The Tom Woods Show, episode 2788
Source: The Tom Woods Show
“Biggest Academic Charlatan of Our Time, Celebrated.” (08/19/26)
https://tomwoods.com/ep-2788-biggest-academic-charlatan-of-our-time-celebrated/
America’s Authoritarian Fantasies
Source: The Next Move
by Evan Gottesman
“Earlier this year, Donald Trump made some additions to the White House Palm Room: two photos of himself with autocratic leaders; one alongside Xi Jinping, the other with Vladimir Putin. The picture of the president with Putin, a memento from the Russian dictator’s 2025 Alaska visit, was placed above a photograph of Trump’s own granddaughter. Trump has since taken down the picture of his grandkid, but Putin is still there. Trump’s admiration for foreign authoritarians is shared by Hasan Piker, the influential political streamer who’s staged frequent interventions in Democratic primaries. Piker has interviewed numerous successful primary candidates on his stream, including Darializa Avila Chevalier, Chris Rabb, and Abdul El-Sayed. He praises Mao Zedong as one of the greats and dresses like him too. Piker even has a Chinese flag positioned prominently in the background of many of his streams.” (08/19/26)
https://www.thenextmove.org/p/americas-authoritarian-fantasies
The Reasonable Liberal
Source: Liberal Currents
by Guillaume AW Attia
“It is well-known that liberalism accommodates differences of opinion and world view. Unlike other political arrangements, liberalism does not require uniformity of thought, or that individuals and factions see eye-to-eye. What liberalism does require, says Krista Lawlor, is that civilians retain an interest in being reasonable. Reasonableness may not be enough to ‘cure sectarianism or secure our liberal democracy,’ she explains, but liberal democracy stands little chance without it.” (08/18/26)
China: Court sentences founder of troubled property developer Evergrande to life in prison
Source: NBC News
“Chinese property developer Hui Ka Yan, founder of the Evergrande real estate group, has been sentenced to life in prison and the companies fined a total of $2.3 billion, a court in the southern city of Shenzhen said Thursday. The decision marks a milestone in Evergrande’s saga after it collapsed with more than $300 billion in liabilities when Chinese authorities cracked down on excessive borrowing in the real estate industry in 2020. That triggered a crunch among many developers and brought on a downturn in the property market that has weighed on the broader economy ever since. The Shenzhen Intermediate People’s Court convicted Hui, also known as Xu Jiayin, and Evergrande of engaging in large-scale financial fraud in inflating the group’s assets and concealing its liabilities.” (08/20/26)
Dave DeCamp on The Scott Horton Show
Source: The Scott Horton Show
“Dave DeCamp on Palestine, Iran, Somalia and the Risk of an American Nuclear Strike.” (08/19/26)
What Did Fauci Mean by “Game On?”
Source: Brownstone Institute
by Jeffrey A Tucker
“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)
https://brownstone.org/articles/what-did-fauci-mean-by-game-on/
The invasion of the delivery robots
Source: UnHerd
by Ed Wiseman
“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)
Still recovering from Hurricane Lala, Hawaii prepares for a possible weekend cyclone
Source: SFGate
“Communities still recovering from last weekend’s hurricane in Hawaii could get pounded again in coming days from another tropical system gaining strength over warm Pacific waters. Hurricane Lala tore roofs off houses, uprooted trees, covered roads in mud and rock and left many households without electricity. With thousands of homes and businesses still in the dark Thursday, forecasters warned another tropical cyclone is likely to form southeast of the islands soon. A depression moving west and northwest could become a tropical storm later Thursday and pass near or south of Hawaii’s Big Island over the weekend or early next week, according to the U.S. Central Pacific Hurricane Center.” (08/20/26)
https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/still-recovering-from-hurricane-lala-hawaii-22396522.php
LPA Two Hour Lunch Hour, episode 7
Source: LP Alliance
“Join us for our anything goes podcast every Wednesday at noon eastern!” (08/19/26)
MMT: A Political Movement without Serious Defenders
Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by Per Bylund
“[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)
https://mises.org/mises-wire/mmt-political-movement-without-serious-defenders