“Benjamin Franklin said it best: ‘There never was a good war, or a bad peace.’ Now that war is again underway — the third attack on Iran in two years — people of healthy human consciousness must pray that the destruction and carnage is limited. Yet the trajectory appears to be grim. Wars often progress in unexpected ways. The Persian Gulf region is a tangled spaghetti plate of interests including economic, religious, cultural, and geopolitical. None of our politicians have proved capable of comprehending those interests and foreseeing the consequences of their elective wars.” (03/04/26)
“Lawmakers in at least eight states this year are aiming to reel in wage garnishment for unpaid medical bills. The legislation introduced in Colorado, Florida, Hawaii, Indiana, Maine, Michigan, Ohio, and Washington builds on efforts made in other states in past years. This latest push for patient protections comes as the Trump administration has backed away from federal debt protections, health care has become more costly, and more people are expected to go without medical coverage or choose cheaper but riskier high-deductible insurance plans that could lead them into debt. … Wage garnishment is one tool creditors can use in most states to recoup money from people with unpaid bills. In many states, they can garnish someone’s bank account or put a lien on their home, too.” (03/04/26)
“Jonah Goldberg discusses the Iran war, Trump’s governing style, the rise of the populist right, and why he believes the GOP is drifting away from conservatism.” (03/04/26)
Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Deborah Palma
“Brazil finds itself at a historical crossroads that demands a rigorous analysis of its institutional structures. The release of the 2025 Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI), record-breaking data from the Impostômetro, and the persistence of an authoritarian labor framework expose a system of economic asphyxiation and moral erosion. The State, under the pretext of protecting the citizen, in reality hinders their initiative, their property, and their future.” (03/04/26)
“Right-wing criticism of Trump’s war has mostly come from familiar MAGA cranks like Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson. But it could quickly spiral out of control.” (03/04/26)
“A Brazilian Supreme Court Justice ordered the arrest of Daniel Vorcaro, the former head of a bank worth up to $16 billion in assets, in a new phase of a sprawling investigation into a fraud involving billions of reais. In the 48-page long decision authorizing Vorcaro’s pretrial detention signed Tuesday and accessed by The Associated Press on Wednesday, Justice André Mendonça said the probe had already revealed signs of crimes by Banco Master against the finance and justice systems as well as participation in organized crime and money laundering. Separately, Brazil’s federal police said Wednesday in a statement that they had launched raids ‘investigating the possible crimes of threats, corruption, money laundering and invasion of computer systems carried out by a criminal organization.'” (03/04/26)
“In his famous draft of the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798, Thomas Jefferson advised that ‘in questions of power, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.’ Jefferson’s rhetorically powerful phrase rested on a simple assumption: that the Constitution constrained federal power. That assumption is understandable. After all, the Constitution is written, and it contains a list of powers. For generations, most Americans have followed Jefferson down this well-worn interpretive path and assumed that enumeration equals limitation. It now appears, however, that we have all been profoundly mistaken.” (03/04/26)
“One of the favors that chatbots have done for humanities professors is to reveal to us that chatbots are so good at doing the thesis-essay assignment because it has always been an exceptionally formulaic thing. If we engage in a little self-examination, we’ll realize that we like it formulaic, because that reduces the time and mental energy we have to invest in grading. It’s easy to compare any given student’s essay to the template in your mind and quickly see the extent to which it matches or deviates from it. The rise of the chatbots — with their algorithmic pattern-matching, their stochastic parrot behavior — has revealed that students and faculty alike have been, for many decades, functioning in exactly the same way. If we could confront our chatbots the way parents confront their kids about drug use, the bots would surely reply ‘I learned it by watching you!'” (03/04/26)
