Source: The Daily Economy
by Stephen Lewarne
“When the Fed withholds information, markets don’t stop searching — they simply reward those with privileged access.” (08/17/26)
https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/the-price-of-fed-silence/
Source: Caitlin Johnstone
by Caitlin Johnstone
“Life in the 2020s comes with so much dissonance and dysphoria because everyone knows this civilization is doomed, but it’s not being acknowledged by any of our mainstream institutions. We can all see everything getting worse and worse before our eyes in real time, but our government officials don’t talk about it. Our mass media outlets don’t report on it. Our education systems don’t recognize it. There’s a giant elephant in the room with us at all times, and normal people are acutely aware of it, but the talking heads keep speaking as though everything’s going to keep ticking along normally into the foreseeable future. We can all see the summers heating up. We can all see that there are fewer insects and less wildlife around than when we were young. We can all see that the western empire is on borrowed time.” (08/17/26)
Source: Reuters
“Rebuffing President Donald Trump for a second time, the U.S. Supreme Court declined on Monday to hear his appeal of a $5 million verdict in favor of E. Jean Carroll after a jury found him liable for sexually abusing and defaming the former magazine columnist. The justices rejected Trump’s request to reconsider their previous decision in June denying his appeal of the 2023 jury verdict stemming from allegations that he raped her in the 1990s in a Manhattan department store’s dressing room. Trump’s lawyers contend that the trial was unfair. The Supreme Court is also weighing the Republican president’s appeal of a separate $83.3 million jury verdict for defaming Carroll in 2019 during his first term as president, when he denied the claims and asserted that she lied about the accusations. Trump’s lawyers in that appeal argue that presidential immunity shields him from Carroll’s claims and that lower courts wrongly decided that he had forfeited that defense.” (08/17/26)
Source: Everyday Samurai
“Not Civil War.” (08/17/26)
Source: Libertarian Institute
by José Niño
“Credit for the coinage belongs to Peru’s Fernando Belaúnde Terry. Foreign Policy traces his first use to 1982, after Shining Path hit a prison and a police station, when he called what he saw ‘narco-terrorism — the union of the vice of narcotics with the violence of terrorism.’ The SAGE Encyclopedia of Terrorism places the birth year at 1983 instead. The date stays unsettled because the idea underneath never firmed up. Experts remain split over whether the term ‘designates too broad a range of activities to be definitive.’ Elasticity proved to be the feature. … Every fresh narcoterrorism designation narrows the space between a criminal suspect and a lawful target, and it narrows that space inside their own borders first.” (08/17/26)
https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/what-exactly-is-narcoterrorism/
Source: Washington Post
by Ramesh Ponnuru
“Americans, for all their complaints about the health care system, generally dread the prospect of Washington disrupting their insurance. Many surveys have found that most people are satisfied with what they have. When Bill Clinton proposed a more government-run system a generation ago, the most potent attack against it was that it threatened that coverage. Barack Obama, having learned from Clinton’s failure to enact his legislation, made ‘if you like your plan, you can keep your plan’ a central promise of his own health policy. The lowest political moment for Obamacare was when that promise didn’t bear out for 4 million people who saw their plans canceled. … Medicare-for-all would impose more radical disruptions on the health care system than any of these earlier proposals and laws.” (08/17/26)
Source: Los Angeles Times
by Jon Duffy
“The Trump administration chose this war, launched it without congressional authorization, has repeatedly changed its definition of success and has failed to define an achievable political end. It owns the strategic failure. But bad strategy does not absolve military leaders of responsibility for how military force has been employed.” (08/17/26)
Source: France 24 [French state media]
“A Malian court sentenced on Monday a prominent broadcaster and an influencer, who had both criticised the ruling junta, to seven years in jail, an AFP journalist saw. The sentences are the latest handed to Malians critical of the unstable west African country’s military government, which came to power following back-to-back coups in 2020 and 2021. Television and radio commentator Mohamed Youssouf Bathily – alias Ras Bath – was convicted by the court in Bamako of criminal conspiracy and discrediting the state, alongside Rokia Doumbia, a noted campaigner known online as ‘Rose, the cost of living’. Both had been in custody for several years following the airing of a 2023 programme by the journalist dedicated to the economic difficulties facing ordinary Malians.” (08/17/26)
Source: EconTalk
“The Hidden Cause of the Industrial Revolution (with Ben Southwood).” (08/17/26)
https://www.econtalk.org/the-hidden-cause-of-the-industrial-revolution-with-ben-southwood/
Source: Brownstone Institute
by Charles Krblich
“Growing up, I never cared for Mathematics. It was too logical, bland, boring, difficult, and when contrasted against the stories, battles, wars, glory, destruction, growth, and exploration that was History, I never gave it a fair chance. So it was one of the little ironies of life, that I came to do Mathematics for a living. Focused study softened the difficulty, and armed with growing knowledge, bland and boring transformed to mildly charming. With new perspective, I discovered what has since become my favorite toy, a Galton Board. The toy is a small window into our experience over the last several years in which our free and independent lives have clashed broadly against arcane, top-down rules conceived by bureaucrats.” (08/17/26)
https://brownstone.org/articles/chaos-and-the-birth-of-order/