“In the anti-free speech community, the most intolerable form of speech often seems to be humor. For thousands of years, satire and parody have proven to be the most penetrating – and at times, irritating – forms of political speech. Even with absolute rulers, court jesters were often the few figures who could challenge a king. As Shakespeare wrote in ‘King Lear’: ‘jesters do oft prove prophets.’ In the case of comedian Graham Linehan, he has unwittingly become a prophet for the death of not just free speech but also humor in the United Kingdom.” (09/06/25)
“‘Money is Money, and Paper is Paper. All the invention of man cannot make them otherwise.‘ With those words, Thomas Paine went after what he saw as one of the greatest scams in history: governments claiming that paper is money. Through a series of devastating critiques, Paine delivered one of the most brutal takedowns of paper money ever written, systematically exposing every aspect of this fundamental fraud.” (09/05/25)
Source: Electronic Frontier Foundation
by Molly Buckley
“If you live in Mississippi, you may have noticed that you are no longer able to log into your Bluesky or Dreamwidth accounts from within the state. That’s because, in a chilling early warning sign for the U.S., both social platforms decided to block all users in Mississippi from their services rather than risk hefty fines under the state’s oppressive age verification mandate. If this sounds like censorship to you, you’re right — it is. But it’s not these small platforms’ fault. This is the unfortunate result of Mississippi’s wide-sweeping age verification law …. Lawmakers often sell age-verification mandates as a silver bullet for Big Tech’s harms, but in practice, these laws do nothing to rein in the tech giants. Instead, they end up crushing smaller platforms that can’t absorb the exorbitant costs.” (09/05/25)
Source: Caitlin Johnstone, Rogue Journalist
by Caitlin Johnstone
“He hung up a sign that said Secretary of War, / snapped a picture for the socials, shut the door, / took a swig of Jameson straight from the bottle, / then sat down and fondled the revolver in his desk drawer / like a little boy playing with his penis. / Visions of cruise missiles danced through his head, / aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines / and tiny middle eastern bodies blown to bits by glorious inventory. / Mushroom clouds flashed in his eyes / as he caressed the trigger with an index finger. / ‘They call me the Secretary of War,’ he said. ‘They call me the Secretary of War.’ / He did not feel the robins in his chest / or hear the red-winged blackbirds trilling in his hair. / The electricity of the flesh was a stranger to him. / Exuberance was a deadbeat dad who never called.” (09/06/25)
“America specializes in making trash and throwing things away. We see that as a symbol of how prosperous we are. Our ancestors did not think this way. They saw prosperity as linked with how much they could save and how little they spent unnecessarily.” (09/05/25)
“On Tuesday, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker gave an extraordinary press conference. Together with the mayor of Chicago and the president of the Cook County board of commissioners, the governor announced that President Donald Trump is hatching plans for what can only be described as the prospective invasion of his sovereign state. And not just by federal troops, but by units of the Texas National Guard. … It is not politics as usual when a state’s elected chief executive, charged with protecting his people, takes to the airwaves to warn that another state’s troops may soon be used as an instrument of occupation on his soil.” (09/05/25)
“Trump is the toddler in the backseat of the Family Truckster who, when told not to touch his brother, holds an index finger an angstrom away from his sibling’s forehead while bleating, ‘I’m not touching you!’ All of us — and Trump’s apologists most of all — know exactly what Trump is doing: He is seeing what he can get away with. He believes that his supporters and sycophants will accept virtually any degree of misbehavior from him — that they will celebrate it — and that our institutions are not equipped to deal with a president who cynically abuses power in this way. And he is right on both counts.” (09/05/25)
“Maybe we do need a Civil War 2.0 – with guns. Our politics has become so partisan and so nasty, using guns to settle our national political differences may soon end up being the only solution. It’s bad enough no one agrees with what the other side is saying anymore. But now when one side says something spectacularly horrible or ‘subtly’ wishes harm on their opponent (and I’m thinking specifically about the prancing governor of Minnesota), no one on their side has the common decency to criticize them for it. Tim Walz made a goofy loser of himself last fall as Kamala Harris’s VP pick. And on Labor Day, he showed why he’s still the reigning buffoon of the Democratic Party.” (09/06/25)
“Recently, international media has highlighted the mass famine in Gaza. Yet, there have been effectively three waves of famine in Gaza since spring 2024. First weaponized 18 years ago in the Strip, these hunger games could have been preempted several times. Why weren’t they?” (09/05/25)
“[I]n the roaring ’60s, it was popular among the ruling establishments of underdeveloped countries, supported by the Western intelligentsia, to impose large tariffs on foreign manufactured goods in order to help domestic manufacturing. Only when, a few decades later, it was realized that such an industrial policy was a fool’s errand, were the poor people of underdeveloped countries able to jump on the bandwagon of free trade and to escape dire poverty. A basic economic reason why ‘unfairly traded steel’ or the underlying ideal of mercantilist and industrial policy is a fool’s errand is that it presupposes a central economic planner possessing what he does not and cannot possess, that is, the information of time, place, costs, and preferences that is carried by prices determined by supply and demand on free markets.” (09/05/25)
