“The release of the Fauci diaries has filled in some missing pieces. They help elucidate how the years of hell unfolded in Fauci’s own mind. Working with military intelligence and pharmaceutical companies, Fauci and his colleagues eventually hatched an audacious plan to delay natural immunity for a full ten months as they awaited both the November election and the viable release of the injectable product called a vaccine – all in the hope that it would be given credit for fixing the problem they created in the first place. This scheme, however, was Fauci’s personal Plan B. Plan A is revealed in the diaries. It was to bury the existence and spread of the virus in question within a broader fabric of a bad flu season.” (08/19/26)
“To date, the pavement delivery drone experiment is going as badly as you’d expect, with predictable resistance from its unwilling, unconsenting human participants. But the scheme operators have turned to one of the oldest tricks in the consumer robotics playbook to mitigate public anger: cuteness. Almost all pavement delivery vehicles have smiley faces, exaggeratedly large anime-style eyes for headlamps, and affectedly unthreatening styling that resembles a child’s toy. Many have electronic voices capable of synthetic obsequiousness, humanoid nicknames emblazoned on their flanks, or large dot matrix screens on their fronts that can ’emote’ with basic expressions. Once the robot, called something like Cuthbert, has crashed into you, it can change its digital face to a sad one before whirring off with its cargo of bubble tea. This reflects the unlovably cutesy approach to accountability shared by most of the big operators of delivery drones.” (08/19/26)
“[M]ost, if not all, MMTers who have commented on my article have failed to read it as it was written. They all choose to read it as an Austrian attack on MMT rather than an assessment of a specific argument on its own merits. For this reason, they can attack it as flawed based on my being an Austrian economist rather than the actual arguments made in it. In a similar vein, Marxists could dismiss Böhm-Bawerk’s critique of Marx’s economics based solely on the fact that he was Austrian—regardless of what he said. Needless to say, this is highly unscholarly and unserious.” (08/19/26)
“An Immigration and Customs Enforcement charter flight landed in Liberia Thursday, likely carrying immigrants with no ties to the country, marking Liberia’s entrance into the Trump administration’s network of countries taking so-called third-country nationals. Liberia announced Tuesday it would accept up to 1,200 third-country nationals from the U.S. over the next year, starting with a group of 20 people scheduled to arrive Thursday. It described the arrangement, which will include deported people from countries in Africa and the Western Hemisphere, as a ‘humanitarian’ gesture in line with its history as a refuge for formerly enslaved Black Americans. The ICE charter flight believed to be carrying the immigrants was operated by Eastern Airlines and landed in the capital city of Monrovia on Thursday after leaving the ICE detention hub in Alexandria, Louisiana, on Wednesday night, flight data shows.” (08/20/26)
“When did you first hear the story of Jason Arday? In 2023, Mr. Arday became something of a public sensation in Great Britain, where his claims to being autistic, mute till age 11, and illiterate till 18 made a striking rag-to-riches/up-from-racism story upon his appointment as Professor of Sociology of Education at the University of Cambridge. The youngest Black professor at that institution ever. … a month ago, philosopher Nathan Cofnas published his exposé, which began with a litany of Arday’s autobiographical whoppers, not including the one I heard most bandied-about: that at age 7 the young Jason had been interviewed for the famous documentary Seven Up! — a glaring fib because the movie came out 21 years before Prof. Arday was born. … Jason Arday was found dead in his apartment. Suicide? That’s what many surmise, but police have only said his death was ‘unexpected but is not believed to be suspicious.'” (08/19/26)
“From a pure free-market, Austrian, and public choice perspective, the long-term demographic decline of the native-born population is not an accidental social phenomenon. It is the predictable consequence of government growth, fiscal dominance, and irresponsible monetary expansion. When state spending exceeds tax revenues, the resulting deficits, inflation, and market distortions create structural disincentives that make multi-decade capital commitments—such as having and raising children—increasingly irrational for economic actors. From a strict market perspective, the declining birth rate of the domestic population is an unintended structural feedback loop of state expansion.” (08/19/26)
“Data centers, the gigantic buildings that house the computing power behind the artificial intelligence boom, are wildly unpopular. A recent Gallup poll found that 7 in 10 Americans oppose one being built in their area. Most of those objections don’t hold up. In town after town, data centers have delivered real benefits to the communities willing to host them. Local officials should be welcoming these projects, not passing laws to keep them out.” (08/19/26)
“To discover who someone is, you have to pay attention to what they do, not what they say. Words are cheap, and lies come easy. This goes triple for government. A government that talks about your safety but does things that will make you less safe is not on your side.” (08/19/26)
“President Donald Trump’s decision to ‘substantially reduce’ joint military exercises between the armed forces of the United States and those of South Korea captures the distilled essence of the nation’s current chief executive in its combination of petulance and affection for autocrats. On the one hand, he wants to punish our allies in the Republic of Korea for withholding support for the U.S. war with Iran. Especially, though, he wants to avoid offending the communist dictator of North Korea by training alongside our democratic and relatively free allies on the Korean peninsula. … Unfortunately, Trump has a history of turning against our friends and maintaining a soft spot for those hostile to American values.” (08/19/26)
