“There are two explanations for why the United States ends up with the policies it does. The first blames corruption. For example, six in ten Americans favor a national health plan like Medicare-for-all. That we haven’t adopted such a policy, and instead maintain an awkwardly assembled Rube Goldberg system — hybrid, employer-based, inconsistent — should be taken as damning evidence for the perversion of the democratic process. So you follow the money. … The second explanation appreciates just how complicated politics can be.” (02/04/26)
“Fifty-seven Republicans in Congress worked with the bulk of Democrats, and the President of These United States, to continue funding development of a ‘kill switch’ on new cars. On Tuesday, the bill became law. You may have thought that most new cars driving down the road could already be switched ‘off’ remotely. After all, the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, signed by former President Joe Biden, required the National Traffic Safety Administration to develop just such a technology … But government isn’t fast, and the kill switch project ‘needed’ more funding, which was included in the new $1.2 trillion spending package.” (02/05/26)
“Israel is by far the biggest recipient of U.S. military aid over the past 80 years. Is America getting its money’s worth? Advocates say it provides critical support for a small, embattled American ally. … But critics say that, today, Israel is rich enough to pay for its own defense and that the aid effectively discourages an over-armed Israel from reaching peace agreements with its neighbors or resolving the Palestinian issue. Israel’s growing violation of Palestinian human rights shouldn’t be funded by American taxpayers, the argument goes. For Israel, the case for military aid is much clearer. It covers a good part of its defense budget, and because U.S. presidents have never seriously used it to pressure Israel to change policies, it comes with almost no political strings attached.” (02/04/26)
“In April 2007, a relatively unknown fellow going by the pen name of Mencius Moldbug started a new blog. ‘The other day I was tinkering around in my garage and I decided to build a new ideology,’ he writes. (A Formalist Manifesto, Unqualified Reservations, Apr. 24, 2007) But the new theory he created was ideological dynamite. It has become the favored ideology of the New Right. But it did not spring wholesale out of nothing. In his formalist manifesto he writes favorably of libertarianism, particularly the Rothbardian version. ‘I love libertarians to death,” he writes. “I would love to live in a libertarian society. The question is: is there a path from here to there?’ But as Yarvin told Ava Kofman for a recent essay at The New Yorker, he moved on from libertarianism after reading Hoppe’s Democracy: The God That Failed.” (02/04/26)
“Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson continues to dismay. Her attendance at the rancidly partisan anti-ICE Grammy Awards on Sunday was a joke. The 55-year-old Biden DEI candidate was nominated for a Grammy for narrating the audiobook of her memoir ‘Lovely One,’ which she unashamedly believes herself to be. But she should have stayed home rather than laughing and clapping in the audience with a bunch of virtue-signaling luvvies ranting ‘Fuck ICE’ every time they got on stage. It should have been obvious to Jackson that the event would be politically charged. She has to sit in judgment on various Trump administration immigration enforcement cases. How can she be seen as impartial? Answer is: she can’t …” [editor’s note: When sitting in judgment on the actions of a violent and unconstitutional street gang, “impartiality” is irrelevant; SCOTUS’s portfolio precludes support for ICE – TLK] (02/05/25)
“Dan Denvir, host of the Jacobin Radio podcast The Dig, sat down with three organizing leaders behind the January 23 action — Emilia González Avalos, Greg Nammacher, and JaNaé Bates Imari — to discuss how that day came to be, and how their fight continues.” (02/04/26)
“For critics — particularly on the left — sprawl represents environmental waste, excessive consumption, car dependence, and the aesthetic or cultural vulgarity of mass suburbia. For conservatives, sprawl is not a pathology but a feature: quiet neighborhoods, good schools, and safe places to raise families. Libertarians tend to avoid the culture war surrounding sprawl, but there has nonetheless been internal disagreement over its merits. It usually turns on a single question: is sprawl a market outcome, or the result of government social engineering? The honest answer is: both.” (02/04/26)
“Fears of a looming market bubble have returned as stock prices climb and artificial intelligence spending accelerates, but several leading economists argue that the broader economic picture remains more stable than the headlines suggest. From Wall Street valuations to U.S. growth and global resilience, their message is consistent: conditions look stretched in places, but not fundamentally broken.” (02/04/26)
Source: Electronic Frontier Foundation
by Adam Schwartz
“Federal agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) have descended into utter lawlessness, most recently in Minnesota. The violence is shocking. So are the intrusions on digital rights. For example, we have a First Amendment right to record on-duty police, including ICE and CBP, but federal agents are violating this right. Indeed, Alex Pretti was exercising this right shortly before federal agents shot and killed him. So were the many people who filmed agents shooting and killing Pretti and Renee Good – thereby creating valuable evidence that contradicts false claims by government leaders. To protect our digital rights, we need the rule of law.” (02/04/26)
