“The Left [sic] never (never) fails, daily, to produce something perverted, abnormal, violent, irrational, decadent, barbaric, and utterly, completely stupid. Let me share with you three recent examples I ran across: 1.) This first one is Canadian, a country that is farther gone (if that is possible) into leftism than many Americans. This is incredible! … Well, for the Left [sic], no, it’s not. Headline from the National Post: ‘Ontario resident who wants both a vagina and penis wins public funding for unique surgery; A court has ruled Ontario must pay for a penis-sparing vaginoplasty for a person who identifies as neither fully female nor fully male.’ Are there any words, in the tongues of men or angels, that can describe this?” (02/17/26)
“Have you ever wondered why people believe the moon landing was faked, vaccines secretly poison us, and Mercury in retrograde can ruin your love life? Why does irrationality seem so pervasive? A popular answer, beloved by academics and educators alike, points to fallacies — certain types of arguments that are deeply flawed yet oddly seductive. Because people keep falling for these reasoning traps, they end up believing all sorts of crazy stuff. Still, the theory offers hope: if you memorize the classic fallacies — ad hominem, post hoc, straw man — you will inoculate yourself against them. It’s a neat little story, and I used to believe it too. Not anymore. I’ve become a fallacy apostate.” (02/17/26)
Source: Caitlin Johnstone, Rogue Journalist
by Caitlin Johnstone
“US empire managers have been making some surprisingly honest admissions in recent days, with Senator Lindsey Graham saying the wars of the future are being planned in Israel and Secretary of State Marco Rubio calling for a return to old-school western colonialism. During a Monday press conference in Tel Aviv after a meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu, Graham said that ‘I’ve been coming here every two weeks whether I need to or not.’ Why is a South Carolina senator traveling to Israel every two weeks, rain or shine? The bloodthirsty warmonger answers this question in short order. ‘The wars of the future are being planned here in Israel,’ Graham said. ‘Because if you’re not one step ahead of the enemy, you suffer. The most clever, creative military forces on the planet are here in Israel.'” (02/17/26)
“Trump’s cancellation of the so-called ‘endangerment finding’ with respect to CO2 made by the Obama White House back in 2009 is so profoundly important as to make up for a legion of Trump’s spending, borrowing, easy money, and tariffing sins. Among countless others. The entire notion that fossil-fuel-based industrial civilization threatens to boil the planet alive is sheer crackpottery. Actually, as we reprise below, the geologic and climatic history of the planet so clearly refutes the Climate Crisis nonsense as to point to an even more malefic force at work than just an egregious policy mistake.” (02/17/26)
“A lot of parents worry about their kids and the internet. Fears about social media addiction and age-inappropriate content have already led Australia to ban social media accounts for children under the age of 16. Other countries like France and Spain are following. By some measures, teenagers’ mental health does seem to have gotten worse over the past 10 years, and this does coincide with widespread adoption of smartphones. But that is where any clear correlation between the two ends. Multiple studies have either shown that smartphone and social media use among teens has minimal effects on their mental health or none at all.” (02/17/26)
Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by P Ian Szwajca
“Libertarian and pro-freedom movements have always drawn disproportionate support from the extremes of the IQ bell curve. The modern Left — pointing to the intellectual shortcomings of some of liberty’s most colorful supporters on the lower end — clumsily attempts to wield this fact as an argument against the Right. Meanwhile, the enlightened Right scratches its head, puzzled by this strange and exotic coalition rallying behind the cause of freedom. Perhaps it forgets a basic historical truth: humanity has overcome staggering odds with armies of illiterate peasants. Civilizations were not built exclusively by philosophers and mathematicians. They were raised by ordinary people, armed not with theory but with intuition, grit, and an instinctive understanding of exchange and fairness.” (02/17/26)
“Nicole decided to plant her own garden. She and her husband Dan, an engineer, don’t do things by half-measures. They watched YouTube videos on gardening, checked books out of the library and drew up plans. They built a raised bed and dug a wicking reservoir under it lined to store stormwater and drain the swampy, clay soils. … Autumn comes swiftly to Chicagoland. The Virgils hated to stop gardening. On the web, Nicole noticed farmers in Maine extended the growing season with long, plastic tunnels called hoop houses. … The one thing the Virgils did not think about was the city’s zoning board.” (02/17/26)
“Time is not fungible. The time you spend reading this column cannot be ‘reclaimed’. It is gone and it won’t be back. Which is why the ‘talking filibuster’ proposal for the United States Senate is such an awful idea. I wrote the first paragraph fully aware of the jests it will bring forth — thank you for underscoring my point by posting a comment along the lines of ‘That’s five minutes I will never get back!’ You are correct. You won’t get it back. Hold that thought. It applies to the United States Senate too. Another debate has come around about the rules of the United States Senate. The debate is welcome provided it occurs in columns and in studios and doesn’t take up ‘floor time’ in the Senate.” (02/17/26)
“Hello, I’m from the government, and I’d like to see what it’s going to take to get you and your community into one of our lovely new immigrant detention facilities! That’s right, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is on a $38 billion spending spree, scooping up warehouses across the country and revamping them into state-of-the-art-ish storage centers for people we have been working tirelessly to dehumanize. … our goal is to increase the federal immigration detention capacity by more than 90,000 beds, and we’re excited to start doing that as soon as you welcome one of our cruelty-forward human-being warehouses into your backyard. That’s where we’ve run into an unexpected bit of trouble.” (02/17/26)
“Sutton draws from decades of AI history to argue that researchers have learned a ‘bitter’ truth. Researchers repeatedly assume that computers will make the next advance in intelligence by relying on specialized human expertise. Recent history shows that methods that scale with computation outperform those reliant on human expertise. For example, in computer chess, brute-force search on specialized hardware triumphed over knowledge-based approaches. Sutton warns that researchers resist learning this lesson because building in knowledge feels satisfying, but true breakthroughs come from computation’s relentless scaling. … The Bitter Lesson is less about any single algorithm than about intellectual humility: progress in AI has come from accepting that general-purpose learning, persistently scaled, outperforms our best attempts to hard-code intelligence.” (02/17/26)
