Source: The Daily Economy
by Paul McDonnold
“W.E.B. Du Bois was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts (where AIER is now headquartered), in 1868. Today, this towering figure of the early civil rights movement is remembered as a groundbreaking sociologist, Pan-African socialist, and near-mythical hero to the intellectual left. … But there was once a W.E.B. Du Bois who was radical mainly in the scientific sense. Before drifting into the study of history and sociology, he was an economics student at Harvard. The marginal revolution had just remade the dismal science into a more mathematical and literally ‘edgy’ subject. And Du Bois made original contributions that leveraged insights from the free-market Austrian school and anticipated later developments in neoclassical economic thought, as Daniel Kuehn explains in a recent paper published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives.” (01/07/26)
https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/the-w-e-b-du-bois-we-lost-marginal-economist/
Source: Washington Examiner
by W. James Antle III
“Before Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) became the first casualty of the burgeoning Minnesota day care fraud scandal, he was supposed to be the reason white men and working-class white people more generally might vote Democratic. Walz, who abandoned his gubernatorial reelection bid on Monday, was the Democratic nominee for vice president in 2024. He was billed as a dad’s dad, an affable football coach, a fixer of trucks who was not afraid to get his hands dirty under the hood. Instead, Walz was judged by many voters to be as ‘weird’ as he claimed Vice President JD Vance — then a freshman Ohio senator and junior partner on the 2024 Republican ticket — was. He, or at least his aides, bungled a basic football metaphor.” (01/07/25)
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/campaigns/state/4407834/spectacular-failure-tim-walz-democrat-minnesota-day-care-fraud/
Source: NBC News
“The deadliest clashes so far broke out Tuesday between Syrian government forces and Kurdish fighters in a contested area of the northern city of Aleppo, as efforts to merge the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces with the national army have shown little progress. Syria ’s state-run SANA news agency said a soldier was killed and three others were wounded in an attack by the SDF. State TV later reported that three civilians, including two women, were killed and others were wounded, including two children, in shelling of a residential area that it blamed on the SDF. SANA also said nine Aleppo Directorate of Agriculture employees were wounded by SDF shelling that hit its office. The SDF in a statement denied being behind the shelling that killed the civilians and said a shell launched by ‘factions affiliated with the Damascus government’ landed in the al-Midan neighborhood.” (01/07/25)
https://www.nbcnews.com/world/syria/syria-aleppo-government-forces-kurdish-fighters-clashes-rcna252741
Source: San Diego Union-Tribune
“Lawyers representing the New York Daily News and an array of news organizations suing OpenAI for allegedly stealing [sic] and distorting their reporters’ work have asked a Manhattan judge to sanction ChatGPT’s parent company, alleging the tech behemoth deleted millions of conversations they were required to hand over as evidence of copyright infringement. OpenAI continued to destroy output logs despite orders from two judges to preserve and provide them to the news organizations, new court filings allege. More than 1 million logs that had been requested — containing information the news outlets believe was based on their journalists’ reporting — were subbed out, according to court documents.” (01/07/26)
https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/2026/01/07/ny-daily-news-other-papers-seek-sanctions-over-allegations-open-ai-deleted-key-evidence/
Source: The Dispatch
by Kevin D Williamson
“A party run by people dumb and insular enough to nominate Kamala Harris is also a party dumb and insular enough to mistakenly believe that the way to connect with the rural voters who have rallied to the banner of Donald Trump is to push out an older dad type in a blaze orange vest and have him point a 12-gauge at some tasty birds. … To the extent that [Tim] Walz’s gun-toting made an impression at all, it was a poor one: Gun-rights voters did not seem him as a potential champion but as the worst thing you can be in those circles: a ‘Fudd,’ meaning an out-of-touch dork who believes that the Second Amendment is about hunting, as though the Founding Fathers took the time to write a hobby into the Bill of Rights.” (01/07/26)
https://thedispatch.com/article/tim-walz-minnesota/
Source: Common Dreams
by Joseph Bouchard
“After a series of strikes in the last few days, and more than two decades of attempted coups (in 2002, 2019, and 2020), warfare, sanctions, and a ‘Maximum Pressure Campaign’, the United States has just toppled Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Maduro and his wife are standing trial for ‘narco-terrorism’ charges, a cover to extend the War on Terror without congressional authorization, in New York, with members of his security team, along with several civilians, dead. Far-right hardliner María Corina Machado, the leader of the opposition who has longstanding ties to the White House and even went on Donald Trump Jr.’s podcast to justify a coup based on oil wealth, was expected to be put in power. She promised to implement a vision of deep privatization under ‘Popular Capitalism’, modeled on Augusto Pinochet, Margaret Thatcher, and Ronald Reagan.” (01/07/25)
https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/us-rogue-state-venezuela
Source: The Hill
“Private employers added 41,000 jobs in December, recovering from losses in the previous month but missing the projected estimate for gains by a few thousand jobs. Dow Jones estimated the private sector would add about 48,000 jobs in the final month of the year after losing 29,000 workers in November. Gains made were coupled with a 4.4 percent year-over-year pay increase for employees, according to ADP. The South and Northeast tracked the most growth, with 54,000 new jobs in the Southern region and 40,000 in the Northeast. The West was the only region to see a decrease in jobs, with 61,000 roles cut. The decrease reflects a broader decline in roles within the information, business services and manufacturing industries.” (01/07/26)
https://thehill.com/business/5676352-december-job-growth-recovery/
Source: Underthrow
“Applying Great Thinkers: Hayek, Boyd, and McCluhan w/ Mark McGrath and Brian Rivera (Part Two).” (01/07/26)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjbcnY9CeTE
Source: Law & Liberty
by David D Corey & Dominic MM Saunders
“In ‘Contemporary Muses,’ Henry T. Edmondson III is gently critical of those who defend the value of pop music on political grounds. Political protest may be a mainstay of pop music, but ‘it would be disappointing,’ he writes, ‘if America’s … cultural commentators were unable to see past the politics.’ Instead, Edmondson proposes to defend (certain) pop music as something that approaches philosophy: ‘Some pop songs explore deep themes of moral philosophy’ or ‘meditate thoughtfully on the human condition.’ Edmondson’s approach bears fruit as he catalogues lyrics that echo major themes of Western moral philosophy. One might wonder, however, whether defending pop music as philosophy is much different from defending it as political protest.” (01/07/26)
https://lawliberty.org/forum/defending-pop-music-as-music/
Source: The Hill
by Bill Press
“Trump’s war against Venezuela is just the latest manifestation of his abuse of presidential power. In the last 11 months, he has flouted domestic law by firing tens of thousands of federal employees without cause, firing 17 inspectors general, firing the head of the Office of Special Counsel and the director of the Office of Government Ethics, directing the Justice Department to prosecute his political opponents and tearing down the East Wing of the White House. … Trump also violated the War Powers Act of 1973, which limits a president’s ability to send troops into armed conflict without congressional approval. Like the rest of us, members of Congress only learned about the invasion of Venezuela and Maduro’s seizure after it happened. So what’s Congress going to do about it? Absolutely nothing, of course! And that’s the most disturbing news of all.” (01/07/26)
https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/5674080-venezuela-trump-regime-change/
