“The Federal Bureau of Investigations launched Sentinel in 2005 with an expanded budget and intensified project management discipline. With the active involvement of at least 18 concurrent oversight and governance bodies — the Government Accountability Office, the Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General, and numerous congressional committees among them — what could go wrong? Turns out, quite a lot. Sentinel rapidly degraded into an unusable product that threatened to waste hundreds of millions of dollars.” (08/11/26)
“On June 16, 1989, a bearded 26-year-old stood before a quarter million Hungarians in Budapest and demanded that Soviet troops leave his country. His fearless call for free elections helped bring down communism in Hungary. The young firebrand was Viktor Orban. Twenty-five years later, he proudly announced he was building an ‘illiberal state.’ What happened in between is a microcosm of what has happened to liberal democracy itself. That story gives Daron Acemoglu’s new book ‘What Happened to Liberal Democracy?’ its urgency.” (08/11/26)
“Remember the early 2020s when cancel culture ran rampant, defunding police was a standard position on the left and we were all supposed to fall in line with their bad ideas, or else? Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wants us to pretend it all went away. AOC took to ‘This Week with Jonathan Karl’ on ABC to defend Francesca Hong, the latest Democratic Socialist star, running for governor of Wisconsin. In 2020, Hong said Thanksgiving should be canceled, claiming it’s ‘a time that’s incredibly painful for people’ in her community. Now that she wants to get elected, Hong suddenly called Thanksgiving her ‘favorite holiday’. AOC argued that Hong has ‘moved away’ from some of her more controversial positions then giggled that she agreed with NYC Councilman Chi Ossé, who had said, ‘Woke 1 was crazyyyy’. Tee-hee, woke 1, you guys!” (08/10/26)
Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Cláudia Ascensão Nunes
“If a regulator struggles to decide whether a live transmission on YouTube should be considered ‘television,’ the real problem may not be the platform, but the rules and the state’s insistence on continuing to apply them.” (08/11/26)
“We have previously discussed how many professors seem to compete in finding new forms of racism in every facet of society and education. Astrophysics, math, runoffs, science, statistics, and meritocracy have all been denounced as racist. In this academic cottage industry, professors secure publications and speaking opportunities by identifying racism in expressions, images, or entire fields. Even time itself has been declared racist. Now, however, academics have found another undiscovered continent of white privilege: niceness. When I saw a story in The College Fix on a study of ‘niceness as Whiteness,’ I was skeptical and decided to take a look.” (08/11/26)
“In the contemporary imagination, liberalism means different things to different people. To some on the left, it means a set of deceptive platitudes masking an eventual, inevitable collaboration with fascists. To those on the populist right, it stands for out-of-touch technocracy, woke identity politics, and globalization hollowing out rural and industrial America. To many less ideological voters, it simply stands for the status quo and existing institutions—a status quo that many believe, or can be convinced to believe, is just not working for them. What liberalism isn’t, for the most part, is appealing. Liberalism is in peril not because of philosophical defects or better available alternatives, but because liberals have too often struggled to make liberalism seem attractive, compelling, and exciting.” (08/11/26)
“Keeping pace with new developments in the world of social media and artificial intelligence is no easy task. Almost as challenging is keeping up with the slew of regulatory, judicial, and civil society actions seeking greater transparency from Big Tech into the design parameters, data extraction, and internal research behind social media apps used extensively by children and adolescents. Last Wednesday, a U.S. Senate committee unanimously advanced the Kids Online Safety Act, which would mandate default privacy settings and require ‘reasonable care’ when designing platforms to minimize potential harm to minors. The next day, a New Mexico court fined Meta $567 million to address harms it knowingly caused to young people through design features of its Facebook and Instagram platforms. The range of recent and pending laws and legal actions is notable for a few key reasons.” (08/10/26)
“[Woodrow] Wilson’s central argument was that government should be split into two separate domains: politics, where elected officials set broad goals and policy direction, and administration, a technical, expert-driven sphere that should be run with ‘large powers and unhampered discretion’ and insulated from day-to-day political interference. Wilson suggested that government ought to be removed from the political process…in other words: ‘Democracy is too important to be left to voters.'” (08/11/26)
“[R]enewables are not cheaper than fossil fuels. If they were then we’d not even have a climate change problem in the first place – everyone would just be naturally scrambling for the now cheaper option and the problem would go away. Which does mean that every plan, every insistence, every fine and policy imposed is proof that renewables are not cheaper. Could even still be worthwhile, but not cheaper.” (08/11/26)
