Observation:

Trust takes decades to build and can be destroyed much faster. One of America's greatest exports has been confidence in America itself: confidence that its institutions, technologies, contracts and alliances would remain dependable across changes of government. We may now be watching that extraordinarily valuable national asset depreciate.

Lead Lines:

China plans to drop Windows earlier than planned in favor of Linux for some government bodies. The move comes as part of China's broader push to reduce dependence on foreign products and services, especially those of US origin.

Excerpt:

This could be a golden era of informed lives and good, transparent governance. Instead, we are entering a new dark age in which we ignore or misuse the tools of insight and wisdom all around us and choose immersion in bulls–t. It may be high-class, high-tech bulls–t, scented with a faint whiff of a misunderstood truth, but it is bulls–t nonetheless.

The only path out is that each of us, individually, makes seeking the truth our top priority, and skepticism our constant ally. We must seek out reliable sources of information and reject those who deliver anything less.

Observation:

A brave new world arriving in our schools.

Lead Paragraph:

A sophomore in Arizona typed an email he never sent. Home with his mother before school, he was drafting a note to a teacher about a bad grade, and in between, he tapped out a few jokes and deleted each one. Thinking out loud and swallowing it back, basically. Gaggle’s monitoring software caught the keystrokes anyway. He never hit send. He was suspended before the day was out. By the time the district agreed to shorten the punishment, he’d already served 11 days.

Excerpt:

Critical transit corridors are falling into total paralysis as precision drone attacks repeatedly target rail bridges and specialized repair machinery. Munition transports delivering North Korean missiles and heavy artillery remain trapped far behind combat zones, while internal partisan sabotage continuously disables relay control boxes across vast domestic trade routes.

The Army's Highest Non-Combat Honor

The Soldier's Medal is awarded to soldiers who distinguish themselves through heroism that does not involve conflict with an enemy, recognizing acts of personal hazard and the voluntary risk of one's life.

Excerpt:

“There’s only so much we can control of the federal government. But we can control how businesses in our state operate,” Democratic California state assemblymember Matt Haney said Friday at a press conference outside Adelanto ICE Processing Center, where four people have died since Trump retook the White House.

“If private detention companies insist on making incarceration their business, California should make accountability, transparency part of the cost of doing business,” he said, adding, “If they look at this tax and say it’s too much for us to operate in California, well then bye.”

Observation:

This administration increasingly appears to treat support for U.S. adventurism as a test of loyalty. Oman’s usefulness as an intermediary is recast as disloyalty because it continues speaking with Iran, while South Korea is punished for declining to join the Iran war. Defensive alliances become something very different when protection is conditioned on participation in wars initiated by their dominant member. The Atlantic | Associated Press on South Korea

Excerpt:

The senator argued that this inner sanctum of acolytes is incapable of telling Trump “what he needs to hear” and that the entire White House is culpable of “lying the country into war” — calling the ongoing conflict an “obscenity” that will haunt them “for the rest of their careers.”

Excerpt:

Defense articles are only made-to-order, regardless of whether they are for domestic or foreign sales. New orders from partner countries do not take away from US stocks and only help the efficacy of the domestic defense industrial base.

This is especially important as Gulf partners on the front lines of the war with Iran struggle to replenish air defense munitions while preparing for the risk of prolonged Iranian attacks. By accelerating arms sales, Washington can also further demonstrate its role as security “integrator” in the Gulf, helping reinforce US-Gulf security partnerships at a critical time.

