“Many consider J.D. Vance the heir apparent to Donald Trump’s MAGA legacy and the man to beat in the 2028 Republican presidential primaries — a state of affairs the Republican foreign policy establishment has never liked. Hawks have long worried that the vice president is too much of a foreign policy restrainer for their tastes (though Vance has often sounded more like neoconservatives in Trump’s second term). Still, neocons were giddy last week when polling showed that Marco Rubio’s numbers had improved against Vance, with the secretary of state being hawks’ main man in the 2016 GOP primaries and a figure who could repurpose ‘MAGA’ as the neoconservatism of old (though Trump seems to be doing this already, making Vance’s supposed 2028 inevitability less clear). But there could be more than one neocon champion in 2028.” (03/19/26)
“The official response to my column Monday about the FBI’s failure to prevent four recent Islamic terror attacks has been unsatisfactory, to say the least, and the personal attacks by FBI Director Kash Patel’s private PR operatives have been downright deranged. None of which is reassuring when it comes to the FBI’s preparedness to handle a heightened terror threat on home soil. It’s not Patel’s fault that our foremost domestic counterterrorism agency has been degraded and politicized under his predecessors, but it’s his job to fix it fast and his defensiveness suggests a problem. The most alarming case involves Mohamed Bailor Jalloh, a convicted ISIS terrorist who was on supervised federal release when he yelled ‘Allahu Akbar’ and opened fire on an ROTC classroom at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va., last Thursday, killing the instructor before being killed himself.” (03/19/26)
“One Year After is the fourth story I’ve read now where the end of the world is revealed as a primitive society with none of the modern conveniences we take for granted. We are so dependent on our electronic devices and on the electrical grid that it hard to imagine what life would be like without them. But what would cause such an event?” (03/18/26)
Source: Freedom and Flourishing
by Dr. Edward W Younkins
“The defense of a free society has emerged from diverse intellectual traditions. One line of argument, associated with thinkers such as Friedrich A. Hayek, Gerald A. Gaus, Jonathan Haidt, and John Hasnas grounds liberty in cultural evolution, spontaneous order, epistemic limits, and moral psychology. From another direction, Douglas B. Rasmussen and Douglas J. Den Uyl have developed a neo-Aristotelian justification of natural rights rooted in individualistic perfectionism, virtue ethics, and the metanormative structure of political morality. These two traditions have often been viewed as distinct and divergent: the former emphasizing emergent social complexity, evolved rules, the limits of reason, and epistemological humility; the latter emphasizing teleological ethics, virtue, and the normative structure of human flourishing.” (03/18/26)
“The death of Paul Ehrlich, at a decidedly selfish, resource-hogging 93, has elicited a resounding consensus on his legacy. He has been roundly condemned on both right and left as one of the most malign and unrepentant doom-mongers to sway public opinion and policy since the pre-war eugenics movement. Initially an entomologist specialising in moths and butterflies, Ehrlich became famous during the late 1960s and early 1970s for trying to prevent the spread of what he saw as an altogether more troublesome species – his own, mankind.” (03/18/26)
“Discussions of the Iran War’s economic effects understandably fixate on crude oil. The Strait of Hormuz, through which about 27 percent of the world’s seaborne petroleum supplies usually transits, has been effectively closed since the war started in late February, causing global oil and gasoline prices to spike — something both American drivers and politicians have surely noticed. … Yet the strait is a lot more than an oil pipeline, and the Iran War’s economic effects are about a lot more than just oil. Roughly 11 percent of global maritime trade transits the strait each year—a lot of it crude oil and liquid natural gas, yes, but also loads of minerals and energy-intensive commodities …. The Iran conflict has also spread beyond Iran and the strait itself, in the process threatening major Middle Eastern production and shipping hubs for other important goods.” (03/18/26)
“For over 250 years, Americans have relied on the United States Postal Service for timely processing of their mail, no matter the conditions. After we dropped it in a box or gave it to a letter carrier, we could count on our mail being postmarked on that date so that our bills and tax returns aren’t late and our election ballots are counted. Unfortunately, this trust is now increasingly risky, since we can no longer rely on USPS to postmark mail on the day it’s collected. As part of former Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s broader cost-cutting and restructuring plan, the Postal Service has stopped its practice of picking up mail at the end of every day from all post offices. This means your ballot or bill payment could sit there until the following morning or even longer before being postmarked at a huge processing center.” (03/19/26)
