“Ofcom has been making a right fool of itself since the Online Safety Act came into force. Over the past two years, it has been chasing US websites, formally instructing them to obey British law, and to fill in reams of compliance paperwork while they’re at it. The results have been predictable. Many of the US operations, supported by the excellent American free-speech lawyer Preston Byrne, have politely declined to take any notice of orders barked at them by bureaucrats from a small island 3,000 miles away. Ofcom, as ever tin-eared, has doubled down in response – making blood-curdling threats and imposing ever-more ludicrous fines on the sites involved.” (07/29/26)
“COVID rocked our world, plain and simple. We have never seen anything like it, and in my honest opinion, it was a test. To see how we would handle an outbreak, but that is neither here nor there, and I’m not looking to get into conspiracy theories (right now). One thing is undeniable: millions of Americans lost moments they’ll never get back. Grandparents missed the births of their grandchildren. Families watched funerals through computer screens. Children lost years of a normal childhood. People died alone. And for what? That’s the question I keep asking myself as more of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s private writings and communications become public.” (07/29/26)
“Missouri has already taken some action to limit ratepayer costs resulting from new data centers by requiring large data centers to pay their share of costs for connecting to the grid, such as for transmission lines. … One promising state-level solution are private electricity grids, also called consumer regulated electricity (CRE). This could create a parallel path for energy generation, and help protect ratepayers from risk, accelerate capacity buildout and innovation for both data centers and power plants, and alleviate pressure on the government to meet every aspect of this complex challenge. New Hampshire became the first state to allow it, and the U.S. Congress is considering a federal CRE policy. Similar solutions can be implemented for water usage.” (07/29/26)
“Despite movies and shows, Satan and his minions do not go around wearing horns with red skin and costumes. Evil is described as being a wolf in sheep’s clothing: it disguises itself as doing good. We’ve seen that to be the case with human government time and time again. ‘Hello, I am here to help you’ is the first of the lies we can expect on a visit from a government agent.” (07/29/26)
Source: Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression
by Tyler Tone
“The NO FAKES Act, which recently advanced out of the Senate Judiciary Committee with unanimous support, would offer a right to seek damages over an unauthorized digital replica of one’s likeness. The bill’s ‘one-pager’ summary points to some of the biggest examples that have inspired worry about deepfakes: an AI-generated version of Tom Hanks used for ‘advertisements for a dental plan that he never appeared in,’ for one example, and a principal at a Baltimore, Maryland, high school ‘framed as a racist by an AI-generated recording of his voice,’ for another. The bill promises to cover both. But proposals targeting deepfakes also sweep in the protected use of AI depictions for news, commentary, and, notably, parodies of public figures and elected officials.” (07/29/26)
“Last summer, a former student journalist asked the University of Michigan’s student paper The Michigan Daily to take down or anonymize an article they had written more than 10 years ago. The article mentioned their involvement in a movement calling for the school to divest from companies associated with the Israeli government. In the email, they explained that their partner was a green card holder, and they were about to travel abroad with their young child. They worried they would not be allowed back. … There’s a disturbing nationwide trend of student journalists making similar requests to avoid deportation or other repercussions for their protected speech.” (07/29/26)
“While Americans remain transfixed by the political circus—cheering for their preferred party, jeering at the opposition, obsessing over every manufactured outrage and waiting for the next spectacle—the Surveillance State continues its steady march forward. The government is watching. It watches where you go, whom you meet, where you worship, what medical offices you visit, what political rallies you attend, what protests you join, what books you read, what websites you visit and what causes you support. It watches through your phone, your car, your doorbell, your appliances, your purchases, your social media accounts and the cameras positioned along the roads you travel every day. This is how freedom dies in the digital police state: not always through dramatic declarations of martial law or soldiers stationed on every street corner, but through the gradual construction of a technological dragnet—an electronic concentration camp—so pervasive that privacy becomes impossible and anonymity becomes suspicious.” (07/29/26)
Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by Conner McEleney
“Many progressives, such as Robert Reich and Kyle Kulinski, argue that the economy needs a universal basic income (UBI) to fix it. Their argument stems from the idea that UBI has no serious flaws, that many studies show success, and that it’s the moral thing to do. An example that these progressives would cite would be the Denver UBI experiment. The study had three groups of people. Group A had $1,000 per month, and Group B had $6,500 for the first month; the other months were $500. Group C had $50 a month. The study concluded that giving money improved their overall well-being. As the saying goes, it’s too good to be true; the results alone are exaggerated by UBI proponents.” (07/29/26)
Source: The Intercept
by Tom Engelhardt & Nick Turse
“Last week, almost a quarter century since Bush made the case for war in Iraq, a U.S. soldier was killed in an Iranian attack on an American base there. President Donald Trump was elected on a promise to say goodbye to all that. American-style wars of choice were going to be a thing of the past …. No one, I suspect, not even Trump, has the faintest idea why he did this, though maybe he felt left out of the club of forever-war makers, co-chaired by Russian President Vladimir Putin and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.” (07/29/26)
