“Despite rising public debt, intensifying fiscal extraction, recurrent economic shocks, and heightened trade and policy uncertainty, the global economy has exhibited a striking degree of resilience. This resilience, however, goes beyond mere survival. It reflects a shift from robustness to what can be described as ‘antifragility,’ where systems not only withstand shocks but gain from them. This dynamic adaptation is evidenced not just in headline GDP figures consistently surpassing pessimistic forecasts, but more profoundly in the way markets adapt and evolve in response to these challenges, becoming stronger rather than merely enduring.” (02/12/26)
“For several months now, controversy has swirled over Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts and his strange defense of Tucker Carlson against charges of antisemitism. A wave of staffers have resigned from Heritage in protest, as well as a number of high-profile trustees. More interesting than the daily drama of open letters and leaked team meetings, though, is the way the controversy has become a proxy fight for the battle to define the future of the conservative movement. Many of Roberts’s most passionate and vocal supporters come from the so-called ‘postliberal’ camp. … These new ideologues of the right seem far less interested in preserving the particular arrangements and commitments of the American Republic (and the philosophical truths they incarnate) than in promoting some abstract sense of, to use Howting’s term, ‘Western identity.'” (02/12/26)
“New York City is facing serious public health challenges. Drug overdoses are surging. Mental illness is rampant. Emergency rooms are under strain. Life expectancy in parts of the city has declined. So what are some employees at the New York City Department of Health reportedly studying? The effects of ‘global oppression’ on health. This is not a joke. It is a disturbing example of how ideology has displaced competence in city government — and how taxpayers are being asked to foot the bill. A public health department has a straightforward mission: protect people from disease, respond to health emergencies and ensure basic safety standards. It exists to prevent outbreaks, combat addiction, improve maternal health and keep food and water safe. It is not a political theory workshop.” (02/12/25)
“Abraham Lincoln stands not only as America’s greatest president but also as its greatest lawyer. At the time of his election to the presidency in 1860 he was the most prominent practicing lawyer in the state of Illinois. As a politician and as president, Lincoln was a profound student of the Constitution and constitutional history. Perhaps most important, Lincoln was America’s indispensable teacher of the moral ground of political freedom at the exact moment when the country was on the threshold of abandoning what he called its ‘ancient faith’ that all men are created equal. How can it be that lawyers know so little of the giant of their profession?” (02/12/26)
“It’s getting a little old at this point, but as the Deep State log rolls for another U.S. attack on Iran, it is promoting a new Iranian national savior, one with a familiar name. Here’s a graphic seen on X, much like others showing up on social media, championing Reza Pahlavi as ‘the legitimate national leader of Iran.’ Because Pahlavi calls for more U.S. intervention in Iran including airstrikes, his champions are a midnight choir of failed voices from prior regime change calamities: Richard Perle, Michael Ledeen, James Woolsey. He is featured frequently in the warmongering of the Empire’s lapdog press, in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and on Fox News. Pahlavi’s only claim to legitimacy is that he is the son of the late-Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi who was driven from Iran in the 1979 revolution.” (02/12/26)
“Let’s be clear about what’s happening here: robots and AI are taking over our culture, our politics, our way of life and our relationships to each other as social beings. They’re becoming the advance guard for a new and unprecedented technocratic form of governance — the apotheosis of Western scientific materialism. Further, these new forms of governance are being carried out by unelected Big Tech overlords operating behind the scenes and in the backrooms of a mediated society well out of public view. I certainly hope that Gioia is right about a major cultural rejection of technocracy. There are indeed hopeful signs.” (02/12/26)
Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Jacob G Hornberger
“Right-wing American statists are celebrating with great glee the U.S. government’s economic strangulation of the Cuban people through its embargo and oil siege because right-wingers say they’re opposed to socialism, which has long been the economic system of Cuba’s communist regime. What these right-wing statists and interventionists fail to recognize, however, is that they, like most Americans, fully embrace the socialist principles that undergird Cuba’s socialist economic system. They fail to recognize that communist Cuba has simply carried the socialist principles that underlie American socialism to their logical conclusions.” (02/12/26)
“Prediction markets are one key component of America’s flourishing online gambling ecosystem. And they rely on the type of wager that many experts see as being at the heart of modern problem gambling: the prop bet. Prop bets (more formally, proposition bets) are bets that can be placed on specific eventuality, from how many touchdowns a quarterback will throw in a game to, yes, whether Jesus Christ will return in this calendar year. This gamblification of the world is the business model. Prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket proudly boast that users can bet on just about any proposition imaginable.” (02/12/26)
Source: Responsible Statecraft
by Laura Mahrenbach, Narayanappa Janardhan, Gedaliah Afterman, & Maximilian Mayer
“The global order was already fragmenting before Donald Trump returned to the White House. But the upended ‘rules’ of global economic and foreign policies have now reached a point of no return. What has changed is not direction, but speed. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s remarks in Davos last month — ‘Middle powers must act together, because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu’ — captured the consequences of not acting quickly. And Carney is not alone in those fears. Leaders around the world are increasingly moving from rhetorical warnings about the systemic risks of superpower dynamics to actively experimenting with new ways of navigating what Carney called ‘a rupture in the world order.'” (02/12/26)
