Source: Caitlin Johnstone, Rogue Journalist
by Caitlin Johnstone
“A US-based nonprofit is planning to use AI surveillance to check for ‘hateful’ speech about Israel inside classrooms in the genocide-ravaged Gaza Strip. The Associated Press reports: ‘A U.S. charity in Gaza is worried that teachers at its schools might stray from a curriculum it says promotes peace and tolerance, so it plans to record classroom conversations and use artificial intelligence to flag speech deemed ‘hateful’ or ‘inciting.’ … So inside the ruins of Gaza an American charity funded by Israelis is going to be teaching schoolchildren not to hold negative beliefs toward the US-backed ethnostate which just destroyed their neighborhoods, killed their families, and laid siege to their entire population, and will be enforcing these standards using AI tech surveillance which will be shared with God knows whom.” (10/10/26)
Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Jacob G Hornberger
“Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has announced that the U.S. military’s planned execution by firing squad of Nidal Malik Hasan, the U.S. Army psychiatrist, who murdered 13 people at Fort Hood in 2009, will be live-streamed. Of one thing we can be fairly certain: Leading up to Hasan’s execution, U.S. officials will either (1) do everything they can to avoid mentioning what motivated Hasan to commit those murders or (2) lie about it by claiming that he just hates America for its ‘freedom and values.'” (10/09/26)
“If a crisis can also be seen as an opportunity, the United States Department of Defense is staring at the greatest opportunity of its existence. In the last eight months of warfare with Iran, the U.S. military has produced arguably the worst performance in American history. It had many months, if not years, to prepare for an air campaign against Iran. It was facing an enemy with an already devastated air force, which had been bombed heavily by Israel and once by the United States the year before. The United States had the benefit of an advanced mixed force of land-based and sea-based air power, missiles which the Iranians could not intercept, and excellent intelligence on Iranian activity. Furthermore, the U.S. military also had access to supposedly world-leading, cutting-edge artificial intelligence capabilities …. And the U.S. military failed miserably.” (10/09/26)
“Laws, no matter how well intended, are only as strong as people’s beliefs in them. And there is no higher law in life than the one that says we are to treat each other as we wish to be treated.” (10/09/26)
Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Laurence M Vance
“The plain fact is that it is immoral to take money by coercion from one party and give it to another party. Just because the government does it does not make it any less immoral. Welfare is immoral in any country.” (10/09/26)
“Let us imagine, just for a moment, that this climate change thing is really big and important. So much so that we’re going to subsidise people moving from internal combustion engines over to electric vehicles. No, no, don’t worry about whether all that is true or not, necessary or a good idea. That’s just the set up. We’ve got to shift that transport sector and we’re going to do it via subsidy. ‘Andy Burnham is preparing to raise tariffs on Chinese electric cars as part of a closer relationship with the EU.’ … The answer to climate change is that we both subsidise electric vehicles and also that we tax electric vehicles at a rate of 45%. That the political process would even consider this – this before how we all know there will be those who think it a good idea – shows, precisely, why politics and good economics just do not mix.” (10/09/26)
“Whether reflecting on the impersonal essence of ‘virtual reality’ and the incessant stream of demands and anxieties it imposes upon our diurnal, increasingly alienated existence, or listening to the concerns of one’s fellow citizens, one hears a persistent leitmotif: the longing for true community, especially among the youth. One aspect of this longing has been well bruited: people’s gnawing sense that the myth of ‘virtual community’ is an alienating illusion that increasingly leaves them numb and pining for personal engagements—the flesh-and-blood amities, intimacies, and sundry other encounters of true community. Exacerbating this sense of loss, especially among the young, people are very concerned about ‘affordability’ (such as the inability to purchase a new home, rent an apartment, find an entry-level job, or keep the one they already have) due to the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and inflation.” (10/10/26)
Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by Joshua Mawhorter
“The masterful socialist strategy is to present only the benefits of their policies with no (or almost no) costs, and then assert that the consequences of state intervention are actually the costs of free-market capitalism. Ironically, however, the socialists need the genuine production and exchange from some degree of market capitalism in order to give anything to anyone. What does not exist or is not possessed cannot be given.” (10/09/26)
“For the ancients, thymos always had to cede to reason to be exercised properly, and always, as for every virtue, in moderation. The consequences of unrestrained thymos could be disastrous, as Socrates taught, and Alcibiades, who rashly got Athens into a war it could not win, proved. So no, the West is not defined by ambition, nor by ‘the unapologetic pursuit of national power.’ For most of the last two thousand years, after all, ‘national power’ did not exist. Christendom did. The West is defined by reason allied with Christianity, which eventually gave us the liberal order. Rubio wants to replace that with unconstrained passion allied with the will to power. God help us. But that just reveals how virulently anti-Christian the American right has now become.” (10/09/26)
Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Marta Roels
“At the turn of the century, Italy was a G7 industrial power, admired for its fashion, automobiles, machinery, food, and design. Since then, a rigid labor market, complex taxation, slow courts, small family firms, heavy public debt, demographic decline, and the constraints of the euro have combined to undermine growth. Italy has not dramatically collapsed; it has lost time. Between 2000 and 2022, Italian labor productivity fell by roughly 4%, while the EU average rose around 20%.” (10/09/26)
