"Immortal Rome was at first but an insignificant village...but by degrees it rose to a stupendous height, and excelled din arts and arms. But the demolition of Carthage, by removing all danger, suffered it to sink into debauchery and made it easy prey to Barbarians." John Adams

''The preservation of liberty depends upon the intellectual and moral character of the people.''

From John Adams, by David McCullough p 70.

This made-up, political BS term 'narco-terrorist' bothers me. "Terrorist" has a definition: to sow fear among the civilian population, usually for political reasons. The only people drug dealers usually want to intimidate are the competition.

We have our guesses, but it's pretty clear as to just WHO would be interested in allocating their resources toward running a foreign influence operation aiming to get Alberta to secede from Canada?

a few years ago, no one could merely be cautious. Everything was done out of 'an abundance of caution.' Thankfully, that's gone away for the most part. Can the phrase 'authoritarian playbook' please go the same way? There are lots of synonyms if we look for them

The Paranoid Style in American Economics
open.substack.com/pub/paulkrug...

The problem appears to be that Trump and I have been playing snap while Zelensky and Budanov were playing poker.