Source: Brownstone Institute
by Rob Jenkins & Michael R Jenkins
“ithin academia, there seems to be a growing consensus that the peer-review system — once the backbone of academic scholarship — is broken. But is it irreparably so? Perhaps. At the very least, the breakdown of its current form is worth exploring. However, rather than abandoning the entire endeavor, we believe we have a novel solution. First, though, let us examine where the system went wrong.” (04/29/26)
“Beef has jumped 65 percent since 2020, turning a staple into a splurge. From drought-stricken ranches to fast-food menu shifts, beef prices are reshaping how Americans eat.” (04/29/26)
“Government shouldn’t be important enough to motivate people to kill others to gain control. Moreover, people willing to engage in violence to seize the means of governance have no business exercising political power. These are points we should be drumming home after the latest in a series of assassination attempts against President Donald Trump and other administration officials at a time of surging political violence in the United States.” (04/29/26)
“Section 702 was added to FISA in 2008 with a provision that requires Congress to periodically reauthorize it. The measure allows national security agencies like the NSA, FBI and CIA to collect and monitor – without a warrant – any electronic communications sent to and from non-US persons ‘reasonably believed to be located’ outside the US. Notably, Americans who send messages to people abroad may likewise have their data surveilled. Law enforcement agencies have consistently abused this loophole to spy on US citizens in clear violation of their Fourth Amendment rights.” (04/29/26)
“Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels taught us that capitalism is a system primarily characterized by private control over the means of production. In other words: Factories and banks are privately owned. Business decisions are guided by whether they generate surplus value that can be appropriated as profit by the owners. Workers become a commodity, one that must, however, market itself and generate exchange value. In this context, the state’s primary role is to safeguard these relations of production and balance the interests of the various factions of capital. In doing so, the construction of neoliberal ideologies sought to minimize state benefits for the poorer strata of society, destroy the protective mechanisms of poorer societies, and simultaneously transfer state resources to capitalist oligarchies. Those who demanded the elimination of subsidies were, in fact, the very ones who benefited from them.” (04/29/26)
Source: The American Conservative
by Peter Van Buren
“[T]he question hanging over the present war is whether we are witnessing the reassertion of American dominance or the continuation of its gradual displacement. The United States is still the meanest dog on the block. No nation can match our ability to destroy things, literally to erase a whole society off the face of the earth if we really wanted to. Even without our archipelago of bases worldwide, the U.S. can launch untouchable B-2s and other bombers from Missouri, bomb Tehran, and return them home safely. That is not the same as shaping what comes after — that is, primacy. The way the Iran War plays out says in part whether the U.S. is indispensable in reacting to nascent nuclear states or directing events on the very largest scales possible, as was envisioned in the postwar world.” (04/29/26)
“John Locke’s A Letter Concerning Toleration is widely regarded as a foundational text of religious liberty. For centuries, thinkers have praised its clarity, moral confidence, and rejection of the coercive religious politics that prevailed in early modern Europe. On the surface, Locke offers a simple and powerful claim: the state has no authority over the salvation of souls, and therefore it ought not to coerce religious belief or practice. But this framing, so often viewed as self-evident, rests on claims that are highly contestable.” (04/29/26)
“The idea that artificial intelligence could usher in a ‘post-money’ world — and that such a world would also render firms obsolete — rests on a misunderstanding of what firms are and why they exist. Even if, for the sake of argument, we accept the highly implausible premise that money would disappear beneath an AI/robotics explosion of superabundance, it does not follow that firms would disappear with it. Firms are not artifacts or by-products of monetary exchange; they are organizational responses to coordination problems, uncertainty, and the costs of markets.” (04/29/26)
