“Movies are big business. In the United States alone, studios pulled in a whopping $8.72 billion in box office revenue last year. Despite these healthy returns, movie companies receive hefty subsidies from state governments countrywide. The reason these subsidies were created and continue to exist provides a powerful lesson in how governments function and the inescapable dilemmas faced by all policymakers.” (02/28/25)
“The so-called wall of separation between church and state in the United States may be excellent policy — the more time I spend in churches and talking with politicians, the more I think it is! — but it has a problem: Nobody voted for it. The First Amendment prohibits the ‘establishment’ of religion, which means the creation of a national church — a state church is what an established church is. And while many of the men who negotiated, argued about, wrote, and ratified the Constitution had wall-of-separation (the phrase itself is, of course, Thomas Jefferson’s) views and many didn’t, none of them thought that they were proposing or voting for a document that might make it illegal to put up Christmas decorations at a public building in Jackson County, Indiana, a couple of centuries hence.” (02/28/25)
“‘There’s no use trying,’ Alice said to the White Queen: ‘One can’t believe impossible things.’ ‘I daresay you haven’t had much practice,’ said the Queen. ‘When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.’ Reality can sometimes seem even stranger than fiction, and the second Trump administration has done what many people supposed to be six impossible things within the first month of its tenure. The upshot is that we are now living in a post-NATO world where black is white, up is down, friends are foes (and vice versa), and once-unthinkable impossibilities have become our new reality.” (03/01/25)
“To understand why organizations grow senescent, get fat, and fail – whether they be public or private – there is probably no topic more important than performance measures and incentives. Many readers will know that I have spent 25 years working with government agencies in a company that privately operates public recreation facilities. Not infrequently I have had my managers, in frustration over something our agency partners have done or not done, complain that the folks they are working with in the government are ‘bad’ people. More generally this is a common refrain of government critics, that state agencies are full of ‘bad’ people. I always disagree with them. The people that the government hires are no different on average than the people hired in private industry.” (03/01/25)
“This Sunday millions will tune in to watch Hollywood’s premier awards ceremony, the Oscars. All eyes will be on the red carpet to see who is wearing what and viewers will be anxiously waiting to see if any drama unfolds — like a Will Smith slap or accidentally awarding the Best Picture Oscar to the wrong film. What won’t be mentioned is the fact that many of the movies vying for Oscar wins wouldn’t have made it to the big screen without help from the U.S. military.” (02/28/25)
“Let’s be honest; it is impossible to be friendly with the radical left. I’m not talking about the run-of-the-mill Democrats who vote that way because their grandparents and parents were Democrats; I’m talking about the hate-America left [sic] – the mutants burning American flags, throwing bricks at cops, and taking over college campuses calling for the extermination of Jews every time Israel retaliates after an attack from terrorist scum. You can’t be friendly with them as they are the enemy of everything good humans have created over the centuries. Harsh, I know, but I didn’t bring us to this point, I’m simply noticing.” (03/02/25)
Source: Christian Science Monitor
by the editorial board
“In the past decade, terrorist attacks in the Middle East have dropped sharply, often because of military defeat, sometimes by a change in conscience. A possible example of the latter came Thursday. In a letter from his prison cell of 26 years, Abdullah Ocalan, founder of a four-decade-old armed insurgency for the rights of the large Kurdish minority in Turkey, called on his outlawed group to disarm and dissolve.” (02/28/25)
