One example of this phenomenon was the subject of a Wednesday The Guardian article. The article described concerns expressed by residents of Southaven, Mississippi in regard to a data centers of the company xAI that are near their homes. Noise is a primary matter vexing residents. In short, the residents are complaining about the data centers bringing a nuisance to the area.

The source of the complained of problem in this and other instances of data centers being placed near homes is not just the companies that build and operate the data centers, as well as seek to profit from them. Government is also responsible. For instance, the article in The Guardian related that Southaven Mayor Darren Musselwhite “oversaw a land swap deal with xAI that resulted in a new police and firefighter training center for the city.” The mayor is also quoted as declaring, “This development will produce unprecedented tax revenue for DeSoto county taxpayers that will enhance the quality of life for all.”

Maybe the city government will, as the mayor suggests, make big money off its and xAI’s scheme to bring data centers into the city. Surely, xAI hopes the money will roll in for it as well. But, there are residents who see the corporatist deal to make the data centers their neighbor as causing a significant detriment to their quality of life. It is yet another example of the disturbing tendency of government to reject defending the rights and wellbeing of residents and to instead pursue central planning actions that impose suffering on some people in the name of advancing a purported greater good.

In Sullum’s analysis, Trump is exposed for his frequent efforts to suppress First Amendment protected speech. While Sullum outlined how courts have stifled the Trump administration’s speech suppression efforts in some instances that went through litigation, in other instances just the threat of government action has been enough to quell targeted communication.

“Whether he is suing journalists, trying to imprison opponents, demanding prosecution of flag burners, threatening to yank broadcast licenses, expelling reporters from the White House, arresting foreign students, using executive orders to cripple law firms, or pressuring universities, Trump wants everyone to know these are the consequences of daring to exercise your constitutional rights in a way that annoys him,” wrote Sullum, providing in the concluding section of his article a rundown of some areas into which Trump’s attacks on free speech have extended.

You can read Sullum’s article here.

Last week, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier filed a lawsuit in Florida state court against Pfizer and Albert Bourla, who has been the chief executive officer of Pfizer since 2019.

Michael Nevradakis provided much detail and context regarding the Florida lawsuit against Pfizer in an October 2 Children’s Health Defense article you can read here. As noted by Nevradakis, the Florida case brought in state court follows similar cases brought by the states of Kansas and Texas that are making their way through the judicial process.

The Florida case makes the straightforward argument that the company and its CEO promoted the shots as safe when it was known the shots carried the risk of serious and deadly side effects. It is also argued that they promoted the shots’ effectiveness against coronavirus despite lacking support for that claim. The allegations against Pfizer and its CEO can be largely summed up as they engaged in fraud, something for which businesses since the early days of America have routinely been held liable.

A key barrier that Florida’s and the other states’ legal actions confront is special protections against liability that have been put in place at the US government level to shield big pharma from liability, especially in relation to US government approved vaccines and to a select group of medical products that the US government designated as suitable for countering coronavirus.

Over at CNBC, Luke Fountain pointed out in a Sunday article that Trump has an imperfect history of carrying through on similar promises. Trump’s promised 5,000 dollars “DOGE dividends” and 2,000 dollars “tariff rebates” in 2025, as well as 200 dollars prescription drug cards for Medicare beneficiaries in Trump’s first presidential term, failed to materialize.

First up, Schiff discussed the big rise in value of shares of US government-sponsored entities Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that operate in the real estate sector. That rise came as Trump talked up the entities and the potential for big gains for investors in them if Trump carried through with his plan to privatize them. Since then, their valuations have fallen substantially. Schiff said in the episode that he thinks Trump had acted “to get the price of the stock up so that his friends and his early donors who already owned the stock or who bought more in the week or two after he won the election and they loaded up” could then sell the stocks for a big gain to people seeking to obtain them, based on Trump’s hype, at much increased prices.

