“Britain is set to ban goods from Israeli [squats] in the occupied West Bank in response to an expansion program that is imperiling efforts to establish [sic] a Palestinian state, the U.K. government said Tuesday. Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband is due to give details in the House of Commons later, after saying last week that he would ‘reset’ U.K. relations with Israel. Before the announcement, Work and Pensions Secretary Pat McFadden said that it ‘isn’t intended to be a boycott of all Israeli goods.’ He said that the measures were ‘specifically targeted at the expansion of these [squats], which are illegal under international law, in the West Bank.’ … Senior Israeli ministers condemned the U.K. government’s impending announcement. … The move also was criticized by the U.S. ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, who said that it was ‘discrimination against the Jewish people.'” (09/08/27)
“The jury took just two hours. Tony Greenstein – Jewish socialist, anti-Zionist – had faced fourteen years under the Terrorism Act for three social media posts and a blog article opposing Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The Crown called it ‘inviting support for Hamas.’ The jury called it something else. Section 12 of the Terrorism Act makes it an offense to invite support for a proscribed organization. Greenstein’s reference to a ‘Gaza ghetto uprising’, it argued, amounted to support for Hamas. Three social media posts and a blog article. The bill the State was demanding for those words – fourteen years.” (09/07/26)
“A federal appeals court ruled that the U.S. Constitution does not guarantee the right to clean drinking water in a Sept. 4 decision rejecting Jackson, Mississippi, residents’ lawsuit over the city’s lead-contaminated water system. The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court ruling dismissing residents’ 2022 lawsuit. The plaintiffs, Priscilla Sterling, Raine Becker, Shawn Miller and John Bennett, alleged that the city knowingly allowed residents to drink unsafe water. They argued that the water contamination violated their constitutional right to bodily integrity under the 14th Amendment’s due process clause. In the majority decision, Judge Kurt Engelhardt wrote that while the deprivation of clean water was ‘grievous,’ it did ‘not infringe upon any deeply rooted constitutional right.'” (09/07/26)
Source: USA Today
by Cristine Soto DeBerry and Greg Srolestar
“In the spring of 2020, the nation was roiled by protests as people reacted to disturbing video footage showing Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin kill George Floyd, a Black man he arrested and subdued who posed no plausible danger to him or anyone else. … Some of the calls for changes in 2020 went beyond what most Americans were ready to accept. It’s understandable how a call to ‘defund the police’ was easily turned into a political weapon, especially as crime increased during the COVID-19 pandemic. But in the years since, we’ve seen a growing backlash to any change to policing … This lack of effective accountability is particularly troubling as police killings remain stubbornly high, with most data showing more than 1,000 people killed by officers each year. According to Mapping Police Violence, there were just six days in 2025 when police did not kill someone.” (09/07/26)
“The war in Iran has now cost U.S. consumers $100 billion in higher energy prices, and the bill is rising another $1 million about every two minutes, per a real-time estimate from Brown University as of Monday morning. … The Iran War Energy Cost Tracker from Brown’s Watson School says higher gasoline and diesel prices have cost the average U.S. household more than $760 since the war began Feb. 28. Most of that is gas, though the diesel burden is rising faster of late. On Friday, diesel hit an all-time record high, and it’s continued to rise every day since. As of Monday morning it’s at $5.90 a gallon, per AAA, up about 60% from a year ago.” (09/07/26)
Source: ProSocial Libertarians
by Anrew Jason Cohen
“Education is important. Some believe we must provide education to maintain the society we live in. Without education, after all, we would not have the doctors and teachers, etc. (many would say, politicians, police officers, and lawyers; see this post), that are needed to make society work. This seems right. We do need a system that provides doctors, teachers, and more. But that says nothing about the sort of educational system we ought to have. In my last post, I laid out my view of an ideal college. It is, unsurprisingly, very different from what we now have.” (09/07/26)
“Erik and Lyle Menendez have been granted an early parole suitability hearing, much to the delight of their family. In a statement released on Monday morning, a family spokesperson confirmed that the California Board of Parole granted the brothers the sooner hearing. They were previously eligible for a parole suitability hearing next in Aug. 2028. … The brothers were sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for the murders of their parents, Jose and Kitty Menendez, at their Beverly Hills home in 1989.” (09/07/26)
“What is so fucking sacred about the nuclear fucking family? This is a totally modern construct devoid of anything even remotely resembling traditional family values. The notion of family as two married adults with two children in one house in the suburbs is actually a violent and relatively recent break from thousands of years of multi-generational village life in which small, tight knit, rural communities raised their children collectively. In fact, the nuclear family as we currently understand it is largely a construct of early twentieth century progressive academia who saw suburbia as the model for a carefully planned society built on the backs of economically efficient prisoners, with the nuclear family serving largely as the perfect means to organize each three-bedroom jail cell.” (09/06/26)
“American free expression doctrine is younger and thinner than we think. An older legal tradition solved problems we are still arguing about.” (09/04/26)
