Source: Independent Institute
by K Lloyd Billingsley
“On his recent trip to Beijing, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney praised the leadership of Xi Jinping and announced plans to bring 49,000 Chinese electric cars into Canada. In several ways that escaped notice, Carney was following in the footsteps of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. … In the late 1970s, Prime Minister Trudeau allowed the USSR to sell the Soviet-built Lada in Canada. Like all cars produced by Communist regimes, the Lada was an inferior vehicle that failed to catch on with Canadians in a significant way. The ‘plagiarized Fiat,’ as one reviewer called it, was built in the USSR, so the deal did not benefit Canadian auto workers, then struggling to compete with the surging Japanese.” (01/28/26)
“The time is ripe for The Golden Thread, James Hankins and Allen Guelzo’s ambitious two-volume history of Western civilization. Coming into a society that has passed its global obsession and is beginning to consider what being particularly rather than universally cultured means (and whether the latter is even possible without the former), there is a felt need for a project like theirs. In this vein, The Golden Thread forms part of a genre well-established in English-speaking popular culture, but one we’ve abandoned in recent decades. I hope its publication indicates revitalization.” (01/28/26)
“‘Disguised and undercover,’ explains the O’Keefe Media Group article, ‘James O’Keefe embeds inside the World Economic Forum, slipping past armed security and exclusive guest lists to capture what the global climate elite say when they think no one is listening.’ The bad haircut? A goofy blond wig that Mr. O’Keefe (1984– ) donned to fool the European bigwigs (er, elites). He looked like Andy Warhol as a special guest on ‘Sprockets.’ What did this subterfuge accomplish? ‘Posing as an employee of a fictional climate engineering firm, O’Keefe and the OMG team are welcomed into late-night events, luxury hotels, and mountaintop forums where climate financiers openly discuss carbon taxes, geoengineering, and weather modification, commonly referred to as ‘chemtrails.’’ Yes, chemtrails!” (01/28/26)
“More Americans now support abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) than keeping it. A January 13, 2026 Economist/YouGov poll found that 46 percent want to eliminate ICE, compared to 43 percent who support preserving it. It’s a trend that’s been growing since ICE agents have been running rampant in U.S. cities during President Donald Trump’s second term. … Senators who believe in compassion and human rights have a unique opportunity to pull back the agency’s powers by refusing to back an appropriations bill passed by the House of Representatives. That bill, according to the ACLU, ’would renew ICE’s excessive budget, with no strings attached, adding to the over $170 billion in taxpayer funds already allocated for immigration enforcement in July 2025.'” (01/28/26)
“Has America been made great again enough for you yet? I asked that question back in May of last year in a column titled The Godzilla Window. It didn’t go over very well at the time, at least not with my conservative readers. … And now, here we are, eight months later, just over one year into The Golden Age of America Made Great Again, and … well, you know what’s happening. … I’m not going to go on and on about all the details of the MAGA authoritarianism on display in the USA currently. It would take an entire column to do that, and you have access to the same news that I do. Instead, I want to urge you to step back from the intense political polarization of the moment and focus on the fundamental forces at play.” (01/28/26)
Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Harry Phibbs
“Like the United States, the United Kingdom has a first-past-the-post voting system. This tends to entrench a two-party system. It takes a lot for other rivals to break through. The resulting culture of complacency and entitlement by the main parties is certainly less than ideal. In the UK, politics has been dominated by the Conservative and Labour Parties for the last century. In 1922, Labour overtook the Liberal Party. By 1924, the Liberal Party’s support had collapsed. Our opinion polling suggests that just over a hundred years later, British politics is having another shake-up. An insurgent party called Reform UK, led by Nigel Farage, a friend of Donald Trump’s, has a commanding lead in the polls, and has done so since the end of April last year.” (01/28/26)
“In principle, extremists primarily seek to harm people who do not share their race, religion, or nationality. In practice, they often harm the very people they claim to serve and protect, people with whom they share some supposedly sacred demographic. Consider Minnesota, currently under siege by anti-immigrant extremists in the employ of the federal government, with ICE and CBP at the forefront. Immigrants have indisputably suffered the most from this program of harm, but we have seen a recent turn toward harming non-immigrants.” (01/28/26)
“Protein-folding models are the success story in AI for science. In the late 2010s, researchers from Google DeepMind used machine learning to predict the three-dimensional shape of proteins. AlphaFold 2, announced in 2020, was so good that its creators shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in chemistry with an outside academic. Yet many academics have had mixed feelings about DeepMind’s advances.” (01/28/26)
“You’re a government official and you have just learned that some of your employees have shot and killed a civilian. You don’t have all the facts, and there are discrepancies in the initial accounts. What do you do? For most of us, I presume, the answer is to call the victim’s family to express condolences and then to promise the public a full investigation followed by whatever consequences the results warrant. That’s how previous administrations, regardless of party, would have responded. But the Trump administration views such niceties as weakness. Looking weak, giving an inch to the critics, must be avoided at all costs. … If the administration were consciously pursuing a strategy optimized for producing confrontation rather than for bringing down the number of illegal immigrants, it would be proceeding just as it has been.” (01/28/26)
