Source: Jacobin
by Dan Denvir
“Dan Denvir, host of the Jacobin Radio podcast The Dig, sat down with three organizing leaders behind the January 23 action — Emilia González Avalos, Greg Nammacher, and JaNaé Bates Imari — to discuss how that day came to be, and how their fight continues.” (02/04/26)
https://jacobin.com/2026/02/minneapolis-ice-protest-organizers-trump/
Source: Independent Institute
by Scott Beyer
“For critics — particularly on the left — sprawl represents environmental waste, excessive consumption, car dependence, and the aesthetic or cultural vulgarity of mass suburbia. For conservatives, sprawl is not a pathology but a feature: quiet neighborhoods, good schools, and safe places to raise families. Libertarians tend to avoid the culture war surrounding sprawl, but there has nonetheless been internal disagreement over its merits. It usually turns on a single question: is sprawl a market outcome, or the result of government social engineering? The honest answer is: both.” (02/04/26)
https://www.independent.org/article/2026/02/04/is-sprawl-a-market-outcome/
Source: Bitcoin.com
by Jamie Redman
“Fears of a looming market bubble have returned as stock prices climb and artificial intelligence spending accelerates, but several leading economists argue that the broader economic picture remains more stable than the headlines suggest. From Wall Street valuations to U.S. growth and global resilience, their message is consistent: conditions look stretched in places, but not fundamentally broken.” (02/04/26)
https://news.bitcoin.com/are-markets-in-a-bubble-top-economists-see-strength-with-caveats/
Source: Electronic Frontier Foundation
by Adam Schwartz
“Federal agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) have descended into utter lawlessness, most recently in Minnesota. The violence is shocking. So are the intrusions on digital rights. For example, we have a First Amendment right to record on-duty police, including ICE and CBP, but federal agents are violating this right. Indeed, Alex Pretti was exercising this right shortly before federal agents shot and killed him. So were the many people who filmed agents shooting and killing Pretti and Renee Good – thereby creating valuable evidence that contradicts false claims by government leaders. To protect our digital rights, we need the rule of law.” (02/04/26)
Source: Reason
by Jack Nicastro
“Polymarket’s pop-up grocery and Kalshi’s food money giveaways are the latest examples in New York’s decades-long history of food charity.” (02/04/26)
https://reason.com/2026/02/04/the-private-sector-handles-hunger-better-than-mamdani-could/
Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by Carlos Boix
“With the idea of banning large investors from buying real estate, President Trump has brought to the forefront the issue of real estate. This has been recently at the top of popular discourse, and politicians and pundits of all colors have grabbed the opportunity to push their own agendas. And one of the ways to sway public opinion towards one’s goals is semantics. If we can rename something to our advantage, half the job of convincing people is done. It is a lot more important than most people think.” 902/04/26)
https://mises.org/mises-wire/cost-living-problem-isnt-too-little-credit-too-much
Source: In These Times
by Alessandra Bajec
“The 2022 ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ protests erupted in Iran following the shocking death of 22-year-old Jina Mahsa Amini, in police custody. Like many Iranians in the diaspora, illustrator Roshi Rouzbehani was filled with grief, rage and a profound duty to speak out. She felt compelled to create art that echoed what so many were experiencing, and to share the images online to help bring global attention to her people’s struggle. ‘Art became both a personal coping mechanism and a form of activism for me,’ Rouzbehani tells In These Times. Now based in the UK, she left Iran in 2011 to seek safety from political pressures. In the year of the women-led uprising, the Iranian regime’s security forces killed hundreds of protesters and threatened the lives of numerous journalists, and detained, tortured and persecuted thousands more.” (02/03/25)
https://inthesetimes.com/article/iranian-artists-woman-life-freedom-us-hands-off-middle-east
Source: Liberal Currents
by Audrey Lee
“In Portland, members of the community have been standing up to ICE for most of Trump’s second term so far.” (02/04/26)
Source: Niskanen Center
by Rachel Levine
“With much of the country still digging out from Winter Storm Fern, one thing is clear: Severe winter storms continue to stress-test the grid’s reliability, and the system is repeatedly falling short. Fern has made the case once again for expanded interregional transmission to provide the power system with much needed resilience while lowering consumers’ energy costs.” [editor’s note: No, Winter Storm Fern has made the case once again for abandoning the obsolete “grid” paradigm in favor of localized / decentralized power – TLK] (02/04/26)
Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Jacob G Hornberger
“The first thing to note about the federal conviction of libertarian Ian Freeman, who was in the business of selling Bitcoin, and the eight-year prison sentence that a federal judge meted out to him is that he would never have been convicted of his ‘crimes’ had he been living in 1890 America. The second thing to note about his conviction and long prison sentence is that he is innocent as a matter of fact and law.” (02/04/26)
https://www.fff.org/explore-freedom/article/the-federal-punishment-of-an-innocent-man-part-1/