Source: Antiwar.com
by Ron Paul

“Last week we heard that US sailors and Marines aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln and other ships in the Middle East were being fed food that, from photos that surfaced in the media, looked worse than what you would feed a dog. Parents and spouses of service members risked disciplinary action against their loved ones to highlight to the US Navy Secretary and to the media the revolting conditions aboard the carrier, which has been at sea with no port of call for a record period of time. … the best way to support the troops is to bring them home. Never has that message been clearer than today.” (08/18/26)

https://original.antiwar.com/paul/2026/08/17/support-the-troops-bring-them-home/

Source: Cobden Centre
by Tim Price

“The world changed profoundly just four years ago. In February 2022, in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the West immobilised roughly $300 billion of Russia’s foreign reserves. At the end of the month, both the EU and the US froze Russian central bank assets in Europe and the US. This may go down in history as one of the biggest unforced geopolitical errors of the 21st Century. So far. When, like the US, you have official national debts of $40 trillion that will never be paid except in devalued money, it looks almost churlish to remind generous foreign strangers that their holdings of your ‘assets’ can be voided on a whim. But that’s what they did. The decision triggered an understandable exodus of foreign sovereign capital out of the US Treasury bond market and into a stateless asset that is nobody’s liability: gold. That exodus is continuing, and the increasingly farcical Iran conflict isn’t helping.” (08/18/26)

https://www.cobdencentre.org/2026/08/whats-in-your-wallet/

Source: The UnPopulist
by Nathan Law

“The only Chinese Nobel Peace Prize awardee, Liu Xiaobo, whose books I learned a lot from, famously said, ‘I don’t have enemies.’ He did not hate people who hold different opinions, or even those who enabled the brutalities of the Chinese Communist regime. He fought against the regime, and the ideologies that enabled the violence. In the face of the illiberal waves, I want to re-conceptualize the idea to address the challenge that we all face. The enemy is not the political opposition. The enemy is apathy. It’s the state where people don’t care, live in their half-baked stereotypes about the world, and stop thinking deeply about anything.” (08/18/26)

https://www.theunpopulist.net/p/liberal-democracy-is-not-self-sustaining

Source: The Hill
by Gleb Tsipursky

“The headline from a new modeling experiment by Econtime Consultants claims flexible work arrangements can raise one’s ‘effective’ salary by 56 percent. That number may sound startling, even inflated, until you picture the actual worker behind it: a 39-year-old programmer with one or two children, a mortgage or other debt, a demanding job, and a calendar where every recovered hour matters. The flexible work value in an IT worker’s life does not come from abstract corporate generosity. It comes from fewer rushed mornings, fewer lost evenings, fewer unpaid hours trapped in transit, and more control over the fragile border between work and everything else. … The most important aspect of the study is conceptual: It asks leaders to stop treating salary as the only form of compensation that matters. A paycheck tells workers what they earn. It does not tell them what the job costs them.” (08/18/26)

https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/6033665-economic-value-personal-time-salary/

Source: Christian Science Monitor
by staff

“Five years ago this month, as the last United States forces withdrew from Afghanistan, the Taliban grasped the reins of government and have kept a tight hold on them since. The group’s harsh interpretation of Islamic rule excludes girls and women, who make up half of Afghanistan’s estimated 50 million people, from any meaningful education …. Yet, even amid a system likened to ‘gender apartheid’, Afghanistan’s girls and women refuse to be completely cowed. They tune in to sessions on the radio – or the internet, when it works. Some, whose families can afford it, attend clandestine informal schools in neighborhood homes. Others read and reread the same textbooks that they or their siblings used in pre-Taliban years, when girls could attend secondary school and even university.” (08/17/26)

https://www.csmonitor.com/Editorials/the-monitors-view/2026/0817/Afghans-cling-to-education-for-girls