“The bellicose may find wars attractive and cleansing, but those responsible for such dry matters as inventory, material and how prepared the armed forces of a country are will stalk them with unpleasant truths. The addiction of the US imperium to waging wars, one that President Donald Trump promised, and failed, to treat, has gotten the wags in the military worried. The depleting nature of Operation Epic Fury has been particularly telling in this regard, revealing the US war machine to be unprepared for conflict.” (03/27/26)
“Midterm elections are where slogans go to trial. Primaries, especially, are where interests that cannot reliably win a general election try to win the nomination. They do it with money, with media saturation, and with the oldest trick in politics: framing obedience as unity. This year, two Republican races show the fork in the road. In northern Kentucky, Rep. Thomas Massie is fighting a primary that has become a national vendetta project. In South Carolina, Senator Lindsey Graham is seeking a fifth term while publicly linking his political identity to a foreign-policy crusade, and treating dissent at home as a moral failing. If Massie survives and Graham falls, it signals that Republican voters still have room for independence, constitutional friction, and skepticism toward overseas commitments. If Massie loses and Graham wins, it signals the reverse: the slogan becomes a mascot for power, not a restraint on it.” (03/27/26)
“Here’s a number that should make every American wince: $4 million. That’s what it costs to fire a single Patriot interceptor missile. Here’s another: $30,000. That’s an estimated price tag of an Iranian Shahed drone — the kind that Tehran has been lobbing across the Persian Gulf at US bases and allied cities since the start of the war four weeks ago. In other words, we’re spending at least 100 times more to shoot down each drone than our enemies spend to build one. And it’s not just the cost that’s a problem — it’s also our production capacity. … Just replenishing those weapons at current production capacity will require 18 months. That is no way to fight against Iran, much less against a larger adversary like China or Russia.” (03/27/26)
“In 1917, some Portuguese children started seeing visions of the Virgin Mary. The Virgin told them she would enact a great miracle on a certain day in October, and a crowd of 100,000 gathered to witness the event. According to eyewitness reports, newspaper articles, etc, they saw the sun spin around, change colors, and do various other miraculous things. At least a hundred separate testimonies of the event have come down to us, with only two or three people saying they didn’t see it. … there was no record of a miracle exactly like Fatima happening within a non-Catholic religious tradition. Until now! Substacker Arthur T, building on research from Sophia In The Shell, has found a 1990s Buddhist sun miracle very similar to Fatima.” (03/27/26)
Source: Isonomia Quarterly
by George Agbesi & Joshua D Ammons
“At one point, Gordon Tullock thought taxi medallions were inefficient but intractable institutions, a classic example of what he called the transitional gains trap. The medallion system persisted not because it served the public, but because the rents it generated were capitalized into medallion prices, making any reform politically impossible. Then came Uber, and within a matter of years this supposedly permanent institution crumbled. What if a similar technology shock could do the same for societies lacking the rule of law?” (03/27/26)
“Far from being a sign of resurgent faith, Christian identity politics is a symptom of religious decline. As one observer has noted, the fact that Americans are growing more secular and less religiously literate has made religion more salient as a marker of political difference, even as invocations of it become less informed.” (03/27/26)
“A bad idea doesn’t get better with age. Bad ideas aren’t wine, jeans, or your high school memories. The tax subsidies for the Post-Dispatch building redevelopment in downtown St. Louis were a bad idea back in 2019 when the development was proposed, and they are a bad idea now. Using tax subsidies for economic development rarely benefits the public. Instead, it lowers the risk and increases the returns for private investors.” (03/27/26)
“You host a website. Users can say whatever they want on this site. Next thing you know, a UK regulatory agency is sending you, an American organization based in the United States, a letter announcing a trillion-dollar fine for failure to comply with UK censorship demands. How much do you panic? If you’re 4chan, not much.” (03/27/26)
“The main theme in much writing on contemporary politics is how ideologically polarized Democrats and Republicans have become. But the truly consequential change is that Republicans have broken with their own past. Under Donald Trump, the party hasn’t just reversed its positions on specific policies. It has routinely betrayed basic tenets of the conservative philosophy that Republicans have long claimed was the bedrock of their party. No one is shocked by Trump’s betrayals. What is more surprising is that most Republicans haven’t seemed to care. I’ve been thinking about the Republican betrayal of the party’s own tradition because of a comment about my work by Glenn Loury, the conservative Black economist. When I was on The Glenn Show in December, he criticized my new book American Contradiction because of my ‘apparent disregard for the positive contributions of conservative thought and policy to American life.'” (03/27/26)