Next, Schiff argued that Trump facilitated a similar pump and dump with bitcoin. Trump, related Schiff, “made all kinds of promises and talked big about bitcoin” causing it to reach a new high. This benefited bitcoin-owning funders of Trump’s presidential campaign by providing them with an opportunity to sell at a much increased price. Further, noted Schiff, “he did the same thing with his own meme coins — with Trump coin and Melania coin; he made a fortune hyping that up.” The Trump coin and Melania coin prices since plummeted.

“The people who made money on the Trump trades were the people who front ran them — who were already positioned for what Trump was gonna promote and hype up and they were able to sell into the hype that the president created,” concluded Schiff.

Watch Peter Schiff’s Trump pump and dump discussion here:

Two aphorisms come to mind: Be careful what you wish for and better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.

The US military is good at breaking things and killing people as it has demonstrated across the world. And, while the US military has been sent abroad many times to achieve proclaimed missions of advancing democracy and human rights, it has tended to be quick to sacrifice both in the quest for establishing order and submission, while ensuring profits for the well-connected.

Trump has been stifled at times by courts and legislators seeking to enforce constitutional restrictions on his asserted powers. But, a military coup can be expected to come with the establishment of martial law. Marital law can, for a “temporary” span that will likely stretch on and on, set constitutional restraints fully to the side.

When people resist, we could see the return to America of the modern equivalent of General William Tecumseh Sherman’s march to the sea. Maybe the military will take actions echoing horrid triumphs across the world such as firebombings in Germany and Japan, massacres in Vietnam villages, and widespread suffering and death brought through destroying infrastructure and denying goods necessary to support health in Iraq.

Americans have a tendency to not notice, or to give the benefit of the doubt to, depravity in US military’s serial rampages abroad. “Thank you for your service,” say many Americans to current and former military members they happen to encounter. What service is supposed? Working for a bureaucracy that consumes a huge chunk of the US government’s spending and drives the growth of the national debt to spread instability, death, and destruction in wars of choice against people who pose no danger to Americans but that can stir up animosity raising the threat of blowback attacks? That does not sound like service to most Americans. Military-industrial complex special interests are served. Israel expansionist interests, and other select foreign interests, are served. Deep pocketed multinational companies with money on the line are served. People in targeted locations who ascend to powerful positions and receive suitcases of cash through alliance with powerbrokers are served.

Do you really think things will be different when the military brings war home? No thank you to a military coup in America.

Catch that? The report conflates being a Jewish student with being a pro-Israel student. Being Jewish, however, does not go hand in hand with being pro-Israel, especially among the younger Americans who are the vast majority of college students. Consider, for example, the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll results from June indicating that 23 percent of Jewish Americans age 45 and over say Israel has committed a genocide in Gaza, with the percentage jumping to 37 percent for Jewish Americans under 45 years old. Of course, the numbers will come in higher for lesser criticisms of the Israel government. It is thus no wonder that at college campuses across the country Jewish students are among the leaders of and participants in protests against actions of the Israel government, as well as against its substantial influence on, and support from, the United States government.

In a Wednesday editorial at Forbes, Scott White challenged a core argument of the Campus Climate Brief that one thing that makes a college good for Jewish students is the suppression of criticism of Israel. In contrast, White argues persuasively that many Jewish students will prefer a college that includes in its mission tolerance for disagreement:

Rankings like this one can answer part of the safety question parents want answered. But families might do better asking a wider set of questions: Can a student wear a yarmulke or Star of David across campus without fear? Can an observant student eat kosher and keep Shabbat? Can a Zionist student defend Israel without being frozen out of unrelated organizations — and can a critic of Israel do the same without being treated as less Jewish? Can Jewish students disagree with each other inside Jewish organizations? Can a Palestinian student condemn Israel just as freely? Does the administration protect controversial speech while drawing a clear line at threats and harassment? And when controversy erupts, does the college teach students to interact with it, or try to make it go away?

Those questions say more about a campus’s intellectual and Jewish life than the number of protests on the quad.

