Source: spiked
by Austin Williams

“Nudging people out of driving has become a guiding principle of the modern Labour Party. It views cars as nothing but a menace to society – a threat to pedestrians and cyclists, and bad for the environment. Keir Starmer’s recently announced ‘Road Safety Strategy’ – a raft of measures designed to make life even more difficult for drivers – seemed, if anything, long overdue. As I found out recently, motoring is a slow, expensive business anywhere where Labour has been in power for a long time. Over the Christmas holidays, I drove from north to south Wales and back. Laden with presents, I assumed it would be cheaper and easier than taking the train. The incompetence of Transport for Wales, which has a regular supply of excuses for cancellations, initially reinforced this decision. It turned out, however, that the freedom of the open road wasn’t what it once was.” (01/23/26)

https://archive.is/EDT2K

Source: Foreign Policy
by Ariel Petrovics

“The United States is approaching a decisive moment in its management of nuclear risk. New START — the last remaining arms control agreement between the United States and Russia — is scheduled to expire on Feb. 5. Signed in 2010, New START has helped limit nuclear competition between the world’s largest arsenals by capping warheads and delivery systems and enabling inspections and data exchanges. Although Russia suspended inspections and halted treaty-mandated data exchanges in 2023, protesting U.S. and NATO support for Ukraine, it promised to maintain treaty limits and has since offered to extend those limits by one year if the United States agrees to do the same.” (01/23/26)

https://archive.is/ibrZB

Source: The Bulwark
by Will Saletan

“Trump isn’t Hitler, of course, and any attempt to compare Hitler with a current political figure can seem laughable or outrageous. Trump is an incipient fascist; Hitler was a full-fledged totalitarian dictator. Trump likes to sue, indict, and humiliate people; Hitler orchestrated history’s worst mass murder. So let’s stipulate up front that in any analogy to Nazism, the differences dwarf the similarities. But with all that being said: It’s disconcerting how much Trump’s speech resembles Hitler’s.” (01/23/26)

https://www.thebulwark.com/p/trump-davos-speech-greenland-echoes-1938

Source: Antiwar.com
by Andrew P Napolitano

“In recent days, the government in America has not only failed to protect the freedom of speech, it has attacked it. Like authoritarians throughout history, it has sought to silence the speech it hates and fears. But most authoritarians did not have a Constitution that was written as an intentional obstacle to them.” (01/23/26)

https://original.antiwar.com/andrew-p-napolitano/2026/01/22/the-american-police-state-has-arrived

Source: Responsible Statecraft
by Mike Fredenburg

“Are the military services babying the F-35 to obscure its true costs while continuing to get enormous sums of taxpayer funding for a plane that has consistently failed to live up to performance expectations? From the very beginning, the F-35 program has been plagued by hundreds of billions of dollars in cost overruns and repeated schedule delays. Moreover, even as promised capabilities have been delayed by well over a decade, billions poured into fixes haven’t resolved ongoing reliability issues, crippling its operational effectiveness, and rocketing the program cost to over $2 trillion dollars — 400% more in inflation-adjusted dollars than its 2007 Government Accountability Office estimate.” (01/23/26)

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/cost-of-f35/