“There is an argument making the rounds: Flock cameras are good because cop cams have proven themselves so useful. More transparency! Flock cameras, you may remember, are the traffic cameras integrally linked to an artificial intelligence that tracks car license plates (and thus the cars, and drivers) that come within the cameras’ field of vision. The company contracts with cities and other governments. To surveil us. You know, ‘to protect us from crime.'” (09/11/26)
“The 44 percent support for the neo-Nazi Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in the small east German state of Saxony-Anhalt has produced great anxiety about the causes of a new turn to fascism in the nation that produced Hitler. Call me an economic determinist, but for the most part it’s the economy, stupid. And absent drastic changes in the global economic order and the role of China, Germany and the West are headed for much worse. This story comes in three parts. Part One: Hitler came to power due to the collapsed German economy following the draconian terms of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles. During the post–World War II boom, with over-full employment and the return of prosperity, there was virtually no support for neofascists.” (09/11/26)
“Why do governments take control of entire sectors of the economy? The textbook answer falls into what many economists call ‘public interest’ reasoning. But what really happens turns out to be more complex than what the profession has so far understood.” (09/11/26)
Source: Karl Dickey’s Freedom Vanguard
by Karl Dickey
“The attacks were not about hating our freedom. They were the predictable result of intervention. The Patriot Act then stripped liberty at home.” (09/11/26)
“Last Wednesday, House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan sent FBI Director Kash Patel a letter demanding every document connected to an operation codenamed Round River. If you haven’t heard of it, that’s understandable; it’s the sequel nobody promoted, and I’ll get to it. I’ve spent part of my career testifying as an expert witness on fiduciary duty, the branch of law that punishes people for betraying the trust placed in them. Measured by that standard, Round River isn’t merely disinformation; it’s a breach of duty so complete that in my industry it would end a career and trigger a bar complaint. In Washington, it’s earned a strongly worded letter. That’s the whole scandal in one sentence: the deep state keeps getting caught, and nobody ever pays for it.” (09/11/26)
“[W]hen secular Zionism arose in the late 19th century, which proposed an ‘ingathering of exiles’ (that is, virtually the entire Jewish diaspora), most observant Jews opposed twisting their religion into a nationalistic movement in search of statehood. They feared that a state would replace God and Torah. They also believed that a Jewish state would endanger their emancipated status in their home countries and require domination of the Palestinian Arabs. The anti-Zionists’ prophecy proved correct. In light of the Holocaust, which changed the presentation of Zionism from an ingathering project to a refugee program, Jewish anti-Zionism faded but did not disappear.” (09/11/26)
“More than a third of the U.S. population today is under 30 years of age. This is the only America they ever have known. They may have seen the new World Trade Center, which is, in a kind of perverse victory for continuity in aesthetics if nothing else, about as ugly as the old one, but its symbolic status is mostly lost on them. Those of us who are older want to tell them that this is not normal, but, of course, it is we who are the outliers, we graybeards with our books and our memories. This is not the ‘new normal’—it is just normal, from the wider historical point of view. What we should be trying to make them understand is not that this is not normal but that normal is not good enough.” (09/11/26)
“When Karyann Parkinson’s 5-year-old son, Sam, asked if he could walk about a half mile to their neighborhood pond to collect goose feathers, she didn’t have a hard time saying yes. It was June. They’d walked the route before, including that morning. Her son is mature, and their surroundings are part of what the homeowners association describes as a ‘secure, multi-generational gated community.’ The risks were low, and yet Karyann is fast becoming famous for what came next. … Thanks to Karyann’s transgression — trusting her son — she was placed on Virginia’s child abuse and neglect registry for seven years. In court, she was found guilty of ‘contributing to the delinquency of a minor’ — a Class 1 misdemeanor — and given a six-month suspended jail sentence.” (09/11/26)