“At what point must we be frank about the fact that Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb author who died last week at the age of 93, was not simply wrong about almost everything he ever wrote or said or thought, but positively and culpably dishonest? If ever there were an intellectual grave that deserves pissing on posthaste, it is Paul Ehrlich’s. So let us commence. Ehrlich was an intellectual fraud, something he had in common with many of the celebrated pseudoscientists, quacks, and cranks who became intellectual heroes to our era’s progressives, from Sigmund Freud to Noam Chomsky, Rachel Carson, Margaret Sanger, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. until about five minutes ago. (Right-wingers don’t go around reading books by crackpots — they put them into the Cabinet.)” (03/17/26)
“Trump’s use of the constitution’s plenary grant of pardon authority to him — from all the J6’ers, to his cronies and friends, to implicit promises to administration thugs high and low — has been without precedent in scale to be sure. But the history of the pardon clause has always been fraught. Increasingly in the last few generations its abuses — from Clinton’s Marc Rich to Bush’s Iran Contra plotters — have become prominent. Amendments may require Republican members of Congress to get on board, but they do not require the president. Pardon reform, especially if it does not have a particular partisan valence, could be a low hanging fruit for the 120th Congress to address through that mechanism.” (03/17/26)
“Equality under the law and global federalism — two of Hayek’s most cogent ideals — are consequential from numerous perspectives and justified by many strong arguments. A dozen phrases pass through the mind — ‘The best arguments persuade,’ ‘The truth will out,’ ‘Survival of the fittest beliefs,’ ‘Truth emerges from the marketplace of ideas’ — to accost reality. Unfortunately, society is not a truth table, where the input of truth entails the output of further truths. Truth tables are constructs of logic, and reality is not beholden to the results of formal logic and its apparatuses.” (03/17/26)
Source: Antiwar.com
by Jeffrey D Sachs & Sybil Fares
“The Israel-US war on Iran is engulfing the entire Middle East and could escalate to global war. The economic consequences are already severe and could become catastrophic. The Strait of Hormuz carries approximately one-fifth of all oil traded globally, and 30 percent of the world’s LNG. A sustained closure of the Strait would trigger an energy shock without modern precedent. The conflict is likely to spiral out of control because the US and Israel are dead set on hegemony in the Arab world and West Asia – one that combines Israeli territorial expansion with American-backed regime control across the region. The ultimate goal is a Greater Israel that absorbs all historic Palestine, combined with compliant Arab and Islamic governments stripped of genuine sovereignty, including on choices as to how and where they export their oil and gas. This is delusional.” (03/17/26)
“More than material weapons might sway the war in Iran. As both Washington and Tehran are finding out, allies that would come to your assistance probably prefer to first share your values and not just mutual interests. On Saturday, President Donald Trump put out a call to seven countries to send ships to defend the vital oil-shipping lanes in the Strait of Hormuz. The response has been largely halting – at best, hesitant. The international uncertainty over the legal premise for the U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iran is probably a hindrance to those nations in risking their military to protect petroleum flows. ‘This is not our war; we did not start it,’ said Boris Pistorius, Germany’s defense minister. For Iran, two of its most powerful partners, China and Russia, are largely playing a minor role in the conflict, focusing mainly on crisis management or diplomacy.” (03/16/26)
“I loved my father, and I still admire his instinctive belief in freedom and justice. But in the years since his passing, I have grown uneasy with how confidently diaspora voices like his continue to shape American debates about Iran. Too often, those conversations are marked by certainty untethered from lived experience and by a readiness for confrontation that carries little personal cost. … Many of the loudest calls for regime change in Iran come from outside the country. Figures such as Reza Pahlavi, the son of the late shah of Iran who was ousted from power in 1979, are frequently elevated in Western media as potential transitional leaders, even though their level of support inside Iran is unclear and cannot be freely measured under current conditions.” (03/17/26)
“You vill eat ze bugs! Sorry, Klaus. Not interested. … as if to prove that Schwab’s Great Reset of our diet will not be driven by cartoonish elitists, Ÿnsect — Europe’s largest insect farm — has officially gone bankrupt.” (03/17/26)
“The notion that the ancient Israelites were a kind of prototype for a modern nation is more a creative misreading than solid history — which is not really a knock, since most novel ideas start as creative misreadings of old ones, but which does suggest that plain old nationalism is all we’re talking about here, with the use of the word ‘Zionism’ being just a kind of rhetorical trapping. And the most obvious problem with advocating a nationalist revival is that the first round of nationalism was incredibly bloody, and continues to be so today; pay a visit to the Donbas if you doubt it. Contrary to the theory that the often violent birth of nations was a mere transition, nationalists have not generally been happy to tend their own gardens but often take a keen interest in those of their neighbors.” (03/17/26)
“[N]early everyone was complicit. Politicians, media, educators — they all went along with the hysteria. Now, they want to sweep it under the rug, pretending it never happened. Everyone failed. But we cannot forget.” (03/17/26)
