“Humanity’s relationship with its mechanical helpers has always been a little bumpy. In a production of Lohengrin, the celebrated tenor Leo Slezak was supposed to climb onto a swan during his dramatic farewell. At one performance, the contraption departed without him. Slezak turned to the audience and asked: ‘When does the next swan leave?’ I was reminded of this anecdote from what very much feels like another era when I bought a coffee on the sidelines of the World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing (also known as the robot Olympics). A metallic barista filled a cup with coffee, reached for a jug of hot milk, and made quick, delicate movements as it poured. The coffee was surprisingly good, and the robot had even decorated it with a remarkably detailed swan made out of milk. The performances of the robots inside the arena were more uneven.” (08/26/26)
“Government is obviously a criminal gang; unaccountable to the people it rules, and refusing to be limited by the rules that apply to it. Like in all criminal gangs, there is infighting. Sometimes the opposing factions fight and focus on someone who is also in government, but they’ll ignore those who have done worse to punish someone who has stepped across a line the other politicians somehow notice and care about. I used to wonder how people could be so blind to the situation and keep supporting the existence of government in spite of the evidence right under their noses. I used to wonder, but I don’t anymore. It’s fear.” (08/26/26)
“A better name for the current Women’s National Basketball League (WNBA) might be Women’s Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), given the growing performance-art violence that is now endemic in the league. Prior to the 2024 arrival of then-22-year-old Iowa superstar Caitlin Clark, very few people watched the WNBA. Team franchises were worth less than $20 million. The league ran chronic deficits and was subsidized by the men’s professional basketball league, the National Basketball Association (NBA). An unspoken subtext of the WNBA was that the owners and coaches were left-wing and made little effort to hide their political biases. Despite talk of diversity, the league was (and remains) about 83 percent nonwhite and about 70 percent black. Some media outlets have suggested that about 50 percent of the players are lesbians. By Clark’s third year, her level of play had revolutionized the WNBA – or rather, saved it from financial collapse and cultural obscurity.” (08/27/26)
“What is missing from the conversation about 2020—Trumpism, Woke 1, the origins of coronavirus, and so on—is real accountability. Accountability was the missing ingredient in Woke 1, where the priority in approaching alleged wrongthinkers was always cancellation; punishment rather than rehabilitation—if, in fact, the accused had even done anything wrong. So I am not out to cancel AOC, though I agree with her on vanishingly little. Her electoral career is for voters to decide. What I would like from the congresswoman is accountability; not for her to simply disown her bad ideas but to seriously interrogate what made those ideas bad. The same can be said for Dr. Anthony Fauci, who has been the target of a Republican-led witch hunt for the better part of a decade, but is also a deeply flawed leader.” (08/26/26)
Source: Rutherford Institute
by John & Nisha Whitehead
“What began publicly as Donald Trump’s lavish, taxpayer-funded vision of a gilded White House ballroom is now being justified by the administration—in and out of court—as a matter of national security. To President Trump, it seems, a ballroom by any other name is a bunker. … hundreds of workers have been laboring around the clock, 20 hours a day, seven days a week, to push the project forward as quickly as possible. The message seems clear: get far enough along, fast enough, and it becomes that much harder for Congress, the courts or some future administration to undo what has already been built. There is a lesson in that, and it speaks to much more than a ballroom or a bunker.” (08/26/26)
Source: Independent Institute
by Alvaro Vargas Llosa
“Gianni Infantino, the president of FIFA, soccer’s worldwide governing body, is a good example of what happens when one person concentrates too much power. Don’t get me wrong. He can rightly boast some important achievements, both financially (for instance, the recent World Cup produced a record-breaking $12 billion (roughly) in revenue for FIFA) and in terms of finishing the job of breaking Europe’s stranglehold on the sport that others had begun in the 1970s …. But he is perceived as having turned FIFA into a one-man show (and I am not talking about Lionel Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo) and as a power structure run like a political machine, where everything seems organized with one end in sight: to keep Infantino at the top.” (08/26/26)
“‘Evil is turned into Good, and Good into Evil’ … Written almost 300 years ago, Thomas Gordon warned us about political parties being little more than cults that promise to protect your country – while really killing it. It was so prophetic that it sounds like it was written today.” (08/26/26)
“Dear friends and colleagues, The United States and Israel launched a war of aggression against Iran in February of this year. For six months, US missiles and bombs have fallen upon civilian and military targets inside the country. Hospitals, schools, energy facilities, and neighbourhoods have been struck. The 168 schoolgirls killed in Minab have become the terrible symbol of this war. Iranians have been forced to live under the constant expectation of another attack, while Iranian families outside the country endure the peculiar agony of watching the destruction from afar. This follows on three years of Israeli genocide in Gaza, which has been carried out due to the relentless military support of the United States.” (08/27/26)
