The Need for Judgment
Source: Law & Liberty
by Philip K Howard
“America’s moral culture has been torn apart by ideology. To revive it, we need a society capable of passing judgment.” (03/04/26)
Category: Opinion
Labour’s War on UK Pubs
Source: The American Conservative
by Lauren Smith
“‘When you have lost your inns,’ warned writer Hilaire Belloc over 100 years ago, ‘drown your empty selves. For you have lost the heart of England.’ A century later, his message could not be more pertinent. Since the beginning of this year, roughly four pubs have permanently closed their doors every day. By the end of 2026, something like 540 pubs could shut for good. For this British institution, no help can be expected to come from the current Labour government.” (03/04/26)
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/labours-war-on-uk-pubs/
It’s which infrastructure, not how much
Source: Adam Smith Institute
by Tim Worstall
“Some infrastructure spending undoubtedly increases productivity, creates economic growth. Say, a functioning commercial law system. Or something more than a rutted track as the pathway from Bristol to London. Just to offer a wide expanse of things that could be beneficial. But other forms, types and pieces of infrastructure perhaps don’t. Better housing certainly makes lives better but it’s not an increase in productivity nor a cause of economic growth other than the process of building the better housing itself. It’s even possible for infrastructure to be productivity reducing. Say, the Humber Bridge, which cost a great deal in real resources and never has reached anything like the traffic levels to justify it. … the answer to ‘infrastructure?’ is like so much in economics, the answer is ‘It depends.'” (03/04/26)
https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/its-which-infrastructure-not-how-much
Trump’s Iran Tantrum: Because Nothing Screams “Leadership” Like a Government Throwing Tantrums With Other People’s Lives
Source: International Guild of Professional Anarchists
by Alexander Snitker
“Trump’s Iran policy isn’t ‘tough;’ it’s just the usual government cosplay: ‘I’m strong because I can make strangers halfway around the world suffer for my approval rating.’ We, the card-carrying, dues-paying members of the International Guild of Professional Anarchists are here to say: congratulations, you absolute clowns in suits. You’ve once again proven that the only thing governments are good at is inventing enemies so they can charge taxpayers for the fireworks.” (03/03/26)
https://alexandersnitker.substack.com/p/trumps-iran-tantrum-because-nothing
San Francisco’s reparations program, and what it reveals about city leaders
Source: New York Post
by Erec Smith
“Recently, Evanston, Ill., enacted the first reparations program in the country. San Francisco is following suit, but its reparations plan is less about policy and more about performance. What is being sold as a moral reckoning and care for citizens in need feels more like a moral play, meant to lull the intended recipients into a false sense of hope. In December, Mayor Daniel Lurie signed a bill, unanimously passed by the city’s Board of Supervisors, that created a mechanism for distributing a one-time $5 million payment to eligible black residents as a form of reparations. San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie speaking at a podium with a logo of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce. It was not long before taxpayers and civil-rights advocacy organizations sued the city for violating the U.S. Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause.” (03/03/26)
https://nypost.com/2026/03/03/opinion/san-franciscos-reparations-plan-is-a-joke/
A Possible US Government iPhone-Hacking Toolkit Is Now in the Hands of Foreign Spies and Criminals
Source: Wired
by Andy Greenberg
“An iPhone-hacking technique used in the wild to indiscriminately hijack the devices of any iOS user who merely visits a website represents a rare and shocking event in the cybersecurity world. Now one powerful hacking toolkit at the center of multiple mass iPhone exploitation campaigns has taken an even rarer and more disturbing path: It appears to have traveled from the hands of Russian spies who used it to target Ukrainians to a cybercriminal operation designed to steal cryptocurrency from Chinese-speaking victims—and some clues suggest it may have been originally created by a US contractor and sold to the American government.” (03/03/26)
Iran’s Youth Broke the Islamic Republic’s Spell Before the Airstrikes
Source: The UnPopulist
by Pouya Nikmand
“I fled Iran at 18 under the most desperate of circumstances, making a bargain with a human trafficker who secretly abused me for years in exchange for a visa that kept me out of Iran. My birth country was made so inhospitable that to return was to face death. Last week, when I heard that Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader, had been killed in a U.S.-Israeli airstrike, I felt … thankful. My thanks mostly went not to the military operation that ended his life but to the millions of young Iranians who had prepared the ground for his regime’s demise long before the first bomb fell.” (03/03/26)
https://www.theunpopulist.net/p/irans-youth-broke-the-islamic-republics
The Iran War Exposes the Farce of American “Representative Democracy”
Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by Ryan McMaken
“The Trump administration has unilaterally—without any Congressional debate or vote, of course—forced Americans into yet another war. This time, the war is a large-scale military campaign against Iran. Was there any groundswell of public support for this war? Did the Congress vote to spend more American tax dollars on another war? Apparently not. According to a March 1 poll from Reuters, only 27 percent of Americans polled said they support the US’s new war on Iran. Needless to say, few Americans have been calling their representatives in Congress asking for yet another Middle Eastern war. So, why is the US now at war with Iran? Not even the administration appears to know for sure.” (03/03/26)
https://mises.org/mises-wire/iran-war-exposes-farce-american-representative-democracy
A premortem on OPM’s HR 2.0 initiative: Imagining failure in order to support success
Source: Niskanen Center
by Gabe Menchaca, Steve Krauss, & Peter Bonner
“Large-scale IT modernization projects fail with remarkable regularity. They fail in private companies with strong profit incentives and unified leadership. They fail in state and local governments with narrower missions and simpler constraints. And they fail — often spectacularly — in the federal government. Entire multibillion‑dollar industries exist precisely because implementing large, complex software, including Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, is hard: technically complex, organizationally disruptive, politically fraught, and culturally destabilizing. OPM’s new HR 2.0 initiative is therefore entering hostile terrain by default. The initiative aspires to rationalize, consolidate, and modernize a sprawling thicket of federal human resources systems that has grown organically over half a century.” (03/04/26)
A Very Stable War
Source: The Atlantic
by Jonathan Chait
“After the president of peace, a man who felt deserving of the Nobel Prize, authorized a massive aerial bombardment of Iran last summer, the task of explaining away the contradiction fell to J. D. Vance. … The difference was simple: Other wars were bad because they were led by dumb presidents, but a Trump war would be good because Donald Trump is smart. Yet after the administration’s second wave of air attacks on Iran, the president’s strategy seems more sundown than Sun Tzu.” (03/03/26)