“‘Seven men drugged and gang raped a 20-year-old woman’. That verdict in the alleged Cornell rape case was delivered by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has joined a chorus of others in pronouncing the guilt of Cornell students accused of raping a fellow student. Mind you, not a single witness has testified under oath publicly and not a single charge has been brought. However, guilt is now being collectively declared from the usual figures and outlets who have never been late to mob justice. Ocasio-Cortez declared, ‘I want to be clear that the culture of rape, sexual assault, and pedophilia is protected in elite institutions across the United States and including Cornell University in this instance. It has got to stop’. We have been here before.” (10/05/26)
“The title of Jim Ostrowski’s brief and latest book The Government Takes 80% reads at first like a libertarian’s exaggerated fever-dream of government rapacity over the economy. The government takes 80% of the average American’s productivity every year? It sounds ridiculous on its face. But he literally means it, that all levels of government take some 80% of the average person’s income between taxes and regulations in America today. And he demonstrates the estimate as generally true, despite all conventional wisdom to the contrary.” (10/05/26)
“War does not seem like a mere necessary evil to Hegseth. I’m not sure he sees even unjust war as evil at all. I think he likes it. Is this conservative? The late conservative sociologist Robert Nisbet didn’t think so.” (10/05/26)
“Political polling has had a black eye since at least the 2016 presidential election. That’s when national polls had Hillary Clinton leading Donald Trump by a significant margin all the way up to Election Day. Democrats started measuring the curtains. Unfortunately, the polls massively underestimated the strength of Trump’s support, and Trump went on to win the Electoral College and the White House. More recently, pollsters have suffered embarrassing failures in high-profile contested primaries. … In truth, polls have always been unreliable. Numbers create the illusion of infallibility, but polls are an imperfect gauge of unpredictable behavior.” (10/04/26)
“Any search for the chief enabler of Donald Trump’s corruption and subversion of American democracy really must lead to one and only one place: the Supreme Court. The reactionary majority, led by Chief Justice John Roberts, has repeatedly bailed Trump out from his many prosecutions, enabled his wildly lawless trampling over the basic appropriations process, and (in what is for my money the worst Court decision in American history, Trump v. U.S.) explicitly immunized him from being prosecuted for breaking, in effect, any law. Yet despite that, many Trump critics still balk at proposals to attack the Court’s power head-on. At a recent conference about liberalism in the 21st century, when asked about Court reform, Bob Bauer, former White House counsel for President Obama, warned that ‘You don’t respond to norm breaking by breaking more norms’.” (10/05/26)
“[G]overnments constantly grab and keep more and more over us more and more often, and that in turn causes greedy and immoral people to seek power and be worse and worse parasites on us. Today, that means letting a supposed majority of people electing and giving someone incredible power. At least in part, because those people (not just the immigrants) promised them the modern equivalent of bread and circuses. … Bluntly, Americans have done it to ourselves.” (10/04/26)
“With the power of the purse, Congress can pressure the president to stand down in Iran by doing what it usually does best: nothing. … To date, we’ve spent over $40 billion on the president’s Iran adventure, yet Congress has never passed specific appropriations for any of it. The administration has been paying the bills by tapping into Pentagon funds authorized for other purposes, such as military training and readiness. … Facing ‘an urgent budget shortfall,’ the Trump administration requested Epic Fury funds in June. In July, the House passed a budget resolution incorporating the ask. The supplemental request now sits with the Senate …. doing nothing—simply refusing to pass the supplemental—would be a good start.” (10/02/26)
“In the 21rst century, the modern world has become a Frankenstein empire with a thousand terrible new machines produced per minute as resources dwindle and the emotional wellbeing of entire generations crashes with the bombs. We call this progress, but what it really amounts to is slavery in exchange for convenience. The problem isn’t even really the devices themselves, but rather the fact that human beings seem to take less and less moral inventory with every new device produced. … The end result is a brave new world where life is cheap and oppression is downright affordable. … The only bright side to this strangely convenient dystopia is that with the mass production of quite literally everything, resistance becomes as cheap as oppression.” (10/04/26)
Source: Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression
by Sarah McLaughlin
“‘We shouldn’t accept that this is the end,’ Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy said this week of the UK’s looming under-16 social media ban. ‘This is a staging post to what must be a very active interventionist state, policing and regulating the online space so that people are safe.’ Next March, the initial rollout will begin to keep teens under 16 from using ‘high-risk’ social media apps, and further algorithmic restrictions will later hit those under 18. After that, more restrictions will apparently follow. What new ‘policing and regulating’ powers will officials seek?” (10/02/26)
“Thomas Cromwell was the Lord Chancellor of England for much of the reign of King Henry VIII. He engineered the convictions and executions of many whom Henry wanted out of the way, including his two predecessors in office — one of whom was St. Thomas More — and even the king’s second wife, Queen Anne. When Cromwell’s son Gregory, who became sickened as he watched his father devolving from counselor to monster, learned that an executioner for the queen had been sent for from France a week before her trial, he asked his father what the purpose of her trial was if the king had preordained the queen’s guilt and prepaid the executioner. Cromwell replied that the king needed a jury to give the appearance of legitimacy to her conviction and prevent the public perception of ‘the tyranny of one man’s opinion.'” (10/02/26)
