“Everyone hates Congress. That poll showing that cockroaches are more popular than Congress is now thirteen years old, and things haven’t improved in those thirteen years. Congressional approval dipped below 20% during the Great Recession and hasn’t recovered since. A republic where a supermajority of citizens neither like nor trust their representatives is not the most stable of foundations, so it should not be shocking that the legislative branch is being subsumed by the executive. What’s the solution? Many have been proposed, some with very snazzy websites.” (03/11/26)
“It is impossible to understand the recent politics of the Western world without considering a giant sociological transformation—one that, inevitable though it may seem in retrospect, nearly nobody predicted: The bourgeoisie has switched sides. For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the proletariat was the political stronghold of the left. The bourgeoisie was the stronghold of the right. Indeed, the assumption that affluent professionals would tend to be conservative is reflected in the most famous political treatises and pieces of art that the period produced. Karl Marx called on the workers, not on the lawyers or freelance illustrators, of the world to unite. … But of late, these realities have started to shift, with huge impacts on contemporary politics.” (03/11/26)
“The strongest objections to fiat money are moral and institutional, not legal. Inflating a currency erodes trust over time, but it isn’t counterfeiting.” (03/11/26)
“For anyone looking into the history of U.S.-Iranian relations, what’s laid bare is not a history of friendship, diplomacy, and mutual respect, but rather a past marked with covert action, harsh rhetoric, and now, hot war.” (03/11/26)
Source: Property and Environment Research Center
by Jonathan Wood
“Federal permitting reform is usually framed as a question of efficiency: why do approvals take so long, and how can agencies move faster? But recent bipartisan permitting talks have surfaced that the problem is not just efficiency but also certainty. Even when permits are issued, the government often retains broad discretion to pull them back, grinding projects to a halt and stranding investments. Rather than providing the security of property rights or an enforceable contract, federal permits can be more of a promise from one whose fingers are crossed behind their back.” (03/10/26)
Source: Electronic Frontier Foundation
by Kit Walsh
“EFF’s client, J. Doe, is a member of the Jehovah’s Witnesses who became interested in the history of the organization’s public statements, and how they’ve changed over time. They created research tools to analyze those documents and ultimately created a website, JWS Library, allowing others to use those tools and verify their findings through an archive that included documents suppressed by the church. … There is no law against questioning the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Instead, Watch Tower argues that Doe’s activities constitute copyright infringement and seeks to use the special process provided in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to unmask them. It sent DMCA subpoenas to Google and Cloudflare, seeking information that would help them uncover Doe’s identity. The problem for Watch Tower is that Doe’s research and commentary are clear fair uses allowed under copyright law.” (03/10/26)
“The post-Olympics news cycle was a dizzying display of handwringing over the supposed victimhood of empowered, badass American female athletes. If we were to believe much of our media and feminist commentators, these women had been disrespected by President Trump, who cracked a joke, and by the men of Team USA hockey, who laughed. It led to an online geyser of anger and indignation on the women’s behalf. During their match against South Korea in Australia last week, the Iranian women’s soccer team took part in a quiet protest by not singing along to their national anthem — less than 48 hours after the US began striking Tehran. Off the phony controversy, we heard the refrain that women athletes are treated like gum on the bottom of a shoe.” (03/10/26)
“Analysts from Washington think tanks and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have appeared dozens of times in the New York Times, Washington Post, CBS, and Bloomberg as subject matter experts on the Iran War — and counting. While they are usually presented as neutral policy experts, their funding structures and advocacy histories are rarely disclosed. As the United States moves deeper into conflict, the public conversation is increasingly shaped by experts whose institutions are funded by donors with clear interests. The question is not whether these institutions produce substantive research. Many do. The question is whether readers are given sufficient context to understand the financial and political ecosystems in which that research is produced.” (03/10/26)
“A genuinely liberal education is about freedom, and not in some utilitarian or sophomoric sense of freedom as a rejection of form or boundaries. The indispensability of a liberal education is the freedom from being tied to the zeitgeist of one’s age or situation to love what is true, good, and beautiful, and to be initiated into the world while cultivating a love for it. Such a vision of education advances an inward concern as opposed to the more technical processes typically promoted in teacher education.” (03/10/16)
