Source: Rutherford Institute
by John & Nisha Whitehead
“The National Guard was just the beginning. One year after President Trump deployed military troops to the nation’s capital, we find ourselves navigating a posse comitatus presidency in which the visual trappings of martial law are the norm, not the exception. The Founders warned against standing armies on American soil, fearing that the military might someday be used not to defend the people but to control them. They understood something Americans are being encouraged to forget: soldiers and police serve fundamentally different purposes.” [editor’s note: Since the first US police force wasn’t founded until 1838, I doubt the founders thought in those precise terms – TLK] (08/12/26)
“If you count on government providing something, before long you may not have it at all. It’s the fox watching the henhouse. At the very least, government involvement doesn’t stop the inevitable. If something is not sustainable, putting government in charge won’t save the day.” (08/12/26)
“With the cost of living on every voter’s mind, an old idea is getting a new push on Capitol Hill: fixing a flaw in the tax code that makes everything more expensive. Anyone who has ever sold a home, stock, or even a collectible is familiar with it. When you sell an asset that has risen in price, the IRS taxes the gain. But that gain is measured against the price you paid, not your true cost. If you bought a stock, a bond, or a business many years ago, and its price merely kept pace with inflation, you are no richer in purchasing power than the day you bought it — yet the tax code treats the difference as income and taxes it anyway. This is especially noticeable in periods of high inflation, like the last five years. It is a tax on rising prices, dressed up as a tax on profit.” (08/12/26)
“The AI alignment problem asks whether the autonomous agents derived from Large Language Models and other AI technologies can reliably internalize the objectives for which they are optimized. The problem is magnified because human objectives are complex and hard to formalize, it is not possible to monitor the internals of the systems, and previous behavior is not necessarily a reliable predictor of how the AI will behave in novel situations. Worries that AIs might find goals that ‘score well’ but don’t match human intent have become a fashionable topic, driven in part by news stories about AI tools behaving in unexpected and disturbing ways, which can be difficult to monitor and reverse. … Human alignment, by comparison, has never been effectively enforced, although significant effort is spent on trying to determine our fellow humans’ motives.” (08/12/26)
“Taylor Swift is enemy No.1 to cash-grabbing Democrats in Rhode Island. They’ve named their new statewide vacation home property tax after her. But from the East Coast to the West Coast, ‘tax the rich’ is the battle cry of radical-left Democrats. They claim that by attacking the rich, including celebs like Swift, they’re saving democracy. Don’t be fooled. Their new forms of taxation — including wealth taxes, mansion taxes and pied-a-terre taxes — are fueled by jealousy and hatred for our free-market system, working people and everything American. You’re their next target.” [editor’s note: In fairness, McCaughey hates “free market systems” at least as much as Bernie Sanders or AOC. She just prefers different targets – TLK] (08/12/26)
Source: Bluegrass Institute
by Caleb O Brown & Dan Canon
“Kentucky’s new license plate camera law is now in effect, and it already looks out of step with the Constitution. Just before it took effect, the U.S. Supreme Court handed the commonwealth a warning its lawmakers cannot afford to ignore. On June 29, the Court ruled in Chatrie v. United States that police conduct a Fourth Amendment search when they obtain a person’s location data — even from a private company, and even for a short window of time. … That case was about cell-phone data. But the reasoning lands squarely on the surveillance network Kentucky’s local governments have spent the last few years building through a single vendor: Flock Safety.” (08/12/26)
Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by Connor O’Keeffe
“Around two and a half years ago, as the Biden administration was entering what we now know was its final year, the then-president’s re-election campaign was growing frustrated. … In one of the most unsurprising developments in modern American politics, it turned out that people who were struggling to navigate the aftermath of the government’s destructive economic shutdowns and keep up with rising prices did not like being told by establishment-approved economic ‘experts’ that they were essentially stupid if they didn’t understand how excellent the economy actually was. … now, as the midterms approach and he and his party are the ones in charge, the Republicans are faced with the exact same choice the Democrats had been faced with before 2024. And, notably, they have decided to adopt the same strategy that helped torpedo the Democrats last time around.” (08/12/26)
“In a region that’s a flash point for unrest, Turkey has taken a key step toward calming domestic as well as cross-border tensions – and it’s one that could lead to new conceptions of national identity that transcend ethnic or linguistic differences. On Monday, the country’s parliament overwhelmingly voted for a landmark bill aimed at conclusively ending more than 40 years of conflict with its substantial Kurdish ethnic minority. The legislation outlines processes for conditional amnesties and the reintegration of thousands of Kurds, including armed combatants who have lived or operated from strongholds in neighboring Iran, Iraq, and Syria for decades. Turkey’s separatist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) – designated a terrorist organization by Turkey, the United States, and the European Union – abandoned the goal of full independence a few decades ago. And in May 2025, it announced it would disband and disarm, thus putting the onus on the Turkish government to move the process along.” (08/11/26)
