“Alicia Kennedy, one of the most celebrated food writers of her generation, sometimes seems to approach food as a series of moral dilemmas waiting to be untangled. In her new memoir, On Eating—a useful starting point to consider progressive culture as a whole—she writes that alcohol ‘is one of the most wasteful things one can consume, producing twelve times the wastewater for the amount of spirit created.’ Climate change may make wheat scarce, she worries. Sugar, meanwhile, conjures up a litany of horrors—it was originally harvested by slaves, and the present-day sugar industry is often accused of mistreating workers. … For at least a decade, left-of-center, educated, middle-class-and-above Westerners have become inflamed with guilt for the way we live. In a roundabout way, the left has reinvented the idea of sin.” (07/06/26)
“I’m serious, and this is not just my disgust with everything Trump. There is no good reason for the overwhelming majority of people in the country to ever put a dollar in a Trump account for their kids. To be clear, I’m not in favor of tax-sheltered accounts in general. They strike me mostly as a very inefficient way to accomplish public goals, in this case making education more affordable. The more efficient route would be to have more public funds go to support public colleges and community colleges. The tax-sheltered account route also favors higher-income people. Over a quarter of households owe no income tax, meaning they would get no benefit whatsoever from putting money in a tax-sheltered account. Another 20 percent are in the 10 percent bracket, meaning the account would just save them just 10 cents on every dollar invested. By contrast, the highest income households save 37 cents on every dollar invested in a tax-sheltered account.” (07/07/26)
Source: Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression
by Marie McMullan
“For nearly four decades, students in America’s public schools have experienced a straightjacketed version of the First Amendment. That’s due to the Supreme Court’s Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier decision. School administrators — who are government officials — have used Hazelwood to censor student expression, often prioritizing the school’s reputation over student voices. These administrators mark certain stories and topics as off-limits, including critiques of school boards or commentary on federal immigration policy. … Justice Samuel Alito’s recent dissent calling the Court to reconsider Hazelwood should be echoed, not dismissed.” (07/06/26)
“Today it is not revolutionary communists but so-called conservatives who wish to trample on human individuality in service of dreams of a remade society.” (07/07/26)
“When the U.S. launched a war against Iran in February, it sent the prices of goods like fuel and fertilizer skyrocketing. Hoping to remediate the damage, President Donald Trump issued a waiver of Section 27 of the Merchant Marine Act of 1920. Better known as the Jones Act, the statute says cargo moving between American ports must be carried on a ship that was built in America, with predominantly American owners and crew. … Since the waiver has been in effect, America’s shipping lanes have thrived—providing further evidence that we should scrap the Jones Act altogether.” (07/06/26)
Source: In These Times
by Adam Johnson and Steven Thrasher
“In late May, Adam Johnson, author of How to Sell a Genocide: The Media’s Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza spoke with Steven Thrasher, author of The Overseer Class: A Manifesto, about their respective books’ efforts to catalogue the ways that many of the same elite voices now opposed to Trump resorted to similarly Orwellian and even violent tactics in their effort to quell the movement for Palestinian liberation after Oct. 7. Their talk dissects the way these powerful liberals, as Thrasher puts it, exist to ’police the boundaries of what we’re allowed to think about and what we’re allowed to do.'” (07/06/26)
“Is it selfish, asks Good Morning Britain, to want air conditioning? Yes, it’s selfish to want to live and prosper and be comfortable in 90 degree heat. And this ‘selfish’ cooling is bad because … ? According to ‘the experts’ queried by the Good Morning Britain presenters — which broadcasts using ‘non-green’ energy — it’s bad because ‘we know’ that the cooling of indoor air will heat up the outdoors — and therefore the planet. Catastrophically, of course. But we don’t know. It’s one of many unproven assertions about the future of weather that get tossed around to make us feel guilty about not wanting to live in caves and eat dandelions.” (07/06/26)
“We live in condition Z. The libertarian anarchists both want condition A, which is a society without a monopoly government. The gnostic anarchist looks at A, sees the vision clearly, and falls in love with what he sees. He pictures the end state in fine detail and then, in his mind, simply arrives: Z to A, with no intervening steps. Because A is the only acceptable condition to the gnostic anarchist, every other governance arrangement is equally illegitimate to him, and fighting over any of them is silly or wrong-headed. … The directional anarchist keeps the same destination in view and never loses sight of A. But he knows he is standing on real ground, and that the climb has a topography. … A direct path to A is not on the board. It is not a path he nobly refuses; it is a path that does not exist.” (07/06/26)
“Even if you’ve never read On War, you probably know Carl von Clausewitz’s famous dictum that ‘war is the continuation of politics by other means.’ His point was that war should always have a clear political objective, which must guide the choice of strategy and the manner in which military power is used. Brilliant battlefield achievements are meaningless if they fail to produce the desired political results. I’ve been thinking about this issue a lot lately, and I’m beginning to wonder if war in today’s world is increasingly pointless. I say that with considerable trepidation, because past predictions that war was increasingly costly and likely to become less frequent have not fared well. … So I’m not going to tell you that war is disappearing. It’s not. It’s just becoming increasingly pointless. Consider the recent historical record.” (07/06/26)
