“Ten days ago, I quoted Veronique de Rugy, warning that Minnesota’s day-care fraud scandal was ‘only the tip of the iceberg.’ Beyond subsidized daycare? Health care, home health care, Medicaid. Fraud, fraud, fraud. But it wasn’t just a lone Reason scholar saying it. ‘What we’re seeing in Minnesota … is dwarfed by what I saw in California,’ The Epoch Times quotes Dr. Mehmet Oz, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Minnesota, Dr. Oz said, ‘is just the tip of the iceberg.'” (01/21/26)
“The freedom of worship is a cornerstone value of our Republic, enshrined in the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. Last Sunday, a group of anti-ICE agitators violated this most sacred right when they stormed into Cities Church in St. Paul, MN, during church services to protest the pastor’s supposed ties to ICE. This mob of leftist bigots included fired CNN anchor Don Lemon, who stunningly claimed they (somehow) had the First Amendment right to target, trespass into, terrify and disrupt a church service – even based upon the race and religion of the congregants. … For his outrageous criminal behavior and total lack of remorse, Lemon must face legal accountability – including federal felony charges under the FACE Act and Ku Klux Klan Act. In short, Lemon must go to federal prison – and for years.” (01/21/25)
“Hitler left blood. Richard III left bones. Lenin left an entire body, preserved like a specimen. For centuries, historians and biographers have understood the powerful by scrutinising their words and letters, dissecting their decisions, and weighing the testimony of those they governed. But the recent rise of ancient DNA research has opened unsettling possibilities for analysing the actions of our rulers both past and present on the basis of their biology. This new perspective complicates but does not replace traditional interpretation; it could challenge old assumptions or further reinforce them. More significantly, however, genetics offers a tantalising — and possibly distorting — shortcut to understanding the minds that have shaped, or are now shaping, our world.” (01/21/26)
“Donald Trump has quit numerous international organizations. Many of his choices are good and long overdue. A few others, though, present real dangers to peace.” (01/21/26)
Source: Popular Information
by Judd Legum, Rebeccas Crosby, & Noel Sims
“In 2025, 32 people died in the custody of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). That figure was the largest in more than two decades and tied for the highest number of deaths among ICE’s detainee population ever. 2026 is only three weeks old, and it’s already shaping up to be much worse. In just 21 days, at least six people have died in ICE custody.” (01/21/26)
“F. A. Hayek is perhaps best known as the author of The Road to Serfdom (1944), a prophetic work issuing a warning about the totalitarian tendencies of socialist economic planning. Socialism, Hayek argued, was both incompatible with liberal democracy and material progress and well-being. A critical step in his argument was that socialism could not replace the market economy not only in its efficient use of resources, but in stimulating creative innovation and technological change that enhanced the human condition. To economists, however, Hayek is most appreciated for his article further explaining the argument in the critical step published a year later – ‘The Use of Knowledge in Society.'” (01/21/26)
“Imagine you inherit a thriving department store chain. Rather than listen to experts on consumer trends, supply-chain logistics, human resources, etc., you instead opt to go with your gut. Rather than follow market research or anything like that, you prefer to just hire your friends and do business with vendors who flatter you or sell stuff you think is cool. Under such a ‘system’ you might make some good business decisions, but odds are very strong that you’ll more often make bad ones. The rep from the Pet Rock supplier who gives you a ‘World’s Greatest Businessman’ award gets his products in the store window. I chose a department store for this analogy because that’s precisely how President Donald Trump thinks about international trade, and the American economy in general.” (01/21/26)
Source: Electronic Frontier Foundation
by Katherine Trendacosta
“At its core, copyright is a monopoly right on creative output and expression. It’s intended to allow people who make things to make a living through those things, to incentivize creativity. To square the circle that is ‘exclusive control over expression’ and ‘free speech,’ we have fair use. However, we aren’t just seeing artists having a time-limited ability to make money off of their creations. We are also seeing large corporations turn into megacorporations and consolidating huge stores of copyrights under one umbrella. When the monopoly right granted by copyright is compounded by the speed and scale of media company mergers, we end up with a crisis in creativity.” (01/21/26)
“Discussions about children’s online experiences and the dangers they might face are nothing new. But in recent months, officialdom seems to have become increasingly concerned about protecting children’s ‘wellbeing,’ rather than protecting them from ‘harm.’ So instead of concerns about children seeing extreme content or writing nasty things about each other, the current focus is on the amount of time kids spend on social media. … This focus on the duration of kids’ social-media use is revealing. It shows the extent to which calls for a ban are rooted in a lack of confidence in parental authority – a lack of confidence, that is, in parents’ capacity to control their kids’ behaviour and limit the amount of time they spend on social media.” (01/21/26)
