Source: Karl Dickey’s Freedom Vanguard
by Karl Dickey
“In case you’ve been hiding under a rock, you know that NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani has just appointed Cea Weaver to lead his new tenant protection office. If the name sounds familiar, it’s because Weaver is the architect of New York’s aggressive ‘cancel rent’ movements. And it’s her past comments that are currently setting the internet on fire. In resurfaced posts, Weaver labeled private property — and specifically homeownership — as a ‘tool of white supremacy.’ She has since pulled her X account. As an American, I find her perspective not just radical, but dangerously racist and seriously flawed.” (01/07/26)
“U.S. President Donald Trump on Wednesday said his administration is moving to ban Wall Street from investing in single-family homes in a bid to reduce home prices, a potential blow for private-equity landlords that also pressured homebuilder shares. In a post on Truth Social, Trump said he was taking immediate action and would ask Congress to codify the measure, adding he would also be discussing additional housing and affordability proposals in a speech at the Davos World Economic Forum. … Wall Street landlords dispute that their investments have stoked inflation and hurt housing supply. In a January research note, Blackstone said institutions own only 0.5% of all single-family homes in the United States. It was not immediately clear what legal authority Trump would draw upon to impose such a ban on the private market purchases of houses.” (01/07/26)
“W.E.B. Du Bois was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts (where AIER is now headquartered), in 1868. Today, this towering figure of the early civil rights movement is remembered as a groundbreaking sociologist, Pan-African socialist, and near-mythical hero to the intellectual left. … But there was once a W.E.B. Du Bois who was radical mainly in the scientific sense. Before drifting into the study of history and sociology, he was an economics student at Harvard. The marginal revolution had just remade the dismal science into a more mathematical and literally ‘edgy’ subject. And Du Bois made original contributions that leveraged insights from the free-market Austrian school and anticipated later developments in neoclassical economic thought, as Daniel Kuehn explains in a recent paper published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives.” (01/07/26)
“The deadliest clashes so far broke out Tuesday between Syrian government forces and Kurdish fighters in a contested area of the northern city of Aleppo, as efforts to merge the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces with the national army have shown little progress. Syria ’s state-run SANA news agency said a soldier was killed and three others were wounded in an attack by the SDF. State TV later reported that three civilians, including two women, were killed and others were wounded, including two children, in shelling of a residential area that it blamed on the SDF. SANA also said nine Aleppo Directorate of Agriculture employees were wounded by SDF shelling that hit its office. The SDF in a statement denied being behind the shelling that killed the civilians and said a shell launched by ‘factions affiliated with the Damascus government’ landed in the al-Midan neighborhood.” (01/07/25)
“Lawyers representing the New York Daily News and an array of news organizations suing OpenAI for allegedly stealing [sic] and distorting their reporters’ work have asked a Manhattan judge to sanction ChatGPT’s parent company, alleging the tech behemoth deleted millions of conversations they were required to hand over as evidence of copyright infringement. OpenAI continued to destroy output logs despite orders from two judges to preserve and provide them to the news organizations, new court filings allege. More than 1 million logs that had been requested — containing information the news outlets believe was based on their journalists’ reporting — were subbed out, according to court documents.” (01/07/26)
“A party run by people dumb and insular enough to nominate Kamala Harris is also a party dumb and insular enough to mistakenly believe that the way to connect with the rural voters who have rallied to the banner of Donald Trump is to push out an older dad type in a blaze orange vest and have him point a 12-gauge at some tasty birds. … To the extent that [Tim] Walz’s gun-toting made an impression at all, it was a poor one: Gun-rights voters did not seem him as a potential champion but as the worst thing you can be in those circles: a ‘Fudd,’ meaning an out-of-touch dork who believes that the Second Amendment is about hunting, as though the Founding Fathers took the time to write a hobby into the Bill of Rights.” (01/07/26)
“Private employers added 41,000 jobs in December, recovering from losses in the previous month but missing the projected estimate for gains by a few thousand jobs. Dow Jones estimated the private sector would add about 48,000 jobs in the final month of the year after losing 29,000 workers in November. Gains made were coupled with a 4.4 percent year-over-year pay increase for employees, according to ADP. The South and Northeast tracked the most growth, with 54,000 new jobs in the Southern region and 40,000 in the Northeast. The West was the only region to see a decrease in jobs, with 61,000 roles cut. The decrease reflects a broader decline in roles within the information, business services and manufacturing industries.” (01/07/26)
Source: Law & Liberty
by David D Corey & Dominic MM Saunders
“In ‘Contemporary Muses,’ Henry T. Edmondson III is gently critical of those who defend the value of pop music on political grounds. Political protest may be a mainstay of pop music, but ‘it would be disappointing,’ he writes, ‘if America’s … cultural commentators were unable to see past the politics.’ Instead, Edmondson proposes to defend (certain) pop music as something that approaches philosophy: ‘Some pop songs explore deep themes of moral philosophy’ or ‘meditate thoughtfully on the human condition.’ Edmondson’s approach bears fruit as he catalogues lyrics that echo major themes of Western moral philosophy. One might wonder, however, whether defending pop music as philosophy is much different from defending it as political protest.” (01/07/26)
