“As the U.S. midterms approach, headlines regarding the Ukraine war are emerging at breakneck pace. But amid the noise and recurring outrage, the fundamental dilemma has not changed: how can the United States build up a self-sustaining European equilibrium that maximizes Washington’s room for maneuver in an increasingly multipolar world? Achieving a comprehensive settlement to the war in Ukraine is a necessary, albeit insufficient, part of the answer. European leaders perceive Russia’s war of aggression not just as a security threat but as a fundamental breach of the post-Cold War continental compact. It will not soon be forgotten. As long as the fighting continues — and even in the event of a ceasefire that leaves deeper political cleavages unaddressed — Europe and Russia will not arrive at a stable balance of power on their own.” (10/16/26)
“The European Union’s long project to build the continent into a fortified zone of peace and prosperity has hit a new pitfall. Over the past two weeks, the war in Ukraine has expanded far into the Black Sea. Several merchant ships carrying grain and other civilian cargo were struck by drones – widely viewed as Russian – off the shores of two NATO members, Bulgaria and Romania. Nearly two dozen sailors from many countries were either killed or are missing. ‘The Kremlin is testing the EU and Nato, and will act depending on the results of the testing,’ a popular Ukrainian blogger, Boryslav Bereza, wrote on Facebook.” (10/16/26)
“Trump’s effort to fire a Fed governor may be political interference, but it exposes a real problem: central bankers exercise enormous power with little accountability for their mistakes.” (10/16/26)
“Data centers have quickly become very unpopular, with more than 70 percent of Americans now opposing the construction of one in their area. It’s tempting to assume these attitudes are driven by anxiety over artificial intelligence, and as such have little relevance for housing debates. But data center skeptics are far more likely to mention environmental, cost of living, and quality of life concerns than negative views of AI. Many of these critiques are familiar to anyone who has attended public meetings about any residential or commercial development (right down to complaints about the size, noise, and traffic). In other words, the data center backlash … is in many respects just an amplified version of normal anti-development politics.” (10/16/26)
“I’ll never forget my first job working on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk project, back in 2008. I was on maternity leave and needed some extra cash to make ends meet, so for several hours a day I would look at and tag photos with as many keywords as possible. If I was looking at a picture of a cloud in the sky, for instance, I would tag additional words such as ’sky’, ‘daylight’ and ‘atmosphere’. I didn’t know then that Mechanical Turk, or MTurk as it came to be called, would become my fulltime job and that in the process I would become one of the hundreds of thousands of data workers who built the backbone of Big Tech’s AI machine. After a little more than two decades of service, Amazon shut down MTurk for good on September 30 of this year.” (10/16/26)
“Don’t we all wish we had congressional term limits or age limits, or both, whenever a congressman of extremely advanced tenure or age, or both, drags himself through yet another reelection campaign? Age limits would have been academic for Chuck Grassley, however, had he been subject to limits of, say, two six-year terms when he first became a senator in 1981. This is not an issue of people in their 70s, 80s, and 90s getting elected to Congress for the first time. Grassley, for example, has been in Congress for the last 52 years: 46 years in the Senate and six years before that as a U.S. Representative. And let’s note 16 years in the Iowa State Legislature before that. Grassley has been in elected office non-stop for 68 years.” (10/16/26)
Source: Cato Institute
by Jai Kedia and Norbert J Michel
“Tariffs would be bad policy even if they had hit every one of their stated targets because those targets are not measures of economic welfare. That they have missed those targets anyway only makes the verdict against tariffs even harsher. Congress, which holds the constitutional power to set tariffs, should stop grading them on inflation prints, factory payrolls, and the trade balance. There is no world where increasing taxes, restricting trade, and pushing people into jobs that wouldn’t otherwise exist will increase Americans’ living standards.” (10/15/26)
“While tooling down the freeway one day, you’re pulled over by a cop and it comes to light that you don’t possess a government-issued ‘driver’s license.’ Does that mean you aren’t a ‘driver?’ ‘Admission to the bar’ and other occupational licensing schemes don’t exist to distinguish ‘real’ lawyers, doctors, and even (in some states) hair braiders and interior decorators from ‘fake’ ones. Nor do they exist to ‘protect the public’ from less qualified practitioners. They exist to raise the incomes of people who procure those Extra Special, Very Important Permission Slips and to make it more expensive and difficult to competitively join those anointed elites. Which is why the strongest lobbying for implementing and enforcing such schemes always comes from the existing practitioners. If you ‘practice law,’ you’re a ‘lawyer’ or ‘attorney,’ whether you have government credentials saying so or not.” (10/15/26)
Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Jacob G Hornberger
“During my entire life, there have been crises and chaos along the U.S.-Mexico border. That’s because of America’s immigration-control program, which has been in existence for more than 100 years. This program is based on the socialist principle of central planning, whereby government officials centrally plan the movements of millions of people who seek entry into the United States. Rather than rely on free-market principles, including the law of supply and demand, the central planners determine how many total immigrants will be permitted to enter the country over the course of each year, how many will be allocated to different countries, and what their credentials will be. It simply cannot be done, at least not without continuous, never-ending chaos and crisis.” (10/15/26)
“The federal government just closed fiscal year 2026 with a deficit of nearly $2 trillion, according to figures the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released last Thursday. Only the two pandemic years of 2020 and 2021 were worse. Today, though, there is no recession and no emergency. These enormous budget deficits are the new normal. The usual response to a deficit warning is that the government just needs more money. It doesn’t. Thanks to the remarkable strength of the private sector, federal revenue rose by 3 percent, to more than $5.4 trillion, over the fiscal year. But spending rose by 6 percent, reaching $7.4 trillion.” (10/15/26)
