“It’s a pathetic milestone: Two months ago, about 100 U.S. Marines who otherwise would have been stationed in Okinawa ended up instead on a base in Guam. This was the first force reduction contemplated by longstanding negotiations between Washington and Tokyo designed to trim the gigantic U.S. military footprint in Japan’s southern-most prefecture. Eventually, 9,000 Marines — a little less than half the number now deployed there — are supposed to exit Okinawa. But don’t hold your breath. The two countries, members of the most important security alliance in Asia, have been slow-walking the process.” (02/27/25)
“American politics is a disaster and it’s due, in large part, to the fact that the people in charge have no idea what they’re doing. They don’t know anything, have little interest in learning, but are confident in their ability to fix everything. The result looks to be about what you’d expect: instead of fixing, they’re breaking, and instead of acknowledging that they broke it, they’re insisting that’s just what ‘fixing’ looks like. One way to frame this is that Americans — or enough Americans to win elections — reject expertise. They don’t value knowledge much anymore, and don’t feel they should be led by experts because they’ve looked around, don’t like what they see, and blame it on the experts having led us astray. The solution, at least in their minds, is to replace experts with non-experts, which can’t be any worse, right?” (02/27/25)
“Western leaders and media are helping bolster a propaganda narrative about the Israeli captives that makes the resumption of Israel’s slaughter all but inevitable.” (02/27/25)
“As I look back on my early work, I see too many cases of trying to accommodate hostile opponents… too much effort spent on making my arguments unassailable. And I see that it was wasted effort. It’s time to unchain ourselves from apologetics. It’s time to accept that we are right and to act like it. We’ve already explained ourselves quite publicly and quite well. Those who want to know will know; those who prefer not to know will maintain their shells.” (02/27/25)
“A few decades ago, preventing a North Korean nuke was a reasonable objective. The DPRK was desperately poor and far from joining the nuclear club. Neither of its long-time patrons, the People’s Republic of China and Soviet Union, wanted Pyongyang to possess nuclear weapons. When the Cold War ended and the USSR collapsed, the North was left uniquely vulnerable to U.S. pressure, and therefore perhaps open to a deal. Policymakers hoped that Great Leader Kim Il-sung could be convinced to join the emerging global marketplace. However, that time is long past, and that world long gone. … What can the U.S. threaten or offer to achieve denuclearization? Not much.” (02/27/25)
“The White House press corps has nerve complaining about access to the president after it raised barely a peep in protest at Joe Biden being practically AWOL his entire presidency. Biden didn’t even hold a press conference until two months in. The handful of press conferences he did conduct were a bad joke, in which he would take three or four questions from preselected reporters, whose names and photographs were printed on a card. Yet he still got fawning praise from the Washington media. The worst insult they could muster was ‘boring,’ but the Baltimore Sun even spun that into ‘Biden’s superpower.’ In the absence of access to the president or real news to report, the pool contented itself with secondhand stories about Biden family life, doled out like party favors by unnamed White House staff” (02/26/25)
Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Kerry McDonald
“It’s an exciting time in American K-12 education. Families now have many more choices about where, what, how, and with whom their children learn. Founders are embracing an entrepreneurial spirit when building new schools and the kind of educational spaces that families increasingly want. School-choice policies that enable education funding to follow students continue to expand nationwide, with 33 states now offering some form of private school choice. These school-choice wins should be applauded, as they enable more families to exit a mandatory district-school assignment for other settings if they wish. What shouldn’t be applauded, however, are federal school-choice policies — or federal education policies in general.” (02/27/25)
“Michael Saylor announced via X on Feb. 26, 2025, that his March 11 Bitcoin for America keynote will outline a theoretical strategy to pay off the U.S. national debt, currently at $36 trillion, using bitcoin. Saylor’s provocative assertion, central to his March 11 keynote, likely rests on a detailed, hypothetical plan demanding rare collaboration among lawmakers, regulators and financial bodies. This analysis explores the layered strategy the U.S. might employ to turn this vision into reality.” (02/26/25)
