“The recent U.S. airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities have fundamentally altered the geopolitical landscape of the ongoing Iran-Israel-U.S. confrontation. While the situation has been deteriorating since the escalation of Israeli hostilities in Gaza and subsequent Iranian retaliations, Washington’s decision to bomb key Iranian sites (including the Fordow underground uranium enrichment facility, Natanz, and Isfahan) marks a game-changing shift. The strikes on Iran (justified under familiar pretexts of ‘non-proliferation,’ ‘peace’ and ‘defense’) serve as a warning to emerging multipolar blocs, particularly BRICS and China-led alliances, that deviation from Western geopolitical orthodoxy will not be tolerated, even when conducted within the boundaries of international law.” (06/24/25)
“For too long, the history of race relations in the United States has been misrepresented as a battle between ‘progressive’ liberals, supposedly partisans of policies that benefited racial minorities, and ‘conservatives’ trying to block their advancement. Jonathan Bean’s Race and Liberty, of which the first edition appeared in 2009, constitutes an invaluable corrective to that portrayal. A partisan of the ‘classical’ liberal tradition — the liberalism of the American Founders, who believed in the Lockean doctrine of limited government, aimed at securing the equal rights of all individuals — Bean (history professor at Southern Illinois University) provides a collection of over 75 documents, accompanied by helpful, brief editorial commentary, which correct the record. The readings cover not only relations between ‘whites’ and racial minorities, but also immigration policy.” (06/24/25)
“Some pro-Trumpers embrace the President on the idea that ‘a businessman can apply common business sense to out-of-control government.’ Though government could use more such sense, not less, overall I’m not very impressed with this argument because in key ways government is nothing like business. Government lacks the salient standard of profit and loss. Therefore, people trying to apply decent standards are at a disadvantage.” (06/24/25)
“For all of his talk about fighting socialism, President Donald Trump seems to have an affinity for socialist policies. Trump is going after Marxism in universities. He wants to rip out the roots in the military. He’s even against Marxists entering the country. But when he’s the Marxist, it’s just ‘The Art of the Deal.’ Socialism is generally considered to be a Marxist utopia where the people, meaning the government, control the means of production. I don’t know a more fitting description for America’s new ownership interest, known as a ‘Golden share,’ in U.S. Steel, as a condition to allow its merger with the Japanese company Nippon Steel to move forward.” (06/23/25)
“Even Americans who loathe President Donald Trump should be capable of seeing that the United States and the world are safer without a nuclear-capable Iran. But Trump derangement is blinding them. On Saturday, the president and the US military executed a ‘spectacularly successful’ precision bombing of Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities, with no American casualties and minimal impact on Iran’s people. Yet now Trump is being bombarded with attacks here at home. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) called Trump’s strike ‘grossly unconstitutional,’ a claim repeated by Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.) and GOP Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, who has sparred with Trump on other issues. New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and a chorus of other Democrats are calling for Trump’s impeachment. New York City’s Democratic mayoral candidates — for whom Trump-hatred is a litmus test — are piling on. … These claims are crazy.” [editor’s note: Yes, it’s crazy to expect Trump to follow the law, or McCaughey to admit he doesn’t – TLK] (06/23/25)
“In February 2022, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued a bulletin condemning online voices and public gatherings attacking such government Covid policies as mask and vaccine mandates. Those spreading ‘misinformation’ about the pandemic, DHS warned, were undermining ‘public trust in the U.S. government institutions’ and could be considered a ‘domestic threat actor’ or a ‘primary terrorism-related threat.’ How did government vigilance against lethal attacks like 9/11 culminate in the claim that critics of public health measures were terrorists? The bulletin ignored the possibility that one reason trust in our governing institutions had been undermined was not denunciations of our pandemic policies but the policies themselves, along with the government’s manipulative public messaging about them.” (06/23/25)
Source: Freedom and Flourishing
by Dr. Theodore N (Ted) Pauls
“Flourishing individualism is a philosophical vision that places the rational, morally responsible individual at the center of ethics, politics, and human life. It is an ideal that affirms the dignity of the person, the objectivity of value, and the necessity of freedom — not merely as a constraint on power, but as the essential condition for human excellence.” (06/23/25)
“As of Thursday evening, the One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB) is no longer as big, and it never was all that beautiful. But the biggest decision, worth $3.76 trillion, could come as soon as today. The estimate of the Senate Finance Committee’s tax provisions reflect a cost of $441 billion over ten years, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation’s estimate over the weekend. How, you might ask, could the Finance Committee have extended all the Trump tax cuts, expanded some of them, added a bunch of other new tax cuts, made some temporary business tax cuts permanent, and still only cost $441 billion? The trims to clean-energy tax credits and other rollbacks, you would presume, weren’t SO costly that they would nearly wipe out all of the costs! The answer, friends, is a big gimmick known as the current policy baseline.” (06/24/25)
