Source: Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression
by Tyler Tone
“Much like the information gleaned from reverse engineering Sega’s copyrighted software, the patterns an AI model learns are not necessarily copyrighted works. Copyright protects an author’s particular expression, not the broader relationships among words, concepts, themes, or writing techniques that readers — or even AI models — may learn and deploy from it.” (07/24/26)
“Was Odysseus, the legendary Greek warrior, actually a wimp? The most trenchant criticisms of Christopher Nolan’s new blockbuster movie ‘The Odyssey’ involve how he portrays the hero of the tale. In the original, Odysseus is a clever, multifaceted hero who comes up with the idea for the Trojan horse and then, after the Greeks win the decade-long war with Troy, embarks on his arduous journey home to Ithaca and his waiting wife Penelope. Now, it’s true that Nolan modernizes Odysseus for a contemporary audience, but what was he supposed to do? If he’d given us the 100% Homeric Odysseus — abducting women, slaughtering unarmed people, sleeping around with nymphs, ordering the execution of housemaids — there’d be little chance that movie-goers would be interested in shelling out to see a 3-hour movie about his adventures and travails.” (07/24/26)
“Basically we’ve got two choices: we either aggressively denormalize Israel or we watch our society become more and more Israeli. We either collectively reject Israel, or we watch western militaries fuse inseparably with the IDF. We either turn support for Israel into political campaign poison, or we watch politicians obliterate our right to criticize Israel while backing increasingly evil Israeli military agendas. We either ferociously oppose our government’s involvement in middle eastern wars, or we watch Israeli leaders grow more and more ecstatic as more and more western blood and treasure flows into the war machine.” (07/25/26)
Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Jake Scott
“On July 20, Andy Burnham attended Buckingham Palace, where King Charles III invited him to form a government—making him Britain’s seventh prime minister in a decade. Burnham is nicknamed ‘the King of the North,’ inspired by the Game of Thrones series and also speaks to his extremely popular tenure as mayor of Greater Manchester since 2017. As a politician, he reflects all of the establishment’s trusted elements and very little of its baggage. Having served as a minister in Blair’s government and won three landslide re-elections since becoming Manchester’s mayor, Burnham has managed to avoid the scandals associated with the Labour Party of the last two decades while building a prominent personal brand—and has cast a shadow over Sir Keir Starmer’s leadership as a result.” (07/24/26)
“Complaints about Nolan’s ‘Odyssey’ are mainly complaints about what does and doesn’t count as Western, as manly, and as heroic art. And those complaints are about maintaining a highly circumscribed and prejudiced boundary of American identity downstream of a facile, vulgar conception of the ancient ‘West.’ It’s worth stressing—if, somehow, it hasn’t been stressed enough—that many of America’s right-wing nationalists view the United States as a culmination of a fancifully idealized Western culture. … what matters more here is who is seen as capable of making history. It’s certainly not women, and it’s absolutely not non-whites.” (07/25/26)
“In what is the monetary equivalent of tearing down statues, the British have decided they must replace iconic images on their currency. Out of an apparent fear of offending the stampede of human beings who have chosen to abandon their own homelands to live in Great Britain, the historic images on British currency of people instrumental in making that nation what it is, have been forced to yield to images of animals. Foxes, badgers, and hedgehogs are in the ascendency. Our problem in the United States is somewhat different. It appears that the iconography of our currency will be made to climax in images of Donald Trump.” (07/24/26)
“The AI Kill Switch Act, introduced Thursday by Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) and Rep. Nathaniel Moran (R-Texas), seeks to hand the government unprecedented authority to order private companies to throttle, suspend, or shut down products in “kill switch” fashion, purely on their own arbitrary determination, with fines up to $20 million a day. Behind this carefully staged rollout is a fanatical coalition that looks like a broad consensus, but it is mostly one funding network with an arsenal of astroturf organizations at its disposal.” (07/24/26)
