“If feminism means standing for all women, then the silence surrounding Iranian women today demands an answer. Not all women are free — and not all feminists are willing to say so. Members of Iran’s women’s national soccer team recently sought asylum in Australia after refusing to sing the Islamic Republic’s national anthem. For that act alone, an act of conscience, they were treated as enemies of the state. Some were ultimately forced to return to Iran after being warned that their families’ lives were at risk. That is what courage looks like in Iran: choosing between your own freedom and the safety of the people you love most.” (03/23/26)
“How much would it cost to bribe a Daily Caller writer for positive coverage? It could be cheaper than you think. According to a newly unearthed ledger kept by a Washington lobbyist who tracked his payments to conservative bloggers, it took only $500 to buy a story in the publication, which was one of a handful caught in the latest payola scandal. And though the story appeared under the byline of the Caller’s managing editor, prosecutors who unearthed the ledger say it was actually ghostwritten by the company that effectively bought the coverage. The spreadsheet listing these transactions was seized by the FBI as part of a 2020 investigation into a fraudulent cryptocurrency promoted by infamous Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff.” (03/24/26)
“War allows governments to increase spending, taxes, and regulations in order to feed the war machine. Wars can justify measures that remain in place long after the wars end. An example of this is income tax withholding that was created to fund World War Two. The use of war as a justification for increased interference in the market is reason enough for libertarians to oppose war. However, war also enables the government to violate liberty.” (03/23/26)
“RISAA attempts to limit the use of Section 702 for purely domestic criminal investigations by prohibiting queries conducted solely to find evidence of a crime unrelated to foreign intelligence or national security. That constraint, however, is narrower than it may appear. RISAA does not impose a warrant requirement for U.S. person queries, and it allows queries to proceed where a foreign intelligence or national security nexus can be asserted. In practice, queries are almost never characterized as being conducted solely for evidence-of-a-crime purposes. This dynamic is at the center of the warrant requirement debate.” (03/24/26)
Source: Independent Institute
by Alvaro Vargas Llosa
“We tend to focus on why immigrants want to come to the U.S., but we talk much less about why the U.S. wants immigrants to come to this country—i.e., why, xenophobic rhetoric notwithstanding, so many Americans have quietly and consistently welcomed them. The foremost reason for this is simply that Americans don’t want to have babies. For decades now, the fertility rate among native-born Americans has been below the replacement rate (2.1). … Not surprisingly, the native-born work force has diminished by several million since peaking in 2005 and now amounts to less than 140 million. If no foreign workers are added to the economy, in a few years, the labor force will shrink much more dramatically, reflecting the impact of the currently dismal fertility rate.” (03/23/26)
“Missouri’s Department of Social Services (DSS) has been tasked with integrating its Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Medicaid eligibility systems while preparing for new community engagement requirements. This integration has been needed for years, but the new federal rules make it urgent. The goal is straightforward: simplify how benefits are administered while reducing costly errors. If Missouri cannot bring those error rates down, the state will be responsible for a larger share of program costs.” [editor’s note: Why not just eliminate the “benefits,” and with them the need for that “administration?” – TLK] (03/24/26)
“In the past several weeks, we have heard a lot of claims about the tragedy at a girl’s school in southern Iran. … The building was indeed part of the IRGC base until 2016, when a new wall was built dividing that area and that building from the rest. Apparently as part of the conversion of the building into a school. But American intel agencies: analysts and reviewers, did not know this. We submit this is not an excuse: there is no excuse for a negligent action like this. No excuse for killing innocent children, or even their teachers and staff. And we cannot even blame the IRGC or the tyrants of the Islamic Republic for perhaps attempting to use a girl’s school as a human shield for their military base. The blame rests solely on the intelligence agencies of the FedGov, both civilian and military. And therefore, upon their superiors.” (03/23/26)
“Rabbi Jessica Rosenberg, like hundreds of other residents and organizers in the Twin Cities, now keeps a strict schedule — at least every other day — of long volunteer patrols for vehicles driven by federal immigration agents occupying the region. In about two and a half months, thousands of agents unleashed wanton violence across the country as they abduct an average of more than 60 residents per day; shooting, killing and firing chemical weapons at nonviolent protesters, and extrajudicially arrest preschoolers and send them across the country. Things have been hard, but neighborhoods have also become more united and communication has become systematized and effective. … We talked just days before the massive January 23 economic shutdown, where there was a stunning amount of participation and support across the state, and somewhere between 50,000 to 100,000 people poured out of work, school and their homes to fill the streets.” (03/23/26)
“The Department of Energy’s Speed to Power Initiative addressing large-scale transmission and generation projects represents an important step toward ensuring affordable and reliable power, both focus points of the Trump administration’s national energy emergency declaration. The need is significant: In 2022, Grid Strategies estimated that insufficient capacity to deliver the lowest-cost generation cost consumers $20.8 billion. Increased ‘reconductoring’ of aging powerlines stands out as a highly promising tool to remedy this issue quickly.” [editor’s note: The solution to the problems of long-distance transmission via “grids” is to abandon “grids” in favor of local and decentralized power generation. Anything else is just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic – TLK] (03/24/26)
“A recent Facebook memory notice reminded me of when I was young and naïve and full of political hope. Okay, maybe I wasn’t full of political hope but at least I wasn’t as old at the end of the last century. Facebook flashed a jpeg image with a quote from my 1999 book, Freedom in Chains: ‘It is absurd to expect governments to descend gradually, step-by-step into barbarism – as if there was a train schedule to political hell and people could get off at any stop along the way.’ When I wrote that book, I reached deep within to dredge up whatever remnants of positive thinking that I could find. But that didn’t stop the Los Angeles Times from denouncing my ‘political paranoid’s view’ in which ‘government assumes an overweening, menacing aspect.'” (03/23/26)
