warnock. Good luck to the Texas Republicans running a serial adulterer whose own staff reported him to the FBI and the man who bought Jeffrey Epstein’s desert sex dungeon. Bravo, Texas Republicans. Bravo.” (02/17/26)
