“Hasan Piker is deeply envious of Charlie Kirk. The hard-left influencer debated Kirk in 2017 and was set to do so again before Kirk was murdered last year. Yet now Piker is going around mocking Kirk’s assassination — leading a crowd last weekend, during his live podcast tour, in a sarcastic singalong of an AI-generated song called ‘We Are Charlie Kirk’: ‘We are Charlie Kirk, we carry the flame / We’ll fight for the Gospel, we’ll honor his name’, Piker sang off-key, the crowd howling along, while the celebrity socialist’s co-hosts guffawed and waved their arms in the air. This wasn’t satirizing a political opponent — Kirk has been dead nearly a year. It’s because Piker knows his audience, and they’re not looking for thoughtful politics: They want a hatefest.” (08/25/26)
“One of the important characteristics of Israel and Donald Trump’s war on Iran was that it never had the support of the American people. When George Bush launched his illegal invasion of Iraq, support stood strong at 72%. As the war turned into a debacle, that support waned. By contrast, the Iran war had the support of only 27% of the American public at the outset. It took four years for support for the Iraq war to fall to the low levels of support the Iran war enjoyed from the beginning. But an untold story is the apparent opposition – though the exact numbers remain unknown—within the ranks of the US military. I am not talking about frustration, as evidenced by complaints about living standards on the USS Abraham Lincoln, but actual opposition.” (08/25/26)
“The surveillance contractor Flock Safety argues that police customers don’t need a warrant to track drivers with its automated license plate reading cameras because drivers have ‘no reasonable expectation of privacy’ on public roads. So YouTube host Benn Jordan applied the same logic back on Flock. He sat outside Flock’s recent police convention in Atlanta with radio equipment and a drone, which he used to unmask attendees and even listen to microphones inside the convention hall. ‘Flock values their privacy. Oh well,’ Jordan wrote in the title of his video on the convention.” (08/24/26)
“Every August, debate renews over both the wisdom and the morality of dropping the two American atomic bombs, 81 years ago, on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima (August 6, 1945) and Nagasaki (August 9, 1945). This August has been no exception. As ever, many critics have faulted the United States for the bombings: two gruesome blasts—aimed at dual-use military and industrial targets in both cities—that may have caused some 100,000–120,000 immediate deaths among combatants and civilians. And not all these critics are on the Left. Two years ago, podcaster Tucker Carlson blasted the Truman administration’s decision, alleging that the atomic bomb was not the result of decades of sophisticated nuclear physics research or the dividend of a two-billion-dollar Manhattan Project investment to rapidly develop an atomic weapon in a race to beat the Axis powers’ nuclear programs before they themselves developed such existential weapons.” (08/25/26)
Source: David Friedman’s Substack
by David Friedman
“Musk is building them. The Chinese are building and selling them. Why? The first answer that occurred to me is that if we end up with robots neither much abler than humans nor much less able we will want the option of employing a mixed workforce, being able to have humans and robots substitute for each other. That is easier if they are about the same size and shape.” (08/24/26)
Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by Ryan McMaken
“Writing in the 1960s, Rothbard was addressing what was then a common claim among conservatives about the revolution: that it was a conservative, restrained, and almost gentlemanly revolution that sought only to preserve and restore what had already been established. … Rothbard understood that this characterization of the revolution served a modern-day political purpose: to manufacture support for the status quo and to deny any possible moral legitimacy to any new revolutionary political movements that might arise. … in the conservative schema, the American revolution is to be contrasted with the French Revolution, which is portrayed as a more typical revolution, and an illustration of how revolutions are too dangerous to risk at any time.” (08/24/26)
“Illiberalism isn’t limited to the right. As Republicans ramp up their attacks on the DSA—with Trump and other senior Republicans indiscriminately branding democratic socialists and Democrats as communists—the organization practically volunteered to become Exhibit A. On what would have been Fidel Castro’s 100th birthday, the DSA issued a glowing statement describing the late Cuban dictator as a ‘stalwart symbol of anti-imperialist struggle and self-determination.’ Castro led the revolution that overthrew Fulgencio Batista’s brutal and corrupt dictatorship in 1959. He then replaced it with a brutal communist dictatorship of his own: a one-party state that imprisoned political opponents, suppressed independent journalism, prohibited meaningful elections, and punished virtually every form of dissent.” (08/24/26)
“Having failed at and then become bored with a shooting war, Donald Trump is returning to what really gets him up in the morning: an economic war. An ‘economic D-Day’ for Iran was announced at around the same time as retaliatory trade measures against Canada, a demonstration of the fact that to Trump, there’s no functional difference between tariffs and economic sanctions. I’ve seen some commentators discuss this as a more humanitarian way to handle Iran, as if starving a country’s citizens is somehow preferable to bombing them. But the combination with Canada, as my colleague Bob Kuttner went over yesterday, reveals that this is just bullying with different tools: a spreadsheet instead of a surface-to-air missile. The nagging problem for any would-be emperor short of Nero is that the ungrateful plebes don’t like the world being created.” (08/25/26)
“Just as every baby boomer knows exactly where they were when John F. Kennedy was assassinated, people my age can tell you precisely what they were doing just after 9 a.m. on 9/11. I was in seventh grade music class. In other classrooms, my friends watched people jump out of buildings. My mom picked me up early from school, and I distinctly remember that every television channel had been overtaken by news coverage. I watched the twin towers collapse over and over again for what felt like days. … The U.S. government responded in many ways that either were largely kept secret from the public or are so integrated into daily life that we no longer recognize them as what they are: marked expansions of government that have weakened constraints on government and eroded our liberties.” (08/24/26)
“Economic planners can’t obtain the knowledge they would need. Prices carry information that no committee could produce. Attempts to impose a uniform design on a spontaneous order tend to destroy the very thing they were trying to improve. But then we turn to politics, and many of us start acting like engineers. Rothbard is the clearest case. About markets he was a thoroughgoing Austrian, insisting that no mind could assemble the knowledge that prices convey. When the subject turned to rights, though, he proceeded almost entirely by deduction, deriving an entire legal and political order from self-ownership and homesteading. … The same thinker who found the market unknowable found the just constitution derivable, as though a system for restraining violence, settling disputes, and determining who owns what were somehow less demanding than the coordination of a grain market, rather than more.” (08/24/26)
