Source: Electronic Frontier Foundation
by Corynne McSherry & Rory Mir
“In the Netflix/Spotify/Amazon era, many of us access copyrighted works purely in digital form – and that means we rarely have the chance to buy them. Instead, we are stuck renting them, subject to all kinds of terms and conditions. And because the content is digital, reselling it, lending it, even preserving it for your own use inevitably requires copying. Unfortunately, when it comes to copying digital media, US copyright law has pretty much lost the plot.” (01/22/26)
“Trump has this bizarrely durable ability to win by losing. He can be so appalling in his behavior, so simultaneously aggressive and craven, demanding to get his way in everything one minute then desperate for a deal — any deal — the next that one might easily forget whether he’s actually achieved any objectives at all in substantive terms. More often than not he does nothing but set his own declared aims back — and yet his domestic opponents, trying to block him as he lunges about, often wind up in such contorted positions themselves that with the next lunge he can push them over.” (01/22/26)
“Popular historian Joseph J. Ellis’s latest book, The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding, examines the persistence of slavery in the wake of the American Founding and the American Revolution’s impact on American Indians. Expulsion of the British from the Thirteen Colonies and John Jay’s diplomatic masterstroke yielding the Mississippi River rather than the Appalachian Mountains as America’s western boundary would have effects on blacks, Indians and ultimately the American Union that no one could have foreseen. This is what Ellis considers ‘the tragic side of the American Founding.’ What is new about Ellis’s telling of this tale is that he apportions responsibility differently than has become customary in recent years.” (01/22/26)
“President Trump is making big moves the world over. From nabbing Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro to threatening the conquest of Greenland to pushing for a Ukraine-Russia cease-fire, Trump’s foreign policy plate is full. The World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, is still buzzing about it. Overshadowed by these bigger headlines but no less important is Trump’s newly minted Board of Peace. The board is designed to implement the president’s 20-point peace plan for the war-torn Gaza Strip, as endorsed verbatim by the UN Security Council in November. Notable critics, including French President Emmanuel Macron, assert that Trump … is trying to supplant the United Nations as part of a wider overhaul of the international system that, in the wake of World War II, produced the UN, NATO and many of the other organizations that are steadily losing relevance today.” (01/21/25)
“Many modern economists struggle to define money. Often beginning with an historical overview of the concept of moneyness, they generally end by describing the functions of money. What money ‘does’ is not a definition of what money ‘is.’ Another way they strive to define money is with the use of adjectives. A common example is ‘sound money,’ which is like saying ‘wet water.’ The adjective is superfluous because the noun is intuitively understood, or at least should be, as it was to the pioneers of the Austrian School. Although I obviously cannot speak for Menger and Mises, their intuitive understanding of money is different from that of modern writers. It had to be because the environmental factors when they were writing a century or more ago were so very different from today given the then prevailing everyday use of gold and silver.” (01/22/26)
Source: Antiwar.com
by Jeffrey D Sachs and Sybil Fares
“The question is not if the US and Israel will attack Iran, but when. In the nuclear age, the US refrains from all-out war, since it can easily lead to nuclear escalation. Instead, the US and Israel are waging war against Iran through a combination of crushing economic sanctions, targeted military strikes, cyberwarfare, stoking unrest, and unrelenting misinformation campaigns. This combination strategy is called ‘hybrid warfare.'” (01/22/26)
Source: Freedom and Flourishing
by Dr. Edward W Younkins
“At its core, Humanomics aims to integrate moral and social dimensions into the scientific study of economic behavior, recapturing insights from Adam Smith that have been marginalized in mainstream economic theory. Rather than reducing humans to narrow maximizers of utility, Humanomics treats them as sentient, social, purposeful, learning agents whose actions are shaped by sentiments, norms, ethical commitments, and reflective judgment.” (01/22/26)
“IIUC, the argument is that people who would not donate to charity themselves find it more congenial to vote to tax other people and give their money to charity. A simple problem with this argument is that actually, each voter’s money will also be taxed. So for example, if there’s a vote on whether to tax everyone an extra $100 and spend the money on foreign aid, then voting in favor of the law costs you $100, the same as if you donated the money yourself voluntarily.” (01/22/26)
“During his successful campaign to become New York City’s new mayor, Zohran Mamdani promised he would combat rising grocery prices by setting up a city-run grocery store in each of New York’s five boroughs. Critics have slammed the proposal as a socialist fantasy that would only create uncompetitive, Soviet-style stores. They point out, rightly, that other American cities and towns have tried running grocery stores in recent years and their track record is not great. … But if the whole concept of government-run grocery stores is untenable, someone needs to alert the Pentagon, because since 1867, the U.S. military has operated discount grocery stores called commissaries, with great success for active-duty service members, certain veterans, and their families.” (01/22/26)
