“Attorneys asked a judge to bar an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) charter flight from leaving Equatorial Guinea Friday unless their client was onboard in an emergency motion filed shortly after the aircraft landed on the island city of Malabo. An ICE official had told the judge in a sworn statement a day earlier that the flight to Equatorial Guinea had been canceled, a claim the attorneys called ‘plainly false’. Flight data indicates the plane took off two hours and 30 minutes later, before the judge issued a ruling.” (10/23/26)
“An unlikely alliance between farmers and conservationists illustrates how government subsidies create political constituencies that lobby to preserve them.” (10/23/26)
“Since the beginning of President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown in January 2025, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) claims more than 1.1 million people have been arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) combined. But so far, the names of most arrestees have been kept secret. This lack of public disclosure threatens Americans’ ability to hold the government accountable.” (10/23/26)
“AI apocalypse fears went mainstream last month after an Anthropic researcher resigned, saying the technology has more than a 10% chance of wiping out humanity. Leaders of AI companies called for a collective slowdown of development. In the process, the public learned that the tech industry’s conception of AI safety is dominated by a small group of people who believe, with a certainty and devotion resembling religion, that an artificial superintelligence will arrive soon and take over the world. Befitting that millenarian outlook, they appear to have an unhealthy internal culture, part of which sure looks like a sex cult.” (10/23/26)
“Universities are making a consequential concession: allowing privately owned generative AI systems into the very processes through which students learn to read, write, reason, and exercise judgment. Their adoption is increasingly presented as inevitable. AI exists, so higher education must adapt. Under this logic, adoption is expected, while refusal requires an explanation. But technological availability is not educational justification. Before reorganizing teaching and learning around these systems, universities should answer the question that advocates of adoption too often avoid: Why should AI be there at all? The language of inevitability obscures who is responsible.” [editor’s note: The language of inevitability is the language of fact; since AI exists, students will use it, end of story. No amount of whining about it will change it – TLK] (10/24/26)
“Sometimes you have to restate the obvious—dirty work, but someone has to do it: Another round of strikes is unlikely to accomplish this war’s stated political goals, which themselves change on a regular basis. While never-ending, mindless destruction for its own sake has its charms, I guess, generally speaking a war is supposed to accomplish something; the ‘something’ here has been at various times and non-exclusively the end of the Iranian nuclear program, reopening the Strait of Hormuz (which was open before the war), and regime change. The going theory among the teeming intellects downtown appears to be that yet another movement in the symphony of death, in concert with Scott Bessent’s exotic economic maneuvers, will get the Iranians to cry uncle and/or provoke a change of management in Tehran. Anything is possible, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.” (10/23/26)
“An uncanny strength of the second Trump administration has been its ability to be involved in so many scandals that no single one seems to become a dominant story. Take the most recent allegations about Alina Habba, Trump’s former personal defense attorney, who recently landed a plush gig working for Julio Herrera Velutini, a Venezuelan banker. Habba will get $50 million over five years to do unspecified work for a company that barely exists, according to The New York Times, while Herrera got a presidential pardon for a 2025 campaign finance charge. That’s just a typical day for the current White House, where the mingling of personal and public business has become routine.” (10/22/26)
Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Jacob G Hornberger
“According to election polls, Democrats are fairly certain to take control over the U.S. House of Representatives. There is now also the possibility that they could take control over the U.S. Senate. Realizing the danger he faces of losing control over Congress, President Trump is barnstorming the country, doing his best to rally his MAGA supporters to go to the polls and vote. But a question naturally arises: If Trump becomes certain that he faces defeat next month, will he switch directions and simply suspend the midterm elections? After all, one cannot lose an election if no election is held.” (10/22/26)
“After leading with the theory of perfect competition, economics textbooks standardly add a ‘corrective’ chapter on the evils of monopoly. While they occasionally mention government-created monopoly, the focus is almost always on the harm of free-market monopoly, and the necessity of antitrust laws to combat such monopoly. A free-market monopoly is a business that manages to control a whole industry, and uses its control to slash output and raise prices. Later textbook chapters move on to markets with varying degrees of ‘monopoly power’ – and broadly conclude that as monopoly power goes up, market performance goes down. The moral: Free markets are only optimal in an extreme polar case. The further the real world strays from that case, the more suboptimal they become – and the more regulation improves the free-market outcome. Murray Rothbard rejects this picture, using three different sets of arguments.” (10/22/26)
