Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by Ryan McMaken
“In spite of the religious claims made by some Zionists, no state on earth was created by God, and there is no moral principle or natural law that mandates support for any state. Nor is there any moral principle or natural law that prohibits delegitimizing any state. States are simply organizations, created by human beings, that carry out the agenda of the governing elite in each state. There is no mandate from heaven. There isn’t even any such thing as ‘the will of the people.’ In this, the State of Israel is no different from any other state.” (02/10/26)
Source: Electronic Frontier Foundation
by Beryl Lipton
“Amazon Ring’s Super Bowl ad offered a vision of our streets that should leave every person unsettled about the company’s goals for disintegrating our privacy in public. In the ad, disguised as a heartfelt effort to reunite the lost dogs of the country with their innocent owners, the company previewed future surveillance of our streets: a world where biometric identification could be unleashed from consumer devices to identify, track, and locate anything — human, pet, and otherwise.” (02/10/26)
Source: Electronic Frontier Foundation
by Mario Trujillo
“In the past year, DHS has consistently targeted people engaged in First Amendment activity. Among other things, the agency has issued subpoenas to technology companies to unmask or locate people who have documented ICE’s activities in their community, criticized the government, or attended protests. These subpoenas are unlawful, and the government knows it. When a handful of users challenged a few of them in court with the help of ACLU affiliates in Northern California and Pennsylvania, DHS withdrew them rather than waiting for a decision. But it is difficult for the average user to fight back on their own. … That is why we, joined by the ACLU of Northern California, have asked several large tech platforms to do more to protect their users …” (02/10/26)
“Marta Jiménez, a hairdresser in Cuba’s eastern city of Holguín, covered her face with her hands and broke down crying when I asked her about Trump’s blockade of the island—especially now that the U.S. is choking off oil shipments. ‘You can’t imagine how it touches every part of our lives,’ she sobbed. ‘It’s a vicious, all-encompassing spiral downward. With no gasoline, buses don’t run, so we can’t get to work. We have electricity only three to six hours a day. There’s no gas for cooking, so we’re burning wood and charcoal in our apartments. It’s like going back 100 years. The blockade is suffocating us, especially single mothers,’ she said crying into her hands, ‘and no one is stopping these demons: Trump and Marco Rubio.'” (02/11/25)
“Hong Kong once prided itself on a free press and an independent judiciary. Before the 1997 handover from British to Chinese rule, the city had been promised that its liberties would endure. Yet now a newspaper publisher faces the rest of his life in prison merely for doing his job.” (02/10/26)
“You don’t sell surveillance out of the gate with a system that tracks down a person in the neighborhood behind on taxes or child support. No, you sell it as a system to find that adorable lost dog (notice not even generic pets or certainly not cats because dogs are the new children for this generation). They can fight all the backlash by saying, ‘Oh come on, who can be against finding lost dogs?’ Then, months or years later, the terms and conditions have morphed and broader search capabilities are enabled without the user even knowing …. When it really gets scary, they are not even going to tell you about it. I do not believe this is just a marketing mistake — Ring appears to have adopted neighborhood surveillance as their core business model.” (02/10/26)
Source: Foundation for Individual Rights and Education
by Amanda Nordstrom
“Public universities don’t get to pick which political viewpoints are safe to express. But administrators at two major universities are trying to do just that. At the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, administrators treated the College Republicans’ pro-ICE political message like a civil rights violation. … At Penn State, an anti-ICE poster discovered outside the student center on Jan. 29 sparked heated reactions across the ideological spectrum. When some people raised the call to identify and punish whoever created the poster, Penn State responded by condemning it and announcing that University Police and Public Safety were investigating. These incidents are two sides of the same coin: administrators using official investigations to police protected political speech, in this case, on opposing sides of the immigration debate.” (02/10/26)
“Novo Nordisk recently introduced Wegovy in pill form, at a price of about $150 a month. Hims & Hers had planned to offer the same chemical compound, without Wegovy branding, for about $50 a month. The whole POINT of Novo Nordisk’s attempt to enforce its patent is to CREATE a shortage of semaglutide in pill form. Why? Money. The patent, if enforceable, allows Novo Nordisk to charge customers AT LEAST three times as much for its pill as the market says it can be sold profitably for. Hims & Hers wouldn’t offer it for $50 if it expected to lose money doing so.” (02/10/26)
“After Leave won the Brexit vote in 2016, lots of thinkers who accepted the economic case for high immigration started flirting with a political case against high immigration. While the details of this political case were often vague, one word was painted on its banner: BACKLASH. The central insinuation was that staunch support for high immigration is what philosophers call ‘self-defeating’: When immigration gets too high, voters reliably shift their support to right-wing populists, who in turn reliably slash immigration. I’ve long maintained that the rhetoric of ‘immigration backlash’ is classic motte-and-bailey. If ‘backlash’ merely means ‘More immigration leads to more complaining about immigration’ then the claim is almost surely true, but also trivial.” (02/10/26)
Source: Caitlin Johnstone, Rogue Journalist
by Caitlin Johnstone
“Australian authorities were fully aware that inviting Israel’s president for a visit was going to ignite unrest and furious opposition. They invited him anyway, and sent in the police to assault the protesters. I saw a video of two cops pinning a kid in a keffiyeh face down on the ground and proceeding to punch him over and over again long after he’d been subdued. I saw another video of police repeatedly punching a middle-aged man who was holding his hands in the air until he fell to the ground. I saw another video of police repeatedly pepper spraying a demonstrator directly in the face as he was visibly complying with their demands to move and providing no resistance whatsoever. I saw another video of police manhandling Muslim men who were literally on their knees praying, presenting no possible threat of any kind.” (02/10/25)
