“I can’t stop thinking about this video of an ICE agent violently shoving a crying wife to the ground. … Here’s another video. In this one, an ICE agent slams a 79-year-old American business owner to the ground. For trying to show his workers’ paperwork, they broke his ribs and gave him head trauma. Here’s a group of (masked, of course) ICE agents running after a guy on a bicycle because he said ‘fuck Trump.’ Here’s a journalist leaving in a neck brace after ICE agents pushed him to the ground for trying to cover proceedings at an immigration court in New York City. I see all this and I think about John Wayne. Who, if I remember correctly, became a symbol of American masculinity for saving endangered women on-screen, not shoving them to the ground for crying too close to him.” (10/01/25)
Source: The Daily Economy
by Alex Tokarev, Daniel J Smith, & Kristin Tokarev
“New York City, the bastion of global capitalism, is on the verge of electing its first socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani. Many of his socialist visions for the metropolis fail basic economics. Worst of all is his proposal to freeze the price of rent. It ignores decades of empirical evidence that rent control harms the very residents Mamdani hopes to help. Socialists are infamous for stubbornly rejecting the laws of economics in pursuit of utopian fantasies. Yet rent control has led to such obvious and abysmal failures around the globe that even hard-core socialists have disavowed it.” (10/01/25)
Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Laurence M Vance
“[T]he next time you see someone burn an American flag, just ask two questions: (1) Whose flag? and (2) Whose property? The real issues are theft and trespassing, not whether the sight of someone burning a flag is offensive or unpatriotic.” (10/01/25)
“Botswana has a lot going for it, including a stable history of relatively ethical and responsible government sustained by a fast-growing economy and a GDP per capita that puts it a world ahead of neighbors such as Zimbabwe and Namibia, an economy that is experiencing much-needed diversification but one in which diamond mining and diamond cartels still play an outsized role. There was a peaceful transfer of power after the Botswana Democratic Party was turned out by voters in the 2024 elections after 58 years in power. … Botswana is doing reasonably well. But if it is not doing as well as it could be, it is because it is not making the most of the resources with which it is blessed. I don’t mean diamonds. I mean the people.” (10/01/25)
“Philip K. Howard, a graduate of Taft prep school, Yale and the University of Virginia School of Law, says he never wore ‘white bucks.’ This 1950s campus fashion waned before he matriculated. Those buckskin shoes were popular among young blades destined to become ‘white-shoe lawyers’ at prestigious ‘white-shoe law firms,’ such as Covington & Burling, where Howard, 76, is senior counsel. He also is a genteel inveigher against the coagulation of American society, which is saturated with law. … When all choices by people in authority are, in Howard’s words, ‘strained through a legal sieve,’ we understand Alexis de Tocqueville’s warning from nearly 200 years ago: Minute regulations that stifle intuition, judgment and freedom perpetuate ‘a drowsy regularity,’ and the status quo.” (10/01/25)
“Democrats are talking themselves into forcing a government shutdown. But they can’t seem to agree on why. House Republicans have passed a bill to keep the government funded, but they need seven votes from the Democratic minority in the Senate or else there will be a shutdown tonight. In the spring, Democrat Senate leader Chuck Schumer wasn’t willing to force a shutdown; he didn’t have a message and was trying to get out of Donald Trump’s way so long as the president looked to be making enough mistakes on his own. It would also have been nonsensical to shut down the government to protest against the Department of Government Efficiency’s refusal to fund and staff the government. That’s still a risk. Trump’s Office of Management and Budget director Russ Vought is openly salivating at the prospect of a shutdown, precisely because he has plans to use one to justify more government lay-offs.” (09/30/25)
“Since the 1950s, the U.S. has been the world’s leading arms-exporting nation accounting between 2019 and 2023 for 42 percent of all global arms exports. Several laws exist ostensibly to regulate and ensure that U.S. security assistance is provided to allies without undermining America’s core values. For example, Section 502B of the Foreign Assistance Act expressly forbids the United States from providing security assistance to any country whose government engages in a ‘consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights.’ Investigations by human rights groups and the media, including Reuters and Premium Times, have uncovered a consistent pattern of abuse by security forces that suggests that Nigeria has met this threshold.” (10/01/25)
“Democrats have an available response to Republican attempts to shift all the blame onto them: Republicans don’t need us to open the government. They can change Senate rules and suspend or eliminate the filibuster on a party-line vote. And Republicans can’t argue that they think changing the rules on a party-line vote — the so-called ‘nuclear option’ — is a terrible violation of Senate norms because Republicans literally changed the rules on a party-line vote three weeks ago to speed confirmation of judicial nominees. If they don’t go nuclear and the filibuster to keep the government open, that shows how little they care about keeping it open, and how much they care about creating excuses for vilifying Democrats.” (10/01/25)
“The recent Pakistan-El Salvador Bitcoin deal exemplifies how the adoption of cryptocurrency can allow emerging economies to circumvent mechanisms of traditional multilateral oversight, and thus represents a potential challenge to the wider architecture of global financial governance. The unprecedented agreement between these two countries symbolizes a departure from standard bilateral engagement and marks the emergence of what some have termed ‘Biplomacy,’ or the use of Bitcoin advocacy in international relations.” (10/01/25)