While White presented a commendable critique of the Campus Climate Brief, he passed along in his article results from a Hillel report on antisemitism on college campuses that share a fundamental problem with the Campus Climate Brief. Hillel inflates its reporting of antisemitism incidents numbers by including in them incidents where people were critical of the Israel government — speech that White praises colleges for accepting on campus. I wrote more about Hillel’s bogus claims regarding antisemitism in a June of 2024 article you can read here.

The crackdown has continued in various forms in the many years since, including with President Ronald Reagan signing into law in 1984 the National Minimum Drinking Age Act. That statute used the threat of withholding highway funds from state governments to pressure them to impose alcohol purchase and possession prohibitions on people under 21 years old. At the time, many states had set lower “drinking ages.”

One US government restriction regarding alcohol is a “Reconstruction era” statutory prohibition that has stayed in place for over 150 years. It bans distilling at home.

This home distilling prohibition could be struck down by the US Supreme Court if the court reviews the case of Ream v. US Department of Treasury. The case involves an Ohio resident who wants to distil spirits at home for his own consumption, something prohibited by US statute since 1868.

C. Jarrett Dieterle of the Manhattan Institute, which is involved in the effort to seek Supreme Court consideration of the case, presented in a Saturday Reason article a review of the ongoing litigation. The article also explains how the top US court deciding in favor of home distilling could additionally impose greater limitations on the US government’s ability to use the Constitution’s Commerce Clause as a basis for restricting the exercise of freedom in other regards as well.

US bonds offering a four to five percent return that can be wiped out by inflation, argued Schiff in the episode, are “not risk free, not at all.” In contrast he asserted that “ironically, there’s one product that the government makes that’s risk free, and that’s the nickel.”

With copper making up 75 percent of each nickel and nickel making up the rest, the increased price of those metals over time has resulted, explained Schiff, in each nickel with a five cent face value having a just over fifty percent higher metal value. That, continued Schiff, means that when you exchange two dollars at a bank for a roll of 40 nickels you walk out with over three-dollars-worth of copper and nickel. “That,” concludes Schiff, “is a can’t lose investment.”

“You can’t lose” in this investment strategy, Schiff elaborated, because that roll of nickels will never be worth less than the face value of two dollars you pad for it — even if copper and nickel values crash. But, if copper and nickel prices rise an additional third you will have “doubled your money,” turning the traded in two dollar bills into roughly four dollars in metal value.

Watch here Schiff discuss investing in nickels in the Tuesday episode of his show.

Take a look as well at my August 19 article “Pennies Have Been Abandoned. Now What Will Be Done with Nickels?” to learn about how the situation with nickels having higher metal value than their face value came about and what the US government may do in response.

Ruffalo’s comments hit the mark. Thus, it is not surprising that instead of trying to refute them, Paramount sought to keep people from considering what Ruffalo said. Paramount did so by rolling out in response the accusation that Ruffalo had used “antisemitic tropes.”

Looking at the coverage in the New York Post of the back-and-forth, it is clear that Ruffalo’s comments in no way criticized anyone on the basis of ethnicity or religious views — what has until recently been nearly universally considered a necessary component of antisemitism. Instead, Ruffalo’s criticism is focused on the actions of the Israel government and the support for such from people and a company related to the proposed corporate acquisition. Tellingly, Paramount in its attack on Ruffalo just threw out the accusation that Ruffalo stated antisemitic tropes without critiquing in particular the comments he made.

In a rejoinder to Paramount and others flinging the antisemitic label at him, Ruffalo wrote in part at Twitter:

The accusation that I am antisemitic is appalling and fundamentally dishonest. Criticizing the actions of the Israeli prime minister, a military technology contract, or the executives who supply it is not the same as criticizing Jewish people.

Hear! Hear!

Fortunately, people are increasingly seeing through such vicious and vacuous smears. The days of being able to suppress people’s arguments by shouting “Antisemitism!” are over. People are on to the misuse of this allegation to condemn statements that criticize the actions of the Israel government or the support others provide for those actions.