“MBS’s influence with Trump has grown as the Saudi government has invested billions in projects that personally enrich Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Despite the glaring conflicts-of-interest, Trump installed Kushner as a top negotiator with Iranian officials. Kushner and Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff participated in a mediation session with their Iranian counterparts in Geneva on Thursday, billed as a last-ditch effort to avoid war. The Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund (PIF) is the largest investor in Jared Kushner’s private equity fund, Affinity Partners.” (03/02/26)
“I often get that question. I can’t say I have a very good answer. Going back to the last bubbles, it would be difficult to identify any events in the world that precipitated the collapse of either the 90s tech bubble or the housing bubble in the 00s. Both times the economy seemed to be moving along at healthy clip just prior to the collapse. There had been warnings in both cases. … But these warnings came well before the crashes. There is no obvious event that caused the stock market to turn in March of 2000 or the housing bubble to peak in the summer of 2006.” (03/02/26)
“There is a great deal of legal significance to whether the child of an alien to the United States born in California thereby becomes a citizen of this nation. The longstanding understanding is that such a child benefits from birthright citizenship, that such a child is a natural-born American citizen by virtue of having been born within the United States. That would have been true under the English common law prior to the American Revolution. It was the dominant understanding of American common law after the Revolution. It was the established meaning of the text of the 14th Amendment adopted after the Civil War.” (03/02/26)
Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by James Vermillion
“Böhm-Bawerk was a student of Carl Menger, the founder of the Austrian school of economics, and he became one of the tradition’s most formidable systematizers. His major work, Capital and Interest, published in three volumes between 1884 and 1921, remains one of the most ambitious attempts to explain why capital exists at all and why human beings bother to build tools, factories, institutions, and other intermediate goods when they could, in principle, simply apply their labor directly to the natural world and consume whatever comes out.” (03/02/26)
“GLP-1 drugs — including Ozempic and Wegovy — may be tied to a slightly higher risk of osteoporosis and gout, according to research presented Monday at the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons’ annual meeting. … Osteoporosis is a disease that weakens the bones and makes them likelier to break or fracture, often from minor falls. It’s a common concern for many older adults and for people who lose a significant amount of weight over a short period of time. Gout, meanwhile, is a painful form of arthritis that can occur when the body has too much uric acid, which can come from a diet high in red meat and alcohol — as well as rapid weight loss.” (03/02/26)
“Hu Shih, former president of both Peking University and Academia Sinica, and known for his ties to Chinese liberalism and John Dewey’s (American philosopher and psychologist) experimentalism was an influential figure in Chinese politics and academia. He was also China’s Ambassador to the United States during 1938–1942. Despite Hu Shih’s substantial achievements and impact, there were extended periods where he was officially a ‘forbidden figure’ and was repeatedly and publicly denounced. During Mao Zedong’s regime Hu Shih’s writings were officially purged and censored from circulation. In most of the propaganda red films inside China, the surname ‘Hu’ was mostly given towards counter-revolutionary figures or bourgeois landlords. To understand the Chinese Communist Party (CCP’s) organized efforts to eliminate Hu Shih’s influence from intellectual discourse in China, it becomes important to know his politics and philosophy.” (03/02/26)
