Source: Responsible Statecraft
by Anatol Lieven

“Recent Ukrainian victories made the Russian government’s declaration of partial mobilization a military necessity from Russia’s point of view. Without this, Russia could not sustain the war in the long term. The fact that Putin hesitated for so long before doing this … is a sign of how much he fears the public reaction in Russia. Wednesday’s mass protests against conscription and the huge increase in people trying to leave Russia indicate that he was right to fear this. It also suggests that the Russian government recognizes the extent of its strategic failure. This, and the fact that in his speech Putin made a positive reference to the peace proposals issued by the Ukrainian government last March, suggest that Russia may now be ready for negotiations, as long as they achieve at least some of the Kremlin’s initial goals. But how long will this moment be in our grasp?” (09/22/22)

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2022/09/22/tick-tock-putin-escalation-begins-countdown-of-diplomacy-clock/

Source: Cato Institute
by Jeffrey A Singer & Josh Bloom

“After the U.S. Centers for Disease Control suggested dosage thresholds for patients receiving pain medication in 2016, 38 states rushed to pass legal limits on opioid prescribing and dispensing. Even though the CDC insisted the guidance was ‘voluntary, rather than prescriptive standards,’ states wanted to signal they were being tough on opioids. So they enacted tougher laws, even though CDC guidelines recommended dosing thresholds based upon the ‘morphine milligram equivalents’ (MMEs) of the various opioids, a metric that never made sense, was not evidence‐​based, and amounted to ‘junk science.’ … When a government agency ‘recommends’ a policy, it’s akin to a recommendation from Tony Soprano; it is inevitably interpreted as a mandate, obeyed by state and federal agencies, health insurers, and even pharmacies.” (09/21/22)

https://www.cato.org/commentary/its-time-undo-harm-cdc-has-done-pain-patients

Source: Newsweek
by May Mailman, IWLC

“To avoid becoming an impoverished, crime-ridden nation, our families and neighborhoods need high-performing teachers dedicated to improving literacy and math skills — now. This requires teachers who will show up to work in person. Union-backed COVID-19 lockdown policies caused a drastic loss of learning, the largest decline in reading scores since 1990 and the first drop in mathematics scores ever recorded. These test scores are a dire warning sign. … The U.S. could lose $188 billion annually in GDP by 2040, due to lower productivity from lockdown-affected children. But teachers’ unions (under current state policies that grant unions tremendous power) are continuing to lock children into miserable futures.” (09/22/22)

https://www.newsweek.com/teachers-unions-get-raise-failing-your-kids-opinion-1744649

Source: Heartland Institute
by Larry Sand

In a recent New York Times piece, ‘School Is for Everyone,’ Anya Kamenetz lavished praise on 19th Century education reformer Horace Mann …. Mann and his acolytes insisted that shifting the reins of educational power from private to public hands would ‘yield better teaching methods and materials, greater efficiency, superior service to the poor, and a stronger, more cohesive nation.’ He even ventured to predict that if public schooling were widely adopted and given enough time to work, ‘nine-tenths of the crimes in the penal code would become obsolete,’ and ‘the long catalogue of human ills would be abridged.’ On the macro level, Mann was dead wrong. Our nation, with its massive education bureaucracy, is more divided than ever, crime is skyrocketing, and we have more ‘human ills’ than we can handle. On the micro level, he also misses the boat.” (09/22/22)

https://blog.heartland.org/2022/09/nowhere-mann/

Source: Bet On It
by Bryan Caplan

“I used to think of Singer as a radical leftist first, and a contrarian second. Since then, he’s changed and I’ve learned. Now I think of him as primarily the intellectual godfather of Effective Altruism, a movement for which I have great admiration. As I told students at the University of Chicago last year, ‘Effective Altruism is what Social Justice ought to be.’ (In slogan form, “EA is what SJ ought to be.”) Though I often disagree with specific EA views, their hearts and their brains are in the right place. And the same goes for Peter Singer himself.” (09/22/22)

https://betonit.substack.com/p/reflections-on-the-caplan-singer

Source: Caitlin Johnstone, Rogue Journalist
by Caitlin Johnstone

“Vladimir Putin has announced that referenda will be held in four regions of the eastern part of Ukraine whose populations will now vote on whether to join the Russian Federation, much like the Crimea referendum of 2014 which resulted in Russia’s annexation of that territory. Putin announced that 300,000 additional troops will be mobilized for the war to help facilitate this action, which is a major escalation in the conflict by any measure. Putin also issued a stern nuclear warning that’s being hysterically spun by empire managers as a shocking and unprecedentedly bellicose threat, but if you read what he actually said it’s clear that he’s really reminding the west of the same principles of Mutually Assured Destruction that have been in place for generations, and isn’t expressing any position that western nuclear powers don’t also hold.” (09/22/22)

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2022/09/22/the-us-empire-is-accelerating-toward-global-conflict-on-two-fronts/