“Americans today spend a great deal of political and cultural energy litigating between the comparative importance and veracity of two well-documented crises, in education as well as in life more broadly. The first crisis, worrisome to conservatives and thoughtful liberals but considered explicable if not laudable by many progressives, is the political radicalization of young women. … The second crisis, broadly associated with masculinity, has two elements: male academic and professional underperformance and failure to launch, combined with elevated mortality and decreasing life expectancy …. the truth is that too many young Americans of both sexes have the same basic problem: They lack any sense of purpose or duty larger than themselves and their own preferences.” (02/09/26)
“The dollar’s lost half its value and the price of gold exploded since our author first warned that politicians are ruining our purchasing power.” (02/09/26)
“It’s Super Bowl Sunday, and Bad Bunny is playing the halftime show, and as you may have heard white bigots in the U.S. are losing their minds over it. There’s a whole separate halftime show that’s been counter-programmed just for people who experience psychological distress at the idea of a fellow human being taking center stage at one of the grand U.S.ian cultural events, if that fellow speaks Spanish. Bad Bunny is a U.S. citizen, by the way. He hails from Puerto Rico, which is a part of the United States. He’s also one of the most popular and acclaimed musical acts on the planet.” (02/08/26)
“The 401(k) is one of the most consequential financial inventions of the last half-century. Accounting for $9.3 trillion in assets, 401(k)s direct the investment and retirement decisions of 70 million Americans. But they’re not as high-yielding as most plan owners might think. When workers set one up through brokerages like Fidelity or Voya, they learn that their ‘choices’ are limited to mutual funds, target-date funds, and perhaps a bond fund. … Such limits don’t come from brokerages or technological barriers. A federal law called the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) regulates 401(k)s. Passed a half-century ago, it imposes a mindset that’s both infantilizing and outdated, and in practice is designed less to empower workers than protect employers from lawsuits.” (02/08/26)
“Whoever posted a video on President Trump’s social media containing a racist animation of the Obamas as apes committed an own goal that overshadowed what otherwise would have been a great week for the administration. It shouldn’t have needed the GOP’s only black senator, Tim Scott, to decry the clip as racist for the post to be deleted and an apology issued by the White House. The one-minute video reposted late Thursday on Trump’s Truth Social account was about voter fraud in the 2020 election, one of the president’s favorite subjects. At the end, the video flashed for a split second to a clip of the Obamas from an old ‘Lion King’ meme depicting Democrats as animals, and Trump as a lion. It was obviously a mistake.” [editor’s note: So it’s not the person who posted the video “stirring up racial division,” it’s anyone who noticed and mentioned it? How … Clintonesque – TLK] (02/08/25)
“The fallout from the latest release of files related to sex offender Jeffrey Epstein is being called the biggest political scandal so far this century. Newspapers and television news are splashing fresh revelations daily. High-profile careers are crashing. The police are investigating. There are even whispers of ‘borrowed time’ for the country’s leader. Not in the United States, but in Britain. The enormous tranche of more than 3 million emails and other documents, photos and videos released by the Justice Department on Jan. 30 have created a minor headache in the White House and a major crisis in Whitehall.” (02/08/26)
“The people of Greenland have been fighting for their sovereignty from both Europe and their NATO-American overlords for generations, finally achieving home rule in 1979, voting to withdraw from the EU in 1985, and expanding home rule to a self-government agreement with a window to complete independence in 2009. This is what the actual people of Greenland overwhelmingly support; to be free of pompous white assholes from both sides of the Atlantic along with their toxic waste and petty pissing matches. But Denmark, dear tolerant socialist Denmark, continues to hold Greenland’s local government hostage with a 5 billion Kroner block grant that funds nearly all of their public services with the unspoken threat being that full independence would mean economic devastation.” (02/08/26)
Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Joe Tabor
“More than five years after the failure of the so-called Fair Tax Amendment, Illinois politicians are still trying to eliminate the state constitution’s flat income tax protection and make it easier to raise state income taxes.” (02/08/26)
“There is an irony to the undying Jeffrey Epstein scandal: It may never be more than an annoyance for President Trump, who knew Epstein well, but it could topple British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who never met the sex-offender financier. Starmer has a 71 percent disapproval rating and leads the least popular British government since World War II. The reasons for the Labour Party leader’s deepening plight are moral, because decency and shame still matter in British politics. But they are also institutional. An American president is less democratically accountable than the British prime minister, because partisanship has disabled the checks that the Founders placed on the chief executive.” (02/08/26)
“Trumpism is a movement [Lionel] Trilling would still recognize as one that expresses itself ‘only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.’ Memes and AI slop, in current parlance. Or in mass deportations and state-sanctioned street violence and murder. If those ‘gestures’ appear garbled, it is because the ‘the high priests of MAGA ideology,’ Stephen Miller and Russ Vought, are not driven not by coherent ideas. What drives them is visceral rage at cultural change that fails to center men as base as themselves. And by the congenital insecurity of Donald Trump himself.” (02/08/26)
