“The American government — after years of nurturing a censorship agenda in the South American country — is now penalizing Brazil’s super-censor Supreme Court justice, Alexandre de Moraes, along with various colleagues, for imposing censorship demands on U.S. companies. The U.S. State Department revoked their visa privileges, preventing them from entering the United States.” (07/29/25)
“The war with Russia is now going very badly for Ukraine. But Ukrainians must feel like the world, and not just Russia, is treating them badly.” (07/29/25)
“Trump had a reputation as a different Republican president: less libertarian, more authoritarian, less interested in shrinking government or cutting entitlements, more interested in using the levers of government to reward friends and punish enemies. But Trump’s approach to FEMA in his second term belies that reputation. The agency, created in 1979, is explicitly retreating from the disaster relief business and shifting the burden to already overburdened states and localities.” [editor’s note: Scher always says “libertarian” like it’s a bad thing – TLK] (07/28/25)
“The Donald Trump-Russia collusion scandal that first broke in December 2016 and roared on until April 2019 has no parallel in our history — it’s not even close. As president-elect and later as sitting president, Trump was accused by the country’s intelligence and law enforcement apparatus of conspiring with a hostile power to subvert the 2016 election and sneak down a crooked path to the White House. Along the way, a damning Intelligence Community Assessment was issued, a major FBI investigation, code-named Crossfire Hurricane, targeted the president, and a special counsel, Robert Mueller, was granted a team of prosecutors and a budget of millions to bring the guilty to justice. It was the most sensational news story in history. By one estimate, more than half a million articles were written about the collusion issue, the vast majority asserting or assuming criminality on Trump’s part. A manic media competed fiercely to deliver the latest ‘bombshell.'” (07/28/25)
“The Founding Fathers recognized unalienable rights – not rights that couldn’t be taken away. Rather, rights which it was wrong (sinful! evil!) to take away. They are God’s gift to His creations: every human being. Our headlines are filled with both examples of those rights, those liberties, being stolen away. And of people who use their liberties to do evil things. Not just to others, but even to themselves.” (07/28/25)
“Modern far right thinkers style themselves as an insurgent movement against power, combining a self-pitying victimhood with exaggerated fantasies of rediscovered manliness.” (07/28/25)
Source: Center for the Study of Innovative Freedom
by Stephan Kinsella
“Industries dependent on the patent and copyright monopoly grants scream bloody murder any time someone suggests any slight improvement. … Now Trump has proposed changing the USPTO system to charge ‘patent holders 1% to 5% of their [patents’] overall patent value, a shift that could dramatically increase fees. … The new fee would be a much more exorbitant cost for some patent holders that would function like a property tax.’ And of course the entrenched IP interests and patent whores are already screaming about this …” (07/28/25)
“A signature complaint from conservatives trying to dismantle government is that it wastes taxpayer dollars while providing nothing of value. I await their condemnation of Donald Trump, who has pilfered just under a billion dollars from a secret Pentagon account to pay for the retrofitting of the gold-plated ‘gift’ airplane he accepted from the government of Qatar. When Qatar made the gift in May, Trump pitched it as a cost-saving measure. ‘I would never be one to turn down that kind of an offer,’ Trump said. ‘I mean, I could be a stupid person and say, ‘No, we don’t want a free, very expensive airplane.’’ But documents provided to Congress reveal $934 million that was covertly shifted from a Pentagon account earmarked for the modernization of America’s ground-based nuclear missiles. The money was moved to an unnamed classified project that budget experts have identified as Trump’s new vanity plane.” (07/29/25)
“There’s that old saying, ‘Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.’ The Covid-19 pandemic has laid bare unhealthy power structures that were already in place, but were operating largely unnoticed by most people just going about their daily lives. Every year, the National Institutes of Health distributes billions of dollars in grants and contracts for research and studies. In 2022 NIH research grants totaled $33.3 billion. … At the same time Big Pharma is granted taxpayer money for product development, scientists and researchers who need funding for research are largely dependent on being in the good graces of those who hold the purse strings at NIH. In a 2006 Harper’s article, Celia Farber exposed the corruption and vendetta-driven system, headed by Dr. Anthony Fauci for 40 years, that has made NIAID an appendage of Big Pharma.” 907/28/25)
“Nasty immigration raids are hardly unprecedented. ICE’s predecessor, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), frequently used heavy-handed enforcement tactics that smacked of intimidation. During the late 1990s, a friend and colleague of mine (a native born U.S. citizen) was stopped at a checkpoint on a highway in Arizona leading northward from the U.S. border with Mexico. He was detained for over an hour as the INS sought to determine if he was an American citizen. Such episodes (and worse) became far more frequent after the 9-11 terrorist attacks and the transformation of INS into a more powerful agency, ICE, in 2003. President Barack Obama’s supporters hailed him as the ‘deporter-in-chief’ because of the record number of undocumented immigrants apprehended and expelled from the United States during his presidency. The alarming militarization of law enforcement began long before then, however.” (07/28/25)
