Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Kritsian Niemietz
“Gary Stevenson thinks that he has discovered the root cause of Britain’s malaise: wealth inequality. In his version of events, the super-rich are monopolising all the assets, including property and they are using the returns on those assets to buy even more assets — a self-reinforcing downward spiral. A small, super-wealthy elite is getting wealthier and wealthier, while the rest of the country is sinking into abject poverty. Gary has assembled a mass following on the basis of this thesis, so it is clearly persuasive to a lot of people. It is also completely wrong, for a number of reasons. ” (12/08/25)
“Musk’s irate philippics against the Brussels machine might be driven by self-serving impulses. His conversion to what we might call the Brexit spirit followed the EU’s slapping of a €120million fine on X for breaching the transparency rules in its authoritarian Digital Services Act. In response, Musk taunted EU officials on X and openly called for the EU’s dismantling. ‘The EU should be abolished and sovereignty returned to individual countries, so that governments can better represent their people’, he tweeted. So it was the EU’s meddling with his bank balance, rather than its meddling with the European people’s sovereign rights, that pushed him over the edge into Euroscepticism. He’s still right, though.” (12/08/25)
Source: Caitlin Johnstone, Rogue Journalist
by Caitlin Johnstone
“The blue whales have stopped singing / because the krill are vanishing / because the oceans are warming / because we are ruled by long-toothed liars / whose insides are full of dead leaves. / The great whales have gone silent / and my bird has gone blind / and there are chatbots in the basement / and corpses in the corn. / Under the overpass it is dry and still. / You would never know that everything is dying. / You should come and visit me. / Meet me over there under the sepia streetlights / with the strangleporn perverts and fentanyl fallen, / all the stillborn scar tissue extractions / from the wreckage of a banished womb, / the NAFTA-noosed factory towns full of deserted buildings / and the window-snarling meth towns full of deserted people, / where the cries of orphaned Palestinians mingle / with the cries of the last baby orangutan / ever born in the wild …” (12/08/25)
“Today marks the 97th birthday of Noam Chomsky, known both for his status as ‘the father of modern linguistics’ as well as his prolific political commentary. I’m aware that as the opinion editor of an editorial page that tilts libertarian he’s an unusual figure to highlight, but he was intellectually influential to me ever since I read a booklet of his (‘9/11’) sometime in 2002 (I would’ve been 11). Though I came to identify more with thinkers like Milton Friedman, Chomsky is still someone whose writings and speeches I return to.” (12/08/25)
“The European Commission is fining the X platform 120 million euros (140 million dollars), for ‘transparency failures’: not sharing advertising and user data with the EU and not making it easy to censor account holders. As Reclaim the Net reports, the European Union wants platforms to open themselves to what it calls ‘independent research.’ In practice, this means that ‘academics and NGOs, often with pro-censorship political affiliations’ get special access to the data, ‘exactly the kind of surveillance the [Digital Services Act] claims to prevent.… The EU is angry that X is not policing speech the way it wants.’ My advice to Elon Musk is to shut down X (formerly Twitter) throughout the EU. And refuse to pay the fine.” (12/08/25)
“A major theme of American politics over the past few decades is Democrats repeatedly bailing Republicans out from the political consequences of their own actions, particularly with health care. During the Obama years, House Republicans voted dozens of times to repeal Obamacare, which Democrats blocked every time. During Trump’s first term, the GOP came within one vote of actually repealing it. Now, with the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), Republicans have finally gotten what they wanted: namely, taking a trillion-dollar bite out of Medicaid, and allowing Biden-era Obamacare subsidies to lapse, meaning premiums on the exchanges are going to more than double. Except, whoops, it turns out that people don’t like this at all, and even the more dim-witted congressional Republicans are starting to fear this might blow up in their faces.” (12/08/25)
Source: The American Conservative
by Harrison Berger
“Russia hawks in Congress and their allies in corporate media have been on the warpath against the Trump administration’s 28-point peace plan for ending the Ukraine war, dubbing the plan a ‘Russian wish-list.’ The MSNBC host Rachel Maddow went so far as to hold it up as proof that ‘the Kremlin runs U.S. foreign policy.’ … Yet there are also criticisms of the plan from the other end of the ideological spectrum. Among the most prominent voices who argued from the start that the United States should never have been drawn into the Ukraine conflict are the War Room host and former White House advisor Steve Bannon and the University of Chicago’s Professor John Mearsheimer. They now warn that far from being a ‘Russian wish list,’ the Trump administration’s plan may not actually address the underlying political problems that ultimately caused the Ukraine proxy war.” (12/08/25)
“In early November of last year, the Assad regime had a lot to look forward to. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad had just joined fellow Middle Eastern leaders at a pan-Islamic summit in Saudi Arabia, marking a major step in his return to the international fold. … Less than a month later, Assad fled the country in a Russian plane as Turkish-backed opposition forces began their final approach to Damascus. Most observers were taken aback by this development. But long-time Middle East analyst Neil Partrick was less surprised. As Partrick details in his new book, ‘State Failure in the Middle East,’ the seemingly resurgent Assad regime had by that point been reduced to a hollowed-out state apparatus, propped up by foreign backers. When those backers pulled out, Assad was left with little choice but to flee.” (12/08/25)
“Way back in the 1700s there was this fucked up little place called Florida, or at least that’s what the Spaniards called it. The original natives of the region had multiple different names for this untamable swampland but most of them were wiped out by slaughter and disease from the Conquistadors who declared the wild mess, Florida. They didn’t last long though. In fact, those butchers only managed to build and populate a few colonialist missions before their glorious Catholic empire collapsed in the tall grass surrounding them and, in spite of such efforts, most of Florida remained a verdant wilderness teeming with all kinds of shit that freaked white people the fuck out- snakes, alligators, mosquitos, humidity … But there was one tribe of Indians just wild enough to call this no-man’s-land home.” (12/07/25)
