Author: nick

Coase, Property Rights, and the AI Debate Everyone Is Having Backwards Jeffrey Wernick The AI debate has settled into two camps. One says the technology is too dangerous to distribute, so it must be concentrated in a few licensed hands. The other says it is too dangerous to concentrate, so it must be distributed widely. Serious people occupy both camps, and both are answering the wrong question. The question is not who should hold the power. The question is what rights everyone else holds against whoever ends up holding it. Neither camp asks, because both camps are populated by people…

This article is based on declassified U.S. government documents, testimonies from former federal employees with top-level security clearances, and investigative journalism spanning over two years. The information presented here draws from Congressional reports, files obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, and sworn statements by officials such as Catherine Austin Fitts, former Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development under the Bush administration. The figures regarding secret expenditures of $21 trillion originate from her analysis of federal financial records. The event that first exposed the existence of the Mount Weather bunker—the crash of TWA Flight 514 on December 1, 1974—is…

New Orleans police officer Brandon Coleman faces 350 criminal charges for allegedly claiming more than $111,000 in overtime pay that he did not actually earn. Investigators say Coleman repeatedly reported working long shifts, while surveillance footage showed him at home during some of that time. The investigation grew out of earlier concerns about unusually high overtime payments to New Orleans police officers. In response, the New Orleans Police Department has introduced stricter overtime controls, like requiring officers to clock in at their actual work locations and improving supervisory checks. Those changes have reportedly reduced police overtime spending by 45 percent,…

Rep. Randy Fine (R-FL) posted the following on Twitter/X Thursday night: It’s no longer Republicans vs. Democrats. It’s Americans who love this country vs. terrorists who want to destroy it. — Congressman Randy Fine (@RepFine) August 13, 2026 Fine appeared to be putting himself on Team America against both, or either, the leftwing, including a new crop of democratic socialists who keep winning Democratic primaries, or also perhaps Palestinians (maybe Hamas specifically, maybe not), who the congressman does not like and has even compared to dogs (for starters). Fine is a vocal Zionist who has repeatedly called for the total…

Representation permeates much of life in the modern liberal state. Politicians make laws for millions of people, laws that every individual is expected to obey under the threat of force. Bureaucracies ensure compliance with these laws through varying forms of coercion, while judges settle disputes over alleged violations. The individual, however, remains largely on the receiving end of this process. One may vote, yet the political outcome will be the same anyway. As political philosopher Jason Brennan writes in Against Democracy, “Regardless of whether you choose to vote or not, and regardless of how you decide, the same result will…

Where Cambodia chose the difficult, winding road of national healing, Israel spurred a suicidal treadmill of retribution in the Middle East, writes Laurent Evrard. Phnom Penh Skyline from the Toul Kork area. (Looppty /Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 4.0) By Laurent Evrardin Phnom PenhSpecial to Consortium News History is written in blood, but it is redeemed by choice. Across the theater of human suffering, few nations have stared into the abyss of total annihilation quite like Cambodia. Under the psychotic agrarian utopia of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, nearly a quarter of the country’s population of eight million people was systematically…

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services, has transformed how Americans think and talk about health policy. Source link

DNC Did Something Right? Actually, It Was Three Things Source link

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. Stories of broken toilets, filth, and mold everywhere were reported in the…

If anyone believes that peace will be achieved by “reshaping the Middle East”—via the Trump Board of Peace project—I’ve got a couple of bridges linking Brooklyn with Manhattan that I’m willing to sell for a song. I might be going out on a limb here, but there will never be peace in the Middle East as long as Benjamin Netanyahu and his ilk are in control of the out-of-control, American-supported and -supplied Israeli government.   And before the usual suspects like the neocons start bleating about antisemitism, here are some undeniable facts: Netanyahu needs the war in Gaza and against Iran…