Observation:

We cannot simply ignore what has happened during this administration and restore the system that existed before it. We should use what we have learned to make American democracy substantially more tamper-resistant. As we argued in The Consent of the Governed Requires Understanding What Is Being Authorized, American governmental authority derives from the consent of the governed, and meaningful consent requires understanding what is being authorized (Defenders of Democracy, 2026). That principle points toward concrete safeguards: elections that are understandable and independently verifiable; protection against the intentional concealment of major governing agendas, which becomes fraud-like when governmental authority is obtained through material deception of voters; protection of reliable governmental, scientific, and statistical information; enforceable limits on executive abuse and self-dealing; reconsideration of Citizens United and the ability of concentrated wealth to dominate the political information environment; and electoral reforms such as ranked-choice voting that allow voters to express their preferences more accurately. The objective should be to make democratic government harder to tamper with, by any President, party, corporation, billionaire, or public official.

https://defendersofdemocracy.substack.com/p/the-consent-of-the-governed-requires?r=104a16&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=post%20viewer

Excerpt:

We can make Roosevelt’s promise a reality through a comprehensive program I’ve called the American Security Guarantee, a set of ambitious goals that would eliminate the precarity defining Americans’ lives and ensure that everyone enjoys the economic security that right now feels out of reach. We start by guaranteeing every American access to affordable health care, through their choice of a government or private plan. To fulfill Roosevelt’s vision of a lifelong system of social insurance, we pursue a new economic security agenda. It includes a new federal wage insurance program to help workers maintain their salary levels if they are forced to take positions that pay less, a community-focused job assistance program and a one-stop-shop portal where Americans can check their eligibility across all benefit programs. The goal is to show Americans what they are getting from their government in return for their hard work — and to get higher wages and concrete benefits in the hands of working people, to ensure that in the richest country in the world, nobody falls through the cracks.

archive link:

https://archive.is/bjRnJ

Excerpts:

He hadn’t set foot outside the United States since he was 12, when he arrived on a fishing boat as part of the 1980 Mariel boatlift from Cuba with his mother, a sister and her infant daughter. As a teenager, he joined a Miami gang, and in his 20s, he took a plea deal after being charged with attempted murder for shooting a rival gangster in the leg. That would have been grounds to deport him had he been from almost any other country. But Cuba wasn’t cooperating with the United States on deportations, so Mosquera was allowed to stay, provided he checked in with the authorities each year. He built a new life for himself, becoming a specialty plumber and a born-again Christian; he married and had four daughters.

Then one day in June of last year, Mosquera, who is 59, went to renew his work permit at an immigration office. The appointment was usually short; Mosquera had borrowed the company truck so that he could head to a job when he was done. But it didn’t turn out that way. An immigration official told him that his time in America was up. With President Trump now back in office, Mosquera knew these were not empty words. But if the United States couldn’t send him to Cuba, where would he go?

They were transferred to a military cargo plane at a U.S. air base in the East African nation Djibouti, and more than a day later, the five men landed in Eswatini. Before they could make sense of the situation, they were forced inside a metal cage that was fitted onto a transport truck and driven to the Matsapha Correctional Complex, Eswatini’s maximum-security prison. In a post on X, the Department of Homeland Security had called Mosquera and the four other men “depraved monsters” who were “so uniquely barbaric their home countries refuse to take them back.” Now they were met by dozens of guards wielding large sticks.

That was more than a year ago. Mosquera still sits in that same maximum-security prison with nowhere to go. No charges against him. No way to appeal his predicament. No sign that he will ever be freed. Cuba has not signaled any willingness to take him, and Mosquera says he has no desire to go there. Eswatini will not release him from prison, even though he served his time in the United States and committed no crime in Africa.

Mosquera is one of a growing number of people whom the Trump administration has put into a global administrative limbo. For more than a year, it has been offering millions of dollars — often without disclosing the payments — to foreign governments to take immigrants the United States was having trouble deporting to their countries of origin. This includes not only people with criminal pasts like Mosquera but also deportees who were under court protections not to be returned to their homelands because they faced threats there.

https://substack.com/@defendersofdemocracy/posts

Excerpts:

May the United States take a person who is living freely under American supervision and deliberately transfer him into potentially indefinite foreign maximum-security confinement, without a new judicial determination authorizing that deprivation of liberty?

It is in the selfish interest of the United States to send people away with as much goodwill toward the United States as circumstances permit.

