Source: Wired
by Jake Lahut
“Privately, some of President Donald Trump’s most loyal allies have come to a sobering conclusion. There’s simply nothing that can be done, they’ve come to believe, to salvage the ongoing catastrophe that is the MAGA base fraying over the ghost of Jeffrey Epstein. People aren’t jumping off the Trump train yet — at least not in significant numbers, though polling shows at least 60 percent of Americans disapprove of his handling of the Epstein case in recent weeks — but the damage has been done with supporters. ‘Honestly, like, fuck Trump,’ a Trumpworld source who works in conservative media tells me. ‘I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but there’s obviously something nefarious that went on.’ … The Epstein story has been a viral content machine on the right for years, and it has too much momentum behind it to simply be shut down and stopped in its tracks.” (08/06/25)
https://archive.is/ECjse
Source: The Political Orphanage
“Greg Lukianoff is Worried About Free Speech.” (08/06/25)
https://politicalorphanage.libsyn.com/greg-lukianoff-is-worried-about-free-speech
Source: Associated Press
“Bosnia’s electoral authorities on Wednesday stripped separatist Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik from his position as president of the Serb entity in Bosnia, following an appeals court verdict that sentences him to one year in jail and six years ban on all political activities. The Central Electoral Commission said that Dodik has the right to appeal, with an early presidential election to be held 90 days after the decision. The last Bosnian Serb presidential vote was held in 2022. … The appeals court in Bosnia-Herzegovina confirmed Friday an earlier court ruling that sentenced the pro-Russia Bosnian Serb leader to one year in prison and handed a six-year ban on political activity. As a result, his mandate as Bosnian Serb president was revoked.” (08/06/25)
https://apnews.com/article/bosnia-serb-dodik-removed-election-separatist-sarajevo-6af8a3073e4851996a6ca2f270d0e659
Source: Law & Liberty
by James Andrews
“AI didn’t break higher ed. It revealed the cracks: falling standards, eroded norms, and a growing disconnect between degrees and the job market. These problems predate ChatGPT. Colleges had already begun relaxing expectations around attendance, participation, and performance, especially through online and hybrid formats designed for convenience, not rigor. But the shift wasn’t merely structural. In chasing enrollment and cutting instructional costs, many institutions de-emphasized disciplines with deep traditions of structure and rigor, expanding instead into programs that are easier to scale online — but often less grounded in formal methods or measurable outcomes. Online and hybrid courses haven’t just changed how students learn; they’ve reshaped what many now expect from faculty, coursework, and from college itself.” (08/06/25)
https://lawliberty.org/data-dishonesty-and-declining-rigor/
Source: WION [India]
“A sweeping hacking attack on the US federal court filing system may have compromised identities of confidential court informants, a report in the Politico website said on Wednesday (Aug 6). The hack targeted the US judiciary’s electronic case filing system. The case management system contains sensitive information, including indictments and arrest warrants. The hack may have exposed sensitive court data in several states, the Politico report said, citing two people aware of the matter. The filing system includes the case management/electronic case Files, or CM/ECF. This is used for uploading and managing case documents. The system also has the Public Access to Court Electronic Records, or PACER, which give the public paid access to some of the data.” (08/07/25)
https://www.wionews.com/trending/hackers-strike-us-court-system-identities-of-informants-compromised-in-wide-hacking-attack-cyberattack-news-1754553131340
Source: Waste No More Time
by Nicholas Sarwark
“It was during the rise of the Rational Unified Process and Java and object-oriented programming that I discovered refactoring. Refactoring refers to the process of changing the internal factors of an object without changing the output of the object, usually to improve performance or resource utilization or to redesign a data structure. … In the United States, there has been a great deal of change to how things work in our government, much of it created by Elon Musk and his disastrous DOGE program to ‘make government more efficient’ that ended up mangling many working systems because ‘move fast and break things’ is the opposite of refactoring. The first thing to break is the expected result of the system. It was a massive failure, but we can use it as a lesson and take the opposite approach.” (08/06/25)
https://nsarwark.substack.com/p/on-refactoring-policy
Source: Reuters
“President Donald Trump could meet Vladimir Putin as soon as next week, a White House official said on Wednesday, as the U.S. maintained plans to impose secondary sanctions on Friday in an effort to pressure Moscow to end the war in Ukraine. Such a face-to-face meeting would be the first between a sitting U.S. and Russian president since Joe Biden met Putin in Geneva in June 2021, some eight months before Russia launched the biggest attack on a European nation since World War Two by invading Ukraine.” (08/06/25)
https://archive.is/c7Vtn
Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by Connor O’Keeffe
“President Trump caused a stir last Friday after he fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) hours after it released a weaker-than-expected jobs report. In a post on his social media site Truth Social, the president blamed the Biden-appointed BLS commissioner, Dr. Erika McEntarfer, for manipulating jobs numbers to prop up Democrats and make his administration look bad. He promised to appoint someone ‘much more competent and qualified.’ … while Trump’s assertion of BLS data manipulation was characteristically imprecise, there’s no question that the political establishment has been concealing, spinning, and even outright manipulating government economic data for its own benefit.” (08/06/25)
https://mises.org/mises-wire/no-matter-who-president-dont-trust-government-data
Source: Bitcoin.com
“Tornado Cash developer Roman Storm was convicted Wednesday of conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business, while the jury deadlocked on charges of conspiracy to commit money laundering and conspiracy to violate North Korea sanctions. … Storm faced three felony counts stemming from his role in creating the cryptocurrency mixing service. Prosecutors alleged Tornado Cash laundered over $1 billion in criminal proceeds, including funds for North Korea’s Lazarus Group. … Storm’s defense maintained he was merely a developer of open-source software and lacked control over Tornado Cash after its launch. The case is seen as a landmark test of developer liability for decentralized finance (DeFi) tools.” [editor’s note: He developed a piece of software. That was his “crime” – TLK] (08/06/25)
https://news.bitcoin.com/tornado-cash-founder-guilty-of-unlicensed-business-operation/
Source: Libertarian Institute
by James Rushmore
“At the core of [Orwell’] polemic is the premise that nuclear weapons grease the wheels of statism by allowing the world’s superpowers to hold the global population hostage. Orwell dispels the most optimistic argument put forward by proponents of the atomic bomb, namely that such technology would inaugurate a new era of peace. That peace, however, would be maintained by the threat of mutual assured destruction. The ruling class would be permitted to amass even more power, all while waving the banner of ‘peace through strength’ and stockpiling tens of thousands of nuclear warheads. The threat of nuclear war would facilitate the exponential growth of the state. Rather than reaping a peace dividend, it would use the prospect of nuclear annihilation to expand its empire, thereby exerting its awesome tyranny over both its own citizenry and billions of foreign civilians.” (08/06/25)
https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/george-orwells-case-against-the-atomic-bomb
