“The pub has been dying for a generation, but the pace has quickened sharply. The British Beer and Pub Association recorded 161 closures in the first quarter of 2026 alone, up 26 per cent on the same period the year before. That is two pubs shutting every day. … The prep school has followed a similar arc, on a shorter timetable. Twenty per cent VAT landed on school fees in January 2025. Most schools also lost the charitable rates relief that had cut their bills by up to 80 per cent. By January 2026, 105 independent schools had closed or been folded into mergers, more than 25,000 pupils displaced. … The pattern in both cases is the same. Government does not set out to destroy an institution. It raises the cost of employing people, taxes an activity that used to be exempt, and withdraws a relief that had cushioned the blow.” (08/17/26)
“It’s increasingly clear that the Gulfies, despite Saudi Arabia’s new defense pact with Pakistan and Turkey, and for all the chatter about a revitalized Sunni Gulf Arab alliance, are prepared to pay Iran to stop the war. To Trump’s great dismay, Riyadh even prevented the use of its bases and air space when Trump last seriously tried to open the Strait in May. This highlighted what had been clear about Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman since 2019, when Trump failed to respond to an Iranian attack on Saudi oil facilities: he no longer views the President as a reliable guarantor of his kingdom’s security. MBS, then, has become like the cautious Saudis of yesteryear.” (08/17/26)
Source: RealClearPolitics
by Marc A Levin & Khalil A Cumberbatch
“For decades, the War on Drugs, mandatory minimum sentences, and other dynamics kept our nation’s federal prisons packed to the rafters, with many facilities operating well beyond their design capacity. But now the Trump administration is poised to do what once seemed unthinkable: Close prisons. This welcome occasion is not a matter of luck. It reflects falling crime, fewer people sentenced for drug offenses. and prisoners earning time off their sentences by completing programs and staying out of trouble. It all adds up to a shrinking inmate population, prompting the Bureau of Prisons to announce plans to shutter six of its lockups. This will spare taxpayers the cost of running half-empty facilities and free up savings to reinvest in measures that reduce reoffending.” (08/16/26)
“This past week, The Wall Street Journal ran a long profile of Cami Clark, the wife of Dario Amodei, the AI savant and CEO of Anthropic. Clark, you see, keeps a very low profile, so low that even Claude, Anthropic’s AI bot, didn’t know she and Amodei were married—a fact reported by the Journal and confirmed by Claude itself. According to the paper, the reality of the marriage is significant for a number of reasons. Clark was previously in a two-year relationship with Eric Schmidt, for example, whom she introduced to Amodei and who became an early investor in Anthropic and the AI revolution. Additionally, and more provocatively, Clark once tried to start a ‘luxury’ porn company and sought financial backing for the endeavor from Jeffrey Epstein.” (08/17/26)
“Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s very public fertility journey is one of the saddest stories of our time. The 36-year-old New York democratic socialist congresswoman has been filming herself in livestreams on Instagram all week, injecting her stomach with hormones and narrating her long-shot efforts to extend her fertility by freezing her eggs. ‘Usually I keep my private life quite private,’ she tells the audience of millions who have watched her videos, ‘but I have made the decision to start freezing my eggs.’ Good on AOC for acknowledging she wants to be a mother, even if it’s not at the top of her list of priorities. But she is living out the feminist left’s antiquated mythology of ‘having it all’ — updated with the false promise from the increasingly popular egg freezing industry that you can easily outwit Mother Nature.” (08/16/26)
“Back in nineteen-ninety-something, escaping reality was still a collective experience. You and your brother and a dozen strangers that were just as bored as you getting together over dangerously over-salted butter popcorn to watch Quentin Tarantino kill just enough people to squeak by with an R rating. It’s all gone now. It’s all over. Everything is digital. Everything has been separated from the fragile fingertips of another actual sentient human being by fifty-five layers of synthetic software. Hollywood is dead and Marvel buried it in an empty computer box. Everything has been reduced to a formula, from the tightly focus-group tested plot of another poorly regurgitated superhero saga of good versus evil to the computer generated, greenscreen special effects of an AI animated cartoon with the faces of A-list celebrities pasted to the action.” (08/16/26)
Source: Karl Dickey’s Freedom Vanguard
by Karl Dickey
“More tariff fun with our neighbors to the north coming up this week. Trump’s dumb Canadian tariffs drop this coming Wednesday, imposing a punitive 50% tax on Canadian imports to the United States. This includes steel, aluminum, lumber, cement, and various consumer goods. Emergency talks are underway, and hopefully, before you read this, the situation will have been resolved, but not likely. And the gaslighting of the American people continues under Trump, trying to make it sound like Americans are not paying extra for goods caught in the tariff net, but the bottom line is. The Trump administration attempts to sell tariffs as some kind of bizarre patriotic weapon to punish foreign governments for taking advantage of us financially, but the only ones penalized are American businesses and consumers.” (08/16/26)
“It should be obvious by now that Trump is not thankful for an independent judiciary, which he views as an illegitimate obstacle to his policy agenda and personal whims. That much is clear from his over-the-top denunciations of recalcitrant judges and justices, whom he habitually accuses of political bias or cowardice, sometimes recommending their impeachment. It is also clear from the arguments that Justice Department lawyers have made in court, especially during Trump’s second term.” (08/16/26)
“On August 5th, the Department of Veterans Affairs, Office of the Inspector General (VA OIG) released a report entitled ‘Review of Radiology Staffing and Services at the VA Washington D.C. Healthcare System’. The blandly titled report was an indictment of the second Trump administration’s misguided return-to-office (RTO) policy. The OIG documented that the RTO caused a ‘mass exodus’ of radiologists from the medical center and delays in patient care (although no documented patient harm). Additionally, the report found that facility leaders didn’t follow appropriate protocols in notifying quality management of known problems and failed to track incomplete radiologic studies. The OIG report appeared just five days after The American Prospect reported on multiple problems at the DC VA Medical Center, one of them being the loss of its radiologists.” (08/17/26)
“In a world where every bank transfer, card swipe, and digital payment leaves a permanent trail for the state to follow, the need for tools that restore private exchange has never been greater. Governments expand financial surveillance under the banners of ‘anti-money laundering’ and ‘tax compliance,’ while inflation and capital controls punish ordinary people simply for trying to preserve their wealth or trade freely. Agorists have long understood that the most effective path to liberty is not petitioning rulers but building parallel systems that operate outside their reach. Zano is one of those systems. It is not merely another privacy coin. It is an open-source Layer-1 blockchain designed from the ground up so that every transaction, every asset, and even the type of asset being transferred remains hidden by default.” (08/16/26)
