Source: The Daily Economy
by Vance Ginn
“Polls show skepticism is rising, yet the moral and economic case for free markets has never been stronger.” (02/26/26)
https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/capitalisms-coalition-is-cracking-and-that-should-worry-us/
Source: The Dispatch
by Timothy Sandefur
“Hating the rich has been a popular pastime since democracy was invented. The ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes even played on this fact in his comedy Ecclesiazusae, written four centuries before Christ, in which the idealistic Praxagora proposes building a utopian community in which ‘there will no longer be either rich or poor,’ but ‘all property [will] be in common.’ When a friend asks her ‘But who will till the soil?’ Praxagora unselfconsciously replies: ‘The slaves.’ The rhetoric hasn’t improved much since.” (02/26/26)
Source: Popular Information
by Judd Legum
“‘We did not protect President Trump.’ That is what Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said on January 30, after what he described as the final release of the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) files on convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. It turns out that was not true. According to a new report by NPR, the DOJ is withholding ‘more than 50 pages of FBI interviews, as well as notes from conversations with a woman who accused Trump of sexual abuse decades ago when she was a minor.’ The New York Times also reported Wednesday that the DOJ withheld summaries of three FBI interviews with the woman about her interactions with Trump. They released a fourth FBI interview, where the woman made allegations about Epstein.” (02/26/26)
Source: Washington Monthly
by Samantha Powers
“Millions are failing college math. Advocates say the problem isn’t students, but decades-old curricula requiring Cold War-era algebra skills.” (02/26/26)
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2026/02/26/almost-no-one-needs-college-algebra-anymore/
Source: Astral Codex Ten
by Scott Alexander
“In The Argument, Kelsey Piper gives a good description of the ways that AIs are more than just ‘next-token predictors’ or ‘stochastic parrots’ — for example, they also use fine-tuning and RLHF. But commenters, while appreciating the subtleties she introduces, object that they’re still just extra layers on top of a machine that basically runs on next-token prediction. … I want to approach this from a different direction. I think overemphasizing next-token prediction is a confusion of levels. On the levels where AI is a next-token predictor, you are also a next-token (technically: next-sense-datum) predictor. On the levels where you’re not a next-token predictor, AI isn’t one either.” (02/26/26)
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/next-token-predictor-is-an-ais-job
Source: The Unpopulist
by Nicholas Grossman
“Iran won’t capitulate under threat, forfeiting major national interests because Trump told it to. His track record suggests he doesn’t have the stomach or strategic foresight for protracted conflict, and will back down if things get difficult, which makes Iranian leaders think they can weather an assault. And they have strong domestic political incentives to resist, fearing that weakness against foreign pressure could fracture the regime or encourage domestic opponents. That leaves the U.S. choosing between another round of limited bombing that accomplishes little, a bigger campaign to collapse the regime with no apparent plan for what comes after, backing down in embarrassing fashion, or an empty ‘deal’ Trump can lie about that, at best, kicks the can down the road and makes the problem even harder to solve. It’s easy to predict which option he’ll pick.” (02/26/26)
https://www.theunpopulist.net/p/trump-cant-win-on-the-cheap-in-iran
Source: Quillette
by Eric Kaufmann
“The surge in support for Australia’s populist right-wing party One Nation suggests that immigration restrictionism has become increasingly popular with voters: a political trajectory that echoes that of many other Western nations.” (02/26/26)
Source: Responsible Statecraft
by Pavel Devyatkin
“The Trump administration has accused China of secretly testing a nuclear weapon in 2020. The group that monitors nuclear tests worldwide, the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO), says it couldn’t confirm a test actually occurred. China has rejected the accusations, calling them a distortion of its nuclear policy. Instead of treating this as a technical disagreement for international institutions to sort out, the Trump administration appears to be using these claims to push for restarting U.S. nuclear testing ‘on an equal basis.'” (02/26/26)
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/trump-china-nuclear-weapons-test/
Source: The American Prospect
by Maureen Tkacik
“Almost nobody noticed earlier this month when the New York Daily News announced what felt like a 500th round of layoffs. Not long ago, the venerable working-class tabloid behind ‘FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD’ would have been the ideal outlet for demystifying the prodigious evils of the Uptown Epstein network for outer-borough New Yorkers who elected Zohran Mamdani. But the latest iteration of ‘New York’s Hometown Newspaper’ has all of four reporters covering national news. The ‘adults in the room’ always say a conspiracy theory becomes less plausible for every individual and institution it implicates. But the Epstein network is so vast and so varied it would suggest that the conspiracy is the system, if we had any institutions capable of making sense of it.” (02/26/26)
Source: Liberal Currents
by Alan Elrod
“More evidence that the Republican Party has been entirely transformed into the party of violence and authoritarianism.” (02/26/26)