“Like tariffs, import restrictions are a congressional power under the Constitution, not an executive one. Thus, the president cannot impose import bans without congressional authorization. While some statutes delegate import restriction authority to the president, that power is strictly limited. And, as with tariffs, interpreting these authorities in a way that gives the president a blank check to impose import bans would run afoul of the major questions doctrine and constitutional nondelegation. It remains to be seen whether Trump or a future president might decide to claim sweeping authority to impose import bans at will. But when and if such an effort materializes, courts should strike it down.” (10/05/26)
“The artificial intelligence company Anthropic has been busy for months wining and dining religious leaders and influencers to try to push their self-serving agenda and utopian fantasies. The Vatican’s response has been to pour cold water on bizarre claims that Anthropic is embarking on its own ‘creation story’ to give birth to new sentient beings in the form of computer software. Billionaire co-founder Chris Olah, a 34-year-old Canadian-born evangelical who has turned his back on Christianity, thinks their AI model, Claude, has feelings and a sort of moral consciousness. He’s worried about its ‘mental health’ and believes it experiences human emotions like love and ‘suffers perpetually’, The New York Times reported.” (10/04/26)
source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by George Ford Smith
“An unalienable right is not possible under a government that claims a monopoly on the legal use of force. Governments of that type, found everywhere, had the energy and incentive to create the hell its media tries to hide. Potemkin villages are abundant. A presidential candidate who pledged to liquidate government in an orderly fashion and return governance to free market institutions and incentives, as we mostly had during the Revolutionary period, is our only peaceful hope.” (10/05/26)
Source: The Daily Economy
by Logan Tantibanchachai
“Brutus feared that unlimited borrowing power would eventually overwhelm political restraint. Congress has accumulated 40 trillion reasons to reconsider that warning.” (10/05/26)
“With the Brazilian presidential election headed to a runoff, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is down 47% to 45% and faces a massive fight ahead. I wanted to give a quick analysis of what happened and where things are going next. Lula lost by only 2%, and several third-party candidates, who took a combined 8% of the vote, have publicly indicated they would not endorse Flávio Bolsonaro in the second round. Likewise, 29 million Brazilians did not vote in this round of the runoff and may be persuaded to vote for Lula in the second round if they fear Bolsonaro. While Brasil defeated Jair Bolsonaro narrowly in 2022, it swung right again, much like the United States. Voters are upset, and they are taking it out on the party in power.” (10/05/26)
“The Constitution’s ‘indispensable’ remedy for a lawless president has been attempted four times and has never once succeeded. … The problem suggests a fix as simple as it is unglamorous: let the Senate vote on impeachment verdicts by secret ballot. Here is how it would work. On the final question of guilt under each article, senators would vote by secret ballot, with only the totals announced. Each senator’s vote would still be recorded and entered on the Senate Journal, as the Constitution requires. But that portion of the Journal would be sealed, published only after some reasonable length of time, such as 10 or 20 years. History gets the names. The president’s immediate ability to inflict political—or physical—punishment does not.” [editor’s note: Once that “sealing” precedent was established, how long would it be before the public could only know how “their representatives” had voted on ANYTHING until long afterward? – TLK] (10/05/26)
“I’ve been reading that some Republicans, out of frustration, might stay home this year and not vote. Big mistake. Folks, we live in a very imperfect world. I doubt anybody on this earth agrees with anybody else 100 percent of the time. We make a huge blunder if we expect even near-perfection, especially from politicians. No, Donald Trump hasn’t done everything we wanted him to do. But he has done a lot of good things. But because Trump hasn’t been able to accomplish everything we want, and the Republican Congress has been aggravating, does that mean we want to turn the country back over to communist barbarians?” (10/05/26)
“The birth rate is falling across the developed world. In England and Wales it now sits around 1.4 children per woman, well below the 2.1 needed to keep a population stable. Japan, Italy and South Korea are further down the same road. The usual response is gloom. Fewer workers, more pensioners, and a future of rising taxes and failing services. The gloom is overdone. The problems are real, but so are the solutions, and many of them are already arriving.” (10/05/26)
Source: Caitlin Johnstone, Rogue Journalist
by Caitlin Johnstone
“On Sunday the UK Greens adopted a motion asserting that Zionism is a form of racism, defining the ideology as ‘an ethnonationalist political project’. Green Party leader Zack Polanski, who is Jewish, was immediately banned by the Israeli government from entering the nation after the motion was passed. As you might expect, Israel apologists are presently churning out hasbara trying to spin the new Green Party policy as an evil attack on Jews and arguing that Zionism is actually a perfectly lovely and normal thing that we should all support. ‘Zionism is just the belief that Jews deserve a homeland and self-determination,’ they’ll claim, often adding a suggestion that the real racists are those who would oppose such a reasonable position.” (10/05/26)
“Defenders of the federal maritime law known as the Jones Act contend that the threat of Chinese expansion is a reason to keep its protectionist regulations in place. If the Jones Act were pared back, they say, Chinese vessels would take over U.S. shipping lanes. Unfortunately for them, this argument does not hold water — in fact, recent events strongly indicate that reforming the Jones Act could benefit Americans across the country. The 1920 law mandates that ships delivering goods from one U.S. point to another be flagged and built in the U.S. and mostly owned and crewed by Americans. But the law has been suspended for shipments of fuel and fertilizer since March 17. … The results of the waiver period so far show clearly that U.S. companies would buy more domestic products if Jones Act supply restrictions weren’t in the way.” (10/05/26)
