“Israel dominates the daily news in this 2026 midterm election year—almost always in a boring, fatiguing, negative light. Tens of thousands of innocents may be slaughtered, ethnically cleansed, butchered, and tortured by the world’s dictators, yet an overwhelming and obsessive abhorrence is reserved for tiny, democratic Israel. Such perverse asymmetry is strange, since, at least privately, most Americans would concede that of the 18 Middle Eastern nations, only Israel is a genuine consensual democracy.” [editor’s note: Well, except for the political parties that are banned, and except for the millions who live under Israeli rule, but don’t get to vote in Israeli elections. You know, little stuff like that – TLK] (08/18/26)
“Don’t get me wrong. It’s wholly reasonable to see the possibilities of technology in schools. After all, pencils, paper, calculators, whiteboards, and buses are all technologies, too. Finding a way to make sensible use of new tools is part and parcel of every profession. But every healthy impulse can easily be corrupted by schlock-peddling vendors, ed school fixations, quick-fix reformers, and assorted grifters. This is education’s evergreen problem, and we now see the result: a flood of dubious ed tech that washed over teachers ill-equipped to navigate the tide. Students were distracted, and teachers were left at sea, even as the wave of Chromebooks, tablets, and learning management systems helped normalize screens at home and in school.” (08/18/26)
Source: Common Dreams
by Alison Schultz & Bemnet Agata
“One of the stranger features of the modern economy is that we no longer disagree about what a multinational corporation is—until the conversation turns to tax. Investors value Apple as a single global business. Consumers experience it as a single company. Its executives manage it as an integrated enterprise, allocating capital, research, production, and marketing across continents according to commercial strategy rather than national borders. Nobody seriously believes that Apple’s subsidiaries are independent businesses negotiating with one another as though they were unrelated companies. They are constituent parts of a single commercial enterprise. Yet this is precisely the legal fiction upon which the international corporate tax system was built—and continues to rest.” (08/18/26)
“It is a testament to the moralism of the eco-doom movement that there has been so much focus on shaming ‘deniers’. Practical matters – like, I don’t know, making the case for the mass rollout of aircon – play second fiddle to the pillorying of heretics. The argument seems to be that these wicked doubters have landed us in the inferno of a neverending summer, just as their witchy forebears gave us crop failure and icy winters. I see it differently. To me, the punishing impact of the heatwaves is less the handiwork of ‘deniers’ than a byproduct of the moral circus of eco-alarmism itself.” (08/18/26)
“The disgraced academic was a pathological liar and lifelong con artist whose misdeeds were covered up for years by self-serving academic administrators. Exposing this kind of rot in elite institutions is our job.” (08/18/26)
“A recent Breitbart headline: ‘DSA Lawmaker Declares Stealing Should *Not* Be Illegal’. This was not, in the least, a surprising headline to me. These people have no conscience, and their only moral standard is whatever they say it is. I guarantee you that her meaning actually is, ‘stealing will be wrong for you, but it won’t be wrong for us’. I will prove to you, in this article, that that is the Left’s definition of ‘stealing’. Lenin did not make the mistake of telling his people what he was going to bring to them. Some of these really dumb Democrats are telling us what they intend, but nobody but people who know the true history of socialism/communism believes them.” (08/18/26)
Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Lipton Matthews
“Few slogans travel through modern politics with as much confidence and as little scrutiny as the claim that inequality is a social ill to be corrected at nearly any cost. Yet a fair reading of the evidence suggests the opposite conclusion. Inequality is not a defect in the system. It is the primary mechanism by which human achievement compounds, wealth spreads, and living standards rise for the great majority of people who never come close to the top of the distribution.” (08/18/26)
