“British parents hand over more than a third of a dual income household’s net earnings on childcare. That’s the highest burden in the OECD. The reflex is to call for more public money. But the international evidence points the other way. The problem isn’t spending. It’s regulation. At the heart of Britain’s high costs sits the child-to-staff ratio. For children under four, the average is 1:4.5, among the tightest in the developed world. Norway and France manage 1:9. Portugal and Luxembourg are similarly relaxed. None of them show the collapse in quality that stricter ratios are supposed to prevent. What they show instead is markedly lower cost to families.” (09/18/26)
“Six months after America launched its war and blockade against Iran, the Islamic Republic is still projecting defiance. Its economy should be in shambles — yet the regime is behaving as though time is on its side. It hasn’t abandoned its regional ambitions or restrained its terrorist proxies. Instead, this week it escalated. That escalation is now visible on both sides of the Arabian Peninsula. Iran continues to impede commercial traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. On the other side, the Houthis have seized the critical Yemeni port of Mokha, advanced toward the Bab el-Mandeb Strait and reached strategic Red Sea islands. … Every additional week in which Iran appears able to dictate the region’s economic temperature weakens the West’s credibility.” (09/19/26)
Source: Karl Dickey’s Freedom Vanguard
by Karl Dickey
“Inflation is a government failure, a failure to the citizens of America. The government prints money to fund its overspending and takes on debt as a result, which devalues the U.S. Dollar. The government creates the inflation problem, and in 2020, it put fire onto the already burning flame of inflation by flooding the nation with printed money, which created the huge issues that live with us six years later. Printing money and subsidizing everything under the sun is a false cure for our economy; we should be removing the State from manipulating the currency supply.” (09/18/26)
Source: Responsible Statecraft
by Nick Cleveland-Stout
“Palantir CEO Alex Karp proclaimed on a panel in 2024 that ‘technology should be able to reduce drastically the amount of collateral damage, civilian deaths.’ Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and former Deputy Director of the CIA David Cohen agreed. Proponents of artificial intelligence use in the military have long made some version of this argument — that the military’s adoption of AI will lead to a reduction in civilian harm. … The question is no longer theoretical, as the U.S. military is already deploying AI. The Pentagon struck 13,000 targets in just the first 38 days of war, aided by Palantir’s Maven Smart System to identify targets and choose weapons used for attacks. But experts at the hearing, hosted by the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission, said the argument that AI reduces civilian harm simply isn’t supported by the facts on the ground, pointing to Iran, Ukraine, Yemen, and Gaza as evidence.” (09/18/26)
“Beyond raising foundational questions of individual autonomy versus governmental authority, our relationship to the Highest Authority would also be impacted by the arrival of ET-like creatures. After all, the question of whether other minds exist is also a question about what makes our own minds—and our moral obligations—distinctive. Would other-worldly beings have their own salvific commandments and beliefs?” (09/18/26)
Source: Inequality.org
by Deepak Xavier & Janet Mudzviti-Zhou
“As we mark 15 years since Occupy Wall Street, it is worth remembering that the movement against inequality has a long lineage. The Gen Z-led protests flooding the streets of India, Kenya, Bolivia, and Tunisia today have been building for generations. On the last day of November 1999, tens of thousands of people shut down the World Trade Organization summit in Seattle. Trade unionists marched alongside environmentalists, students locked arms with farmers, and for a few extraordinary days the people who run the global economy could not get into their own meeting. The press called protesters a rabble with no coherent demand. They were wrong. The demand was simple and it has not changed: an economy that works for the many, not for a handful at the top.” (09/19/26)
“The movement took its name from a Ned Ludd who never existed—yet protesters signed letters and proclamations against mechanization as Ned Ludd, King Ludd, or General Ludd. It began in Nottinghamshire in March 1811, peaked in 1812, and had flickered out by 1816. It was the most prominent, but neither the only nor the first, episode of machine-breaking. Resistance to the introduction of machines in production was not new. It was strongest in old trades, such as wool and hosiery, which were long established in England and capable of expressing political demands. Mechanization in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England was not merely the introduction of new machinery; it was also a breakthrough in that particular technology known as organization.” (09/18/26)
“Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), the great English individualist and classical liberal, emphasized that societies based on contract, unlike societies based on status and coercion, blossom with creative diversity. (How wokeism has corrupted that word in our time!) Free association bestows countless benefits on all socioeconomic levels. Paradoxically, greater individuality accompanies growing interdependence through specialization, the division of labor, and trade. Self-sufficiency is the way to stay poor. The result of industrialism, Spencer wrote, is general affluence and a fading away of coercion.” (09/18/26)
“The Shia Muslim terror proxy of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Houthis of Yemen, are tightening their control over the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. This is a big deal, because an average of 8.1 million barrels per day of crude oil and petroleum liquids moved through the Strait during the second quarter of 2026. There is also the non-energy trade. All this international trade then heads to Europe and/or the Americas. … With Iran also threatening the Strait of Hormuz—however ineffectively—this is bound to have grave repercussions for the world energy market and the international economy. Which leads me to my big question for Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi: ‘What would you say … you do here, President Sisi?'” (09/18/26)
