“An image of Iran as a regional bête noire has long served Israel’s objective of drawing international attention away from Israeli conduct. This is a major reason Israel has promoted unending confrontation with Iran, including the starting and continuation of the current war. This also helps explain why Israel opposes and often seeks to sabotage diplomacy with Tehran. Netanyahu’s government is using the current preoccupation with a rekindled U.S.-Iranian war to intensify its violent subjugation of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. While President Donald Trump has said little about Gaza in recent weeks, Israel’s actions there are undermining the president’s 20-point peace plan for Gaza, which he proposed last October.” (07/21/26)
“This month, amid World Cup fever, New York City implemented a new job-protection law. This law forbids app-based rideshare platforms from removing drivers unless they can show they have ‘just cause’ or a ‘bona fide economic reason.’ The new law follows a pattern set by a similar pandemic-era law, also from New York City, which applied the same standards to the fast-food industry. As examples of political sloganeering, these laws are hard to beat: no one will argue with fairness in firing. But as economic policies, they’re nothing short of an own goal. By making it harder to fire people, they inadvertently discourage businesses from hiring those people in the first place. They also make it harder for already-employed people to switch jobs.” (07/21/26)
Source: Common Dreams
by Jeffrey D Sachs & Sybil Fares
“Eisenhower’s warning that US policy would be captured by a scientific-technological elite supplies a specific reason the US sustains the Ukraine war: Ukraine has become a unique, live-fire laboratory for AI warfare at scale.” (07/21/26)
“The thing we now call ‘conservatism’ in the West largely comes out of a reaction against the French Revolution and other revolutionary movements inspired by it. The Continental conservatives—e.g., Joseph de Maistre, Friedrich von Gentz, Klemens von Metternich, and Juan Donoso Cortés—embraced monarchism, often including its more authoritarian and absolutist varieties, in an effort to avoid repeating the excesses of the French revolution. The conservatives also opposed economic liberalism in the form of free trade and ‘free markets’ because these were associated—wrongly in many cases—with the French revolutionaries.” (07/21/26)
“We didn’t invent liberal capitalism in 2020, so liberal capitalism didn’t cause our current round of unhappiness. The simplest explanation is the pandemic. I’m not sure it’s exactly that simple, because some preliminary results suggest happiness hasn’t rebounded as much as you’d expect after the pandemic ended. I went into this in more in my vibecession post, but I think the lingering national bad mood is a combination of …” (07/21/26)
Source: The American Conservative
by W James Antle III
“Recent socialist victories in Democratic primaries appear to be narrowing the party’s lead, with Republicans outrunning Trump’s job approval rating and possessing a real opportunity to defy history. But Republicans cannot forever defy basic math, economics, or gravity. It is now summertime. Public perceptions of the economy will be baked in by Labor Day, with extremely limited opportunities for improvement by Election Day after that. The public’s attitude about the Iran war may already be set, and not to Trump’s or the GOP’s benefit.” (07/21/26)
“In the early 1930s, the Australian government lost a war against emus, and its present war, this time on tobacco, is heading the same way. Excessive taxation in the name of public health has backfired in extraordinary fashion, helping create a massive black market in tobacco products. This has led to an effective transfer to criminal gangs of billions of dollars of revenue previously earned by the legal tobacco industry, and a corresponding significant drop in excise tax revenue collected by the government, unprecedented violence between those gangs as they scrap over money and territory, and, to top it all off, an increase in the consumption of tobacco and nicotine.” (07/20/26)
“Young progressives are more likely to consider normal day-to-day struggles — like difficulty sleeping and feeling blue — as mental health problems, per a new analysis. Is it any wonder, given the left-leaning ideology that convinces Americans that the system is simply stacked against them? Data from the US General Social Survey, analyzed by the Financial Times, revealed that younger people and more progressive people were more likely to believe that everything from feeling worried, trouble sleeping and feeling a little sad were symptomatic of a disorder. … This politics of suffering and victimization pairs perfectly with a population eager to identify with their struggles rather than their strengths. In recent years, claiming mental illness has become chic in progressive spaces, conferring socially valuable oppression points in the battle to prove who is most downtrodden.” (07/20/26)
