“The United States made war on three continents over three days earlier this month, conducting attacks in Africa, Asia, and South America. During that span, the U.S. also struck a civilian boat in the Pacific Ocean. The globe-spanning scope of the attacks represents one of the few instances since World War II that the United States has been simultaneously involved in armed conflicts with such a wide geographic sweep.” (03/19/26)
“Ever since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, news about the impact of artificial intelligence on jobs has vacillated between two four-letter words: fear and hype. As a result, about two-thirds of Americans believe AI will lead to fewer jobs, while the overpromising of AI’s potential has helped lead to a similar proportion of Americans not using AI much or at all in their jobs. By last year, however, surveys of AI’s actual impact in the workplace had started to roll in. And many indicate a move toward enhancing the application of reason, analytical judgment, and other skills of humans – and redefining intelligence to levels beyond the limits of a machine or the brain. One federal survey in the New York-northern New Jersey area found that a large share of businesses using AI are retraining workers to utilize the technology with no significant reductions in employment.” (03/18/26)
“In an autocracy, truth and falsehood aren’t resolved by fact-finding institutions. They’re dictated by the leader. This is what’s happening now in the United States. Donald Trump says he had to bomb Iran because it posed an imminent threat to the United States. And Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, says only Trump himself can judge whether that claim is true. In the years before America turned authoritarian, Gabbard didn’t talk this way. She insisted on testing the government’s claims against evidence.” (03/19/26)
Source: Reason
by Jeffrey A Singer & Patrick Eddington
“Consider this scenario. You’ve recently received a government-subsidized biowearable. Accordingly, the authorities now know when you’re sleeping, because the device reports your sleep cycle, location, and daily movements in real time to a cloud server accessible through a legal process. It knows when you’re home. It knows when you leave. Those data are then obtained by an FBI field office (either through direct purchase or, if necessary, a legal process), because a federal prosecutor has decided that your criticism of immigration enforcement operations and your social media posts supporting Immigration and Customs Enforcement protesters constitute ‘incitement to violence’ against federal agents. Under the Trump administration’s elastic (and legally dubious) domestic terrorism definitions and designations, that is enough to open a criminal investigation. And because the government has known for weeks when you’re at home sleeping, it knows exactly when to break down your door.” (03/19/26)
“There are no wind turbines on the Great Lakes — and it isn’t for lack of wind. This titanic network of interconnected freshwater lakes with a surface area larger than New England, New York, and New Jersey combined is theoretically ideal for wind farms. Winds sweeping across the lakes are stronger, more consistent, and less turbulent than those over land. The National Laboratory of the Rockies has estimated that the Great Lakes states have enough offshore wind potential to generate more than three times their combined annual electricity consumption. … the vast inland lakes remain untapped largely due to a lack of streamlined permitting processes at the state level and economic hurdles.” (03/19/26)
“The Iran war is a betrayal of both U.S. interests and constitutional principles. This is a war initiated on the president’s whim. The people do not support it, Congress never authorized it, and our treaty commitments prohibit it. It should never have been allowed to start, but we can end our part in it by refusing to fund it.” (03/19/26)
“We’re depleting our big, expensive, Cold War-inspired defensive weapons on Iran’s cheap drones, and if Tehran expands its underwater drone program, look out.” (03/19/26)
Source: Libertarian Institute
by Joseph Solis-Mullen
“In 2008, a book appeared called Deleting the State: An Argument About Government. It was a trim volume, barely a hundred pages of actual text, but it hit me with the force of a hundred pounds from the very first page. As an undergraduate political science student, I had by that point read Robert Nozick, but I had yet to encounter Murray Rothbard or the broader Austrian and anarcho-capitalist tradition. Aeon Skoble’s book was therefore the first work I encountered that seriously challenged the legitimacy of the state itself. Now the Independent Institute has done a new generation of readers a service by issuing a second edition of this compact but provocative anarcho-capitalist work.” (03/19/26)
“We’re in the midst of the quietest government shutdown in American history. For 34 days, funding for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been blocked in a standoff over the Trump administration’s deeply unpopular immigration enforcement, something the White House has finally realized is such a public opinion disaster that they’ve stopped calling it mass deportation. The biggest public-facing side of this shutdown is Transportation Security Administration workers, who have now worked without a paycheck for a month. But aside from frustration about longer airport security lines, there’s been little pressure on Washington to end the impasse. On Wednesday, Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) had his confirmation hearing to run the department that currently has no funding. While his rhetoric was softer, he didn’t really offer many thoughts about the issues in the dispute.” (03/19/26)
