“I have been talking for years now about the death of cable, which has functionally arrived even if the cable networks don’t quite know it yet. The Pew Research Center estimates that cable and satellite TV households were down to only 36 percent of the population in 2025; that number was 85 percent just a decade earlier. Among viewers under 30, cable subscriptions are at 16 percent of households. Streaming represents nearly half of all viewing among all age groups. Cable is a dying medium, and it’s a matter of time before it’s no longer cost-efficient to maintain cable systems, and they are shut down. Charter Communications is trying to grow its way to survival with the acquisition of Cox, but even the biggest cable companies can’t outrun reality forever.” (06/16/26)
Source: Independent Institute
by K Lloyd Billingsley
“A California law requiring venture capital firms to report the race, gender, and sexual orientation of the companies they fund is being challenged in federal court, the California Globe reports. Attorneys for the Colorado-based 1517 Fund contend that the law is unconstitutional. Californians can make a case that the measure also violates the spirit of a state law the people approved in 1996.” (06/15/26)
“The attack on Iran that Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu launched in February has disrupted the global economy, sending oil prices spiking, while utterly failing in its stated objective of regime change. Voters widely, and accurately, view the war as an unmitigated disaster. … Trump launched a foolish and unnecessary war, which the United States has lost decisively. The war proves the US and Israel have limited ability to restrain Iran. So the only alternative is negotiation.” (06/15/26)
“Before 9/11, no one in law enforcement was permitted access to data obtained outside the restraints imposed by the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. Those restraints prohibit searches and seizures — in the modern parlance, surveillance and data acquisition — without a search warrant issued by a judge based on probable cause of crime, sworn to under oath. And the warrant itself must specifically describe the places to be searched and the persons or things to be seized. Since 9/11, the wall between surveillance and law enforcement has collapsed even though the feds still maintain that the Fourth Amendment only regulates law enforcement and not surveillance. This wild proposition is defied by the plain language of the amendment, which protects all persons from all government, and by the history of the colonists dealing with British government agents executing general warrants issued by a secret court in London.” (06/15/26)
Source: Bluegrass Institute
by Caleb O Brown & Jeffrey A Singer
“If reports are correct that Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary resigned under pressure from the White House to approve flavored nicotine vaping products, the episode says a great deal about the state of American tobacco policy. Cigarettes remain legal, ubiquitous, and extraordinarily deadly. Yet smoke-free alternatives that may help adults move away from combustible tobacco continue to trigger political panic out of proportion to the actual public health trade-offs involved. There is something deeply unserious about how Washington talks about nicotine. Cigarettes, the most dangerous products in the category, remain widely available. Smoke-free alternatives, however, are often treated as if their very existence is beyond the pale.” (06/15/26)
“True liberty cannot exist without economic and financial autonomy. Every individual, regardless of their background, must have the right to protect their wealth. They must have the right to access open markets by transacting freely, without the shadow of state corporatism or financial surveillance. Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) are a direct threat to these rights. They are money that can be programmed by the government. They can be turned off completely or just for spending on items the state disapproves of. They are a surveillance-punishment system dressed in the language of financial innovation.” (06/15/26)
“The only way to protect the American people’s liberty is to dismantle the surveillance state and stop trading real liberty for phantom security. True security comes from replacing militarism and authoritarianism with liberty and peace.” (06/15/26)
“So Donald Trump, on his 80th birthday, announced a deal in which there would be a 60-day ceasefire. Precise details have not yet been officially published. But, according to reports, they apparently include a cessation of attacks in Lebanon, the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz … and lifting the U.S. naval blockade of Iranian ports. He touted this as a key win, in the process praising China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin for helping secure it. This ‘deal’ was nothing of the sort. If the reports are accurate, it instead represented a total U.S. capitulation to Iran. It basically set the clock back to February, when the Strait was open and the United States and Israel had not yet started bombing the Islamic Republic. It merely solved a problem that Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had themselves created by launching the war in the first place.” (06/15/25)
“Trump’s Big Lie about rigged elections and Democrats’ supposed cheating — California being his latest target — is by now so familiar that many of us are all but inured to it, and have been for a long time. That’s understandable, and arguably good for our mental health, but collectively dangerous for the nation. The majority of Republican voters accept the lie as truth. What better time than the summer of the nation’s 250th anniversary of independence to reflect on how Trump’s years of lying have corroded the citizenry’s essential belief in the integrity of elections? Attention must be paid, especially ahead of midterm elections in November.” (06/15/26)
Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Mark Moses
“We are witnessing a troubling migration — a flight of capital and talent from states that have adopted increasingly aggressive tax policies. Elon Musk moved Tesla and X from California to Texas; Palantir relocated to Colorado. High-profile individuals and corporations are pulling up stakes and relocating to states with more favorable tax policies. A casual observer might interpret such migrations as a strategic response to changing cost structures. But that framing misses the deeper issue. These departures are not just about lowering costs; they reflect an effort to exit a system that has decidedly turned against them.” (06/15/26)
