“At this point, we cannot be certain if the demonstrations constitute the first stage of a popular rebellion on the part of an aggrieved population finally pushed beyond endurance or is the latest cynical power play by the United States and its favorite ally. It should not come as a surprise if a mounting percentage of Iranians have had their fill of the mullahs and religious tyranny. … However, it also would be naïve to assume that the United States and its allies (especially Israel) would not resort to even the dirtiest tactics to overthrow the clerical regime.” (02/09/26)
“It is clear what Trump wants, but all migrants in the United States have due process rights under federal law. Specifically, Somali migrants have the right to appear before an immigration judge and seek asylum based on a well-founded fear of persecution based on race, religion, political views, or another protected category. This is a particular risk in Somalia, where al-Shabaab, an Islamist militant group, is responsible for hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties. The Trump administration, however, appears to be manipulating the judicial process to dramatically reduce the chance that Somali immigrants are granted asylum.” (02/09/26)
“If you peer through the constructal lens, you can set aside partisan binaries and begin to diagnose the West’s decline in terms of physics.” (02/09/26)
Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Matthew Williams
“The pricing of prescription drugs is often the subject of debate. Many forget that pharmaceuticals and drug development form a market like any other, but circumstances and the human condition make it admittedly more complicated. Medicine is unique in that it grapples with human life amid unavoidable scarcity. Scarcity forces tough trade-offs and costs, and when lives of our loved ones hang in the balance, emotions can overwhelm rational judgment. Politicians eagerly exploit these situations.” (02/09/26)
“The first time I spoke to Jeff Bezos, he had founded Amazon as an online bookstore and made himself available to all kinds of journalists — a ‘political genius,’ said The New York Times Magazine, a ‘brilliant, charming, hyper, and misleadingly goofy mastermind.’ In 1999, having blown past the naysayers who scoffed at the strange notion of online retailing, the 35-year-old businessman was named Time’s Person of the Year. Nearly a decade-and-a-half later, as one of the world’s richest men, Bezos spent $250 million of his personal fortune to buy the Washington Post from Katharine Graham’s family. And now he should fold his cards and sell it. It’s a different era for the industry and a very different Bezos, one who is comfortable slashing a third of the paper’s staff.” (02/09/25)
“In officialdom, it is rare to find someone without at least a suspicion of corruption; the real question is whether the leadership chooses to act. Xi’s predecessors did not refrain from anti-corruption because they lacked the will. The decisive difference was the power structure. Xi has built a system of personal authority second only to Mao Zedong — how he built it is not the subject here. His opponents like to describe his rule as totalitarian. As an expression of moral outrage, that’s fine, but in stricter analytical terms, Xi’s system has not become the kind of totalitarianism associated with Mao or Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. This is not merely a difference in degree but a partial difference in kind. … it is an intensified autocracy: a technological and organizational reinforcement of traditional authoritarian rule in the digital age.” (02/09/26)
“The more forceful, invasive, violent, and dangerous the deed performed upon the body, the more powerful the assault upon the sovereignty of the individual person. Corporal punishment of any kind violates the inherent dignity of human beings. Torture aims to break the human spirit by abusing the human body, crippling its form and impairing its function so it no longer so readily stands, upright, as vessel of immortal spirit. By contrast, forced injection entails — no blows landed upon the surface of the body — but penetration of the physical interior of the person. Coerced vaccination forces entry into the figurative as well as literal bloodstream of the unwilling subject.” (02/09/26)
“The Republican Party’s turn against liberal internationalism is not a passing Trump aberration but a reversion to long-standing illiberalism on the American right.” (02/09/26)
“There are downsides to insulting and threatening friends and acting like a Mafia don slapping around his goons. You risk turning them against you, for one thing. But if those friends have been freeloading off you for years, well, there are some upsides, too. We’re seeing that as President Donald Trump’s rough treatment of our European allies has driven them to huffily make steps to actually defend themselves rather than continue to rely on the American defense umbrella.” (02/09/26)
