“In the classic Cold War film The Ugly American, Marlon Brando plays an American ambassador neck-deep in the kind of covert operations that would later get tens of thousands of Vietnamese killed. The film gave us a phrase, but most people forgot what it actually meant. Burdick and Lederer’s novel portrays the ‘ugly American’ as Homer Atkins, a straightforward engineer who genuinely cared about the locals and actively listened to their perspectives. The real ugliness came from the polished diplomats who saw Southeast Asians as pieces on a chessboard. Sixty years on, we’ve become exactly what we pretended to oppose. Only worse.” (02/19/26)
“On January 29, Venezuela’s acting President, Delcy Rodríguez, signed a law that opens Venezuela’s oil industry to privatization. With the stroke of a pen, Rodríguez signed, not only the law, but the death certificate of a decades old Latin American dream.” (02/19/26)
“The Fifth Circuit embraces a radical vision of endless detention, as does the Trump administration. Will it be too much even for the Roberts Court?” (02/19/26)
Source: Libertarian Institute
by Joseph Solis-Mullen
“In late January 2026, China’s Ministry of National Defense announced investigations into two of the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) most senior officers …. These investigations capped a wave of high-level purges that began in 2023 and steadily hollowed out the PLA’s senior leadership. At one point, the CMC, China’s supreme military decision-making body, was reduced in functional terms to Xi himself as chairman and the anti-corruption chief Zhang Shengmin as vice chairman. … To understand what these developments mean, one must understand the architecture of Chinese politics. China is not merely an authoritarian state. It is a Leninist party-state in which the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) dominates every lever of power, the PLA functions as the party’s armed wing, and central authority increasingly overrides provincial discretion. The recent purges illuminate not dysfunction, but design.” (02/19/26)
“Some readers may be wondering why anything written about culture and politics over 2000 years ago could possibly have contemporary relevance. Fred D. Miller J.R. makes a strong case that Aristotle’s views remain relevant in his recently published book, Aristotelian Statecraft. In particular, Miller demonstrates that we can still learn a lot from Aristotle about the relationships between moral character, culture and political systems.” (02/19/26)
“New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is going after gig workers. To do his dirty work, the mayor is using holdovers from the Biden administration (who oppose independent contractors), reports C. Jarrett Dieterle at Reason magazine. … Mamdani’s war on freelancers will be costly not only for gig workers and the companies that help them function but also for customers.” (02/19/26)
“Trump is issuing subpoenas demanding social media platforms hand over data about ICE protesters but the ‘Twitter Files’ agitators couldn’t care less.” (02/19/26)
“The attempted censorship [sic] of Stephen Colbert’s late-night interview with Texas’s U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico backfired so completely, with millions watching the interview on YouTube, that it may have made Talarico more likely to win his Democratic primary against Rep. Jasmine Crockett. Yet regardless of how you feel about the electoral outcome, the episode is another example of David Ellison and the new ownership at Paramount, parent company of CBS, signaling its intention to use one of the nation’s major broadcast networks as a tool for the Trump regime, with only sanctioned content going out over the airwaves. That’s always been the fear associated with Paramount’s numerous attempts to purchase Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD), parent company of CNN. If that ever went through, the majority of the nation’s main cable news networks would be in the hands of conservative partisans.” (02/19/26)
“Last week, NATO launched ‘Arctic Sentry,’ a new ‘multi-domain activity’ that, for the first time, places Allied operations in the Arctic under a single command structure. The move marks a significant scaling-up of NATO’s footprint in the Arctic. But unfortunately, as NATO’s regional military presence increases, the mechanisms for preventing that footprint from generating a crisis are not keeping pace. … Arctic Sentry arrives in a politically charged context. President Trump has ramped up tensions in the alliance by threatening to annex Greenland. The mission follows Trump’s meeting with Rutte in Davos, where they agreed NATO should do more for Arctic defense and ‘prevent the Russians and the Chinese getting more access to the Arctic region.’ Even after Europe dispatched a small, symbolic force to Greenland last month, the White House made clear that European troops there would not change Trump’s mind about annexation.” (02/19/26)
