Source: New York Post
by Erec Smith

“Recently, Evanston, Ill., enacted the first reparations program in the country. San Francisco is following suit, but its reparations plan is less about policy and more about performance. What is being sold as a moral reckoning and care for citizens in need feels more like a moral play, meant to lull the intended recipients into a false sense of hope. In December, Mayor Daniel Lurie signed a bill, unanimously passed by the city’s Board of Supervisors, that created a mechanism for distributing a one-time $5 million payment to eligible black residents as a form of reparations. San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie speaking at a podium with a logo of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce. It was not long before taxpayers and civil-rights advocacy organizations sued the city for violating the U.S. Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause.” (03/03/26)

https://nypost.com/2026/03/03/opinion/san-franciscos-reparations-plan-is-a-joke/

Source: Wired
by Andy Greenberg

“An iPhone-hacking technique used in the wild to indiscriminately hijack the devices of any iOS user who merely visits a website represents a rare and shocking event in the cybersecurity world. Now one powerful hacking toolkit at the center of multiple mass iPhone exploitation campaigns has taken an even rarer and more disturbing path: It appears to have traveled from the hands of Russian spies who used it to target Ukrainians to a cybercriminal operation designed to steal cryptocurrency from Chinese-speaking victims—and some clues suggest it may have been originally created by a US contractor and sold to the American government.” (03/03/26)

https://archive.is/r7jGc

Source: The UnPopulist
by Pouya Nikmand

“I fled Iran at 18 under the most desperate of circumstances, making a bargain with a human trafficker who secretly abused me for years in exchange for a visa that kept me out of Iran. My birth country was made so inhospitable that to return was to face death. Last week, when I heard that Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader, had been killed in a U.S.-Israeli airstrike, I felt … thankful. My thanks mostly went not to the military operation that ended his life but to the millions of young Iranians who had prepared the ground for his regime’s demise long before the first bomb fell.” (03/03/26)

https://www.theunpopulist.net/p/irans-youth-broke-the-islamic-republics

Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by Ryan McMaken

“The Trump administration has unilaterally—without any Congressional debate or vote, of course—forced Americans into yet another war. This time, the war is a large-scale military campaign against Iran. Was there any groundswell of public support for this war? Did the Congress vote to spend more American tax dollars on another war? Apparently not. According to a March 1 poll from Reuters, only 27 percent of Americans polled said they support the US’s new war on Iran. Needless to say, few Americans have been calling their representatives in Congress asking for yet another Middle Eastern war. So, why is the US now at war with Iran? Not even the administration appears to know for sure.” (03/03/26)

https://mises.org/mises-wire/iran-war-exposes-farce-american-representative-democracy

Source: Niskanen Center
by Gabe Menchaca, Steve Krauss, & Peter Bonner

“Large-scale IT modernization projects fail with remarkable regularity. They fail in private companies with strong profit incentives and unified leadership. They fail in state and local governments with narrower missions and simpler constraints. And they fail — often spectacularly — in the federal government. Entire multibillion‑dollar industries exist precisely because implementing large, complex software, including Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, is hard: technically complex, organizationally disruptive, politically fraught, and culturally destabilizing. OPM’s new HR 2.0 initiative is therefore entering hostile terrain by default. The initiative aspires to rationalize, consolidate, and modernize a sprawling thicket of federal human resources systems that has grown organically over half a century.” (03/04/26)

https://www.niskanencenter.org/a-premortem-on-opms-hr-2-0-initiative-imagining-failure-in-order-to-support-success

Source: The Atlantic
by Jonathan Chait

“After the president of peace, a man who felt deserving of the Nobel Prize, authorized a massive aerial bombardment of Iran last summer, the task of explaining away the contradiction fell to J. D. Vance. … The difference was simple: Other wars were bad because they were led by dumb presidents, but a Trump war would be good because Donald Trump is smart. Yet after the administration’s second wave of air attacks on Iran, the president’s strategy seems more sundown than Sun Tzu.” (03/03/26)

https://archive.is/ezJqV

Source: Electronic Frontier Foundation
by Matthew Guariglia

“The U.S. military has officially ended its $200 million contract with AI company Anthropic and has ordered all other military contractors to cease use of their products. Why? … Anthropic had made it clear since it first signed the contract with the Pentagon in 2025 that it did not want its technology to be used for mass surveillance of people in the United States or for fully autonomous weapons systems. Starting in January, that became a problem for the Department of Defense, which ordered Anthropic to give them unrestricted use of the technology. Anthropic refused, and the DoD retaliated. There is a lot we could learn from this conflict, but the biggest take away is this: the state of your privacy is being decided by contract negotiations between giant tech companies and the U.S. government—two entities with spotty track records for caring about your civil liberties.” (03/03/26)

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/03/anthropic-dod-conflict-privacy-protections-shouldnt-depend-decisions-few-powerful