“The world changed profoundly just four years ago. In February 2022, in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the West immobilised roughly $300 billion of Russia’s foreign reserves. At the end of the month, both the EU and the US froze Russian central bank assets in Europe and the US. This may go down in history as one of the biggest unforced geopolitical errors of the 21st Century. So far. When, like the US, you have official national debts of $40 trillion that will never be paid except in devalued money, it looks almost churlish to remind generous foreign strangers that their holdings of your ‘assets’ can be voided on a whim. But that’s what they did. The decision triggered an understandable exodus of foreign sovereign capital out of the US Treasury bond market and into a stateless asset that is nobody’s liability: gold. That exodus is continuing, and the increasingly farcical Iran conflict isn’t helping.” (08/18/26)
“The only Chinese Nobel Peace Prize awardee, Liu Xiaobo, whose books I learned a lot from, famously said, ‘I don’t have enemies.’ He did not hate people who hold different opinions, or even those who enabled the brutalities of the Chinese Communist regime. He fought against the regime, and the ideologies that enabled the violence. In the face of the illiberal waves, I want to re-conceptualize the idea to address the challenge that we all face. The enemy is not the political opposition. The enemy is apathy. It’s the state where people don’t care, live in their half-baked stereotypes about the world, and stop thinking deeply about anything.” (08/18/26)
“The headline from a new modeling experiment by Econtime Consultants claims flexible work arrangements can raise one’s ‘effective’ salary by 56 percent. That number may sound startling, even inflated, until you picture the actual worker behind it: a 39-year-old programmer with one or two children, a mortgage or other debt, a demanding job, and a calendar where every recovered hour matters. The flexible work value in an IT worker’s life does not come from abstract corporate generosity. It comes from fewer rushed mornings, fewer lost evenings, fewer unpaid hours trapped in transit, and more control over the fragile border between work and everything else. … The most important aspect of the study is conceptual: It asks leaders to stop treating salary as the only form of compensation that matters. A paycheck tells workers what they earn. It does not tell them what the job costs them.” (08/18/26)
“Five years ago this month, as the last United States forces withdrew from Afghanistan, the Taliban grasped the reins of government and have kept a tight hold on them since. The group’s harsh interpretation of Islamic rule excludes girls and women, who make up half of Afghanistan’s estimated 50 million people, from any meaningful education …. Yet, even amid a system likened to ‘gender apartheid’, Afghanistan’s girls and women refuse to be completely cowed. They tune in to sessions on the radio – or the internet, when it works. Some, whose families can afford it, attend clandestine informal schools in neighborhood homes. Others read and reread the same textbooks that they or their siblings used in pre-Taliban years, when girls could attend secondary school and even university.” (08/17/26)
“Left and right increasingly compete over how to wield government power rather than whether to limit it. Stephanie Slade’s ‘Fusionism’ asks whether liberty and restraint still have a constituency.” (08/18/26)
Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by Wanjiru Njoya
“Eighteenth century liberalism rejected the notion of ‘a select class of privileged persons’ who had special rights and freedoms. The fundamental purpose of equality under the law was to ensure that no group is granted rights solely by virtue of membership, rights that remain unavailable to those outside it. But what now passes for classical liberalism does not reflect the same principle. Much of what people now call classical liberalism comes from the progressive egalitarianism of the 1960s. A key principle in modern ‘classical liberalism’ is the notion of ‘equal opportunities’ that did not exist in the eighteenth century.” (08/18/26)
Source: Caitlin Johnstone, Rogue Journalist
by Caitlin Johnstone
“Love and cherish our world. That’s the secret to remaining both (A) deeply happy and (B) well-informed about the dystopian abuses of the empire. You don’t have to choose. You can have both. I sometimes get called a Debbie Downer for my nonstop writing about all the evils that are being inflicted upon our world by powerful people every day, but readers who meet me or listen to my podcasts have often expressed surprise at how upbeat and cheerful I am in real life. They see me focusing on extremely dark subject matter day after day and expressing rage and revulsion at the horrors we are witnessing, so they expect me to show up as some kind of dour, jaded misanthrope. But the truth is I am a very happy person.” (08/18/26)
“Wars don’t just end. They get interpreted, reinterpreted, and turned into strategic doctrine. That is what happened after the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, a conflict that saw the United States back Tehran’s Iraqi adversaries. The war taught Tehran three lessons it never unlearned: that Washington wants the Islamic Republic gone, that Iran stands essentially alone in the world, and that it cannot survive a direct, overt fight with the U.S. and Israel. In other words, it can only prevail through an indirect, ambiguous confrontation. … Now Iran has fought two more wars, in 2025 and 2026, and it is drawing new lessons on top of the old ones. Washington should pay close attention to what those lessons are, because they will shape Iranian strategy for years to come.” (08/18/26)
“Israel dominates the daily news in this 2026 midterm election year—almost always in a boring, fatiguing, negative light. Tens of thousands of innocents may be slaughtered, ethnically cleansed, butchered, and tortured by the world’s dictators, yet an overwhelming and obsessive abhorrence is reserved for tiny, democratic Israel. Such perverse asymmetry is strange, since, at least privately, most Americans would concede that of the 18 Middle Eastern nations, only Israel is a genuine consensual democracy.” [editor’s note: Well, except for the political parties that are banned, and except for the millions who live under Israeli rule, but don’t get to vote in Israeli elections. You know, little stuff like that – TLK] (08/18/26)
“Don’t get me wrong. It’s wholly reasonable to see the possibilities of technology in schools. After all, pencils, paper, calculators, whiteboards, and buses are all technologies, too. Finding a way to make sensible use of new tools is part and parcel of every profession. But every healthy impulse can easily be corrupted by schlock-peddling vendors, ed school fixations, quick-fix reformers, and assorted grifters. This is education’s evergreen problem, and we now see the result: a flood of dubious ed tech that washed over teachers ill-equipped to navigate the tide. Students were distracted, and teachers were left at sea, even as the wave of Chromebooks, tablets, and learning management systems helped normalize screens at home and in school.” (08/18/26)
