Source: The Daily Economy
by Alexander C Cartwright, Julia R Cartwright, & Lakshmi Narayanan
“In 1956, a trucking entrepreneur named Malcolm McLean did something quietly radical: he placed 58 identical steel boxes onto a cargo ship in Newark and sent them to Houston. Those boxes, the first standardized shipping containers, didn’t look like a revolution. But they soon rewrote the logic of global commerce. As economist Marc Levinson chronicled in The Box, this wasn’t just about saving space or time. The genius of the container was its standardization. No matter the cargo, no matter the destination, one set of protocols including fixed dimensions, stackability, and compatibility with cranes, trucks, and ports suddenly governed a previously fragmented industry. Costs fell. Transit times collapsed. Theft and spoilage plummeted. Global trade surged from $100 billion in 1960 to over $25 trillion today …. What the shipping container did for physical goods, stablecoins now promise to do for money.” (09/08/25)
“Military tensions in the southern Caribbean have rapidly grown following President Trump’s decision to launch an airstrike on a boat allegedly smuggling drugs near Venezuela. As the U.S. announced the deployment of 10 F-35 fighter jets to bolster its forces in the region, a pair of Venezuelan planes flew over an American warship in a move that the Pentagon described as ‘highly provocative.’ … The rapid escalation seems to have put Congress on the back foot. While many lawmakers moved quickly to condemn Trump’s attacks on Iran earlier this year, strikingly few members of Congress have shown the same level of enthusiasm when it comes to Venezuela.” (09/08/25)
“With just a few exceptions, my daily life could fit seamlessly into in the 1970s. In fact, I fight to keep it this way: not for nostalgia, but for health, happiness and efficiency. It comes down to the fact that I like thinking my own thoughts; that I’ve found them far more satisfying and useful than thoughts implanted in me by others. Said another way, I pursue simplicity, for the sake of my innate creativity and the satisfactions that come from it. One thing I’ve learned along the way is that the best and most satisfying of our choices and actions come from within us; they are self- generated. The things we’ll be happy about in our old age will not be acts of compliance; they’ll be things we self-generated. I live in the 1970s because it was a better environment for self-generation.” (09/08/25)
Source: Caitlin Johnstone, Rogue Journalist
by Caitlin Johnstone
“In a sense all I’m ever really pointing at here is the importance of taking responsibility. Taking responsibility as westerners for the suffering and destruction inflicted upon the world by the western power structure that we live under. To be a westerner is to live in a civilization that is powered by the abuse and exploitation of the people of the global south. Every one of us benefits directly from the way resources and labor are exploitatively extracted from nations that are held in subjugation to the western empire at the barrel of a gun. The very electronic device you are reading these words on is a testament to this reality. We each have a moral obligation to end this abusive dynamic.” (09/08/25)
Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by Laurent Thynes
“New Yorkers appear to be on the cusp of electing a self-described socialist, Zohran Mamdani, as their next mayor. At first glance, his youth-friendly marketing comes off as rather gimmicky, as do some of his policy recommendations, such as free public buses and state-provided baby baskets. But make no mistake, his core agenda forms perhaps the most heavily interventionist platform the city has ever witnessed, and his proposed price controls could very swiftly bring about the return of the misery of the 1970s.” (09/08/25)
“People who follow the news often claim to be ‘surprised’ or even ‘shocked’ by current events. That’s almost never my reaction. Sure, I can’t predict the details of the latest happenings. But the broad outlines of the news are tiresomely familiar. Heinous domestic murders. War in the Middle East. Blatant violations of the plain English reading of the Constitution. Chaotic socialist tyrannies in Latin America. Pampered First Worlders blaming their horrible plight (?) on hapless refugees. Civil wars in Africa. And always, people screaming at each other. Yet over the years, current events have genuinely surprised or even shocked me a few times.” (09/08/25)
“When the Israeli political philosopher Yoram Hazony appeared on The Ezra Klein Show in August, he worked hard to distance himself and his National Conservatism Conferences from the din of racist and antisemitic voices on parts of the American right. … ‘Blood and soil is literally a Nazi term …. We are not interested in a nationalism of blood.’ Yet on the first day of this year’s National Conservatism Conference (‘NatCon 5’) in Washington, D.C., Hazony gave a speech that didn’t just fail to clarify which elements of the extreme right should not be counted as natcons in good standing; it seemed explicitly to carve out space within the movement for those with antisemitic views. ‘Nobody ever said that to be a good natcon you have to love Jews,’ Hazony, who is Jewish, said. ‘Go take a look at our statement of principles. It’s not a requirement.'” (09/08/25)
“Of all Donald Trump’s cabinet picks, it’s Robert F. Kennedy Jr. who attracts the most vitriol, which is saying something. You could see just how much the Health and Human Services secretary is despised last week at a Senate committee hearing when Democrat after Democrat abused him with slurs like ‘charlatan’ and demanded he resign. There is an orchestrated campaign to force him out that includes the overplayed political ploy of ‘an open letter from nine former CDC leaders’ and another letter from 1,000 current and former HHS employees calling on him to step down. But why would he resign? He’s only just getting started on Trump’s Make America Healthy Again agenda, which is popular with Americans of all stripes, especially Republicans, 73% of whom rated it favorably in the latest Insider Advantage poll.” (09/07/25)
“Foreign-policy realism today still adheres to a circumscribed definition of national interest with little regard for what it views as lesser (and dangerously messianic) moral concerns. It casts a jaundiced eye on a foreign policy influenced by the impulse to ‘remake the world in its own image.’ It bitterly regrets that so many Americans stubbornly regard their homeland not merely as a country but also a cause. … In more practical terms, the realist persuasion holds that America’s longstanding grand strategy has become at once profligate in the use of military force and self-defeating. To so-called realists today, not only does the United States have no vested interest in an extensive system of defence commitments and forward military deployments, but these accoutrements of its global posture also tempt imperial overstretch while eliciting adverse behaviour from allies and adversaries alike.” (09/08/25)
“While the validity of Pulte’s allegations will have to be determined by the courts, the real scandal is Pulte himself. He is supposed to be running the agency that oversees the processing of tens of millions of mortgages by two huge quasi-public agencies. We are not supposed to be paying him to rifle through mortgage documents to find and disclose dirt that Trump can use against his political opponents. … If Pulte helps Trump get his wish and a Trump-controlled Fed lowers interest rates, it would provide a big boost to the Pulte Group’s profits. That hope would give Pulte a strong motivation to try to hasten the day when Trump appointees dominate the Fed’s Open Market Committee that sets interest rates.” (09/08/25)
