Category: Opinion

Source: The Dispatch
by Kevin D Williamson

“Terrorists and their proponents have forfeited their right to sympathy.” (09/18/260

https://thedispatch.com/article/palestinians-irish-republicans-sympathy/

Source: Washington Post
by Morgan Bazilian

“The economic effects of the U.S. war with Iran are often gauged by what the International Energy Agency has called the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market. Cumulative losses exceeded 1.3 billion barrels as of June, and this spring prompted a global emergency oil reserve release that was more than double what the agency ordered after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. Oil and diesel prices jumped after attacks on a key Saudi Arabian pipeline last week. But the fallout goes far beyond that: The war has caused a commodities crisis running several markets deep — and most of these markets have no reserves to rely on.” (09/18/26)

https://archive.is/VjR3v

Source: Adam Smith Institute
by Madsen Pirie

“British parents hand over more than a third of a dual income household’s net earnings on childcare. That’s the highest burden in the OECD. The reflex is to call for more public money. But the international evidence points the other way. The problem isn’t spending. It’s regulation. At the heart of Britain’s high costs sits the child-to-staff ratio. For children under four, the average is 1:4.5, among the tightest in the developed world. Norway and France manage 1:9. Portugal and Luxembourg are similarly relaxed. None of them show the collapse in quality that stricter ratios are supposed to prevent. What they show instead is markedly lower cost to families.” (09/18/26)

https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/britains-childcare-problem-is-regulation-not-money

Source: New York Post
by Dan Perry

“Six months after America launched its war and blockade against Iran, the Islamic Republic is still projecting defiance. Its economy should be in shambles — yet the regime is behaving as though time is on its side. It hasn’t abandoned its regional ambitions or restrained its terrorist proxies. Instead, this week it escalated. That escalation is now visible on both sides of the Arabian Peninsula. Iran continues to impede commercial traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. On the other side, the Houthis have seized the critical Yemeni port of Mokha, advanced toward the Bab el-Mandeb Strait and reached strategic Red Sea islands. … Every additional week in which Iran appears able to dictate the region’s economic temperature weakens the West’s credibility.” (09/19/26)

https://nypost.com/2026/09/19/opinion/china-is-fueling-the-iran-war-can-trump-stop-them/

Source: Karl Dickey’s Freedom Vanguard
by Karl Dickey

“Inflation is a government failure, a failure to the citizens of America. The government prints money to fund its overspending and takes on debt as a result, which devalues the U.S. Dollar. The government creates the inflation problem, and in 2020, it put fire onto the already burning flame of inflation by flooding the nation with printed money, which created the huge issues that live with us six years later. Printing money and subsidizing everything under the sun is a false cure for our economy; we should be removing the State from manipulating the currency supply.” (09/18/26)

https://palmbeachexaminer.substack.com/p/the-state-created-affordability-crisis

Source: Responsible Statecraft
by Nick Cleveland-Stout

“Palantir CEO Alex Karp proclaimed on a panel in 2024 that ‘technology should be able to reduce drastically the amount of collateral damage, civilian deaths.’ Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and former Deputy Director of the CIA David Cohen agreed. Proponents of artificial intelligence use in the military have long made some version of this argument — that the military’s adoption of AI will lead to a reduction in civilian harm. … The question is no longer theoretical, as the U.S. military is already deploying AI. The Pentagon struck 13,000 targets in just the first 38 days of war, aided by Palantir’s Maven Smart System to identify targets and choose weapons used for attacks. But experts at the hearing, hosted by the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission, said the argument that AI reduces civilian harm simply isn’t supported by the facts on the ground, pointing to Iran, Ukraine, Yemen, and Gaza as evidence.” (09/18/26)

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/ai-palantir-weapons/

Source: Law & Liberty
by Stuart Halpern

“Beyond raising foundational questions of individual autonomy versus governmental authority, our relationship to the Highest Authority would also be impacted by the arrival of ET-like creatures. After all, the question of whether other minds exist is also a question about what makes our own minds—and our moral obligations—distinctive. Would other-worldly beings have their own salvific commandments and beliefs?” (09/18/26)

https://lawliberty.org/book-review/not-of-this-earth/

Source: Inequality.org
by Deepak Xavier & Janet Mudzviti-Zhou

“As we mark 15 years since Occupy Wall Street, it is worth remembering that the movement against inequality has a long lineage. The Gen Z-led protests flooding the streets of India, Kenya, Bolivia, and Tunisia today have been building for generations. On the last day of November 1999, tens of thousands of people shut down the World Trade Organization summit in Seattle. Trade unionists marched alongside environmentalists, students locked arms with farmers, and for a few extraordinary days the people who run the global economy could not get into their own meeting. The press called protesters a rabble with no coherent demand. They were wrong. The demand was simple and it has not changed: an economy that works for the many, not for a handful at the top.” (09/19/26)

https://inequality.org/article/15-years-on-from-occupy-the-long-fight-of-the-99-continues/

Source: EconLog
by Alberto Mingardi

“The movement took its name from a Ned Ludd who never existed—yet protesters signed letters and proclamations against mechanization as Ned Ludd, King Ludd, or General Ludd. It began in Nottinghamshire in March 1811, peaked in 1812, and had flickered out by 1816. It was the most prominent, but neither the only nor the first, episode of machine-breaking. Resistance to the introduction of machines in production was not new. It was strongest in old trades, such as wool and hosiery, which were long established in England and capable of expressing political demands. Mechanization in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England was not merely the introduction of new machinery; it was also a breakthrough in that particular technology known as organization.” (09/18/26)

https://www.econlib.org/ai-and-the-luddites

Source: Persuasion
by Charles Lane

“The southern border is a case in point.” (09/18/26)

https://www.persuasion.community/p/congress-failed-to-act-on-the-border