“The first time I spoke to Jeff Bezos, he had founded Amazon as an online bookstore and made himself available to all kinds of journalists — a ‘political genius,’ said The New York Times Magazine, a ‘brilliant, charming, hyper, and misleadingly goofy mastermind.’ In 1999, having blown past the naysayers who scoffed at the strange notion of online retailing, the 35-year-old businessman was named Time’s Person of the Year. Nearly a decade-and-a-half later, as one of the world’s richest men, Bezos spent $250 million of his personal fortune to buy the Washington Post from Katharine Graham’s family. And now he should fold his cards and sell it. It’s a different era for the industry and a very different Bezos, one who is comfortable slashing a third of the paper’s staff.” (02/09/25)
“In officialdom, it is rare to find someone without at least a suspicion of corruption; the real question is whether the leadership chooses to act. Xi’s predecessors did not refrain from anti-corruption because they lacked the will. The decisive difference was the power structure. Xi has built a system of personal authority second only to Mao Zedong — how he built it is not the subject here. His opponents like to describe his rule as totalitarian. As an expression of moral outrage, that’s fine, but in stricter analytical terms, Xi’s system has not become the kind of totalitarianism associated with Mao or Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. This is not merely a difference in degree but a partial difference in kind. … it is an intensified autocracy: a technological and organizational reinforcement of traditional authoritarian rule in the digital age.” (02/09/26)
“The more forceful, invasive, violent, and dangerous the deed performed upon the body, the more powerful the assault upon the sovereignty of the individual person. Corporal punishment of any kind violates the inherent dignity of human beings. Torture aims to break the human spirit by abusing the human body, crippling its form and impairing its function so it no longer so readily stands, upright, as vessel of immortal spirit. By contrast, forced injection entails — no blows landed upon the surface of the body — but penetration of the physical interior of the person. Coerced vaccination forces entry into the figurative as well as literal bloodstream of the unwilling subject.” (02/09/26)
“The Republican Party’s turn against liberal internationalism is not a passing Trump aberration but a reversion to long-standing illiberalism on the American right.” (02/09/26)
“There are downsides to insulting and threatening friends and acting like a Mafia don slapping around his goons. You risk turning them against you, for one thing. But if those friends have been freeloading off you for years, well, there are some upsides, too. We’re seeing that as President Donald Trump’s rough treatment of our European allies has driven them to huffily make steps to actually defend themselves rather than continue to rely on the American defense umbrella.” (02/09/26)
Source: Common Dreams
by Jeffrey D Sachs & Sybil Fares
“History occasionally presents moments when the truth about a conflict is stated plainly enough that it becomes impossible to ignore. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi’s February 7 address in Doha, Qatar (transcript here) should prove to be such a moment. His important and constructive remarks responded to the US call for comprehensive negotiations, and he laid out a sound proposal for peace across the Middle East. Last week, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio called for comprehensive negotiations: ‘If the Iranians want to meet, we’re ready.’ He proposed for talks to include the nuclear issue, Iran’s military capabilities, and its support for proxy groups around the region. On its surface, this sounds like a serious and constructive proposal. The Middle East’s security crises are interconnected, and diplomacy that isolates nuclear issues from broader regional dynamics is unlikely to endure.” (02/09/25)
Source: David Friedman’s Substack
by David Friedman
“People talk a lot about inequality of income but there are other forms of inequality. In a society where most women get married and whom they marry largely determines the rest of their lives, inequality in the characteristics that men value in a wife, most obviously physical attractiveness, may be more important than inequality of wealth. An attractive woman has her choice of husbands, an ugly woman may be unable to get an offer from even one. In a society with bride price and dowry, the parents of an attractive woman can collect a sizable bride price while other parents, if they want to marry off their daughter, may have to provide a sizable dowry. Herodotus describes an economist’s solution to this particular form of inequality.” (02/09/26)
Source: Washington Post
by Phil Gramm and Donald J Boudreaux
“President Donald Trump regularly claims to have achieved unprecedented prosperity in his second term, which he attributes to his implementation of the highest tariffs since the Great Depression. But no matter what data points the president points to, his tariff policies appear to be holding back the very prosperity he claims to have achieved. How can one know this? Test the president’s claim with a comparison that’s as close as you get in the real world to a controlled experiment: Evaluate economic growth in the first year of his first term — which did not see the implementation of tariffs — against the same data in the first year of his second term, which did. This comparison works because all other economic policies in the two terms are virtually identical.” (02/09/26)
