“Does Fauci catch on that the media was using him as much as he was using them; that is, that he inhabited a world of fakery? Maybe but he decides early on that it is his only choice. He has to keep it up, otherwise his whole world crumbles. He just kept going for one year, two years, then three. This Icarus just kept flapping his wings without realizing that they were melting. Another feature that stands out: It was always political theater and never about science.” (08/03/26)
“The Democratic Socialists of America was once a fringe movement. Its recent victories confirm it is now an increasingly powerful national political force. … The DSA’s primary election victories catapulted new political stars into the national spotlight and gave the movement further proof that it can defeat senior Democrats and reshape the party’s delegation. Yet the proverbial Democratic elephant in the room has become nationally consequential: If the DSA operates like a political party, why does it continue running candidates through another one? … DSA supporters reasonably argue that America’s two-party system makes independent organizing difficult and that separate socialist candidacies could help Republicans. But an organization calling for multiparty democracy should help create one, not depend indefinitely on the Democratic ballot line.” (08/03/26)
Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Douglas Carswell
“‘What is a think tank?’ is a question I get asked all the time. The job of a think tank is to generate the ideas that politicians implement in office. If politics were the movie industry, those we elect would be the stars on the big screen; think tanks help write the script. ‘But don’t politicians have ideas of their own?’ I hear you ask. Of course they do (though having spent 12 years in the House of Commons before running a think tank, I’d suggest they have them less often than you might imagine). Even with a clear goal—cutting taxes, improving childcare, encouraging growth—elected leaders often need help with the details of how to make it happen. Free-market think tanks have been enormously influential.” (08/03/26)
“Military threats move markets before they move armies. Announce a massive strike against Iranian oil, military, and infrastructure sites, and traders will immediately begin pricing in damaged production, regional retaliation, interrupted shipping, higher insurance costs, and possible disruption of the Strait of Hormuz. No missile needs to be launched. The announcement itself can add a substantial geopolitical premium to every barrel of oil. Cancel the attack a few days later, however, and much of that premium may disappear just as quickly. … for someone possessing advance knowledge of both the threat and its prearranged cancellation, the same sequence could provide an extraordinary opportunity to profit from a government-created price movement in both directions.” (08/03/26)
“To be college-educated about the West in 2026 is to have great works run through some combination of critical theory, identity politics, and post-colonial studies—the teeth used to chew our identity and our ideals. (Thankfully, there is a group of insurgents keeping the best of the West alive online, though one has to learn to separate signal from slop.) Now, if you were to ask me what the most important work of the Western canon is to our sense of shared identity, it is surely the Exodus story. That story has interesting and important details. It’s full of symbolism, yet it is also based upon peoples and cultures that once lived to tell the tale. But I want to do something risky with Exodus.” (08/03/26)
“If Washington is good at anything, it is self-celebration. Those who dominate the city constantly remind the public, especially those who live in the great beyond, the ‘flyover country’ between the coasts, of the eternal wisdom, dedication, genius, and goodness of those who have successfully climbed the capital’s well-greased pole of political rule. Never is the shameless hypocrisy on greater display than during the funerals of those who did the most to sacrifice the interests of the Americans who lack genuine representation in Washington. Such was Tuesday’s commemoration of the passing of Sen. Lindsey Graham (R‑SC).” (08/03/26)
“Making an enemies list is creepy. Publishing the names of people you dislike to fuel political supporters’ prejudices is even creepier and potentially dangerous. That’s what New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration has done with the introduction of a property tax surcharge on relatively high-value second homes linked to a searchable online database of those who could be affected. The socialist mayor’s defenders point out that tax and property information is a matter of public record in New York, but the packaged publication of surcharge targets and Mamdani’s history of calling out opponents by name suggests something nastier is going on.” (08/03/26)
“A long, long time ago (27 years, to be exact), my boss (the inimitable Mark Melcher) and I predicted that the European Monetary Union would be the death of the EU. The Euro, we wrote for our clients at a now-defunct big brokerage house, would be a disaster and would destroy everything that the post-war Europeans had spent the previous several decades working to build. Specifically, we wrote: ‘Psst! You wanna know a secret? The Euro, and the mess it represents, is going to be a social, economic and political catastrophe. Indeed, we think it is probable that the adoption of the Euro will be to 21st century Europe, what the killing of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was to 20th century Europe …” (08/03/26)
“In 1925, John Maynard Keynes dismissed Marx’s Capital as an obsolete economic textbook that no serious economist would still assign. He was not being contrarian. By the time he wrote that, the marginal revolution of the 1870s had already done the intellectual work: Jevons, Menger, Walras, and later Wicksteed, Marshall, and Böhm-Bawerk had dismantled the labor theory of value that Marx’s entire economic system rested on. Among economists, the argument was over, and Marx had lost it. So why does Marx remain one of the most cited authors in the humanities and social sciences, a century and a half after his death, in fields far removed from the one where his core claims were actually tested?” (08/03/26)
“The popular rightwing network spent months building a case for the Iran War. Now they are invested in keeping up support, even if hosts have to deny reality.” (08/03/26)
