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)
“America’s national debt hit $40 trillion last week. That number certainly feels like something worth panicking over—the mind balks at all the zeros. But although the debt has been in the trillions for decades, not everyone has considered it a problem. One camp of economists has been warning about the perils of high debt for years: Budget hawks predicted that if the country kept spending and didn’t raise taxes enough to keep pace, the resulting fiscal crisis could be devastating. But others—the doves—have brushed it off. … We’re nowhere near a complete failure of the Treasury market, and yet, over the past couple of years, some economists who were once more dovish have switched teams.” (08/26/26)
“Hours after the trade negotiations collapsed and the United States imposed a 50-percent tariff on roughly $20 billion worth of Canadian goods on August 22, Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, stood before reporters and told them what lesson Canada had drawn from 18 months of dealing with Washington. In his words, Canada understood that America ‘would put a series of tariffs on its closest allies and use economic integration as a weapon. That its signature was written in pencil.’ … Tariff rates can be haggled over and retaliation can be unwound, but a signature written in pencil means that there is no real reason for anyone to negotiate, because there is no commitment. Canada did not arrive at this position quickly. It got there the hard way, by giving Washington what it asked for three times and watching a trade deal spearheaded by the very same man evaporate and be replaced by new tariffs.” (08/26/26)
“In the digital age, are car stickers really necessary? They aren’t a requirement for other taxes. Imagine having to affix a sticker to the window of your home to signify that you’d paid your property taxes. Or be required to wear a lapel pin on April 15 as a public symbol that you’d paid your income taxes. … Car stickers and decals are an obsolete and costly vestige of an age when automobiles shared the road with horse-drawn carriages. If repealing such requirements means fewer city workers at the DMV replacing stickers by hand, well, welcome to the modern age.” (08/26/26)
