“This morning, DHS posted ‘GOOD MORNING MINNEAPOLIS!’ on X, relishing their own power to bring fear down on an American city. Mere hours later, a masked agent of the state murdered a US citizen while she was attempting to drive away. DHS quickly spun the killing as self defense, but a plethora of videos and even more witnesses made that lie obvious immediately. … She was turning her car to leave and the agent, in no danger at all, shoots straight into her open window. This tragedy, this crime, is only to be expected from an administration that has always believed itself entitled to not just govern, but to rule over a free people. An administration that rejects professionalism and has sought to scale up what was already the least professionalized federal agency to act as a personal enforcer for the President.” (01/07/26)
“President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Dec. 11, 2025, that aims to supersede state-level artificial intelligence laws that the administration views as a hindrance to innovation in AI. State laws regulating AI are increasing in number, particularly in response to the rise of generative AI systems such as ChatGPT that produce text and images. Thirty-eight states enacted laws in 2025 regulating AI in one way or another. They range from prohibiting stalking via AI-powered robots to barring AI systems that can manipulate people’s behavior. The executive order declares that it is the policy of the United States to produce a ‘minimally burdensome’ national framework for AI.” (01/07/25)
“If social media is to become the new smoking – and it is already to a significant degree – those of us who speak against it are playing the same role as the health nuts of the 1960s. I think we should accept this role. More still, I think we should embrace it and be proud of it. The health nuts were right, after all, and the places where smoking has vanished are very much the better for it.” (01/07/26)
“Greenland has a population is about 57,000. A modest proposal is that they should hold a referendum to decide, not if they should become an American state, but to decide if they wish to become an American protectorate or territory. There are several of these, including the US Virgin Islands. The deal should be that if it goes through, every Greenlander would receive $1 million from the US, for a total cost of $57bn. This is chicken-feed to the US economy. … all of them would become millionaires. Investing this sum for a return of 5% would bring an annual income of $50,000 each, while retaining the capital sum to pass on to heirs and successors. It would be much more acceptable than threats, bluster, and talk of annexation.” (01/07/26)
“Politically addled authoritarians prefer to blame guns and the people who aren’t the problem, rather than to confront the real issues. Once you see it, you realize it’s everywhere, and they do it every chance they get. This isn’t helpful, and it shows which side they are truly on. It isn’t your side. But what about the guns? Crime culture uses guns, too, but this doesn’t make them part of gun culture. Crime culture uses cars in their pursuit of evil far more often than they use firearms, but I wouldn’t be so ignorant or dishonest as to call a vehicular tragedy that happens during a crime a consequence of ‘car culture.’ Criminals also use phones, money, and certain dog breeds.” (01/07/26)
Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Jacob G Hornberger
“American interventionists are besides themselves with glee over the deaths of 32 members of Cuba’s national-security establishment who were serving as part of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro’s security team during the U.S. national-security establishment’s violent abduction of Maduro. Their ecstasy demonstrates that the old Cold War mentality that held interventionists in its grip for some 45 years never went away, not even with the ostensible end of the Cold War in 1989, at least not insofar as Cuba is concerned. But the excitement among among these old Cold War dead-enders pails in significance to their ecstasy over the fact that Cuba is now in the throes of a grave economic crisis, one that threatens the Cuban people with death by starvation and illness.” (01/07/26)
“Across the world, free societies are under assault from a resurgent fascism. Across the world, fears about immigration have been one of the main — arguably the main — weapon used. And across the world, there has been a timidity on the part of progressives [sic] about countering these arguments. … We are locked into a battle we did not seek and our timidity is keeping us on the defensive. It isn’t working. … We are locked into a battle we did not seek and our timidity is keeping us on the defensive. It isn’t working. Our pessimism is self-fullfiling. In any contact sport, you get hurt more by flinching from the tackle than you do from committing to it.” (01/07/26)
“efore Covid, I would have described myself as a technological optimist. New technologies almost always arrive amid exaggerated fears. Railways were supposed to cause mental breakdowns, bicycles were thought to make women infertile or insane, and early electricity was blamed for everything from moral decay to physical collapse. Over time, these anxieties faded, societies adapted, and living standards rose. The pattern was familiar enough that artificial intelligence seemed likely to follow it: disruptive, sometimes misused, but ultimately manageable. The Covid years unsettled that confidence — not because technology failed, but because institutions did.” (01/07/26)
“There have been two parts to the political world’s reaction to the American operation that deposed and captured Nicolas Maduro. The first part was to marvel at what Brit Hume called ‘the extraordinary level of skill, technology and daring’ on the part of American forces and leadership. Hume noted that the U.S. performance, when considered alongside the flawless attack on Iran’s nuclear program, sent to the world ‘precisely the opposite signal from that sent by the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan’. The second reaction emerged after President Donald Trump’s press conference announcing the action. ‘We’re going to run [Venezuela] until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition,’ Trump said. ‘So we don’t want to be involved with having somebody else get in and we have the same situation that we had for the last long period of years.'” (01/07/25)
“Venezuela is well rid of Nicolás Maduro, a corrupt, oppressive, and illegitimate leader who presided over that country’s continuing decline after succeeding Hugo Chávez in 2013. And judging from what happened after the 1989 invasion of Panama, when U.S. forces nabbed a similarly odious strongman who likewise faced a federal drug indictment, the courts will not stand in the way of Maduro’s prosecution. The ‘law enforcement’ rationale for Saturday’s attack on Venezuela is nevertheless both implausible and troubling. It offers an open-ended license for any president who wants to excise Congress from decisions about the use of military force, accelerating a trend that threatens to nullify its constitutional war powers.” (01/07/26)
