Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Laurence M Vance
“About 15 years ago, the great drug war boogeyman was bath salts. Instead of using these salts in the bathtub, people took to swallowing, snorting, injecting, smoking, and otherwise ingesting them. Fentanyl, a type of synthetic opioid more potent than heroin and morphine, soon replaced bath salts as the great drug war boogeyman. More recently, the new drug war boogeyman was nitazenes, another type of synthetic opioid. Nitazenes were said to be more potent than not only heroin and morphine but also fentanyl. The newest drug war boogeyman is kratom — leaves from a tree native to Southeast Asia that are used to increase energy and alleviate pain, coughing, anxiety, and depression.” (09/09/26)
Source: Common Dreams
by Medea Benjamin & Nicolas JS Davies
“The lesson of 9/11 should be that war is not the answer to any of the problems facing the United States. After inflicting violence and chaos on country after country for twenty-five years in a ‘global war on terror’ that has evolved into a Zionist genocide and a revived Cold War against Russia and China, the widespread public opposition to Trump’s war on Iran suggests that most Americans have finally learned that lesson. Unfortunately, powerful sections of our corrupt business and political elites have not.” (09/09/26)
“Age is the great underrated factor. If you want to know how much home equity someone owns, knowing their percentile for their age is less informative than simply knowing their age. Almost everyone starts with low housing wealth, yet a large majority end up with massive housing wealth.” (09/09/26)
“As we approach the 25th anniversary of 9/11, there are many in our country who want us to pretend that the greatest attack on the United States since Pearl Harbor never happened. They want us to look away from the Muslim terrorists who flew planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and who drove another plane full of innocents to their deaths in a grassy Pennsylvania field. They want us to forget that on that day in 2001, Americans came under attack for reasons that few understood, from a far-away people who loathe our culture, our freedoms and our country. When Rep. Ilhan Omar [D-MN] dismissively says, ‘Some people did something’, she is trying to erase the truth. ” (09/09/26)
Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Cláudia Ascensão Nunes
“American progressives continue to advocate for a Medicare for All system, pointing to the Old Continent as a utopian model of universal access to health care. However, in Europe, systems in which the state functions as both direct provider and single-payer monopolist continue to fail. Contrary to the narrative pushed by certain political circles, Europeans are increasingly adopting private health insurance. The structural flaws in countries that double down on centralized, state-run models show notable consistencies: swelling waiting lists, health care professionals fleeing a public sector constrained by rigid salary scales, and a systemic inability to allocate resources where they are needed most.” (09/09/26)
“The term geopolitics, frequently used in discussing global diplomacy and trade relations today, was coined only about 125 years ago. But the concept has been around far, far longer, as evident in the practice of cartography or mapmaking since ancient times. One of the earliest known world maps – created by the Babylonians in 600 B.C.E. – placed Babylonia at the center. Since then, seafaring and colonizing nations in particular have done much the same, centering their locations or adjusting sizes to project global reach and relevance. ‘A map is never neutral’, according to Robert Dussey, foreign minister of the small African nation of Togo. ‘It shapes perceptions, influences how the place of peoples and continents in the world is understood,’ he said at a United Nations briefing last week.” (09/08/26)
‘Beginning in February 2020, the Secretary of Health and Human Services declared that Covid-19 warranted sweeping liability protections, meaning that if someone was injured or died from a Covid-19 vaccine, treatment, or related product, they generally cannot sue for damages in court. The only exception is for ‘willful misconduct’ causing death or serious injury—an extremely high legal standard that is very difficult to prove. Instead of accessing the traditional court system, injured individuals must seek compensation through a government program that has historically been difficult to navigate and provides limited relief.” (09/09/26)
“Those who split the world into binaries—voluntary exchange on one side, state coercion on the other—miss a lot. They miss the enormous third thing Adam Smith described: the unenforced realm of ‘propriety,’ the decency, manners, and mutual forbearances that no contract specifies and no statute compels. If we want less state, we must have more propriety. A friend of liberty has a larger stake in the moral condition of society than the statist does.” (09/09/26)
