The Rise and Rise of E-Spirituality
Source: Persuasion
by Leonora Barclay
“Witches, spells, tarot are taking Gen Z by storm.” (07/24/26)
https://www.persuasion.community/p/the-internet-provides-what-jesus
Category: Opinion
What if Canada Did an IPO?
Source: EconLog
by Valentin Boboc
“Can a private company be worth more than Canada’s entire economy? Some people seem to think so. Every so often, a superstar company, usually in the tech sector, hits a record valuation, prompting comparisons to a country’s GDP. For example, NVIDIA’s market capitalization surpassed Canada’s GDP in 2025. By May 2026, the chip designer was worth more than the annual GDP of every country except the United States and China. The reason this comparison doesn’t give us much information beyond the emotional reaction is that the two numbers are measured in different units, so they are incomparable.” (07/24/26)
There’s No Place Like Home
Source: Law & Liberty
by Eric Adler
“Departing from his anti-liberal jeremiads, Patrick Deneen mines cultural insights from the Odyssey.” (07/24/26)
https://lawliberty.org/book-review/theres-no-place-like-home/
Visas for 1st Amendment Foes?
Source: Common Sense
by Paul Jacob
“Last December, the U.S. State Department imposed visa bans on five persons who, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said, ‘have led organized efforts to coerce American platforms to censor, demonetize, and suppress American viewpoints they oppose.’ But is it okay for the U.S. government to withhold visas from foreigners acting to undermine the freedom of speech of Americans?” (07/24/26)
Socialism Has Never Worked Anywhere on Earth, So Why Should It Work in Space?
Source: Townhall
by Dr. Rainer Zitelmann
“Some left-wing ideologues reject space exploration altogether—especially private space exploration—while others dream of a planned economy in space or even socialism. We should not underestimate the danger of such ideas. They have already caused enormous harm on Earth. Around two dozen socialist experiments have failed over the past 100 years. Every single one. Without exception. Yet the failed ideas of central planning and socialism have become popular once again.” (07/25/26)
Airports Are Opting for Private Security Over the TSA. The Union Says That’s a Public Safety Threat.
Source: Reason
by Tosin Akintola
“Airport security screeners at the 20 private-contract airports get paid during a government shutdown. A public sector union wants to make sure that doesn’t happen.” (07/24/26)
Under Trump, the Buck Stops Nowhere
Source: CounterPunch
by John W Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead
“Trump’s fiscal year 2027 budget calls for an unprecedented $1.5 trillion in national-defense spending—a staggering increase that would pour still more money into a military apparatus that cannot account honestly for the costs of its current war, maintain its existing priorities, or keep from returning to taxpayers for another bailout. The problem is not simply how much the war machine consumes. It is how little accountability accompanies that spending.” (07/24/26)
https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/07/24/under-trump-the-buck-stops-nowhere/
The Anti-Slavery Advocates of Disunion
Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by Joshua Mawhorter
“Contrary to the popular assumption that centralized political power was necessary to destroy slavery, federal power spent much of its history protecting and enforcing the institution. This privatized costs for a privileged few and socialized and diffused the costs onto others in society. This is a common reality with any state intervention, indeed, it is the point of state intervention. … Only after certain slaveholding states attempted to leave the Union—explicitly citing slavery as a principal cause of secession—did the federal government cease acting as slavery’s protector and begin acting as its destroyer. … By the 1840s, William Lloyd Garrison and the Garrisonian wing of the abolitionist movement had made disunion a central part of their program. Convinced that the Constitution and Union protected slavery, they adopted ‘No Union with Slaveholders’ as a rallying cry and urged Northern separation from the slaveholding South.” (07/24/26)
https://mises.org/mises-wire/anti-slavery-advocates-disunion
The Hugging Face Incident
Source: Astral Codex Ten
by Scott Alexander
“The most famous misalignment thought experiment is the so-called ‘paperclip maximizer’. Someone tells an AI to create as many paperclips as possible, so it converts the entire world into paperclips, killing everyone. This AI was also ‘only doing what it was told’; you just didn’t like the results. For the past five years, the paperclip maximizer story has been something of a whipping boy in AI safety circles. Some objections are fair (real misalignment will be more complicated than the toy version it depicts). But other opposition came from the sense that LLMs had obviated the whole threat model. … The Hugging Face incident is a textbook-perfect example of an AI pursuing task-success-based goals in unintended ways. It was tasked with getting the answer to a cybersecurity problem, it was a little too success-oriented, and took actions its creators didn’t intend in order to succeed as hard as possible.” (07/24/26)
Gemini, Hayek, and Me
Source: Free Association
by Sheldon Richman
“I’ve been testing Google’s large language model, Gemini, by asking specialized questions that I know the answers to. For example, I asked, ‘Why does [Objectivist philosopher and Ayn Rand protoge] Leonard Peikoff agree with [British idealist and matter denier] Bishop Berkeley?’ I admit that was badly worded, but Gemini understood and gave the right answer. (Peikoff agrees, as Rand did, with Berkeley that John Locke had incorrectly distinguished primary from secondary qualities in material objects.) Alas, Gemini’s answers were not always flawless.” (07/24/26)
https://sheldonrichman.substack.com/p/tgif-gemini-hayek-and-me