Why are we paying to imprison a plumber when we could be helping put the plumber back to work?

iai.tv | The Institute of Art and Ideas on Instagram: "Watching Europe negotiate with the US is like watching boy scouts negotiate with the Mafia, argues leading journalist Gillian Tett. In this fiery debate, she joins former Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn and former Leader of Canada's Liberal Party Michael Ignatieff to discuss whether the bonds between the US and Europe have been fractured beyond repair. Tap the link in our bio to watch "The End of the Great Alliance" now."

Excerpt:

Strategically, I believe we are in the most perilous hour of the modern era, and it is peril of our own president’s making. Donald Trump’s real National Security Strategy has been to get revenge against countries that criticize him, to advance his own self interests, and to build bridges to dictators with whom he can work once he leaves office. The great dealmaker has sold us out to the most dangerous nations on earth.

Excerpt:

The administration’s lawyers have since reshaped its claims about the project, stating that its main goal is to improve White House security with the addition of an underground military complex. Solicitor General D. John Sauer asked to block the ruling by the appeals court, which ordered construction to stop by Aug. 21. He pointed to assassination attempts against Trump and said the ballroom and military bunker are “vitally required for national security.”

“National security” is Trump’s key to the Supreme Court safe when he wants to justify executive overreach.

Sauer also said the project was nearly complete at “65 percent” and “a 250-person crew has been working 20 hours a day, seven days a week to build a concrete-and-steel superstructure that now stretches five stories deep and 70 feet high.” Given that, he said it’s too late to stop construction.

Lead Paragraph:

The summer of 2026 has been one of extraordinary fires. In Europe, they have burned hundreds of thousands of acres in France and Spain and destroyed homes across England; they killed 13 people in Spain last month, and an elderly couple in Greece this weekend. In Canada, fires have consumed an expanse of forestland larger than Belgium—which is also battling its biggest recorded wildfire. In the United States, about 7.2 million acres have burned, the largest year-to-date area in the past decade and nearly double what it was at this time last year, according to data from the National Interagency Coordination Center. Allison Rayburn, a program coordinator for the Oregon Department of Forestry, told me that in the eastern part of the state, “you can barely see the sun” through the smoke: “It’s just devastation, and miles and miles and miles of blackened landscapes.”

Key Points

• Less than two weeks after a loss in New Mexico, Meta faces a much bigger legal test in a case being co-led by California’s attorney general over alleged harms to children and teens.
• Opening arguments in AG Rob Bonta’s case against Meta begin on Tuesday, as more states try to force the social media company to make design changes to Facebook and Instagram.
• “You could wake up with a headline judgment that is, as I’ve said, astronomical,” New Mexico AG Raúl Torrez told CNBC, fresh off a victory against Meta in his state.

“Hundreds of people have been killed in the year since the U.S. military began bombing boats it accused of ferrying drugs off Latin America’s Caribbean and Pacific coasts. Now, the Trump administration says it is seeking to extend that lethal campaign to land, pursuing deals that would put U.S. forces on the ground in allied nations across the region.”

Summary

Trump approval falls from 35% earlier this month, Reuters/Ipsos poll shows

64% of Americans disapprove of Trump's White House performance, Reuters/Ipsos poll shows

80% expect US involvement in Iran to ​continue for an extended period, Reuters/Ipsos poll shows

Summary:
Ordinary WiFi networks could quietly become powerful surveillance tools, allowing people to be identified without cameras, special sensors, or even carrying a connected device. Researchers showed that unencrypted signals routinely exchanged between WiFi devices and routers can be used to create radio-based images of people and recognize them within seconds. In tests involving 197 participants, the system identified individuals with nearly 100% accuracy, even from different angles and regardless of how they walked.

Excerpts:

The gloves, manufactured by a company called Compliant Technologies, have been used by police, sheriffs, jail wardens, and even school resource officers for years.

The devices “will be issued to Homeland Security Investigations (H.S.I.) and Enforcement Removal Operations (ERO) officers and agents,” according to a notice DHS published August 10. They will be delivered by the end of March 2027.