“President Trump wanted an excuse to send National Guard troops to Chicago, and now he’s got one. The Windy City in recent days has done its best imitation of Los Angeles, where resistance to Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations created the justification for a Guard deployment a couple months ago. Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson hate the notion of the National Guard in the streets of the city, but have failed to rally Chicago residents to do the one thing necessary to avoid the deployment — let federal officers do their job. The word should have gone out long ago: Don’t riot outside ICE facilities. Don’t ram cars into ICE vehicles.” [editor’s note: The word should have gon out long ago to beat the ICE thugs down hard so they quit being thugs and get real jobs – TLK] (10/07/25)
Source: David Friedman’s Substack
by David Friedman
“A firm engaged in this sort of discriminatory pricing faces two practical problems. The first is the problem of distinguishing customers who will buy the good at a high price from those who will not. In the examples I have given that is done indirectly by characteristics of the buyer or the product. The second problem is preventing resale. It does no good to offer your product at a low price to poor customers if they then turn around and resell it to rich ones, thus depriving you of high price sales. This is why discriminatory pricing is so often observed with regard to goods that are consumed on the premises, transportation, movies, speeches, and the like. If GM sells cars at a high price to rich customers and at a low price to poor ones, Rockefeller can send his chauffeur to buy a car for him.” (10/06/25)
“It has been surprisingly difficult to get an answer to a simple and highly relevant question: Is aluminium in vaccines harmful? After having studied the best evidence we have, the randomised trials, in great detail, I conclude that the answer is yes. Like lead, aluminium is a highly neurotoxic metal. We will therefore expect vaccines containing aluminium adjuvants to cause neurological harms if the aluminium enters the nervous system in neurotoxic amounts.” (10/06/25)
“After the attacks of September 11, 2001, the government began cracking down on hidden transfers of wealth. The purpose was to prevent money laundering that might finance terrorism. Some of this was codified in the USA PATRIOT Act. After the financial collapse of 2008, other safeguards were added. All this strengthened the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), with the side benefit of helping regulatory agencies track down other uses of concealed wealth, whether or not they are related to national security. But in the ensuing quarter-century, extreme wealth became ever more concentrated, and oligarchs became ever more crafty at hiding the true ownership of wealth through trusts and corporate forms that are utterly opaque to financial regulators, the IRS, and the national-security establishment, much less the public.” (10/07/25)
Source: Responsible Statecraft
by Carol Daniel-Kasbari
“In Deir al-Balah, a mother told me her son now counts the seconds between blasts. Policy, to her, isn’t a debate; it’s whether trucks arrive and the night is quiet. Donald Trump’s 20-point plan promises ceasefire, hostages home, Israeli withdrawal, and reconstruction. It sounds complete. It isn’t. Without enforceable mechanics, maps, timelines, phased verification, and real local ownership; it risks being a short-lived show, not a durable peace.” (10/06/25)
“The way people of later times view a dark age is, due once again to the lack of reliable records, not at all the same as the way people living in such an age view it; the only people who are in a position to recognize that they’re living in such an age are those who understand what the term means in the first place. So it’s doubtful that the authoritarian rulers of countries like India and the United States recognize (or care) what they’re doing to future history; what’s important to this discussion is that they are using modern computer technology to do it. In the last century, it would’ve been impossible for a Trump, Modi, or Xi to eliminate every single instance of a fact or opinion they disliked …. when physical media are no longer the norm, universal censorship of a work enters the realm of the possible.” (10/06/25)
Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Jacob G Hornberger
“Throughout history, there have been tyrannies that have been imposed on the citizenry through non-democratic means. Monarchies have been one example. Another example have been communist regimes in the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, and Cuba. Still other examples have been U.S.-supported national-security-state coups in Iran, Guatemala, and Chile. What many Americans fail to realize, however, is that it is entirely possible to have tyranny with a democratically elected system.” (10/06/25)
“When John Searle exposes the errors of materialists, dualists can only be delighted. Searle and dualists, both minorities in academic philosophy of mind, have something crucial in common: Namely, they agree that mental states as standardly conceived exist; they are not ‘really’ illusions, behavior, functions, or computer programs. Denial of the reality of the mental, rather than being the necessary implication of science, is in fact a profoundly unscientific attempt to say that reality can only contain what our theories adequately account for. Despite these points of agreement, Searle’s solution to the mind-body problem is avowedly anti-dualistic; and even if he requested admission to the dualist camp, it is likely that they should be uneasy to receive him.” (10/06/25)
“When the second Trump administration issued an order threatening to strip federal funding from K-12 schools that teach children ‘anti-American, subversive, harmful, and false ideologies’ related to gender and race, it was lifting from Florida’s playbook. Likewise, the administration’s campaign against universities on such issues as anti-Israel protests, transgender athletes, and critical race theory were all preceded by Florida, where a powerful executive branch, Republican-controlled Legislature, and conservative state Supreme Court allowed Gov. Ron DeSantis to apply intense pressure to public universities and school districts. … In March, Maria Rojas, a Texas midwife who operated four clinics for low-income women in Harris and Waller counties, became the first person in the state arrested for allegedly providing illegal abortions. Rojas'[s] case was the first opportunity for Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office to flex its new criminal and civil powers under a trio of anti-abortion bills passed in 2021.” (for publication 11/25)
