“As a California mom, I don’t wake up wondering whether an algorithm determined which coupon landed in my inbox. I wake up wondering why a quick trip to the grocery store now costs hundreds of dollars. I wonder whether my children will ever be able to afford a home in the state where they were raised. I wonder how many more families are quietly putting groceries on a credit card just to get through the month. Like millions of parents across California, I’m asking a simple question: When will Sacramento start making life more affordable instead of more complicated?” (07/21/26)
“Federal lawyers say anti-mask laws would endanger immigration agents, citing an ICE face-recognition art project that doesn’t actually work.” (07/22/26)
“Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega announced on Sunday that the country will no longer hold elections, preventing the opposition from competing for power and further cementing his authoritarian grip on the country. … Ortega, now 80 years old, is a former guerrilla fighter who first came to power after the Sandinista Revolution and served as president from 1985 to 1990. After suffering a defeat in 1990, he returned to power in 2007 and has remained there ever since. His regime, which he now formally leads alongside his wife and ‘co-president,’ Rosario Murillo, had long since extinguished what remained of democracy in the country. Over the years, it has cracked down on political dissent, free speech, independent media, and civil society. Ortega’s most recent announcement is just an escalation of that trend.” (07/21/26)
Source: The American Conservative
by Daniel E Zoughbie
“‘If you cross the Halys River and attack the Persians, you will destroy a great empire.’ According to Herodotus, when Lydia’s King Croesus asked the Oracle at Delphi whether to make war on Cyrus the Great, he heard only what he wanted to hear, crossed the river and lost. The empire he destroyed was his own. Today’s oracles are far less discerning. When pastors gathered in the Oval Office this past March to lay hands on the president and pray for war, not one paused to warn him of the cost. Yet this modern hubris was not born in a vacuum. The crisis was a decade in the making.” (07/22/26)
“Should it take four years to earn a bachelor’s degree? No. If you can earn a bachelor’s degree at Oxford or Cambridge Universities in three years, why not at Harvard, Florida State, or the University of Oklahoma? Is the three-year degree being promoted by some in Virginia and Ohio, therefore, a good thing? No, because it appears to aim to achieve this goal by reducing the academic work required by about 25 percent, to about halfway between what an associate degree and a traditional bachelor’s degree require.” (07/21/26)
“In recent years, conservative pundits have compiled an unbroken record of attacking the American entertainment industry’s biggest stars and then finding themselves on the wrong side of public opinion. … It was perhaps predictable, then, that right-wingers would fulminate over Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey before any of them had seen it. … Then the movie came out. Suddenly, conservatives had to contend not only the fact that it brought in more revenue in one weekend ($264 billion) than it cost to make ($250 million), but that, as Ben Shapiro conceded after watching it in IMAX, ‘it’s really, really, really good.’ In moments like this, when ideologues are mugged by reality, a period of adjustment ensues as political allies attempt to get their story straight. We are in that sort of moment now.” (07/22/26)
“I’ve often used the term ‘social panic’ to describe the unmarked-graves claims that swept through Canada in 2021. For reasons described below, the term feels inadequate. But I can’t think of any word or phrase that better captures the spasm of manic self-denigration that unfolded following the purported discovery of 215 dead children (some ‘believed to be as young as three years old,’ gullible reporters told us) on the grounds of a former Indigenous residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia. … It would take months, or even years in many cases, before mainstream media outlets began admitting—tacitly or otherwise—that they’d been duped by Casimir’s fake news (as the Globe & Mail newspaper finally did last month). Despite the passage of five years since the original announcement, many public figures, including former prime minister Justin Trudeau, have never come clean on the issue.” (07/21/26)
“The stench arising from the proposed purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery by Paramount isn’t just the concentration of market power by the merged studios nor the likely takeover of CNN by President Trump’s fanboys. It’s also the fact that the purchase is funded by investments from the sovereign wealth funds of three foreign nations, none of which are in any way, shape, or form democracies: Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, and Qatar. … the purchase of Warner Bros. by foreign nations has not been investigated by the governmental body that customarily handles such matters: the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) …. But the most glaring absence from these duties isn’t CFIUS’s. It’s that of the far-right Republican elected officials who’ve sought to generate and mobilize anti-Muslim bigotry by campaigning against the completely nonexistent threat of Sharia law infiltrating and overtaking American jurisprudence.” (07/21/26)
Source: Independent Institute
by Daniel Sánchez-Piñol
“Every catastrophic wildfire cocktail requires the same dangerous mix: an ignition source, abundant fuel, and people or property in harm’s way. California has long had the perfect blend of these ingredients. Since the devastating Los Angeles wildfires of 2025, the state has taken steps to dilute this dangerous mix, but it remains far too potent. To understand why, consider the 2025 Eaton Fire, the second most destructive wildfire in California history.” (07/22/26)
Source: The American Conservative
by Charles Benoit
“Earlier this month, Bloomberg published a brutal autopsy of industrial policy gone wrong. The article documented how, beginning in 2020, the U.S. government provided $850 million to six American companies to bolster domestic manufacturing of nitrile gloves, a critical component of the medical supply chain. Six years later, not one of those companies is making gloves. … The company that received the most funding, Blue Star NBR out of Wytheville, Virginia, was supposed to use that money to build the first American plant in a generation capable of making nitrile butadiene rubber (NBR)—the raw material every nitrile glove is made of. It never produced a single batch. Its CEO said he is a month from selling the plant for parts, most of which will go to manufacturers based in China. To put it bluntly: American taxpayers built a synthetic rubber plant, and China may now cart it off in crates.” (07/21/26)
