“In the digital age, are car stickers really necessary? They aren’t a requirement for other taxes. Imagine having to affix a sticker to the window of your home to signify that you’d paid your property taxes. Or be required to wear a lapel pin on April 15 as a public symbol that you’d paid your income taxes. … Car stickers and decals are an obsolete and costly vestige of an age when automobiles shared the road with horse-drawn carriages. If repealing such requirements means fewer city workers at the DMV replacing stickers by hand, well, welcome to the modern age.” (08/26/26)
“I have a massive collection of music CDs, about 4,000 in total. Over the years, I probably spent about $40,000 acquiring them. Now, thanks to streaming, they’re virtually worthless. While perusing the used CD section at Amoeba Music (both the LA and Berkeley locations), I discovered that most of my discs now retail for about $3. I doubt Amoeba would pay me $1 a disc, assuming they’d take them at all. Applying familiar NIMBY logic, you might insist that streaming ‘hollowed me out.’ Sure, kids can now enjoy unlimited music free of charge. But I’m $40,000 poorer. A victim of cruel progress. A clear-cut ‘loser.’ If I had zero interest in listening to any new-to-me music, that would be a fair, if self-pitying, verdict. Fortunately, I am not dead inside.” (08/26/26)
Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Jacob G Hornberger
“Trump’s trade war inflicts harm not only on Canadian citizens but also on the American people. Tariffs are simply sales taxes on the purchase of foreign goods. It is American consumers who ultimately pay those taxes. … There are, of course, those Americans who innocently and naively continue to believe that our enemies are Iran, Russia, China, Cuba, North Korea, the communists, the terrorists, the Muslims, the drug cartels, the illegal immigrants, and other scary official boogeymen. Those Americans are flat-out wrong. They are living in la-la land. The enemy of the American people is the U.S. government. Not only is it plundering and looting Americans, regulating and controlling the most minute aspects of their lives, and making life much more expensive, it is also making life more dangerous, oppressive, and precarious for them.” (08/26/26)
“In liberal politics, principles act as coordination points around which activism can bubble up and coalitions can form. But coalitions take different forms, and these forms affect how the ideas of a coalition’s members are shaped within and by their collaboration. Fellow Liberalism.org contributor Matt Zwolinski recently emphasized that ‘tribes,’ notionally formed by family, peers, or shared core values, may significantly define the ideas of their members. While this is true for most members of any political coalition, I want to explore how the form a coalition takes affects the ideas that it encourages its members to adopt.” (08/26/26)
“Like many people, members of Congress ease off on work during their August recess – but not entirely. That time has also traditionally been an opportunity to listen to voters back home – often through town halls. This summer, however, the number of legislators scheduling such events has declined 75% from a decade ago. In 2016, more than 170 lawmakers held August town halls, The Washington Post has reported; this summer, only 42 scheduled one. These civic encounters have been part of American life since well before the United States existed. At some gatherings, recorded as early as 1633, residents voted on decisions affecting their communities; at others, they shared views and debated issues.” (08/25/26)
“We can all recall a time when we put ourselves at the center of the universe. We may have felt frustration when the traffic on the highway didn’t part like the Red Sea. We may have become indignant while sitting in a crowded physician’s waiting room, not knowing a genuine emergency has caused the delay. Most people we encounter today will treat us like the ordinary person we are. Meeting our goals may be the most important thing in the world to us, but not to them.” (08/26/26)
“The GOP is the party that fought against certifying Joe Biden’s victory. And it is the party that continues to buy into Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 election having been stolen from him. Nothing should be considered inconceivable. It’s in our hands.” (08/26/26)
Source: Caitlin Johnstone, Rogue Journalist
by Caitlin Johnstone
“I saw a clip going around from the Netflix series ‘1899’ where a woman discovers a crack in the screen of what she had taken to be her world, causing her entire understanding of reality to crumble before her eyes. Someone had captioned the clip, ‘Every awakening begins with a fracture in the lie.’ Yeah. It does tend to happen like that. You start pulling on one thread and then the whole thing unravels. Maybe you start with the Iraq war lies. Maybe 9/11. These days for a lot of folks it’s Palestine. You keep pulling on that thread, uncovering more and more uncomfortable truths, until eventually you discover that pretty much everything you’ve been taught about your world was a lie. Every war. Everything about how your government really operates. Everything you’ve been told about nations and how they work.” (08/26/26)
“President Donald Trump has been threatening to yank the licenses of broadcasters who irk him since his first term. But this time around, the FCC’s Trump-appointed chairman, Brendan Carr, seems eager to act on that vindictive impulse. Carr portrays the ABC review as a response to ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ programs that may qualify as ‘unlawful discrimination.’ But he has made it clear that the FCC also is considering the broader question of whether ABC’s stations are serving ‘the public interest,’ a vague statutory mandate that he views as a license to override freedom of the press.” (08/26/26)
“In the 1999 movie ‘The Matrix’, Agent Smith hears a train approaching and delivers one of the iconic movie lines: ‘That is the sound of inevitability.’ America, listen closely. Our national debt just blew through $40 trillion, and unless Washington dramatically changes course, that train has another destination coming into view very quickly. $50 trillion. Yes, $50 trillion. But wait! There’s more! It could happen by 2030. Yes, by 2030. This isn’t a Republican problem. It isn’t a Democratic problem. It’s now an American math problem. The Congressional Budget Office projects a federal deficit of approximately $1.9 trillion in 2026. But that’s hardly the end of it. CBO projects deficits totaling more than $23 trillion from 2026 through 2035. Think about that.” (08/26/26)
