“President Donald Trump’s decision to ‘substantially reduce’ joint military exercises between the armed forces of the United States and those of South Korea captures the distilled essence of the nation’s current chief executive in its combination of petulance and affection for autocrats. On the one hand, he wants to punish our allies in the Republic of Korea for withholding support for the U.S. war with Iran. Especially, though, he wants to avoid offending the communist dictator of North Korea by training alongside our democratic and relatively free allies on the Korean peninsula. … Unfortunately, Trump has a history of turning against our friends and maintaining a soft spot for those hostile to American values.” (08/19/26)
“Public acceptance of gambling has fallen among Americans, a shift best illustrated by the number of recent victories by states to curb the burgeoning industry of prediction markets, the practice of wagering on the outcomes of future events. Last week, for example, a judge in Washington state cited the online platform Kalshi for deceptive marketing of ‘illegal gambling activities’. The company is now blocked from offering ‘event contracts’ to consumers who wager on predictions in ‘sports, elections, politics, entertainment, culture, tech and science’. The ruling was pretty easy, as the state defines gambling as ‘staking or risking something of value upon the outcome of a contest of chance or a future contingent event not under the person’s control or influence’. It follows other successful efforts in several states against operators of prediction markets.” (08/18/26)
“As we move toward the end of the Trump era, we need to reckon with the changes his administration has wrought in the American system of government. The most significant is the enormous concentration of power, not just in the executive branch as a whole, but in the office of the president. Any successor administration, Republican or Democratic, will inherit these powers, and will have to decide how it wants to define the limits of executive authority in the future.” (08/19/26)
Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Jacob G Hornberger
“Benjamin Franklin pointed out a truth that should be highly discomforting to 21st-century Americans: ‘Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.’ Why discomforting? Because that’s exactly what both 20th-century and 21st-century Americans have done.” (08/19/26)
Source: Caitlin Johnstone, Rogue Journalist
by Caitlin Johnstone
“Today in dystopia, police have been wrongfully arresting people based on faulty information from AI-assisted Flock surveillance footage instead of actually investigating the evidence of the crime. In an article titled ‘She Spent 7 Months in Legal Hell After Cops Used Flock Surveillance To Identify the Wrong Car’, Reason Magazine documents multiple instances of innocent people having their lives upended in legal battles because police slammed them with charges based on incorrect Flock camera data which could have easily been ruled out by some basic verification. … Reason shared a police body cam video of a cop confidently handing a court summons to a woman for package theft, telling her and her husband that it was ‘100 percent certain’ she was guilty because Flock surveillance had her on camera committing the crime.” (08/19/26)
“The recently released EdChoice ‘Schooling in America’ survey finds that 56 percent of parents believe K-12 education is on the wrong track. Indeed, too many traditional American public schools are failing to fulfill their role. Parental unhappiness is certainly understandable, given that the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), aka the ‘Nation’s Report Card’, showed that in 2024, 12th-grade students scored their lowest in reading and math in decades. In math, 45 percent of high school seniors scored ‘below basic,’ the lowest level since 2005. In reading, 32 percent scored ‘below basic’, the lowest level since the exam’s inception in 1992. Among 8th-graders, 38 percent scored ‘below basic’ in science, meaning they couldn’t recognize basic facts, such as the fact that plants need sunlight to grow.” (08/19/26)
Source: The Guardian
by US Senator Bernie Sanders (D-VT)
“The media pundits have written article after article desperately trying to understand why progressive candidates, despite being heavily outspent, keep defeating establishment Democrats in primaries around the country. Well, the answer is not complicated. Whether it is a corrupt campaign finance system, unprecedented income and wealth inequality, a broken and wildly expensive healthcare system, the enormous threats posed by AI or an immoral and destructive foreign policy, progressives are talking about the real issues facing working families. And they are providing real solutions. Establishment Democrats are not.” (08/19/26)
“In 1988, when I was 27 years old, I read Ayn Rand for the first time. It was her novel Atlas Shrugged, in its just-released Portuguese edition. At that time, I already considered myself a sort of classical liberal, but my superficial knowledge of political philosophy, among many other gaps in my education, made my convictions not very convincing. It was only after reading her that I gained the libertarian worldview I more or less hold to this day. Mind you, I was already in business and volunteering in the classical liberal movement in Brazil, but that was more of an irreflective reaction to being raised under a military dictatorship and then being governed by a left-leaning populist than the result of any deep thought.” (08/19/26)
