“When a crime consists of nothing but handing a police officer or an informant something in exchange for money, the evidence often consists of nothing but that purported buyer’s word, along with drugs that easily could have been obtained through other means. This situation invites dishonest cops to invent drug offenses and take credit for the resulting arrests, as [Gerald] Goines did for years with impunity. When your job is to create crimes by arranging illegal drug sales, it is not such a big leap to create crimes out of whole cloth, especially if you are convinced that your target is a drug dealer.” (08/27/26)
“Much of the self-help movement is focused on improving self-image. Ayn Rand’s former acolyte Nathaniel Branden developed his whole philosophy of psychology around the idea of self-esteem. And for many years he gave a three day intensive workshop, a group therapy event called Self-Esteem and the Art of Being. I took these Intensives twice, gaining additional insights into my own psyche both times. But Ayn Rand is naive to believe that simply studying and adopting a new philosophy will change the subconscious.” (08/27/26)
Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Mark Nayler
“Following Britain’s vote to leave the EU, both easyJet and Ryanair were told by Brussels that they needed to relocate their headquarters and/or sell the majority of their shares to EU citizens in order to keep operating across the continent. easyJet solved the problem by opening a European office in Vienna, although its overall base of operations has remained in Luton, 30 miles north of London. New York-based Apollo has revealed few details about how it proposes to adhere to Europe’s airline ownership regulations, under which its stake is capped at 49.9%. Some aviation experts have noted that Apollo could satisfy Brussels by leaving majority voting rights with EU stakeholders, but still restructure or break up the airline to gain overall economic control.” (08/27/26)
“The first—and typically journalistic—answer defaults to his biography. Intellectually, in terms of his influences, Kendall was not simply the disciple of one single thinker or the product of any one single school of thought. He counted among his influences Aristotle, Rousseau, and the Mayflower Compact. He became, in middle age, a devoted student of both Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin, both of whom reached the apogees of their own careers during his life. Kendall showed an admirable openness—exceedingly rare in tenured academics—to re-evaluate the fundamentals of his own intellectual outlook. Yet that—and his admittedly captivating personal story—sometimes gets him written off as brilliant but unsettled …” (08/27/26)
“Some years ago I gave a good deal of thought to opening a Sociopath Awareness Foundation. I was convinced that if most people understood sociopathy, it would be an overwhelming benefit to the human race. I am convinced of that still, and so I want to familiarize as many people as possible with these facts, again because I believe in their great importance. I’m no longer interested in creating a foundation, but I’ll cheer for anyone who does so reasonably well.” (08/27/26)
“In a case with ‘serious repercussions,’ insists journalist Brazilian-based American journalist Glenn Greenwald, a ‘U.S. federal judge concluded that an immigration record entered in the Customs and Border Protection system during the Biden administration was fraudulent.’ While the idea of fraudulent behavior in a government bureau will hardly shock you, this record was special. It was used to imprison a Brazilian official. The official? Filipe Martins. He filed suit in the U.S., and as a result a truth came out.” (08/27/26)
“It’s probably not very often, if ever, that a Republican nomination to head a federal agency is compared to a Democratic mayor’s race in Baltimore, but that’s where I’m going here. It’s not crazy; I swear it makes sense. Just stick with me, and you’ll see. When I lived in Baltimore in 2016, then-Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake decided not to run for reelection. She was an accidental mayor, the city council president who ascended to the top job when a criminal scandal forced the mayor to resign. Rawlings-Blake served the second half of Sheila Dixon’s term, then won her own in 2011. She was never really good or comfortable in the job she found herself in, so she announced she wouldn’t seek reelection. This led to a feeding frenzy of Baltimore politicians scrambling for the gig.” (08/27/26)
“November’s midterm elections, which will determine which political party controls Congress, are less than 10 weeks away. And Republicans, already likely to lose control of the U.S. House, are now in danger of losing the U.S. Senate too. Time for a Republican boogeyman to frighten voters – a revival of Islamophobic rhetoric. A standing election time tradition in the Republican Party is to pick some group – Chinese Americans during COVID-19, LGBTQ+ Americans in 2024 – to present as an un-American threat to the rest of us. But this Republican Party has run short of ideas on everything from how to fix our economy to which scary people we should be scared of. So we’re getting a retread.” (08/27/26)
Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by William L Anderson
“Keynesians hold that the economy is directed by ‘aggregate demand,’ that is overall spending, and that if consumers slow their spending, then the central bank can respond by lowering interest rates, which would encourage businesses to borrow money for expansion purposes, thus redirecting some of the lost consumer spending. However, according to Keynesians, if interest rates already are near-zero, then lowering rates is self-defeating and can lead to a ‘Liquidity Trap.’ … Mainstream economists speak of so-called automatic stabilizers in which government policies act in a counter-cyclical way to reverse harmful economic trends.” (08/27/26)
“Data centers have become an integral part of American life, powering search engines, GPS navigation, health care systems and more. But as companies invest in the infrastructure needed for AI, vicious land-use fights are emerging in communities nationwide. Nearly 3 in 4 Americans oppose hosting a data center in their community. Localized opposition has mobilized to halt projects in data center hot spots. It need not be this way. What if companies could build data centers on contaminated brownfield and Superfund sites in exchange for cleaning up the land?” (08/27/26)
